I DO NOT LIKE the switch made, already last year if not two years ago, to contest divisions in the Better Newspapers Contest.
My weekly newspapers should NOT NOT NOT be PUNISHED — and that's exactly what's happened — by being lumped not only with semiweeklies but
Managing editor job, five-day daily. Kind of isolated, Western state.
That doesn't reveal too much, as towns big enough to be small cities can be kind of isolated in any Western state due to population and climate controls on it out there.
So, I won't say more, so I don't alienate the publisher if this is read by that person. Well, sort of; hold on to that thought.
Job advertisement was on JournalismJobs in early June. Apparently nobody bit, or nobody good enough for their ask, or nobody cheap enough for their offer sheet or some combo of the above. (Job listing says that pagination as well as website content management experience is required, which means no pagination hub, and who knows how much help, to boot. Also weirdly, it uses a Siri-type app to do voice versions of all stories. Can't be for the visually impaired, as you have to see to hit the "play" button.)
So, it was readvertised a month or so later, early-mid July.
So, I applied, to kick the tires as much as anything. In addition to the notes above about a spot being advertised again, per not wanting to alienate the publisher, I told them in my cover letter and email that I knew more about the place than the typical out-of-state applicant, and hinted it was a fair chunk more, but didn't go into detail, lest I risk alienation.
I did not tell them that I also knew the previous ME had stuck only a year or just over.
Anyway, the publisher did make me a bit green with anger, not envy.
Said I needed clips along with cover letter and resume. I said I have a Google Docs link, open to public, at the end of the resume. Publisher said no bueno.
So, with no more than medium effort, I gave them a police story about a drug and alcohol sales to minors sting, a column related to that, as no more than medium effort, and then a 5,000-word, or more, long feature story about the retirement of the previous priest at the Catholic church here. I wanted something that long deliberately.
Month later? Haven't heard back and I sent no queries. My tire kicking was not high-level interest even before the personal interaction.
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And, what the hell. Let's name names.
It's .... the ....
Roswell Daily Record. Per the "about" on its website, it's like Jill Stein trying to pretend to not be an antivaxxer while actually being one. In this case, it's trying to pretend not to push 1947 UFO conspiracy theory while actually doing so.
In July 1947, something streaked out of the sky, hitting the ground outside of Roswell, New Mexico, beginning years of ongoing speculation as to what the object was. According to initial information provided to the Roswell Daily Record by the Roswell Army Air Field, the startling headlines claimed that the military had recovered a flying saucer from a nearby ranch.
Overnight, the story changed from a flying saucer to a weather balloon, and over the ensuing years, that explanation morphed into a military high-altitude surveillance program. Over decades of conspiracy theories that the U.S. government has covered up the possibility that an alien spacecraft and its otherworldly crew were responsible for the 1947 crash. Through it all, and continuing to this day, the Roswell Daily Record was there to report the news and to spark the public interest and fascination with this story.
Wrong.
The publisher, and owner, is the daughter of a long-term owner who died in 2018. AFAIK, it's the only paper they own.
And, Beck daughter has a reason to peddle this, as did daddy, assuming he did, too.
The paper owns its own UFO store.
Of course, here's the reality.
And, I knew that reality long ago. I also know that, 25 years ago, Roswell boosters were talking about when the city would hit 50,000. Never happened. Population's been basically flat since 1990 and Farmington has just about caught it, while the Farmington metro area is much bigger.
Basically, it's a High Plains/edge of desert community, that has, or it was when built, the largest mozzarella cheese plant in the US if not the world. But climate change and water owed to Texas on the Pecos and no aquifer of note in the area will ding that. There's some oil there, but not like in the Permian. New Mexico Military Institute is the only other major or semi-major business driver.
Update, Feb. 15, 2025: Gee, that last ME (assuming you hired one) really spit the bit quickly if you're advertising anew on Journalism Jobs, six months or so after the readvertising last August of the original June advertisement.
I understand "slow news weeks."
I understand "slow news photography weeks."
But, really?
A college letter of intent signing, and not at Gainesville itself, but a lesser school district? And, not a major sport, but track and cross country? And a Division III NCAA school (that probably should be NAIA)?
That was Feb. 11.
A few weeks ago, I noticed their latest cost-cutting.
They're not running weekend color comics as separate pages. Instead, one page of such is running on the back page of the regular paper. And, that's still with that issue normally being only 10 pages.
First, how does the largest paper, in the most densely populated state in the US, go print-silent? (And, other than possible gloating or to pick up readers and advertisers, why does the New York Times have its story about the New Jersey Star-Ledger paywall-unlocked?)
That said, seeing it unlocked is an eye-opener about the entire chain:
Its sister publication, The Jersey Journal, one of the earliest holdings in the Newhouse media family’s now-vast empire, will cease to exist in print or online, leaving Hudson County, N.J. — a hotbed for political corruption — without a daily newspaper. Three other affiliated papers, The Times of Trenton, The South Jersey Times and The Hunterdon County Democrat, will stop printing and offer only digital news.
Incredible.
But, not surprising.
The NYT goes on to note that the Star-Ledger's parent company is the Newhouse family's Advance, as one could guess from the online name of "NJ dot com." It references what it did in Alabama. And we know what it also did in NOLA, where Baton Rouge, under different ownership, wound up kicking the Times-Picayune ass and forcing a sale-merger.
On the other hand, this may have been inevitable:
In 2005, nearly 600,000 households bought The Ledger on Sundays, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. By 2023, Sunday circulation had plummeted to roughly 86,000. When it announced two months ago that it planned to stop printing on Feb. 2, the company noted that its circulation had dropped by an additional 21 percent last year.
