Minimum wage hikes and the future of newspaper employment

With year one of a three-year, 70-cent-an-hour per adjustment minimum wage hike in place, I see three options for newspaper companies:

• At least partially keep pace with editorial staff wage hikes.
• Improve benefit offerings. Since all sorts of companies across industries struggle with health insurance, this means benefit improvements would include more vacation time, profit sharing, 401(k) accounts, flex time, or some combination of all the above.
• Do nothing, let more and more talented people walk, and resort even more to syndication groups, part-timers, stringers, and in the neon lights, fame-hungry “citizen journalists.”

Knowing how capitalistic the business is, my money is on option 3 being the first resort.

Another reason not to like the Houston Chronicle — a short-falling weather page

When I took my semi-forced move to lower East Texas in January, a friend of mine in the biz warmed be that if I thought editorials and columns at The Dallas Morning News were too conservative, I hadn’t seen nothing yet — that the Chron was often not much more than a right-wing whack job.

Well, whether it is that or not, I do, having perused an entire Chron for the first time while visiting a good friend in Houston for a convention, I see something else to bitch about.

How can it’s weather page not have Texas high and low temps from the previous day, let alone be missing national temperature extremes.

The Eagle, out of Bryan-College Station, I’ll give a pass on them for the same omission, but not the Chron.

AP writing gets sloppier all the time

Prime example: I think I am seeing “its” vs. “it’s” misuse an average of once a week in AP stories now.

Journalism is now being outsourced to India

No, this is NOT a joke.

The New York Times It is pretty freaking scary, though.

When is local journalism not really local? When it's about Pasadena and written by someone in India.

James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired two reporters last weekend to cover the Pasadena City Council. One lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year. The other will work in Bangalore for $7,200.

The council broadcasts its meetings on the Web. From nearly 9,000 miles away, the outsourced journalists plan to watch, then write their stories while their boss sleeps — India is 12.5 hours ahead of Pacific Standard Time.

"A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages," said Macpherson, 51, who used to run a clothing business with manufacturing help from Vietnam and India.

So, on the Indian version of Craigslist, he posted an ad that said in part, “We do not believe that geographic distance between California and India will present unsurmountable problems, and that working together with you will result in your development of a keen working knowledge of this city's affairs.”

Dozens replied. One of the two chosen had attended the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Rob Gunnison, the director of school affairs there, is dismayed. “It just seems so fundamental to journalism to be there,” Gunnison said. “I still can’t quite believe it's not a hoax.”

The only consolation I can take from this at first glance is that this appears to be a Net-only “newspaper.”

Nonetheless, Prof. Gunnison is right. Even with something theoretically as mundane as a city council meeting, you can’t get emotional nuances from a webcast.

How my corporate ownership shakes down its papers

A former publisher from one of its newspapers, but now with another paper, yet having some sort of relationship with our ownership, wrote and laid this two-page (two newspaper pages) "special" on the future of electricity and power plants, etc. (Cameron being near one of the proposed TXU sites, pre-sale.)

Well, then word comes from our HQ that all papers "should" run this.

Today, our publisher finds out we GET BILLED $150 for that "pleasure."

Crazy.

Steve

Texas Senate passes journalism shield law

I give the bill a B/B-minus. Biggest concern is it defines bloggers outside the loop; the story isn’t clear about “independent journalists” or freelancers being covered or not, as well. And, I’m kind of iffy about the bill defining who is or is not a journalist, in general. I think the definition, if any, should be in the act of journalism.

Newspaper future not totally grim

The Web is hitting new marks in ad revenue:

According to a recent survey, for the first time, advertising revenue for local newspaper Web sites last month exceeded local TV advertising. One of the reasons for the improvement in Web ad dollars is the video now being produced for these sites. Video has a big advantage. It can be attached to video commercials.

In other words, the traditional newspaper is becoming more and more video-like.

Now, won’t this also lead to a push to increase broadband speeds in the U.S.? (By the way, average “broadband” speeds in the U.S. are dead last in the industrialized world.) If so, at what price? And, will more cities start offering Wi-Fi as a city amenity, putting more pressure on private providers?