Is #AP prostituting itself?

Possibly, if you look at this story:

The Associated Press said Wednesday that it has entered into a partnership with WhoSay Inc., a company that helps celebrities manage interactions with fans through social networks and traditional media outlets.

The AP will give celebrities who are members of WhoSay the option to provide exclusive, personal photos and videos to the AP for licensing to major media companies worldwide. ...

The company puts celebrities in greater control of —and offers the opportunity to profit from— their photographic lives. It also allows them to spread their social media posts easily across sites like Twitter and Facebook. As an example, (Sofia ) Vergara posted a picture of a family lunch in Miami last month. The photo has a copyright symbol, indicating she owns it and can make money from it if, say, a magazine wants to publish it.

At the least, it sounds like it's cheapening itself. Basically, WhoSay looks like an elitist version of Twitter. Which makes it look very much like AP is doing celebrity butt-kissing. Great. AP's entertainment feed will look like TMZ soon.

And, shock me that Dean Singleton, as ongoing chairman of the board (who should have been canned when MediaNews filed Chapter 11) would think this is a wonderful idea. Hell, look at AP's whole board of directors.

Singleton/MediaNews? Chapter 11. Mary Junck/Lee Enterprises? Chapter 11. Donna J. Barrett/CNHI? Should be in Chapter 11, but, being owned by the Alabama state pension system, probably can't be. Craig A. Dubow/Gannett? Should be. Still doing mandatory furloughs, isn't it? Michael Golden/New York Times? The company that has a fake paywall and lies about it. Paul C. Tash/St. Petersburg Times? Lives on its Poynter reputation. Katharine Weymouth/Washington Post? Would be in Chapter 11 if not for Kaplan. Gary Pruitt/McClatchy? Wouldn't surprise me if it winds up there.

As Michael Hirschorn at The Atlantic notes, it's precisely strategies like this that have made the general public undervalue daily newspapers for years if not decades. Add in the AP board originally selling its content to online aggregators for pennies, and the circle is complete.

Court: Blogger isn't journalist - he may be right

Let's see the new media fluffers' take on this:

A federal judge in Oregon has ruled that a Montana woman sued for defamation was not a journalist when she posted online that an Oregon lawyer acted criminally during a bankruptcy case, a decision with implications for bloggers around the country.

Crystal L. Cox, a blogger from Eureka, Mont., was sued for defamation by attorney Kevin Padrick when she posted online that he was a thug and a thief during the handling of bankruptcy proceedings by him and Obsidian Finance Group LLC.

U.S. District Judge Marco Hernandez found last week that as a blogger, Cox was not a journalist and cannot claim the protections afforded to mainstream reporters and news outlets.

Is this just a matter of Oregon needing a better shield law? That's one claim.

“My advice to bloggers operating in the state of Oregon is lobby to get your shield law improved so bloggers are covered,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. 

Dalgish may or may not be right on that. She is right on this:

“But do not expect the shield law to provide you a defense in a libel case where you want to rely on an anonymous source for that information.”

That's because Hernandez went further:

The judge ruled that Cox was not protected by Oregon’s shield law from having to produce sources, saying even though Cox defines herself as media, she was not affiliated with any mainstream outlet. He added that the shield law does not apply to civil actions for defamation.

But, Dalgish is not guaranteed to be right on this, if Cox is indeed not a journalist.


Now, contra new media fluffers who accuse old media of trying to maintain a guild system, I'm not doing that.


Let's read WHY Hernandez ruled as he did:

Hernandez said Cox was not a journalist because she offered no professional qualifications as a journalist or legitimate news outlet. She had no journalism education, credentials or affiliation with a recognized news outlet, proof of adhering to journalistic standards such as editing or checking her facts, evidence she produced an independent product or evidence she ever tried to get both sides of the story.

Emphasis on the last clauses are mine. Hernandez, although he appears to start from the "guild" point of view himself, goes beyond that to use generally recognized journalistic standards as a large portion of his decision.