There you are.
And, with all those papers going online, what happens with state requirements on legal notices? Erm, this!
The Legislature adopted a temporary fix that permits communities with a defunct newspaper to purchase legal ads through the paper’s online news site. Lawmakers are expected to try to craft a more permanent solution this month. Lobbyists for counties, school boards and the state’s nearly 600 cities and towns are pressing for permission to publish legal ads on their own websites — a step that would deprive news organizations of a longstanding source of revenue.
And, yeah, I expect legiscritters will allow local governmental entities to publish. First, given New Jersey's state government reputation. Second, given how one company has so dominated one state's print media at the larger newspaper level, the NJ Lege may just want to say fuck you to the Newhouses.
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And part 2 of the header?
It's becoming clearer by the day that the Los Angeles Times "doctor daddy" owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, is determined to kiss Trump's ass. His daughter may be right that a Kamala Harris endorsement editorial was spiked in part over Gaza. But, no more than in part, and surely a smaller part than she'd like to claim.
The latest? Doctor Daddy had a column, not a house editorial, critical of Brainworm Bobby, heavily edited, including changing the headline. Worse yet? It was an outsider's submitted column.
David Folkenflik notes that Doctor Daddy has gone Musk-y on his Tweeting for Brainworm Bobby, too.
Since I posted this last week? Doctor Daddy is also doing at least a bit of flirtation with the COVID antivaxxer world.
I know that more and more smaller newspapers, as individuals, or smaller newspaper groups, have been moving to a pagination hub, or even just a couple of individual paginators serving four or five weeklies or semiweeklies. I "get" that, though I'm not a total fan of papers that are still triweekly or more in print outsourcing.
I'm not at all a fan of "community" newspapers outsourcing overseas.
I call ethical hypocrisy, in fact. This, to me, basically spits in the idea of community-mindedness in general.
But that's just one issue.
I know the hedge fund chains aren't passing on any of the actual or alleged savings to remaining employees. What about smaller companies?
Also, part of the "tout" of Indian pagination hubs is that, since they're halfway around the globe from the US (setting aside daylight time, India is 11 1/2 hours ahead of US Central Time) you can work this to your advantage. Well, only if you're further exploiting them. Let's say you send a Google Doc or whatever with pagination info at 8 a.m. It's already 7:30 p.m. over in Mumbai or wherever. Assuming there's not a whiz kid knocking out six pages an hour, and also assuming there's not three people working on your, say, 12 page triweekly at the same time, you're not getting it back until 10:30 p.m. their time. Then, you're doing markups and edits, and expecting their changes? They're not going to be done until midnight Indian time or later. And, they're not getting paid for that late work.
Related? The people who do this work probably don't have the best English-language skills within Indians. People at the top of that food chain aren't working in jobs like this over there.
And, if you ever have to talk on the phone with them? Good luck with that Indian-accented English. All of this is sand in the gears.
In turn, if you have to work around their time, or they have to work around your time, and your press time? Even if you're a triweekly, you're going to have semi-stale news in the print version. Absolutely so, relative to what things would have been like before, if you're still a small daily.
So, this is an argument for further cutting your print days a week. But, that gets back to the bottom line.
So, are you really saving that much money?
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That said, a lot of this isn't that new; it's just accelerating.
Nearly 20 years ago, an online-only "newspaper" was outsourcing local government meeting coverage to Indians watching streaming video from the city, county and school boards meetings, with local governments big enough to be streaming their meetings that long ago. The Miami Herald was doing this not much later.
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And, beyond the general professional angle? Three of four jobs for which I have had first-round interviews in the last 7-8 months do, or were moving to, an Indian pagination hub.
In my neck of the woods, CNHI now has one editor/managing editor for three newspapers: Gainesville, having added it to Weatherford and Cleburne. Now, that said, pre-COVID, none of those were seven-day dailies.
On the other hand, Wichita Falls, Abilene and San Angelo all being run by one editor, as per a new edition of TPA's Messenger? That's worse. Back in the day, less than a decade ago, all three were seven-day dailies.
In today's world, one could barely make an argument to have Abilene and San Angelo under one ME. But not all three.
That then said? Should this take off, and readers not object to any quality declines, or local-news quantity declines? Wait for the hedge fund folks in charge of many newspaper chains push for yet more of this.
I saw this a week ago via LinkedIn News. Per one commenter there, it's pretty much a nothingburger unless other things change at the merged company.
Smartphone improvements and easier to use DSLRs (which have gotten cheaper with the rise of mirrorless) all put as much pressure on both Getty and Shutterstock as do AI.
The press release says that the merged company will be "cutting edge" on its own image search and use of AI. But? I've used one of the photo-generative AI programs twice. Even in a small town, I had enough internet to create Woody Allen in a cowboy hat in less than 5 minutes. Something else, not "real world" in that sense but more dynamic, took a little longer but not that much. And, when I had Substack do me an AI image for a post? Something "acceptable," which gets back to a commenter, took 2 minutes or so.
The only real hope for this merged company is a mixture of totally redefining itself and the hope for massive copyright lawsuits against AI scraping.
So, the "and," as usual with me in such situations, is ultimately rhetorical.
There is a sidebar to all of this.
It's arguable that many photos now copyrighted should be in the public domain, not because they're photos, or photos of a certain type, but that copyright law gives way too many years of protection with its various lengthenings over the last couple of decades, and that this doesn't benefit individuals nearly as much as rich corporations ... like Getty. "Who Owns This Sentence" is a GREAT book on the history of copyright.
Yeah, Getty will stick it to the people it pays for images that are new images. It's still part of the problem.
