Anglonautes > Vocapedia > 2000s - 2010s - 2020s > English words - vocabulary - dictionary - encyclopedia > Subject, topic > Media > Newspapers, newsrooms, Internet, radio, TV

GREY SQUIRRELS are mating. Several males may chase a female through the bare branches, making harsh buzzing notes, and try to mate with her. Males will also chase away their rivals. The female crouches on the ground when she is ready to mate, and generally it is the first male to get to her who succeeds.

Once the female is pregnant, she appropriates a warm winter drey well lined with moss and feathers, or builds a new one, and keeps all other squirrels out of it. She gives birth in the drey about six weeks after she has mated. Usually she has three young. They are naked and blind at first, but their fur soon grows, and they are first seen out of the drey when they are about seven weeks old. This will generally be about the end of April or the beginning of May.

Grey squirrels bury nuts and acorns in the ground in autumn, and now they are looking for them again. But they do not remember where they put them and can only find them by smell. Many get overlooked, and sprout up as young trees in the spring.

DJM

Nature notes,
Times,
4.2.2005,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
article/0,,61-1469617,00.htm - broken link

New Orleans Newspaper

Scales Back

in Sign of Print Upheaval

May 24, 2012

The New York Times

By DAVID CARR

and CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

The Times-Picayune, a 175-year-old fixture in New Orleans and a symbol of the city’s gritty resilience during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, has buckled under the pressures of the modern newspaper market.

Advance Publications, owned by the Newhouse family, said Thursday it would scale back the printed edition to three days a week and impose staff cuts as a way to reduce costs as well as shift its emphasis to expanded online coverage.

The decision will leave New Orleans as the most prominent American city without a newspaper that is printed every day. But it also reflects the declining lure of the paper as a printed product. In 2005, before Katrina struck, the paper had a daily circulation of 261,000; in March of this year, the circulation was 132,000.

The developments were the latest instance of reorganization in a rapidly changing industry, which continues to struggle with declining advertising revenue and the changing preferences of readers for online news outlets. Data tracked by the Audit Bureau of Circulations showed that papers with a circulation of 25,000 or more had a 21 percent drop in circulation between 2007 and 2012.

In response, papers have slashed costs, trimmed the number of employees, reduced coverage, and some have experimented with cutting the number of days they print. The Ann Arbor News in Michigan, another Newhouse newspaper, cut back the printed paper to Thursdays and Sundays in 2009, and hired a fraction of its former staff to run the Web site AnnArbor.com. In 2010, The Detroit News began delivering its paper to subscribers on Thursdays and Fridays only, although it prints papers every day.

Executives at Advance said the paper and its Web site, NOLA.com, would be reconstituted into a new company, the NOLA Media Group, as a way of adapting to the new ways news was being delivered and consumed in an increasingly digital age. An internal memo to the staff said there would be newsroom reductions, but did not specify how many.

“This is a forced march to digital, brought on by the fact that advertising this year has declined so much more than the industry expected,” said Ken Doctor, a consultant to the newspaper industry. “Everyone knows that print editions are going the way of the steam engine, but I question whether they have the readiness to make this switch in such a hurry.”

After the experiment with decreased frequency in Ann Arbor and a string of small daily newspapers in Michigan, the company decided that it was the best, and perhaps only, route to ensure the long-term survival of its newspaper in New Orleans. Beginning in the fall, The Times-Picayune will issue print editions on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday, in part because those days are the most valuable for advertisers, said Ricky Mathews, who will become president of the NOLA Media Group.

“We did not make these changes out of desperation — we have a very strong operation in New Orleans — but we face tremendous challenges in terms of both revenue and the 24 hour news cycle,” Steven Newhouse, chairman of Advance.net, the corporate digital arm of Advance Publications, said in a telephone interview. “We needed to make a plan for the long-term and not sit still for a spiral of losses and cutbacks.”

The Times-Picayune changes were followed hours later by an announcement of a similar initiative at three Newhouse papers in Alabama — The Birmingham News, The Press-Register of Mobile and The Huntsville Times. They, too, will print only three days a week and undergo staff cuts.

