Free Republic

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...

They're angry at their demanding editors. They're angry about the mushrooming workload in shrinking newsrooms. They're even angry about other angry journalists. But these angry journalists are happy they can now vent their frustrations to the rest of the world, courtesy of angryjournalist.com, a sort of online complaint board allowing ink-stained wretches to gripe anonymously. Ironically, their anger is partly fueled by the Internet, which has forced newspapers and television networks to reinvent themselves with painful consequences for their staffs. There's the veterans complaining about newsrooms stretched thin by executives requiring reporters to produce stories for old and new media....

I'm sure you've all heard of the recent scandal in New York where the Governor (Eliot Spitzer, Democrat) was caught up in a call girl ring, but there was another scandal before that in which the Governor's political rival, State Senate majority leader Joe Bruno (Republican) found out that Governor Spitzer was using the State Police to spy on him: "I've been in government 31 years and I've never experienced anything like this," said Bruno. "I was stunned to learn Governor Spitzer is using the fine men and women of the New York State Police to conduct surveillance on me,"...

A usual round of media self-criticism turned into a schoolyard brawl last week, as editors, reporters and bloggers traded insults over a front-page article in The Washington Post, all at the very online water cooler where they usually get their news about the industry. The Post article, which ran on Nov. 29, was about rumors of Barack Obama’s ties to the Muslim world. snip Then things got really ugly. On Dec. 10, Chris Daly, a Boston University journalism professor, posted an entry on his blog that turned the debate over the merits of the article’s reporting into a debate over...

McClatchy November Revenue Slides 9.2 Percent As Classified Ad Spending Slows SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- Newspaper publisher McClatchy Co. said Thursday revenue fell 9.2 percent in November, primarily from a sharp drop in classified ads as jobs and real estate listings continue to migrate online. Assuming McClatchy owned a stable of newspapers it acquired from Knight Ridder in both periods, revenue fell 7.9 percent last month. That figure also excludes from the comparison the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which was sold in May. Advertising revenue on this pro forma basis fell 8.6 percent. Without adjustment, the decline was 9.2 percent. Classified...

IN many towns and cities, the newspaper is an endangered species. At least 300 daily papers have stopped publishing over the past 30 years. Those newspapers that have survived are struggling financially. Newspaper circulation has declined steadily for more than 10 years. Average daily circulation is down 2.6 percent in the last six months alone. Newspapers have also been hurt by significant cuts in advertising revenue, which accounts for at least 75 percent of their revenue. Their share of the advertising market has fallen every year for the past decade, while online advertising has increased greatly. At the heart of...

NEW YORK Newspaper executives have complained for years that the yardstick used to measure audience -- paid print circulation -- was unfair especially when compared to the likes of television and radio. Those media have always touted audience share to advertisers so why shouldn't newspapers? Finally after years of debate, the industry is moving towards tracking its total audience which encompasses all its products (especially online viewership) -- not just how many people plunk down some coins for the newspaper. The change will be reflected next Monday, when the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases numbers for more than 700 daily...

We don't know about you, but we're sick of having to dig for context every time a newspaper reports monthly sales--so we've put it all in a handy online spreadsheet.  We will now be analyzing monthly revenue info for The New York Times (NYT), Dow Jones (DJ), Lee Enterprises (LEE), The McClatchy Company (MNI), Gannett (GCI), and Tribune (TBC)--the latter until the Sam Zell deal closes and it disappears into invisible, private equity slash-and-burn mode. We won't bore you with the July details--you can see them for yourself--but the industry totals are below.  Also, the bottom line:  Every day we...

NEW YORK, June 15 (Reuters) - U.S. newspaper executives will meet next week in New York to wrestle with one of their biggest challenges: persuading investors to stick around. But there will be some conspicuous absences at the annual Mid-Year Media Review hosted by the Newspaper Association of America. Los Angeles Times owner Tribune Co. (TRB.N: Quote, Profile , Research) and Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. Inc. (DJ.N: Quote, Profile , Research) will skip the meeting. One is going private, the other may get bought. Shareholders at both companies lucked out after the surprise bids helped their...

