Free Republic

Today, the Los Angeles Times ordered its bloggers not to talk about the story. Here, via Kausfiles, is the memo from an editor there: Hey bloggers, There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified. If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask Keep rockin,...

SAN DIEGO – The parent company of The San Diego Union-Tribune announced Thursday that it has hired an investment banker to look into the possible sale of the company. Copley Press engaged the New York-based investment banking firm Evercore Partners, which also represented the publishing company in the sale of newspapers it owned in Los Angeles and in the Midwest in 2006 and 2007. In a statement, The Copley Press, Inc., cited the tough times in the newspaper industry as its motivation in deciding to explore the company's strategic options. “The last couple of years have been a difficult period...

The New York Times (NYT: 13.07, +0.21, +1.63%) fell as low as $12.38 this morning after its second quarter earnings missed estimates. Profits plunged 82% to $21 mn versus the $118 mn posted in the same period a year ago, a period that was helped along by the one-time sale of an asset. The share plunge is the lowest since July 1995. Print ads dollars at the Times continue to shrivel, sending operating income in a nosedive, as ad dollars continued their inexorable march toward the Internet. Hotels, automakers, airlines, all hurt by high energy prices, have pulled back sharply....

It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued. The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more...

Bridging the Abyss Why a lot of newspapers aren’t going to survive By Charles Layton Charles Layton (charlesmary@hotmail.com) is an AJR senior contributing writer. Mark Potts is a consultant, based in Washington, D.C., who hires out to newspaper Web sites, dotcoms and the like. He was a reporter and editor (Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, San Francisco Examiner) in the '70s and '80s, that golden age for newspapers before the Internet came along to spoil the party. Ad revenue — four-fifths of a daily paper's income — grew by double digits during many of those years. Last summer, Potts and some...

Pinch Sulzberger has taken perhaps the most recognizable media brand in the country and run it into the ground. Can the Gray Lady be saved?

The newspaper industry is in a bad spot. Actually, run a correction on that statement — newspapers are in a "time to panic" spot. The business model is collapsing, ad dollars are disappearing, newsprint prices are at a 12-year high and the Internet is just giving news away for free. On July 2, the Los Angeles Times announced it was cutting more than one-sixth of its newsroom staff; the Tampa Tribune said it would cut 20%. Some weeks ago, Randy Michaels, COO of the Tribune newspaper group — the second largest in the nation — mused in a conference call...

At long last, has the Associated Press lost all sense of decency? The AP's story (saved here for future reference in case the wire service is embarrassed into revising it; you might consider saving it too as Exhibit A on how far over the cliff the dinosaur media has driven itself) by Douglass K. Daniel, with Jennifer Loven contributing (I might have known), gets in at least three cheap, fundamentally untrue, and totally uncalled-for shots at Tony Snow, who died earlier this morning.

The unnecessary refrigeration of America has become a chronic disease. It seems to have gotten worse over the past few years, with thermostats routinely set at 68deg.F, and sometimes even 65 deg., in the (far too many) hotel rooms I've suffered on the campaign trail. "Americans seem to keep their houses cooler in summer than they do in the winter," muses Edward Parson, an environmental expert at the University of Michigan Law School. But it's hard to know for sure, since there are no comprehensive studies that measure air-conditioning trend lines...

CBS News sinks to new low; publishes crackpot global warming story, attributes it to Associated Press, kills it with no retraction Yesterday I posted a story from CBS News: Quake n’ Bake: Global Warming Causes More Energetic Earthquakes? The main headline was this: Seismic Activity 5 Times More Energetic Than 20 Years Ago Because Of Global Warming This drew a lot of attention because of the total lack of verifiable science associated with it. I posted some graphs of USGS data showing that the opposite was true, that recent earthquake energy was actually less that in the early 1900’s, and...

Commentary: New York Times Co., Gannett report discouraging results NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- The New York Times Co., looking like a company poised to be regarded as takeover bait, reported discouraging news on Wednesday. Already reeling from a prolonged advertising slump, the Times (NYT) said it had an 11.9% decline in ad sales, overshadowing a slight increase in its circulation revenue. Meanwhile, Gannett (GCI) , the publisher of USA Today, said its May ad revenue had dropped 14% from a year ago. Its classified ad figure fell 19% for the month, underscoring the impact of online services. The Times has...