The shake-up at The Times-Picayune is certain to change the traditionally intimate relationship New Orleanians have with their newspaper. Despite circulation declines, it is a fixture in coffee shops and barber shops (it has a 75.5 percent penetration in a city of about 340,000).

Nothing bonded the city and the paper more closely than the adversity of Katrina, the devastating storm that shut down communications around New Orleans for a few days in 2005. The Times-Picayune published online for three days when it could not publish in print, serving as a trusted messenger and conveyor of information in a period of chaos and grief. For its work, the staff was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes in 2006, for public service and breaking news coverage.

On Thursday, people around the city questioned whether the paper would be able to maintain its watchdog role in a place where governance has traditionally demanded close watching. But even politicians declared their support for a paper that has continued to do ambitious, in-depth reporting.

“I expect there to be ferocious and very aggressive attempts to communicate to the ownership how important this paper is to the city of New Orleans,” said Mayor Mitch Landrieu, himself a former paperboy.

On Thursday evening, a group of civic and business leaders gathered at the home of Anne Milling, who is on the board of the paper and is active in civic affairs, to consider options like trying to persuade Newhouse to reconsider or forming an investor group to buy the paper outright.

Mr. Newhouse said the newspaper was not for sale. “We are very bullish on our future in New Orleans,” he said. By creating enhanced print products three days a week, he expects to protect that ability of the newsroom to create quality journalism while using the Web to compete in a changed news cycle.

New Orleans has been steadily, if unevenly, recovering from the flooding after Katrina. And because of billions in federal recovery dollars, it has weathered the recession better than many other places. But it is a smaller city than it was seven years ago.

“The fact is that we have fewer people and fewer households,” said Janet Speyrer, a professor of economics at the University of New Orleans.

Jim Amoss, the editor, will remain with the company as vice president for content. Mr. Amoss met with the staff periodically all day. “The shock of the new has to wear off and it will take some talking and thinking about,” he said. “This is hard news to wrap your head around and adapt to. They are talented journalists and they understand the trends in the industry, I wasn’t telling them something that was foreign to them.”

Reporters were heartened to hear from Mr. Amoss, but wondered why their paper had suddenly become a guinea pig, the largest so far, in the transition to digital.

According to a 2010 report from the Kaiser Foundation, 36 percent of residents in New Orleans still do not have Internet access at home. “Both my subjects and my neighbors are always looking for a print copy of what I do,” said one reporter.

The reporter added: “One of the charms of New Orleans is that we are 10 years behind in everything, and that includes the Web.”

Campbell Robertson contributed reporting.

New Orleans Newspaper Scales Back in Sign of Print Upheaval,
NYT,
24.5.2012,
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/
business/media/
in-latest-sign-of-print-upheaval-new-orleans-paper-scaling-back.html

Franklin McMahon,

Who Drew the News,

Dies at 90

March 7, 2012
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Franklin McMahon, an artist who defied journalism’s preference for photographs to make a renowned career of drawing historic scenes in elegant, emphatic lines, died on Saturday in Lincolnshire, Ill. He was 90.

The cause was a stroke, his family said.

With sketch pads in hand, Mr. McMahon covered momentous events in the civil rights struggle, spacecraft launchings, national political conventions and the Vatican, turning out line drawings for major magazines and newspapers. Many were later colored by watercolor or acrylic paints, and most rendered scenes in a heightened, energetic style. His goal, he said, was to step beyond what he considered the limitations of photography to “see around corners.”

Photographers capture a moment, he said, but he could combine moments, often hours apart, into a single picture and thereby convey, he believed, a larger truth. He might, for example, pluck images from a political convention — a balloon drop, a speaker, a network camera — that never appeared together, and put them in the same frame.

Of Mr. McMahon’s nearly 9,000 pictures, perhaps the most dramatic was created in 1955 in Mississippi at the trial of the killers of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago who was accused of flirting with the young white wife of a grocery owner. Abducted from the home of an uncle he was visiting, he was beaten and shot, and his mutilated body was found in the Tallahatchie River, weighted with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. The killing was a catalyst of the civil rights movement.