June 3, 2007 -- As you can see from the chart above, Katie Couric’s first nine months at CBS aren’t exactly going as planned - in fact, she’s costing CBS an arm and a leg and a whole lot more for each viewer she hangs onto in her shrinking audience. And last week the $15 million- a-year anchor got even more expensive....."

Most people think the Nielson ratings only apply to primetime programming; however, this is a complete fallacy. Network news plays a frequently forgotten but always important roll itself. A few days ago the final May Sweep totals were announced, and let’s just say it wasn’t pretty for ‘CBS Evening News With Katie Couric.’ According to Variety, the perky anchorwoman managed an average of just 6.1 million viewers. That’s the lowest Tiffany network total since they began tracking the news in 1991! ABC’s ‘World News With Charlie Gibson’ led the way with 7.95 Million, while NBC’s ‘Nightly News With Brian Williams’...

For those who prefer their news fair and balanced instead of imbalanced and biased, the demise of the Big 3 networks’ evening newscasts can’t come quickly enough. Though their imminent end seems unlikely (see the reasons at the end of this post), the latest May sweep results strongly indicate that their march towards irrelevance may be completed sooner than originally thought. All the happy talk at evening news sweep winner ABC should not obscure the fact that over 6% fewer Americans watched the evening newscasts during the May 2007 sweep than did during the May 2006 sweep, and that...

According to the scoreboard, CNN's Paula Zahn attracted just 378,000 total viewers on Wednesday, shedding more than 300,000 viewers from her 7pm lead-in. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann more than doubled Zahn. Bill O'Reilly had eight times as many viewers. Nancy Grace also came out ahead. Zahn hasn't managed to deliver more than 400,000 viewers since last week. On Monday, she averaged 386,000 (and 163,000 in the demo). On Tuesday, she averaged 399,000 (and 123,000 in the demo). Now she's down to 378,000. Is this Zahn's worst performance ever?

What a difference an election makes. No one issued a memo or formal declaratory judgment, but guess what? It's now okay to meet with lobbyists again on Capitol Hill. They still can't buy a staffer a peanut butter sandwich and a Dr. Pepper, but K Street representatives have morphed from crooks to counselors, from the "culture of corruption" incarnate to strategic "stakeholders." Yes, influence peddlers are back in vogue in this city, at least according to the media.     Let's be clear. No seismic shift in the actual work of these advocates occurred in the past few months, but the press...

Lost amid the hoopla over the declining viewership for Katie Couric’s newscast has been a perhaps even more surprising development: The nightly news at her old network isn’t doing so well, either. A week after Couric’s “CBS Evening News” dipped to its worst viewership ever, NBC’s “Nightly News with Brian Williams” matched its worst viewership among adults 25-54 in at least the past 20 years, since Nielsen began using people meters in 1987. “Nightly” averaged 2.18 million 25-54s last week, the week ended May 13. The newscast also saw its total viewers average slide to its lowest point in months,...

CBS13 receives a Cease and Desist Letter from Limbaugh's lawyers to stop broadcasting the parody and apologize to Rush Limbaugh.

There's been a lot of talk about how badly CBS is doing with its high priced ($15 million a year) Katie Couric as anchor of the "CBS Evening News." Back in 1976, ABC News made a big splash into the ratings tank by hiring (at the then unheard of $1 million a year) Barbara Walters to co-anchor its evening news with Harry Reasoner. Like Couric, Walters was then co-anchor of NBC's "Today" show where she had built up a reputation as an aggressive, go-getter and in the minds of some, a prima donna b***h. As a teenager, I remembered Walters...

