Horse-Trading on the Gold Coast
Just when you thought the market for buying and selling newspapers was all but dried up, news comes that Hearst has scooped up a bunch of dailies and weeklies on Connecticut's affluent Gold Coast.
Just when you thought the market for buying and selling newspapers was all but dried up, news comes that Hearst has scooped up a bunch of dailies and weeklies on Connecticut's affluent Gold Coast.
It's a Presidential election year, about as big a news story as there can be. But too many news organizations still are not doing a particularly good or innovative job of providing online campaign coverage that goes beyond standard print and broadcast coverage.
A New York Times distributor in La Crosse, Wisc., managed to convince the paper that it had several thousand subscribers there (pop. about 51,000–pretty good market penetration!). Federal wire fraud charges are now pending against the guy, who is accused of defrauding the company of nearly $325,000 over a couple of years.
There's a good but depressing article in the Wall Street Journal about how newspapers are continuing to fall behind in the local online advertising derby–even as their print ad revenues are ebbing away. According to Borrell statistics cited in the story, newspaper share of the local online ad market has fallen to 27.4 percent from 35.9 percent two years ago. Things aren't going in the right direction. That's not good–especially when the overall local online advertising market is growing, ahem, at a 57 percent annual clip.
The past couple of months have seen a drumbeat of announcements of newspaper layoffs, cutbacks and other bad news. Just today, A.H. Belo announced that it's cutting 14 percent of its workforce. Last week, it was the lenders who put up the money to buy the Minneapolis Star-Tribune running for the exits. And it's raining lousy second-quarter earnings reports.
Newspaper Death Watch has a good summary of an interesting PBS MediaShift interview with Vickey Williams, who's written a report about the difficulties in getting newsrooms (and journalists) to change their ways.
Characterizing many newsrooms as "aggressive-defensive workplaces," [Williams] finds structural impediments to the adoption of digital tools, suspicion of online media and organizational resistance to any ideas that don't come from the top.
It turns out The Washington Post's much-ballyhooed 12-part Chandry Levy serial wasn't a 12-part series after all–there's now a 13th chapter promised this weekend. (What, did they realize halfway through that the missing chapter had fallen behind a desk in the newsroom?) One might hope that the bonus chapter will bring the series to a rousing conclusion (Part 12 sure didn't), but it's probably not a good sign that the title of No. 13 is "A Cold Case." (A promised "In-depth preview" of the story is neither a preview nor in-depth.)
The past couple of parts have hinted (spoiler alert!) that Levy was killed by a Salvadoran immigrant named Ingmar Guandique who had a history of assaulting women in the area where Levy's body was found. But the evidence against Guandique is circumstantial or has disappeared—and, according to word around town, so has Guandique, who apparently was deported years ago. (Correction: Guandique, who denies involvement in the case, is in federal prison, scheduled to be deported in 2011.) In any event, Guandique's possible involvement isn't new news–as today's episode of "As Chandra Turns" acknowledges, his name surfaced in connection with the case back in 2002. We had to wade through 12 parts–almost 20,000 words–for that?
Barring some sort of amazing revelation in the upcoming Part 13, it doesn't appear that The Post's mega-series has advanced the story much. So what have we learned from this opus?
There may be no more interesting--or polarizing--figure in American journalism today than Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell. (Yes, he seems to have outstripped Rupert Murdoch for that title.)
The Washington Post's 12-part series on the disappearance and murder of Chandra Levy is the talk of the town, with a lot of people scratching their heads over why The Post would devote 12 stories to a years-old case that was covered ad nauseum at the time.
It's a little bit apples and oranges, but a reader named Ed makes an interesting comment on one of my earlier posts:
It just occurred to me that this coming Sunday, I have the choice of spending $1 to buy a paper, or $1 to buy one share of a giant and powerful newspaper company. For about $4, in the neighborhood of the price of the Sunday New York Times or the tabloid Barron's, I can buy a share of the McClatchy company that owns newspapers monopolizing the markets of Miami, Fort Worth, Sacramento, Anchorage, Lexington and one that covers the entire state of Idaho.
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