Life magazine hired Mr. McMahon to make courtroom sketches of the trial, held in Sumner, Miss., after the judge barred photographers. Mr. McMahon used a small spiral notebook, assuming most onlookers would think he was a print reporter doodling. He later redrew the sketches in his hotel room, and again in his studio.

One of the most celebrated of the trial sketches published in Life captured Mose Wright, Emmett’s uncle, as he stood and identified the two men on trial as the ones who had abducted the youth.

“I was grasping for a viewpoint that I could make the center of everything, and after he did that, I had just what I needed,” Mr. McMahon said. “He shook off 300 years of history to stand up and point like that.”

(A black photographer, Ernest C. Withers, who became renowned for his images of the civil rights struggle and who had sneaked a camera into the courtroom, also snapped a picture of the moment. His photo was published in The Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, and came to be regarded as an emblem of courage.)

A jury of white men acquitted the defendants. But in 1956, in an interview with Look magazine for which they were paid, they admitted guilt, knowing they could not be retried under laws against double jeopardy.

William Franklin McMahon was born in Chicago on Sept. 9, 1921. He sold a cartoon to Collier’s magazine while he was still in high school. After graduating, he enlisted in the Army Air Forces and served as a navigator on a B-17 bomber. His plane was shot down, and he was captured by the Germans. In prison camp, he drew his guards surreptitiously when he could find paper.

He returned home to marry his high school sweetheart, the former Irene Mary Leahy, and lived for many years in Lake Forest, Ill. She died in 1997. He is survived by his sons, William, Franklin, Mark, Patrick, Hugh and Michael; his daughters, Mary McMahon Taplin, Deborah McMahon Osterholtz, Margot McMahon and Michelle McMahon-Kubota; 13 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Margot McMahon said that her father’s wartime experience prompted him to abandon his plans to be a cartoonist. He used the G.I. Bill to study at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and other art schools.

After working for Life at the Till trial, Mr. McMahon, a freelance artist, covered almost every national political convention from 1960 to 2004, the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march, the Nixon-Kennedy debates and the Second Vatican Council.

He made several films using his pictures, and the showing of one, about Chicago at Christmas, became a tradition in the city.

Mr. McMahon insisted he was not a courtroom artist, although he was widely praised for his coverage of the Chicago Eight (later the Chicago Seven) trial of demonstrators who had been arrested during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He also said he was not an illustrator, although he was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. He was definitely not a portraitist, he said, because he never met his subjects. “I sit in the corner and make drawings of them,” he said.

And he even rejected the label of artist, though his work has been shown at many museums, including the Smithsonian. What he was, he said, was simply a reporter, who used art to tell stories.

Franklin McMahon, Who Drew the News, Dies at 90,
NYT,
7.3.2012,
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/
us/franklin-mcmahon-who-drew-the-news-dies-at-90.html

Paying for News?

It’s Nothing New

August 6, 2011

The New York Times

By JEREMY W. PETERS

Jeremy W. Peters

is a media reporter

for The New York Times.

IN April 1912, the surviving operator of the Titanic’s wireless communications system was paid a handsome sum for his account of narrowly escaping death aboard the sinking ship.

It will probably surprise some journalistic purists to learn that the news outlet that forked over $1,000 for Harold Bride’s harrowing tale — multiple times his annual salary — was not some sensationalist purveyor of yellow journalism, but The New York Times.

Evolving standards or no, checkbook journalism has been a persistent and problematic feature of news coverage at even the most powerful and reputable news organizations, long predating the hyper-competitive 24-hour cable news cycle and the celebrity gossip boom.

And the issue is not likely to disappear anytime soon, even with ABC News’s contrite acknowledgment last month that to protect its reputation, it would have to cut back on the kinds of payments that have helped the network score a string of major exclusives in recent years. In Britain, public tolerance seems to have reached its limit with revelations that journalists working for Rupert Murdoch’s recently closed News of the World routinely paid the police for information as well as hacked the phones of crime victims.