FAS-FAX Preview: Circ Numbers To Take Another Big Hit By Jennifer Saba Published: April 25, 2007 12:30 PM ET NEW YORK Anyone thinking the declines in circulation should ease when the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases its spring numbers on Monday will be disappointed. According to industry sources, overall daily circulation for the six months ending March 2007 is expected to sink approximately 2.5% while Sunday will drop around 3.0%. Yet again, major metro papers are bearing the brunt of the responsibility for the declines. Papers that are showing daily drops of 5% or more, according to circulation sources, include:...

NEW YORK Potentially sacked with $13 billion in debt on top of weak Q1 results the Tribune Co. is planning a new wave of job cuts, sources told the Chicago Tribune. According to Michael Oneal at the Chicago Tribune, 100 positions at his paper could be targeted for buyouts. It's not known how many cuts Tribune plans to make company-wide. If not enough people step forward to take the packages, Tribune could result to layoffs. On Thursday, Tribune reported a net loss of $15.6 million in Q1. Operating cash flow fell to $238 million from $271 million compared to the...

The Los Angeles Times is expected to announce a plan Monday to cut slightly more than 5% of its workforce, or about 150 jobs, as profits at the newspaper and its Chicago-based parent company, continued to slide in the first quarter. Executives at the paper said they expect most of the cuts--including nearly 70 positions in The Times' newsroom--to come through voluntary buyouts. After the reductions, the newspaper will have a total of about 2,625 employees. Its news staff will drop to about 870, from 940. Job reductions have been widely anticipated since last fall, when Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson...

NEW YORK In what’s becoming a regular refrain, third quarter earning results are expected to be disappointing with few if any surprises, said a new report from Goldman Sachs. Even after chopping estimates for five newspaper companies, analyst Peter Appert wrote, "we expect further downward pressure on estimates coming out of 3Q results." They forecast a 6% average year-over-year decline in the industry’s 3Q earnings per share. The note waves off investors who might be attracted to the newspaper group’s low valuations and the financial restructuring of several companies. Goldman stamped the sector with an “underweight” rating. Analysts loweredtheir estimate...

he editor of The Los Angeles Times appears to be in a showdown with the paper’s owner, the Tribune Company, over job cuts in the newsroom. In a highly unusual move, Dean P. Baquet, who was named editor last year, was quoted yesterday in his own newspaper as saying he was defying the paper’s corporate parent in Chicago and would not make the cuts it requested. The paper’s publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson, said he agreed with Mr. Baquet. “Newspapers can’t cut their way into the future,” he told the paper. The number of jobs at stake is unclear but the...

Couric Furious At CBS Suits. She Claims "They Are Stabbing Me In The Back." Katie Couric is not a happy camper this morning. The Suits at CBS have sent a strong signal throughout the news department that they have already lost faith in her. Here are the details as reported to me this AM from an old friend at West 57th. (Here beginnith the First Lesson.) “Promos” (short for promotional announcements) are advertisements a station or network runs to promote their own programs. A 30 second televised message advertising Veg-O-Matic is called a “spot” (short for spot advertisement.) A 30...

http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/060814roco02 Must read...

At first everyone thought they were just blowing smoke, but the debunking of a Reuters photograph by a group of Web sites has launched a fiery online war in which bloggers have taken on the mainstream media. Bloggers, or writers on web logs, were the first to reveal that a Reuters photograph depicting plumes of black smoke rising over Beirut was doctored to enhance smoke above the city. The Web site www.LittleGreenFootballs.com is credited with first revealing the scandal, which has been dubbed Reutersgate, but the affair has spread far wider than the Reuters News Agency and into several of...

How Much Does It Cost to Buy Global TV News? The vast majority of the TV news pictures you see are produced by two TV news companies. Presented here is a case for how a large amount of money has been used to inject a clear bias into the heart of the global TV news gathering system. That this happens is not at question, whether it is by accident or design is harder to tell. You may not realize it, but if you watch any TV news broadcast on any station anywhere in the world, there is a better than...

