Gold Country Media, put a crowbar in your wallet

It's bad enough, when you own seven weeklies, one semiweekly and one six-day daily in the Sacramento area, all in growing, even booming communities, to expect out-of-area finanlists for the ME's position at one of your weeklies to pay full travel costs to interview.

It's even worse when you're already planning on hiring from within.

New Zealand’s top daily outsourcing Sunday production

Things like this show I’m in a dying profession:

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) -- Newspaper publisher APN News & Media began outsourcing editorial production work on Sunday, a plan that will be extended to five daily and three weekly newspapers by year end, a senior executive said.

The changes mean news editing and layout operations at The New Zealand Herald, the nation’s biggest daily, and a string of regional dailies will be done by an outside contractor, APN deputy chief executive Rick Neville said.

“I’m confident readers won't notice the difference” in the papers’ editing and design, Neville said.

The Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union that includes New Zealand journalists, however, said the move will erode the quality of news coverage because stories will be handled by copy editors not familiar with local issues. ...

By year end, Pagemasters will employ about 45 editing staff at their site to edit the seven newspapers - nearly 30 fewer than the newspapers employed.

A goofy production thing about Granite Publishing

Not all its papers are on the same web. Most are 50-inch, but at least one is the old 55-inch.

HUH?

The difficulties of news reporting in Iraq

From San Antonio Express-News veteran Sieg Christenson.

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.