And Cox's response, if anything, justifies Hernandez's decision:

Cox said she considered herself a journalist, producing more than 400 blogs over the past five years, with a proprietary technique to get her postings on the top of search engines where they get the most notice.

“What could be more mainstream than the Internet and the top of the search engine?” she said.

Let's try riffs on that:
1. Twenty years ago: What could be more mainstream than junk mail and a filled mailbox?
2. Sixty years ago: What could be more mainstream than Joe McCarthy and a stack of papers waved in one's hand?
3. Seventy-five years ago: What could be more mainstream than Father Coughlin?
I think you get the drift.


I'm sure Dalgish's organization and others will file amicus briefs in any appeal, but, really, they shouldn't. Both for the actual defendant and for the material facts involved.



Here's my response.


First, blogging may be journalism. It isn't automatically journalism. That's reason one professional media organizations should be wary of offering amicus briefs in this case, at least without actually taking a look at Cox's blog first.



Second, I'd potentially partially disagree with the judge that that plaintiff is not a public figure. I'd have to see the details of how big his tax shelter advice was, whether he's a defendant in the fraud case against some of his advisees and other things. He may be a public figure.


This isn't a slam-dunk one way or the other, unlike the Houston-area blogger of a few years ago, who was reporting on a criminal case, a felony, and using anonymous sources.. There's no indication that Cox was even using anonymous sources, or doing anything more than writing opinion pieces. And, even if attorney Patrick IS a public figure, while case law cuts more latitude on opinion pages in conventional newspapers and magazines, even there, there isn't a license to libel.


Given that Cox is using a "proprietary technique," which is probably called paying $99 to some SEO optimizer outfit, and boasts about that, she's not a journalist from where I stand, and probably stands guilty of the failings of effort Hernandez found.


I do agree with media analysts that a case like this shows we need SCOTUS to eventually wade in. BUT, this case ain't the vehicle for it.

New media fluffers profit from dissing old media?

Just wow .... Columbia Journalism Review takes Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, et al, to the cleaners. And, the article is very good overall, not just in the claim that these and other new media fluffer leaders, through consulting fees, teaching at public universities, etc., profit, and perhaps hypocritically, by being old media dissers.

And, it's one thing to disagree on what the future of media should be. It's another to profit off of saying what the media SHOULD be, while pretending to be disinterested. And, it's yet another to ignore "concentration" in social media, ethics issues at some social media, and other factors.


Item No. 2 in the paragraph above is why I largely not just mistrust but actually dislike new media fluffers, at least the new media fluffing part of their personalities. Hey, I'm not denying the right to make a buck. BUT, be honest that your new media fluffing is anything but disinterested.


Anway, let's take a look at CJR.


I'm going to run a string of a few quotes, then start commenting;

The establishment is gloomy and old; the (Future Of Newspapers) consensus is hopeful and young (or purports to represent youth). The establishment has no plan. The FON consensus says no plan is the plan. The establishment drones on about rules and standards; the FON thinkers talk about freedom and informality. FON says “cheap” and “free”; the establishment asks for your credit card number. FON talks about “networks,” “communities,” and “love”; the establishment mutters about “institutions,” like The New York Times or mental hospitals....

The problem is that journalism’s true value-creating work, the keystone of American journalism, the principle around which it is organized, is public-interest reporting; the kind that is usually expensive, risky, stressful, and time-consuming. ...


Not only does the FON consensus have little to say about public-service journalism, it is in many ways antithetical to it. For one thing, its anti-institutionalism would disempower journalism. Jarvis and Shirky in particular have reveled in the role of intellectual undertakers/grief counselors to the newspaper industry, which, for all its many failings, has traditionally carried the public-service load.

So far, I'm in total agreement. The FON crowd largely ignores costs and overheads, as do many of their fellow travelers. And, by over-touting social media, etc., can trivialize news. (See below.)

And, is there a solution? Solutions?