8/1/2006 - This is a really interesting 60 minutes segment from a few yeas ago about how the Palestinians use their own camera crews and actors to basically set up war scenes in their favor. Their calling it Pallywood and I thought it was pretty relavent considering whats happening now in the middle east.

Infighting and Weak Ad Sales Hurt Both New Companies; Questioning a Media Fad 'I Have No Second Thoughts' On Jan. 3, Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone stood on the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange and heralded the split of his media conglomerate. "The world has changed," he declared after he rang the opening bell. Seven months later, the world indeed has changed -- but not entirely in the way Mr. Redstone predicted. The decision to separate the fast-growing MTV Networks from the more mature CBS TV and radio operation coincided with a sudden slowdown in cable-TV ad sales....

"I think we'll have a newscast that evolves over time," Katie Couric told the press in Denver Thursday, on day four of her cross-country tour. Couric will spend time in San Diego today before heading up the road to Los Angeles for the TCA Press Tour this weekend. At the town meetings, Couric and potential viewers have been talking about the Internet, among other subjects. The AP reports: "The changes, she said, could include expanding segments and breaking traditional time constraints of newscasting. The network is also focusing on how the Internet can enhance the nightly news, offering a place...

Dow Jones yesterday offered a clue to the possible next editorial overseer of The Wall Street Journal, its flagship publication, as the company twinned an announcement of the retirement date of the newspaper’s managing editor with the creation of a committee to reassess the ways it delivers news across all its print and online properties. Paul E. Steiger, The Journal’s managing editor since 1991, will step down at the end of 2007, the year he turns 65, in accordance with the company’s retirement policies. Meanwhile, Paul Ingrassia, president of Dow Jones Newswires, will lead the companywide project as part of...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A prominent businessman who turned the sale of the San Francisco Chronicle into a drawn-out legal drama six years ago is now suing to prevent McClatchy Inc. from completing a $737 million deal to sell three of the newspapers it picked up in its recent acquisition of Knight Ridder Inc. Clinton Reilly, a millionaire real estate investor, plans to file an antitrust lawsuit Friday that could derail or at least delay McClatchy's plan to unload the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times and Monterey Herald, according to his lawyer, Joseph A. Alioto. The lawsuit, to...

Normally genteel Santa Barbara convulsed with another round of recrimination Thursday over its daily newspaper — with owner Wendy McCaw accusing journalists who quit her newsroom en masse of using the paper to air their biases, while one of the defectors slammed the wealthy owner as an amateurish meddler. Much of the fighting was conducted on the front pages of the Santa Barbara News-Press and the alternative weekly the Santa Barbara Independent. Even one-time Washington political columnist Lou Cannon joined in the print-lashing of the daily newspaper's operators. While the week-old battle raged, an eighth News-Press journalist resigned Thursday and...

We wonder if the folks over at Truthout.org are rethinking their affiliation with reporter and serial fabulist Jason Leopold. Leopold, you may recall, is the freelance reporter who was caught making stuff up in a 2002 Salon.com article, self-admittedly "getting it completely wrong" in pieces for Dow Jones, and had his own memoir cancelled because of concerns over the accuracy of quotations. Leopold's latest addition to his application for membership in the Stephen Glass school of journalism came on May 12 of this year, when he got what appeared to be the scoop of a lifetime. Now writing for Truthout.org,...

THE ratings-starved Maury Povich and Connie Chung weekend show on MSNBC ended its short, six-month run with a bizarre send-off - sure to live on as a tone-deaf stunt Chung will not soon be allowed to forget. Perched on the edge of a white grand piano and decked out in a full-length evening gown, the former CBS and CNN anchorwoman warbled a farewell song that put down Dan Rather (with whom she co-anchored the CBS news in the early 1990s), her husband and cable TV - all at the same time. "Thanks for the memories," she sang to the tune...

