Free Republic

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Earlier this week our beloved Dear Leader showed up at the American Society of News Editors to make a speech at lunchtime. This was the annual Associated Press luncheon, and Obama shows up and he was introduced by a guy by the name of Dean Singleton. Dean Singleton is the chairman of the Associated Press. What is the Associated Press? The Associated Press is a news wire predominantly. They do have audio networks, radio news networks, and on their websites they have video. But they're predominantly a wire service. They are responsible for 90% of the national...

Well, well, well. Remember back when the Associated Press threatened bloggers for quoting snippets of AP articles? Is the organization considering dipping its toes in the Righthaven waters? The Las Vegas Sun reports that Righthaven has signed up Media News as a client and has sued a blogger on behalf of the Denver Post, after the blogger apparently reposted a Denver Post column by Mike Rosen (with a link and credit). This is interesting for a few different reasons. First, it was just a few weeks ago that the Denver Post published a cryptic "reminder" about copyright that had a...

Denver's MediaNews Group agreed to buy the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times -- the Bay Area's second and third largest newspapers -- from McClatchy Co., the companies said today. New York's Hearst Corp., publisher of The Chronicle and SFGate, is buying the Monterey County Herald and the St. Paul Pioneer Press of Minnesota from McClatchy and will transfer ownership of those papers to MediaNews in exchange for a stake in MediaNews' operations outside the Bay Area. The deal for all four papers was valued at $1 billion -- 11.5 times the paper's earnings before interest, taxes,...