Far from existing at the periphery of journalism and society, the payments have reached the highest levels of politics. Newsmakers who have been cut large checks over the years include not just players in courtroom melodramas like the Casey Anthony and O. J. Simpson trials, but former presidents.

When the British journalist David Frost secured his interview with Richard M. Nixon in 1976, it was because he outbid his American competitors, offering the former president a staggering sum of $600,000. But Mr. Nixon wasn’t the only ex-president paid to appear on camera. Dwight D. Eisenhower and Lyndon B. Johnson both received sums from CBS News for sitting for interviews after they left office.

Networks have long employed the use of high-dollar consulting contracts, which allow them to effectively place prominent political figures on retainer. Gerald R. Ford and former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger signed exclusive arrangements, each reported to be in the $1 million range, as NBC News consultants. Exclusive consulting arrangements exist today most visibly on Fox News, with its hiring of Sarah Palin, Karl Rove and other prominent Republicans as contributors.

Every so often, instances of checkbook journalism produce enough of an outcry that the media business does some soul-searching, as it is doing now. ABC News in particular is under scrutiny for a flurry of payments in pursuit of sought-after news subjects like Ms. Anthony, the mother tried and acquitted in the death of her young daughter; Jaycee Lee Dugard, a kidnapping victim held in captivity for almost a decade; and Meagan Broussard, the 26-year-old who received lewd photos from Anthony D. Weiner, the congressman who later resigned.

After each revelation that money has changed hands in pursuit of a major scoop, a familiar cycle of denial followed by a carefully parsed explanation tends to emerge. News outlets twist themselves into logical knots insisting that they do not pay for interviews. The payment is always for something else, tangible or intangible, like one’s time or the rights to memorabilia. It is a rare but sometimes necessary evil, they say.

The jargon may be different now, but the debate has been the same for decades. Before there were licensing fees — the arrangement popular with news outlets today, in which they pay an interview subject to broadcast personal photos or video — there were “memoir” fees paid to newsmakers for recounting their stories at length. Esquire, for instance, paid $20,000 in 1970 to William L. Calley Jr., the Army lieutenant at the center of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, for his “confessions,” which the magazine used as the basis for a series of articles.

One of the biggest controversies over such payments erupted in 1975 after CBS News coughed up a reported $100,000 for an extended interview with the former Nixon chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, who spent 18 months in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal.

At the time, Robert Chandler, a CBS vice president, justified the payment as “a memoir of his five years at the White House. That’s different from paying for a breaking news story.”

The CBS rationalization — after all, its payment was little different from a hefty book advance to a controversial figure — shows that the issue of paying for news is rarely black and white.

More than 30 years later, the gray areas are as opaque as ever. ABC News is correct when it says a $200,000 payment for videos of Ms. Anthony’s dead daughter didn’t violate network policy. It didn’t pay for an interview, after all. But it did indirectly subsidize Ms. Anthony’s lawyers, who used the money for her legal defense.

It wasn’t the first time a news outlet had subsidized the defense of prominent criminal suspect. During the Lindbergh kidnapping trial in 1935, Hearst Newspapers paid for a high-profile attorney to defend the man accused, Bruno Hauptmann, in an arrangement that guaranteed them exclusive access.

Experts said the practice of paying for news might not keep embarrassing news organizations if they weren’t so murky about their standards.

“It has been handled in a fairly dishonest way by news organizations that view it as a disreputable practice,” said Lorna Veraldi, an associate professor of journalism and mass communications at Florida International University, who has studied and written about the issue. “They pretend not to engage in it by paying for memoirs or for photographs, but that has made it a subject of more outrage.”

Just how much outrage is focused on the issue is difficult to gauge. Indeed, part of the reason checkbook journalism endures could be that most Americans don’t see it as a major offense.

“I’ll be honest with you,” said Kevin Z. Smith, chairman of the ethics committee of the Society of Professional Journalists, “there’s no groundswell from citizens’ groups’ saying, stop paying for stories because you’re tainting the truth.”

For now, though, ABC News has acknowledged that paying for exclusives harms its reputation, and a criminal inquiry is unfolding in Britain.

But experts said don’t be surprised if checkbook journalism resurfaces, perhaps under another guise.