THE ratings-starved Maury Povich and Connie Chung weekend show on MSNBC ended its short, six-month run with a bizarre send-off - sure to live on as a tone-deaf stunt Chung will not soon be allowed to forget. Perched on the edge of a white grand piano and decked out in a full-length evening gown, the former CBS and CNN anchorwoman warbled a farewell song that put down Dan Rather (with whom she co-anchored the CBS news in the early 1990s), her husband and cable TV - all at the same time. "Thanks for the memories," she sang to the tune...

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- As newspaper publishers convene in New York on Tuesday for the Newspaper Association of America's annual midyear review, one theme that will standout among many will be whether or not impatient and frustrated shareholders can be placated while the industry makes the long transition to an online-driven model. Judging by the way things unfolded at Knight Ridder (KRI), and may now possibly be unraveling at Tribune Co. (TRB), the answer appears to be no. Last November, Knight Ridder put itself on the block after its two of its biggest institutional shareholders demanded that that the company pursue...

A drive-by Media (sometimes referred to merely as a MSM) is an attack on a person carried out with one or more reporters, usually automatic RNCFL (ReportNowCheckFactsLater) or sub-standard reporting from a news briefing room, (or a cubicle on the 40th floor of an unnamed MSM headquarters). They often result in the falsely Reporting of innocent conservatives because the objective is to overwhelm the target by a sudden, massive amount of false reporting without attention to accuracy. The CBS - American News Anchor, ""Gunga Dan" Rather, is believed to have invented the drive-by Reporting. Drive by reportings were popular in...

Wednesday, Jun 07 Rick Kaplan Resigns: "He Has Led MSNBC Through A Period Of Impressive Growth" "I want to thank Rick for his service to MSNBC," NBC News president Steve Capus said in a message to MSNBC employees at 4pm. "Over the last two and a half years, Rick has been a tireless champion for the network and all the hard work you do each and every day. He has led MSNBC through a period of impressive growth especially in primetime. You, the staff at MSNBC, are enormously dedicated and have built a rock-solid foundation for our future growth. MSNBC...

Web media is the dominant at-work media and No. 2 in the home, according to a new report from the Online Publishers Association. A research project, conducted by Ball State University's Center for Media Design, tracked the media use of 350 people every 15 seconds. The subjects represented each gender, about equally, across three age groups: 18 to 34, 35 to 49 and 50-plus. The people were monitored by another person for approximately 13 hours, or 80 percent of their waking day. "Someone actually came into their homes and workplaces and had a handheld computer, every 15 seconds registering their...

Peter Handke, perhaps the most preeminent and creative European playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist alive today, has recently been embroiled in a cultural scandal that involves character assassination (his) through ad hominem attacks and calumny, censorship by a faceless theatre bureaucrat, and the relentless abuse of the Parisian bien-pensants, those guard dogs of French palatial conformism. Like in America, getting out of the core political line in France leads to either being utterly ignored or, when famous, being dragged into the mud and punished for crime of lese-majesty. The confluence of intellectual cowardice, financial and strategic interests, and navel-gazing, backslapping...

RICHMOND, Va. -- The Richmond Times-Dispatch said Saturday it fired a reporter for fabricating part of a story and has begun investigating his other work. Paul Bradley, 51, who worked in the newspaper's northern Virginia bureau, was dismissed Friday, the newspaper reported. The article, published May 17, was intended to gather reaction in Herndon to President Bush's speech on immigration. Bradley's fabrications, the Times-Dispatch said, included an interview that did not occur with the director of a center for day laborers and the misrepresentation that he had visited the center by using a Herndon dateline. Managing editor Louise C. Seals...

Truthout doesn't say they were wrong, they don't say they were right. They say: The Rove Indictment Story as of Right Now By Marc Ash, Fri May 19th, 2006 at 04:23:39 PM EDT :: Fitzgerald Investigation On Saturday afternoon, May 13, 2006, TruthOut ran a story titled, "Karl Rove Indicted on Charges of Perjury, Lying to Investigators." The story stated in part that top Bush aide Karl Rove had earlier that day been indicted on the charges set forth in the story's title. The time has now come, however, to issue a partial apology to our readership for this story....