WASHINGTON - Liberal Republican presidential candidate John McCain admitted on Saturday it can be difficult at times to be proud of the United States. “I’ll admit to you … that it’s tough in some respects,� McCain said when asked by a questioner at a town hall meeting how to be proud of the country.

NEW YORK — The "CBS Evening News" audience has taken a noticeable dip ever since the latest round of speculation over Katie Couric's job. The broadcast averaged 5.34 million viewers last week, breaking a record low for CBS News' flagship show that had been set the week before, according to Nielsen Media Research. The "CBS Evening News" - No. 3 in a three-way competition - had nearly 2.5 million fewer viewers than No. 2. NBC's "Nightly News" led with 8.02 million viewers last week (5.5 rating, 12 share), with ABC's "World News" averaging 7.79 million (5.4, 12). CBS had a...

There's a mournful hush in Sacramento these days, the empty sound of an entire political viewpoint quieted. More than 32,000 weekly listeners who once tuned to KSAC (1240 AM) to hear partisan Democrats beat up on President George W. Bush, now hear only Christian hip-hop. There's nothing wrong with Christian hip-hop; it's a great outlet for artists breaking out of the gansta rap mold. But there are six other commercial radio stations licensed in the Sacramento area programming the Christian message. In the political realm, three local radio stations program 264 hours of partisan Republican radio talkers beating up on...

Youtube vid here

By see-dubya • May 9, 2008 01:55 AM For what it’s worth, the New York Times reports that the U.S.’s designated new commander in Pakistan, General James Hood, has not been allowed to take up his new job. He had served as commander of Gitmo, and although he actually did away with some of the roughest forms of interrogation there and won some (grudging) praise from human rights groups, his legacy in the Middle East is tainted by Newsweek’s lie: General Hood, who took command of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay in March 2004, shortly before the Abu Ghraib...

The Minneapolis Star Tribune, reeling under a heavy debt load and plummeting advertising sales, is on the brink of bankruptcy, The Post has learned. One of the nation's top dailies, "The Strib," as it is known to readers in the Twin Cities, recently hired the Wall Street powerhouse Blackstone Group to restructure its balance sheet after failing to meet its debt obligations, according to people familiar with the company. The broadsheet is unlikely to shutter its doors, but its creditors, including the banking giant Credit Suisse Group, figure to eventually end up controlling the paper. Down the road, the creditor...

The Washington Post Co. on Friday reported a 39 percent drop in first quarter profit, hurt by an early retirement program charge at Newsweek and a continued loss of revenue from its newspapers. The Washington-based corporation said earnings fell to $38.8 million, or $4.08 per share, compared with $63.9 million, or $6.70 per share, a year earlier. The company said revenue climbed 8 percent to $1.06 billion from $985.6 million. Quarterly results included a $15.3 million, or $1.60 per share, expense related to Newsweek's early retirement program. Even excluding the costs of the retirement program, earnings fell well below the...

First in a series. NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- By now you know the story: The business of newspapers is in decline. It's a terminal decline, if you believe experts such as Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California at Annenberg. His research suggests traditional media in general must learn to shrink but newspapers in particular are a special case. "When an offline reader of a paper dies, he or she is not being replaced by a new reader," he said. "How much time do they have? We think they have 20...

With print revenue down and online revenue growing, newspaper executives are anticipating the day when big city dailies and national papers will abandon their print versions. That day has arrived in Madison, Wis. On Saturday, The Capital Times, the city’s fabled 90-year-old daily newspaper founded in response to the jingoist fervor of World War I, stopped printing to devote itself to publishing its daily report on the Web. (The staff will also produce two print products: a free weekly entertainment guide inserted in the crosstown paper, The Wisconsin State Journal, and a news weekly that will be distributed with the...

PDN online, (Photo District News) does not allow their material to be posted on FR but this is worth a look. A guy who works for the San Jose Mercury News has been so discouraged by the continuous layoffs in the news industry, he has started taking pictures of empty hallways and bulletin boards. You can read the story by clicking the link below. Read more here.