Many of Shirky’s prescriptions for the economics of journalism are commonsensical and even wise. A point I find inarguable is that while some news models have been found to work in some contexts-—The Wall Street Journal’s pay wall, ProPublica’s fund-raising model (basically, one big donor), Talking Points Memo’s online ad-based system—nothing to date is scalable. There is no news business “model” at all. And who can argue with his call for constant experimentation?

I would tend to agree. And, that's why I'm not always as hard on this aspect of Shirky's thought as on Rosen's or Jarvis'.


Meanwhile, is the FON crowd counter-cultural? The story suggests so:

If some aspects of peer-production theory and its FON offshoot sound familiar—anti-institutionalism; communitarianism laced with libertarianism; a millennial, Age-of-Aquarius vibe; a certain militancy—some scholars have traced its roots to 1960s counterculture.

I'd say look to today, instead; Shirky, et al, sound like the utopian wing of Occupy Wall Street.

Meanwhile, CJR gets to "throwing under the bus" time, saying Jarvis, as example, and most the FON crowd are ... hypocritical leeches:

Like other FON thinkers, he lives the contradiction of extolling peer production and volunteerism from the security of an institution. It is doubly jarring in Jarvis’s case; an opponent of publicly funded journalism, his journalistic entrepreneurialism is, in fact, publicly subsidized. The “C” in CUNY stands for “City.”

CJR then raises a related issue: the claim that news is a commodity. Of course, the FON crowd starts with one half of Steward Brand's famous quote:

Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property', the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better.

And, of course, the FON crowd is coming down emphatically, and simplistically, IMO, on the "free" side. That's why they fight paywalls, diss micropayments and other things.  But, as the CJR story notes, paywalls are working, and getting adopted by more and more dailies.

Meanwhile, here's more of that intellectual dishonesty:

I would note that there’s a point at which predicting institutional decline blurs into rooting for it, and then morphs into hastening it along, as the anti-pay wall debate shows. ... “We need the new news environment to be chaotic” to facilitate experimentation, Shirky writes. In fact, though, only consultants “need” the news environment to be chaotic.

CJN's Starkman goes on to say he expects some "media establishment" to remain in place for quite some time.

I’m going to make a bold leap and predict—eenie meenie chili beanie—that for a long time the Future of News is going to look unnervingly like the Present of News: hobbled news organizations, limping along, supplemented by swarms of new media outlets doing their best. It’s not sexy, but that’s journalism for you. 

And, here's why he's at least halfway comfortable with that statement:

It pays to remember that the most triumphalist FON works were written in 2008 and 2009, during journalism’s time of maximum panic. But now, panic time is over.

It is ... and as he says, "muddling" time continues. And, that is no thanks to the FON crowd:

The cruel truth of the emerging networked news environment is that reporters are as disempowered as they have ever been, writing more often, under more pressure, with less autonomy, about more trivial things than under the previous monopolistic regime. Indeed, if one were looking for ways to undermine reporters in their work, FON ideas would be a good place to start.

Indeed, especially about the trivialization. Working at a newspaper that thinks Facebook and Twitter posting will magically fix things seems to illustrate that. When everything is news, nothing is.

Finally, Starkman says that what he calls "Neo-institutional journalism" can be rebuilt, but that it will take work.

Shirky responds, but, IMO, as a kinder, gentler Jarvis more than anything else.

Beyond that, the new media fluffers fail to address how social media, Internet 2.0, etc. threaten us all, not just journalists, with being crushed beneath the wheel, whether like in Hesse's novel of that name or some other way.

What went wrong at the Mercury News?

An early online innovator. Great reporting by the likes of Gary Webb (before the Merc threw him under the bus). A booming market. Mediocre papers in San Francisco.

So, what went wrong? That's the theme of this in-depth piece by Columbia Journalism Review. (H/t to my friend Leo Lincourt.)

