Insider trading charges could derail Cuban's bid for Cubs (Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

Chicago Tribune ^ | November 17, 2008 | Ameet Sachdev

[TET1968]

Memo to Mark:
Check your ego at the door or follow the path of Martha Stewart.

[GOPGuide]

But what I want to see is the Tribune’s newspapers turned to ash.

How would a Chapter 11 bankruptcy kill all those newspapers?

I thought the debt would be restructured and there would be mass layoffs, but the newspapers would still exist in some limited form?

[abb]

There will come a point - and I think it isn’t too far off - where there simply won’t be the revenues to meet sufficient payroll to physically put out a printed paper. There won’t be enough money to pay the delivery drivers, the pressmen, the editors, the writers and their administrative staff.

It takes a lot of manpower to put out a paper newspaper. Once that point is reached, the only value left is the physical plant - the property and buildings. The presses are worth scrap price or perhaps a little more if the Smithsonian wants them as exhibits.

The only thing left then will be an online paper. And the advertising revenue is not nearly enough to carry the overhead a typical newspaper now has. Plus online newspapers must compete against many, many other sites.

[GOPGuide]

Outstanding!

[abb]

http://gearino.com/?p=389
A prophecy fulfilled (almost)

[SevenofNine]

BOY CUBS Curse strike again eh Abb?

[abb]

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Mercury-News-Managing-Editor-Join/story.aspx?guid={102DFF50-EA9A-47A8-8055-1903D2F894D9}

Mercury News Managing Editor to Join Sitrick And Co. Dave Satterfield Is the Latest in a Series of Respected Journalists to Join the Strategic Communications Firm

Last update: 5:00 p.m. EST Nov. 18, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 18, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Award-winning journalist David Satterfield, currently the managing editor of the San Jose Mercury News, will be joining the Silicon Valley/San Francisco office of Sitrick And Company, one of the nation's leading public relations firms specializing in corporate, financial, transactional and crisis communications.

snip

(Official Dinosaur Media Wake®)

[abb]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003892624

Lunch Panel Debates War Coverage, Blogs and Fairness

snip

“Finally, when discussion turned to the dangers of growing opinion online and on cable television...”

snip

dangers?

[abb]

Here’s where a goodly number of unemployed ‘journalists’ will land. We conservatives best get on the stick if we want to be in the ball game.

http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2008/11/18/huffingtonpost-to-fund-investigative-journalism/

Huffingtonpost to fund investigative journalism

Just got back from a panel discussion at Michael’s restaurant in Manhattan where Huffingtonpost founder Arianna Huffington said that the news and commentary website is going to raise money to fund investigative journalism projects.

I asked her for more details afterward. She said there wouldn’t be any for another three months or so. That leaves me with precious little more to deliver than context. Her plan comes as the news business itself faces dire code-orange-style threat levels — many U.S. newspaper publishers are mired in debt and their ad sales are thinning, making it hard to see how they will soldier on. Not only that, investors are fleeing from them like the proverbial rats from a sinking ship and their equity value is hitting the low single digits.

For all media companies, whether or not they’re in the hands of investors, the ad revenue decline is hitting them hard, and all sorts of publications are axing staff. It leaves many media talking heads and bloggers wondering whether news will survive into the 21st century, at least in the way we know it.

Huffington’s website is small compared with big professional publishers, but it looks like she’s latching on to a growing trend. Mark Cuban, who was charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with insider trading on Monday, is financing several investigative journalism ventures, including former CBS newsman Dan Rather’s reports. Two other projects that he has funded, sharesleuth.com and bailoutsleuth.com, seek to expose financial wrongdoings as well as poorly thought out ways to spend Wall Street bailout money amid the financial crisis. Both are trying to tackle big projects that it is becoming increasingly hard to pay for at many traditional media outlets.

There also is ProPublica.org, of course, the privately funded investigative journalism operation that’s helmed by former Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Paul Steiger.

As for Huffington, there is nothing else to report, but for now — Investigate this space.

[LS]

Hmm. This sounds vaguely familiar to what I’ve been preaching for years, that the news media would not go away no matter how terrible its income/profits get, and that the leftists would merely subsidize it outright. Huffington and Cuban and other idiots will pump money into “news” as propaganda, whether anyone buys it or not.

[GOPGuide]

I would prefer they fund their own news outright, at least then they won’t be able to say they are neutral like the NYTimes and WashPo.

[abb]

Sorry to be so late getting back to you. Gone last night and then the outage this morning and on the road all day today.

You are correct about the future ‘news’ being subsidized by the political parties. But it won’t be as paper newspapers or electronic broadcast. And it will have to compete against many, many other ‘news’ sources.

Perhaps that’s a distinction without a difference, but the choke hold that paper and electronic broadcast has had on information distribution is not long for this world.