Once again, the Gainesville Register

 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.

Media wrap: NJ.com goes print-silent, more LAT censorship

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.

Not a fan of the move to Indian pagination hubs

 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.

==

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.

Gannett stealing editorial over-thinness from CNHI, it seems

 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.

Getty, Shutterstock merging; And?

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.

Wrong on the Associated Press, Matt Pearce

Pearce is generally a very good guy on journalism stuff. I've followed him on Shitter for years.

But this piece at his Substack, bemoaning Evil Craphouse (Gannett) shivving the AP is wrong.

First, let's do the obligatory perusing of Gannett's lie. Any money saved will not be used to improve Gannett journalism; it will instead pay off vulture capitalists and/or line CEO pockets.

OK, that said, the deal itself?

Had a, say, pre-vulture capitalism McClatchey made such a deal with Reuters, or maybe a Lee Enterprises, or some other middling to large newspaper chain with half a sense of real journalism and not in the clutches of vulture capitalism? I'd applaud it.

To expand on what I told Matt in comments?

First, the AP has been just as much behind the curve on all things internet as any individual newspaper chain.

Remember that it was Deano Singleton as chairman of the board of AP who proposed the "TV model" for internet newspapers even though pay cable channels and pay-per-view CCTV etc existed well before the early 1990s. Remember that the rest of AP's board signed off on that.

Since then? AP has hosted internet spam by Taboola for years, and followed that up last year by officially deciding to enter e-commerce with ... Taboola! This ignores the ethics issue of trying to report on shit you're selling. (It was doing other content-shady things besides its Taboola partnership 15 years ago.)

It also "misstated, then adjusted" how much of its revenue still comes from US print.

And, I mistrust how much money-laundering may be behind its community journalism support.

Feel free to report on any or all of that, Matt. Rather than Wall Street having long knives out for the AP, the AP has been hopping more and more in bed with Wall Street for years.

And, while we're at it, speaking of Deano from the past? Hell, Matt, let's take a look at the Associated Press' current board of directors. The odious Will Lewis is on it. (Update: David Folkenflik has dropped a massive thread on Shitter referencing a petition by WaPost staff, much of which directly references Lewis.) The dude who replaced Mary Junck (so hated and roasted by Bill McClellan at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) at Lee Enterprises is there. (In fact, Junck was a former AP board chair.) Maia Abouelenein, before starting her own company, Digital and Savvy, was a bigwig at Google. Michael Newhouse, scion of the family that was one of the first larger chains to gut print newspapers, and in places like Cleveland, use webistes to do union-busting, is on it. In addition to the newspapers, Advance has a 30 percent chunk of Reddit, a slice of cable giant Charter and more. And, in NOLA, it was a fuck-up. That's a bunch of capitalist verschnizzle on a company that you claim Wall Street hates.

As for papers leaving it? The AP was slow to react, in and after the Great Recession, to members' needs and not offering more tiers of membership services, like say, half a dozen.

As for bashing Reuters? Reuters started just like AP, as a membership news aggregation and collection service, but in the UK not the US. It's no more evil than AP getting in bed with Taboola, if even that evil. Maybe Agence France-Presse will do something similar.

As for the fact that AP is a cooperative? Could be good, could be bad. As for the fact it's a nonprofit? The NFL is a 501(c)6 nonprofit. Catholic hospitals denying all women's reproductive services are nonprofits. The NRA is a nonprofit. Means nothing.