My reaction? It nails the main points of what went wrong not just at the Merc, but to some degree, the industry in general:

First. I didn't realize that the Merc had, at the start, "paywalled" its website, only to abandon it later. Related to that, as Leo notes, is its failure to find "niche" reporting worthy of being paywalled, or to realize what it had in Silicon Valley. Especially after Steve Jobs' return to Apple, the Merc, even with national media "discovering" Silicon Valley, could have had the angle on premium, paywalled content. The WSJ is partially paywalled even with the New York Times in its backyard, after all.


Second, specific to the Merc, Dean Singleton is an idiot, and certainly had a hand in the Merc's demise, as he has in the AP focusing first on news aggregators and many other things that have hurt the industry. The story doesn't at all look at him, but it's too bad it didn't. (That said, Deano's injuriousness to the industry, while being Example No. 1 of not "getting" the online newspaper world, could make a separate story of equal length all by itself.


Third per many other observers, we see the problems with newspapers trading on the NYSE and focusing on short-term profits. The stock-zooming 1990s has had its payback, with newspapers doubling down on new purchases while ignoring the destructiveness of the Net:

(General manager Dan) Finnigan explained that either they were going to cannibalize their own businesses or someone else would. 

This was at a meeting of Knight-Ridder publishers, where he tried to get them on board with investing in ...

CareerBuilder! (K-R/The Merc also took a whiff at buying into eBay.)

This was even as people were warning that newspapers should accept lower profit margins and maybe even initial losses for investments in some new technology, websites, etc.

In that way, newspapers (those publicly traded and especially those, like Knight-Ridder but unlike the NYT, with one-level stock structure) are emblematic of what's wrong with hypercapitalist America today.


The "cannibalization" is also another argument for paywalls. Especially at smaller, more regional papers, paywalls not only are a way to make more money off of online operations, but keep people from leaving hardcopy and its ads, which are still the largest revenue producer.

Related to that, how many industries bemoan making "only" a 9 percent profit? As noted, the Merc's margin had fallen to 9 percent by 2006. Even today, if you throw out debt service (mainly from the buying-up binges of 1995-2005) papers are still profitable; just not at 20-plus percent.

In the story, Tony Ridder comes off as a bean-counter, but one who honestly was doing so within "old newspaper" mentality.

Anyway, give the whole thing a read.

One complaint, though. The story throws Gary Webb and his well-known reporting on the Nicaraguan Contras-cocaine-CIA connection kind of, or more than kind of, under the bus, at least by implication. On the purely editorial side, I'd have to agree with one commenter that slicing and dicing Webb was far more egregious than any of the business/editorial/Internet inter-departmental screw-ups.

#Facebook ain't salvation for newspapers

Unfortunately, from blindly buying into Facebook-based commenting systems rather than internally controlling commenting as part of a paywall, to thinking that "socializing" every editorial employee if not every employee of the newspaper with a corporate-backwalled Facebook account, it seems like too many newspapers are still looking for and buying into easy fixes.


The reality, though, is different.


First of all, some newspapers continue the same stupidity that got them into trouble in the first place.


For instance, if you, like many nondaily and smaller daily newspapers, have finally gotten your website paywelled, but undercut it by posting updates about breaking news stories on a regular basis to your free Facebook site, don't be surprised if a lot of people don't sign up for online newspaper subscriptions. Why should they? I wouldn't. Twitter's not quite so bad, if you keep your updates generic and link to a continually-developing version of the story on your website, behind your paywall.


The same holds true for blogging, to some degree. If you're a smaller daily, and your website isn't set up to do an internal, paywalled blog, don't set up a linked, free Blogger or Wordpress blog.


Second, if you don't have a paywalled website, Facebook isn't offering you its comment moderation services on your website out of the goodness of its heart. Rather, it's looking to:
1. Increase its demographic information about its members by seeing what they're reading, and targeting ads that way;
2. Increase its information about what ads on your website may interest them, and targeting its ads that way.