“These news organizations will have to feign shock and horror and figure out another way to do it surreptitiously,” said Robert Boynton, director of the long-form journalism program at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

“It goes on because money is the literal coin of the realm. It is going to continue no matter what.”

Paying for News? It’s Nothing New,
NYT,
6.8.2011,
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/
sunday-review/paying-for-news-its-nothing-new.html

Where News Is Power,

Aides Fight to Be Well-Armed

January 17, 2011
The New York Times
By ASHLEY PARKER

WASHINGTON — Bobby Maldonado has the morning routine of a well-trained marathoner.

With the help of three alarm clocks, he gets up at 4 a.m., is showered and out the door in less than an hour, and scans his BlackBerry almost constantly as he makes his pretimed 12- to 13-minute trek to the Red Line Metro stop where he catches the first train downtown.

He knows exactly where to stand so he can get into the car that deposits him just steps from the escalator at the Farragut North station. “It’s an efficiency thing,” he explained, “so I don’t get stuck behind people, so I hit the crosswalk at the right minute.” Cutting diagonally across Farragut Square, he arrives at his office at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on H Street just after 5:30 a.m. There, in a darkened cubicle, he scans the Internet for the day’s news and condenses it into a two-page memo that he shoots off to Thomas J. Donohue, the Chamber’s president, and other top executives before 8 a.m. He is never late.

Mr. Maldonado, 25, is one of the dozens of young aides throughout the city who rise before dawn to pore over the news to synthesize it, summarize it and spin it, so their bosses start the day well-prepared. Washington is a city that traffics in information, and as these 20-something staff members are learning, who knows what — and when they know it — can be the difference between professional advancement and barely scraping by.

“Information is the capital market of Washington, so you know something that other people don’t know and you know something earlier than other people know it, is a formulation for increasing your status and power,” said David Perlmutter, the director of the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “So any edge you can use to get stuff faster, earlier, better or exclusively is very important.”

For Mr. Maldonado, who said that “the information wars are won before work,” that means rising early to browse all of the major newspapers, new polling data, ideological Web sites and dozens of news alerts needed to equip his bosses with the best, most up-to-date nuggets.

“Our executives walk into meetings and they’re doing battles, whether it’s on health care or cap and trade, and information is power, and my job is to make sure they’re armed with the most powerful information,” he said. “It’s reading the 1,000 stories in the papers and Hill rags, and finding that one needle in the haystack that’s going to matter.”

No hard data exists on how many people spend the hours before breakfast rounding up news and e-mailing clips and quick summaries, and everyone’s routine varies slightly.

Andrew Bates, a media monitor in the White House communications office, is up by 4 a.m. to look over 30 to 40 Web sites and blogs, as well as watch the morning television news and talk shows, and send out relevant news clips to the top ranks of the administration. He has even been known — with the help of Google Translator — to translate articles from other languages. Mr. Bates could “give anyone in this town a run for their money on ‘Jeopardy,’ ” joked Jen Psaki, the deputy White House communications director.

Mr. Bates, 24, said his early-morning search was aimed at harvesting “something that’s very strong, that advances an argument well, or anything that could be jeopardizing or damaging, like criticism.”

Over at the Treasury Department, Megan Leary, a financial economist for the markets room, and six other analysts are each assigned one day a week to get to work at roughly 5 a.m. There, they monitor overnight shifts in the markets and put together a morning briefing for the Treasury secretary.

“I think a lot of why the markets room is valuable is because it’s very unfiltered,” Ms. Leary said. “It’s not like we write something and a week later it goes to the secretary or president. They get it that day.”

Ms. Leary is becoming a familiar customer to the drivers of the cab company she calls the night before to set up her predawn rides. “Sometimes I just get in a cab and I don’t need to say where I’m going,” she said. “He just goes.”

At the Chamber, Mr. Maldonado’s duties also include a morning phone call with Mr. Donohue, the president, who sometimes presses him for a more in-depth analysis on certain topics.

“I study three hours every day, and every now and then I go before the professor and answer questions,” Mr. Maldonado said. “I’m not a policy expert, but I’ll always try to know two or three questions he might ask.”