One week after media reports cast doubts about Katie Couric’s future on the “CBS Evening News,” the third-place broadcast set a new record low for viewership. The “CBS Evening News” attracted an average of 5.39 million viewers last week, placing the newscast more than two million viewers behind the second-place “World News with Charles Gibson” on ABC (7.51 million). The “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams” ranked No. 1 for the week with 8.17 million viewers. While the network nightly newscasts have posted audience declines for more than two decades, a new record low for the “Evening News” will likely...

WASHINGTON Among the gossip and trends swirling at the Capital Conference/combined media convention here is the reality that more and more editors are wishing they could get out of the newsroom earlier in their careers. During hallway chats and bar stool gatherings, in between the sessions at the Washington Convention Center, several editors said the state of the industry – with more cuts, more responsibility for Web, and an unknown future -- has more of their colleagues talking about wanting to hang it up well before retirement age. “That discussion is going on among a lot of people,” said Chris...

The New York Times announced that it's all but a done deal that the paper will have to layoff staffers in the newsroom. The drop-dead deadline is fast approaching for the staffers in The New York Times newsroom to raise their hand and volunteer for a buyout. An internal memo from the paper's assistant managing editor, Bill Schmidt, just went out and said that "we expect" that the buyout numbers aren't looking good and that for the first time the paper will be forced to cut the newsroom through layoffs. "While layoffs have become all too common across our industry,...

CBSNEWS IN TALKS TO CONTRACT OUT MOST REPORTING TO CNN Whynot just make it up? Oh, they already do.

CBS, the home of the most storied news division in broadcasting, has been in discussions with Time Warner about a deal to outsource some of its newsgathering operations to CNN, two executives briefed on the matter said Monday. Over the last decade, CNN has held on-again, off-again talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures but during the last several months, talks with CBS have been revived and lately intensified, according to the executives who were granted anonymity because of the confidential nature of the negotiations. Broadly speaking, the executives described conversations about reducing CBS’s newsgathering...

Sometime, within the next twelve to eighteen months, the average circulation of the weekday edition of the New York Times will drop below one million. This event marks the continuing decline in the fortunes of what had been the U.S. newspaper of record as the New York Times' average circulation has been well above this level for decades. "Hey, Pinch happens."

In a magazine article seven years ago, the chief executive of the Journal Register Company, the publicly traded newspaper company, bragged about being such a skinflint that he checked the odometers in reporters’ vehicles to verify expense reports. Even such penny-pinching was not enough to keep the company from facing a sprawling debt situation now and the possibility of being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. In response, Journal Register, whose flagship paper is The New Haven Register, has hired the investment bank Lazard as an adviser as it weighs a restructuring, according to executives briefed on the matter....

The staff of Newsweek will shrink dramatically, after 111 staffers on its news and business sides accepted a buyout last week. Among those leaving are some of the magazine's best-known, most-admired and longest-service critics, including David Gates, David Ansen and Cathleen McGuigan. Harold Shain, a former president of the magazine who moved over to sister publication Budget Travel at the beginning of this year, is also departing. 146 staffers were offered the chance to leave the magazine, with as much as two years of their current salary as a departing bonus, depending on their age and length of service. The...

According to a pioneering study by a Czech Republic scientist, beer is bad for science because the inebriating effects of beer lower creativity in scientific research. Could this problem be carried over to college students and the general population? Behavioral ecologist Tomáš Grim, of the Department of Zoology at Palacký University (Olomouc, Czech Republic) wrote the 2008 paper, “A possible role of social activity to explain differences in publication output among ecologists.” It appears in the Oikos, the journal of The Nordic Ecological Society. Grim, like all scientists, knew that the number of scientific papers produced each year is a major...

Imagine if a comedy script is submitted to a movie producer. It would be about a major newspaper conglomerate so desperate to turn around the plunging circulation numbers of its various newspapers that it hires a wacky radio consultant as a Chief Innovation Officer to help turn it around. The radio consultant is so strange that he believes the way to improve the circulation numbers is to ensure that the newspapers have soul. He plans to do this by treating newspapers as the new rock 'n' roll.  The wacky Chief Innovation Officer announces his plans in a seemingly endless  e-mail message that wanders aimlessly for 5...