Third, Facebook appeals as much to the casual glancer as the in-depth reader. It may send a few more eyeballs to your website, but, whether that website has any sort of paywall or not, they're not likely to be very "sticky" eyeballs.

Pound #socialmedia sand down a rathole without a #paywall

OK, folks, what would you think of ...

One of the larger newspaper/media companies in America coming up with this bright idea:

Everybody in the editorial office now, including copy editors, who of course aren't out reporting stories, is  supposed to create a "personal" office FB account and Twitter account. This from a company that paywalls nothing at any of its daily papers, including multiple seven-day dailies.

It started paywalling one this spring.

Then some alleged hardcopy subscribers bitched about having to remember a password, so they dropped the paywall.

First, I suspect the paper didn't even check to see if these were hardcopy subscribers. Second, anybody knows you can reset a password. Third, after this, the paper (now becoming corporate-wide) signed up for Facebook logins to comment on stories, allegedly to make it easier to moderate offensive comment.  Which you can do even better by restricting comment to paying subscribers with a paywall!

Yet another example of how the newspaper industry continues to shoot itself in the foot.

Anyway, back to this latest directive. Beyond the copy editors not reporting stories issue, my political and religious views are 180 degrees to the third dimension diametrically opposite the place I currently happen to be. So, readers aren't going to want to read Tweets from the real me anyway.

And, speaking of "political angles," somebody at the office here created a stupid, hokey, WWI-knockoff poster about "Facebook and Twitter: It's everybody's job." Yep, 50-something regular readers will be "hooked," sure, while 20-something "leeches" will keep on leeching. That's great strategy there.

Meanwhile, via a press association website, I saw Russell Viers touted as another "guru" for how to "fix" newspapers. He's no more a guru than Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, et al. First, he says he was dead set against paywalls in the past. Then, he claims that the current NYT one - you know, the one with the Canadian hack invented for it even before it officially debuted in the U.S. - was "working." No, really.

With "gurus" like him, Rosen, et al, on the finance/business side, and being listened to, judging by posts on his blog, again, newspapers keep shooting themselves in the foot. One reader talked about "giving it away" as long as he had ads, clueless to the fact that many people use ad-blocking extensions.

UPDATE, Oct. 27: OK, the latest on this "brightness." The whippersnapper online editor at this paper, in his belief that Facebook = salvation, last Saturday, when we are shorthanded on the copy desk anyway, suggested that, if we had time, we live blog the World Series on the company's main Facebook page, complete with poll. And, he's doing it again tonight with Game 6.

Hey, "dude." People do that already. They work at Yahoo Sports and ESPN, where serious national baseball fans will go to keep up with things like that.

UPDATE, Nov. 2: Not too long after the first update on this blog, the online editor asks me (and our news editor) if we would put some sort of picture/logo (not necessarily our mugs) on our FB and Twitter corporate pages.

And I obliged -- with one version of the Green Party logo. For some reason, I was asked to take that off.

Otherwise, the whole thing seems like an attempt to reach Gen Y types who are generally plugged in, but generally ... DON'T READ NEWSPAPERS! Among other things that they've learned all too well from the tail end of Gen X.

UPDATE, Dec. 20: Oh, and add to this a news editor and assistant news editor who spell "south-southwest" as "south, southwest." Among other things.

The AP keeps slipping

Really, AP? Using a photo from AOL serf labor site Patch.com for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's controversial helicopter flight to his son's ballgame?

Really?

Yet another bridesmaid on a job

Was one of a few, maybe jst two, finalists to be managing editor of a semiweekly in Rio Ranch, New Mexico. Didn't get it.

Publisher left me head-scratching. Before I interviewed in person, I forwarded by email a list of references, even though he said he didn't need them until we were closer to a handshake.

He contacted nary a one.

Best I can figure is he had locked in on one or more candidates, possibly or probably younger and/or less experienced, to see if he could get them for less money, even though he had mentioned some definite numbers to me. He said, in a query to him after he told me his decision, that I interviewed well, when I said I was hoping for a "takeaway" from the decision. I should have been more direct with asking why somebody else, not me.