Getting up early is nothing new, but the lightning speed of news on the Internet and the proliferation of outlets like Politico, which place a premium on “winning” the day, has made the job more demanding and pushed the mornings ever earlier.

“There’s no news cycle anymore,” Dr. Perlmutter said. “You don’t want to be coming into the office at 8 a.m., and everyone is saying, ‘Oh my God, can you believe what happened?’ And you’re going, ‘What happened?’ ”

Such a response is not likely to come from Mr. Bates, according to the White House communications director, Daniel H. Pfeiffer, who said these jobs benefit employer and employee.

“Rapid response requires knowing that there is something that needs response,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “For such a young guy, Andrew has a great ability to sniff out stories that need to be handled with dispatch. During our biggest fights, from health care to the Supreme Court confirmations, Andrew repeatedly spotted potential problems in the farthest reaches of the Internet before anyone else. That information was essential to our success.”

A Democratic National Committee spokeswoman, Brandi Hoffine , rises between 5 and 6 a.m. for what she affectionately calls “Breakfast with Brandi”— the time she begins sending out news articles she sees as favorable to the committee’s agenda to her e-mail list of 500 or so reporters.

“We all work in environments where a 24-hour news cycle can very quickly become a 24-minute news cycle,” Ms. Hoffine said. “Being in a reporter’s inbox first, even by a few minutes, can make a big difference.”

Most of those who work the predawn shift go on to put in a more-than-full day at the office, leaving in the evening like everyone else. The lack of sleep can make for a tough grind. But for Washington’s young and ambitious, it also provides a welcome opportunity to learn a department or an agency from the ground up and can often be a way to fast-track a career. In the White House, for instance, Dag Vega, the director of broadcast media, and Amy Brundage and Reid Cherlin, both Obama administration press officers, all cut their teeth trolling for meaty early-morning news clips.

Until recently, when he was promoted to assistant communications director for Representative John A. Boehner’s political office, Kevin Boland, 25, put together a 50-page national press briefing for Mr. Boehner and his House office. He recalled getting up around 5 a.m., and still in his pajamas, putting on some coffee, and reading Web sites and compiling his report from home. At 7 a.m. he would hit the “send” button on his computer, and walk over to the Capitol for the rest of his day.

“I found it helpful and valuable, and I have a much better appreciation for what the people in the office do,” Mr. Boland said, joking: “They at least have to know who I am if they want to junk me, or put me in the trash.”

Where News Is Power, Aides Fight to Be Well-Armed,
NYT,
17.1.2011,
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/
us/politics/18early.html

Detroit Journal

Detroit’s Daily Papers

Are Now Not So Daily

March 31, 2009
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
and MARY CHAPMAN

DETROIT — Maybe once a year, a city has a news day as heavy as the one that just hit Detroit: The White House forced out the chairman of General Motors, word leaked that the administration wanted Chrysler to hitch its fortunes to Fiat, and Michigan State University’s men’s basketball team reached the Final Four, which will be held in Detroit.

All of this news would have landed on hundreds of thousands of Motor City doorsteps and driveways on Monday morning, in the form of The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News.

Would have, that is, except that Monday — of all days — was the long-planned first day of the newspapers’ new strategy for surviving the economic crisis by ending home delivery on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Instead, on those days, they are directing readers to their Web sites and offering a truncated print version at stores, newsstands and street boxes.

“This morning, I felt like something was missing,” said Nancy Nester, 51, a program coordinator at a traumatic brain injury center who is from West Bloomfield and has subscribed to both papers for four years. “There was this feeling of emptiness.”

She did not even bother to pick up the condensed print versions that were offered free on Monday. “I don’t have time to stop at the store,” she said. “That’s why I have home delivery.”

To Carol Banas, a retired city planner and longtime Free Press reader, the idea of not having a printed paper is unimaginable. “I’m at the age where I like my newspapers in hand,” said Ms. Banas, 56, who read a hard copy of Monday’s abbreviated Free Press in an Einstein Brothers Bagels shop in Royal Oak. “I know that’s English online, but it’s not the same.”

