Posts under ‘News Business’

Editor & Publisher reports that Wendy McCaw, the eccentric owner of the Santa Barbara (California) News-Press, isn’t just presiding over the meltdown of a newspaper. She’s suing a freelance journalist who wrote about her activities, claiming an American Journalism Review article was defamatory. Needless to say, people familiar with journalism and the First Amendment are […]

UPDATED SimplyHeadlines delivers headlines to mobile devices. It’s an obvious and useful tool. Knight Ridder, the company I used to work for, registered the domain Headlines.com in 1998 — and proceeded to do nothing with it. UPDATE: Mark Potts tells me: “Knight Ridder didn’t register headlines.com in 1998 — they got it as part of […]

UPDATED It’s fitting, and somewhat overdue, that Time Magazine’s person of the year is “You” — as in all of us. Don’t get me wrong here. The cover story and the supporting articles are a terrific bunch of pieces. They capture well what has been happening for the past few years in the democratization of […]

The Philadelphia Daily News’ Will Bunch loosely compares Craig Newmark to Lee Harvey Oswald in one of the more bizarre anti-craigslist rants to date from a newspaper guy who understands that advertising revenue is being separated from journalism in the Digital Era. Quote: If you won’t charge customers for ads, and apparently you won’t, then […]

(This is a column I wrote for the current issue of PR Week.) As I write this, scores of employees at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, are sitting by their phones at home. They’re waiting to learn, as pre-announced layoffs loom, whether they still have jobs. I’m offended by this procedure, […]

NY Times: No Stock-Class Shift, Times Co. Chief Says. Janet L. Robinson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, sought to put to rest yesterday any notion that the company might change its dual-class stock structure, a move that could make the company vulnerable to a takeover. “The Ochs-Sulzberger family, which owns approximately […]

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer shreds the Wall Street Journal’s self-serving description of its own downsizing. Quote: It’s the rare amputee who describes himself as better off without his two big toes than with them, but that’s what Wall Street Journal Publisher L. Gordon Crovitz attempts today in a “Letter From the Publisher” on the […]

UPDATED The rise of the citizen journalist is not a new phenomenon. People have been witnessing and taking pictures of notable events for a long, long time. And they’ve been selling them to traditional news organizations just as long. But professional photojournalists, and more recently videographers, have continued to make good livings at a craft […]

American Journalism Review: Blogging Between the Lines. The mainstream media have fallen in love with blogs, launching them on everything from politics to life in Las Vegas to bowling. But does the inherent tension between the blogosphere’s anything-goes ethos and the standards of traditional journalism mean this relationship is doomed? Well, it took only, what, […]

East Bay Express: No reporters, no news?. (A)ll union editorial employees at the San Jose Mercury News have been ordered to not come to work on December 5 between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. Merc management told the reporters and photogs earlier this week that they should remain at home, waiting by their phones for […]