So, to recap ... a weird interview ... and from a "family owned" paper, not a corporate guy, who, IMO, didn't hire the best candidate.

Before that? Allegedly passed over from editing a week due to possible age discrimination. (Also a "family" group.)

Before that? Passed over on running a five-day daily (yest, it's CNHI) by a publisher now "looking" again, six months later or so.

On both the corporate-owned and family-owned sides, one has to "wonder" at times, right?

Corporate-owned newspapers may, by and large, NEVER adjust to the fact that 30 percent profit margins will NEVER return. They certainly have made a hash, in general, of monetizing online operations and likely will continue to do so.

Family-owned newspapers? Well, there are good ones. The Albuquerque Journal, once the Net took off, never made its online content free in the first place. That's rare, though. Many nondailies, with no wire compettion, still give ou their online content for free, and the ads don't pay the freight.

AP source anonmyity gets ridiculous

Here's the latest. On political strategy for a presidential race that won't have its first semi-binding vote for nine months .... granting campaign aides anonymity to "leak" about their boss's campaign plans.

Allies and aides who outlined the path that Romney is charting to the nomination spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publically discuss private strategy sessions.

Ridiculous. "Traditional media" gets worse at this all the time.

Oh, and Philip Elliott of the AP, "publically" is NOT a word. "Publicly" is.

Paywalls and leaks — are they desirable?

The Nieman Labs note that the new New York Times paywall, already live in Canada, can, in current incarnation, be cracked with just four lines of Javascript. And, it says, beyond that, that some "leakiness" in a paywall, if the media company knows how to manage it, can actually be a good thing.

The story approaches the issue in part from a cost-benefit analysis. It notes that there are a couple of classes of people who are simply determined not to pay for content in such situations. Those who have the skill, or who get the information from someone else who has the skill, will work around the paywall easily enough. As long as they're looking at ads, the story says, and maybe clocking an occasional one, then the NYT is still ahead, rather than spending more money to tighten the paywall.

OOPS.

Just one problem with that analysis.

Those same people, in general, are already blocking ads on their computers. I can't believe Nieman was either that dumb or that naive.

And, beyond THAT, the reason WHY for paywalls is to generate revenue not only from falling Internet ad rates, but, because savvy online news readers are already blocking ads, and savvy online newspaper IT staff know that.

That said, from there, we can honestly discuss whether a "straight" paywall, a "freemium" system, or a metered system like that of the NYT is the best thing for a daily newspaper vs. a "weekly" (in hardcopy) magazine, etc.

But, this idea that a fair amount of "leakage" will actually help on the ad side? Stupid.

Is TPA shooting itself in the foot on public notices?

Every other year, the Texas Legislature considers, or is rumored to be considering, changing state law so that local governments do not have to post matters of legality, such as rezoning hearings, etc., in a local newspaper of public record.

Usually, proponents in the Lege argue that municipalities will save money by posting legal notices on their local websites. Or, if government websites aren't worthy, due to transparency and conflict of interest concerns, something like Craiglist.

And, every biennium, the Texas Press Association argues against the idea.

TPA has argued not just against government websites on the conflict of interest and related issues, but have argued against web-based postings in general on grounds such as "a lot of people don't have Internet access," etc.

Well, what do we have now? TPA and the Texas Daily Newspaper Association have now teamed up to offer web-based public notices!!!

At a bare minimum, local governments can now argue that ad rates for public notices should be drastically lowered, since it costs a lot less to run them online. And, if the local newspaper of record is a TPA member, then the local government can say this meets current state law on posting requirements, without going out to Craigslist, etc.

Plus, with the state budget deficit also a municipal budget deficit, this door opening is surely only going to increase that push. And, if TPA doesn't like it, I suspect state law might just get changed this time around.

Big newspaper merger ahead?