NYT: MCCAIN'S BIRTHPLACE IN CANAL ZONE RAISES ELIGIBILITY QUESTIONS...

CHICAGO The New York Stock Exchange halted on-the-floor trading of Sun-Times Media Group Inc. (STMG) when its share price opened at $1.00. Under NYSE regulations, floor trading is stopped whenever a company's stock slips below $1.05 per share. Trading on the Chicago Sun-Times parent company (NYSE: SVN) continued on other platforms, and in after-hours trading late Friday the share price rose to $1.09, up 9 cents or 9%. In the past 52 weeks STMG -- which in addition to the woes of nearly every big-city publisher has suffered from alleged looting of hundreds of millions by former top executives including...

was nothing more than a political hit job and not only did it backfire as McCain is raising money off this story but also sent shares of the Times' stock slipping more than 6%.

According to the liberal website Raw Story, and confirmed by examining Federal Election Committee records, top brass at Greenberg Traurig, the law firm convicted lobbyist Abramoff worked for between 2001 and 2004, have given thousands of dollars to Barack Obama's campaign

Beneath the somber tales of shrinking revenues and staff cuts is an even more somber reality about the news business: The nearly two-century-old marriage between consumer advertising and journalism is on the rocks. In the United States the union dates from the advent of the penny press in the 1830s, when newspaper owners realized that by slashing what they charged readers they could send their circulations soaring and get rich off advertising sales. News found a durable source of funding, and manufacturers hitched a ride into the homes of the burgeoning masses of American consumers. That era is now ending,...

We think we know Big Journalism’s faults by its much ballyhooed lapses — its scandals, gaffes, and breakdowns — as well as by a recent spate of insider tell-alls. When Dan Rather goes public with a sensational expose based on bogus documents; when the Atlanta Journal Constitution wrongly labels Richard Jewell the Olympic Park bomber; when Dateline resorts to rigging explosive charges to the gas tanks of “unsafe” trucks that, in Dateline’s prior tests, stubbornly refused to explode on their own; when the New York Times’ Jayson Blair scoops other reporters working the same story by quoting sources who don’t...

Do newspapers still need The Associated Press? And does The Associated Press still need newspapers? Until recently, these would have been ridiculous questions. But print circulation is tumbling. So is advertising revenue. Editors are slashing budgets and making do with less. Readers are moving online, where they get all the national and international news, sports scores and celebrity gossip they can read--for free, updated constantly, and often by AP. And there's the rub. Long joined at the hip, AP and the member newspapers that own it are seeing their relationship tested like never before. On the one hand, AP copy...

BAGHDAD — Two CBS News journalists were missing in the predominantly Shiite southern city of Basra, the network said Monday. CBS said all efforts were under way to find the journalists, who were not identified by the network. It requested "that others do not speculate on the identities of those involved" until more information was available. Iraqi police said the journalists were taken away Sunday after masked gunmen entered the Sultan Palace Hotel in central Basra. The police spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to media. "CBS News has been in touch with the...

"Bush lied, people died," has been the loopy left's mantra since 2003: The president fabricated evidence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaida's ties to Iraq to inflame support for invading Iraq. These claims have been refuted countless times, but refuse to die. The evidence of Hussein's WMDs was so convincing that Congress overwhelmingly approved the use of military force against Iraq and more than three dozen countries joined the United States in liberating Iraq. Intelligence agencies had it wrong, but stating information he had no reason to believe is false doesn't make President Bush a liar. Meanwhile,...

MIAMI, Jan 23 (Reuters) - Rising ocean temperatures linked to global warming could decrease the number of hurricanes hitting the United States, according to new research released on Wednesday. The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, challenges recent research that suggests global warming could be contributing to an increase in the frequency and the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes.