This just in from source at Black Rock: He/She is at pre-season party in The Hamptons. Other CBSers (The Suits) are there as well. The Suits confirmed: Ran Rather's contract at CBS expires in August. He has not been offered ANY type of renewal. There may be some tiny dollar (the exact fee never to be disclosed) face-saving deal but that's it, Dan is out. This comes after he "resigned" from CBS Evening News position last year in an attempt to stop the bloodletting of advertisers at CBS. As we all know, the primary cause was not so much Rather's...

The major newspapers around the nation are all chirping in harmony that all is well in newspaper-world: the Audit Bureau of Circulation's report showing huge declines in the nation's largest cities' largest newspapers are only down because internet news readership is up. Don't believe it. Two seemingly contraditory trends are happening at once: Readership is down the most in precisely the areas where the network effect would most help newspapers establish a dominance through synergism with their web sites and their hardcopy readerships: the large, urban markets. At the same time, readership is holding steady the best at newspapers whose...

According to Nancy Kruh of The Dallas Morning News , veteran New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been stuck in a rut for years. "For several months now," Kruh writes, "as I’ve read one Iraq war column after another, one thought always comes to mind: Um, haven’t I read this before? So, yesterday, I finally immersed myself in Lexis-Nexis to try to quantify and qualify this phenomenon." What Kruh discovered is that many of Herbert's columns during the Bush presidency contain similar, interchangeable passages. She cites a number of examples that make it seem like your average Herbert column...

John Kerry announced this week's John Kerry Iraq Policy of the Week the other day: "Iraqi politicians should be told that they have until May 15 to deal with these intransigent issues and at last put together an effective unity government or we will immediately withdraw our military." With a sulky pout perhaps? With hands on hips and a full flip of the hair? Did he get that from Churchill? "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we...

NEW YORK, April 20 (Reuters) - Moody's Investors Service on Thursday cut both Knight Ridder Inc. (KRI.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and McClatchy Co. (MNI.N: Quote, Profile, Research) to junk status, citing McClatchy's acquisition of its bigger rival newspaper publisher. In mid-March, No. 9 U.S. newspaper publisher McClatchy said it would buy Knight-Ridder Inc. for $4.5 billion to become the second-largest U.S. newspaper chain. Downgrades, particularly to junk, tend to raise a company's borrowing costs. Moody's cut both Knight Ridder and McClatchy's bond ratings to the top junk level of "Ba1" from the bottom investment-grade rating of "Baa3." The new combined...

SEATTLE Former Los Angeles Times Editor John Carroll urged editors Wednesday to guard against what he called a “milking" of the industry and increased corporate ownership whose only purpose is to make money. During a luncheon speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference here, Carroll, who serves as a guest lecturer at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, told a roomful of editors that their business needs to defend the ideas of journalism and “rock-turning” against increased budget-cutting and bottom-line demands. Under Carroll, the Times won a shelf of Pulitzers a few years back, but he exited the...

The Politburo Diktat has a handy chart that reveals all of the connections between Mary McCarthy and the usual Democrat suspects: (hat tip: Brainster) (click on image to enlarge) If you think this chart better resembles a tea leaf than a logical network of personal and professional connections, then you're probably a healthy skeptic that likes to wait until all the facts come out and all versions of events are vetted before rushing to judgement.....

Yes,my comments on the Duke Lacrosse Case! At the exact moment it would be almost impossible to believe the Duke Lacrosse story could get any more bizarre comes one Raleigh News & Observer Columnist Ruth Sheehan in her April 13th column with a personal unsubstantiated allegation of rape against a male or males in her life TWENTY ONE years ago! ( or twenty, read carefully, it makes no sense) In two short sentences she publicly slanders every male with whom she has associated over the past two decades as well as a goodly number of females who she apparently could...