Freedom Communications and MediaNews, both partially owned by the same capital management group, Alden Global Capital as part of their emergence from bankruptcy, could merge.

It seems pretty clear this is NOT MediaNews driving the process. Dean-O, Dean Singleton, CEO of pre-bankruptcy MediaNews, is being kicked upstairs:

MediaNews on Tuesday announced a series of management changes under which current chairman and chief executive William Dean Singleton will relinquish his CEO role and become executive chairman of the Denver-based company. In a news release, MediaNews said the moves, which also include the hiring of three new directors, will "position the company to identify, pursue and execute on strategic consolidation opportunities."

That said, they aren't the only merger possibilities on Alden's list.

The recession and its fallout have depressed media properties. With folks like Alden either in control, or threatening to become in control, of more and more media chains, they're surely going to throw their weight around more.

Why a newspaper editor increases his loathing for his profession

Here's my personal take.

In the last 15-16 months, in chronological order?

1. I have had a tri-weekly paper try to recruit me to move just a month after I had taken a new job, which felt too soon. And, given that this paper has gone through at least one editor since then, it may not have been the best move. (Update, 2019: That paper was with Moser Community Media, which I've had more reason to distrust since then. See No. 4 adn more.)

2. I have had a paper near Dallas, reportedly being "pushed" by corporate HQ to fill an editor/general manager position I would have loved, then being told by HQ NOT to fill that position, shortly before I was to have a pro forma in-person interview to be hired. (Given that I had had problems with another interview with the same company, at its flagship paper, for a job they on which they couldn't nail down work parameters, pay scale, whether pay would be wage or salary, this doesn't surprise me.) So, folks, be wary of Hartman Newspapers.

3. I have had another newspaper interview me and other candidates, pass me on to corporate for a second interview, then re-advertise the position, with additional parameters, in apparent resume fishing. I'd heard about it, but this was first-time victimhood for me. So, folks, be wary of the Los Alamos Monitor.

4. I'd had the owner of the paper under No. 1 make a run at me to be editor/publisher of a small weekly. I was intrigued, but put pen to paper and realized the margins necessary for bonuses were almost impossible to hit. I also saw that the operational structure was goofy - printing at one site, then mail labeling at a second site, and only THEN bringing papers back to the "hometown." So, ask questions whenever you come across Moser Media.

5. Had the Rio Rancho (N.M.) Observer advertise for a managing editor, noting it was on a fast hiring track. The publisher sent me a precis of the job, boasting how they held down costs in part by not offering health insurance, while noting some people were eligible to buy through a low-cost cooperative. In addition to that, though, other items in the precis made me wonder if the paper had made the ME's job, illegally, into an independent contractor's position, to dodge payroll taxes and more, as well, even as the Department of Labor had been cracking down on that. When I subtly asked in that directly, I was informed, within 2 business days, that the job had been filled.

(And, if you expect DOL's Wage and Hour Division to do a lot of legwork when you file a complaint, think again.)

6. Had the publisher of another paper ask me about a good time to call for an interview, then never call. I suspect this Granite Publications newspaper asked more about why I worked less than a year at a sister publication in the chain, but never asked me about the job bait-and-switch on an advertised vs. an offered job that landed unemployed, job-needing me in Navasota, Texas, as managing editor of a weekly, rather than Taylor, Texas, as ME of a five-day daily, in the first place. So, be wary of Granite Publications.

7. I then had an initial interview for a position I really liked, or thought I might. It was in-person, but I managed to do it during my most recent vacation, without denting my vacation time. (That said, other finalists probably can't say the same.) Then, the paper told me, through a placement agency which has me on file, it was "going in a different direction." (I understood this to be on job description, not me vs. another finalist.) So, be wary of the Sangre de Christo Chronicle, and of its parent paper, the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Some newspaper publisher or owner may see this and say I'm nothing but a poor-mouther. I'd ask him or her if they're an apologist for unethical business practices.