At one time, the American press was well-respected throughout the world. They earned that respect with hard work, honesty, and by reporting on important stories. Unfortunately, the MSM has abandoned all of those principles which has rendered them completely irrelevant. They now spend their time reporting on the latest drunken antics of celebrity tarts such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. The press now seems obsessed with whether or not Lindsay Lohan is still in rehab. Their other obsession is with the unproven and unscientific reports of global warming. Of course, they will still take time out from these issues...

As delightful as it is to criticize politicians for being self-serving do-nothings, the field of Democratic presidential contenders offers some solid choices. Finding flaws among the top three has turned into a science, with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards (less so) dissected daily like frogs in a biology class. So when people stoop so low as to criticize and deconstruct Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama's South Side church, all that's left in their tired analysis on the cultural relevance and style of worship is a bunch of nothing. This Trinity-bashing has to stop. Last year, right-wing bloggers...

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba - The chief of the U.S. military said Sunday he favors closing the prison here as soon as possible because he believes negative publicity worldwide about treatment of terrorist suspects has been "pretty damaging" to the image of the United States. "I'd like to see it shut down," Adm. Mike Mullen said in an interview with three reporters who toured the detention center with him on his first visit since becoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last October.

Iraq's parliament adopted legislation Saturday on the reinstatement of thousands of former Baath party supporters to government jobs, a key benchmark sought by the United States as a step toward national reconciliation. The bill was approved by a unanimous show of hands on each of the law's 30 clauses. Titled the Accountability and Justice law, it seeks to relax restrictions on the rights of members of Saddam Hussein's now-dissolved Baath party to fill government posts. It is also designed to reinstate thousands of Baathists in government jobs from which they had been dismissed because of their ties to the party....

Mr. Thompson leavened his responses with the kind of one-liners that many supporters had hoped he would use sooner. Asked about the United States response in a confrontation with Iranian speedboats, Mr. Thompson said, “I think one more step and they would have been introduced to those virgins that they’re looking forward to seeing.� At another point, he offered that “you can tell that the news is good coming out of Iraq because you read so little about it in The New York Times.�

SACRED HEART UNIVERSITY NEWS Contacts: Funda Alp, 203-396-8241, alpf@sacredheart.edu John Galayda, 203-371-7751, galaydaj@sacredheart.edu For Immediate Release January 8, 2008 AMERICANS SLAM NEWS MEDIA ON BELIEVABILITY Americans see: * Growing media attempts to influence public opinion and policieS * Poor quality * A strong liberal bent in most media * Fox News, CNN and NBC as the most accurate FAIRFIELD, Conn.—A Sacred Heart University Poll found significantly declining percentages of Americans saying they believe all or most of media news reporting. In the current national poll, just 19.6% of those surveyed could say they believe all or most news media reporting....

Fred Thompson today blasted the media for propagating a false rumor about his impending withdrawal, while bolstering the role he has created for himself as the candidate in this race who does not suffer unwelcome questions gladly. Back in Iowa, Thompson famously refused to respond to the debate moderator/school marm's demand for a hand-show on global warming. Then this morning on Today, he declined to engage in horse-race speculation about his own prospects, then took the media to task for its propagation of that false rumor about his impending withdrawal. Weekend anchor Lester Holt interviewed the former Tennessee senator. View...

Although we have been very critical of the New York Times over its journalistic and business failings, there have been interesting signs of change there lately. The paper announced that Bill Kristol will write one column per week on its op-ed page. And yesterday there was a sensible op-ed by William Dalrymple on the decidedly mixed legacy of Benazir Bhutto. It is hard to know if there is a move back toward the center-left for the paper, but if there is one, it might well be in recognition of the looming crisis the paper faces as Rupert Murdoch begins fashioning...

NEW YORK - Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich filed a complaint with the FCC on Friday after ABC News excluded him, fellow Democrat Mike Gravel and Republican Duncan Hunter from its prime-time debates on Saturday. Kucinich argued that ABC is violating equal-time provisions by keeping him out of the debate and noted that ABC's parent Walt Disney Co. had contributed to campaigns involving the four Democrats who were invited. "ABC should not be the first primary," the Ohio congressman said in papers filed at the Federal Communications Commission. < snip > Fox News Channel is sponsoring a debate in its...