On Monday, The News and The Free Press, which share business functions under a joint operating agreement, distributed more than half a million free copies of their condensed print editions, but they will begin charging (50 cents, as always) on Tuesday. The Free Press, the larger of the papers, will still make home deliveries on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, and The News, which does not have a Sunday issue, will deliver on Thursdays and Fridays.

They have been heavily promoting not just their Web sites, but also online “e-editions” that look just like the printed papers. The e-editions have been open to everyone, but executives say that soon, only paying customers will be able to see them. For a day, at least, there was no doubt about the demand: the computers delivering the e-editions could not keep up on Monday morning, and many people were unable to load them.

“We had an overwhelming — literally overwhelming — number of people trying to get onto the e-edition site this morning, and it’s gratifying on one hand, but it slowed things down,” said Jonathan Wolman, editor and publisher of The News, which is owned by MediaNews Group.

The papers went to great effort to prepare readers, printing warnings and guides to the new format, but not everyone got the message. “A lot of people were prepped for it, and yet we’ve also been hearing from folks who were surprised that today was the day,” Mr. Wolman said.

With profits shrinking fast, newspapers are grasping for the formula that will ensure survival, and a few have decided to save on printing and distribution by publishing only on the most profitable days of the week — potentially a step toward an all-digital future. The Detroit papers are not going quite that far, but clearly the impetus is the same. Executives have called it a calculated gamble, but they say that Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays account for more than 80 percent of their advertising revenue.

About 50,000 people tried to click on the e-editions Monday, five times as many as usual, said David Hunke, chief executive of the Detroit Media Partnership. And squeezing all of the day’s news into a 32-page print edition “certainly tested our theories on design and editing.”

In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club on Monday, Mr. Hunke presented a strategy for winning readers electronically. The papers will soon be available on Amazon’s Kindle reader and, possibly by early next year, on another device from a company called Plastic Logic, said Mr. Hunke, who is also the publisher of The Free Press, which is owned by the Gannett Company.

Despite the added demand and confusion, it probably worked to the papers’ benefit that the new strategy began with a crush of news, said Bob Giles, who held Mr. Wolman’s posts in the 1990s and is now curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. “It reminds people how valuable their newspapers are, even if it’s online,” he said.

The future no doubt lies in that direction, but for now, it is a tough sell for some readers of a certain age.

Howard Waxer, 60, dropped his longtime Free Press subscription in anticipation of losing seven-day delivery and said he would not read online. He leafed through The Free Press while eating a club sandwich at Country Oven Family Dining restaurant in Berkley and said this would be his approach from now on — pick up a copy and read it over lunch.

“There’s always going to be this,” he said, holding up the paper. “I can’t picture this city without a paper coming out.”

Mary M. Chapman reported from Detroit,

and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York.

Detroit’s Daily Papers Are Now Not So Daily,
NYT,
31.3.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/
business/media/31paper.html

Op-Ed Columnist

The Daily Me

March 19, 2009
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Some of the obituaries these days aren’t in the newspapers but are for the newspapers. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the latest to pass away, save for a remnant that will exist only in cyberspace, and the public is increasingly seeking its news not from mainstream television networks or ink-on-dead-trees but from grazing online.

When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.

Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.

That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

One classic study sent mailings to Republicans and Democrats, offering them various kinds of political research, ostensibly from a neutral source. Both groups were most eager to receive intelligent arguments that strongly corroborated their pre-existing views.

There was also modest interest in receiving manifestly silly arguments for the other party’s views (we feel good when we can caricature the other guys as dunces). But there was little interest in encountering solid arguments that might undermine one’s own position.

That general finding has been replicated repeatedly, as the essayist and author Farhad Manjoo noted in his terrific book last year: “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.”

Let me get one thing out of the way: I’m sometimes guilty myself of selective truth-seeking on the Web. The blog I turn to for insight into Middle East news is often Professor Juan Cole’s, because he’s smart, well-informed and sensible — in other words, I often agree with his take. I’m less likely to peruse the blog of Daniel Pipes, another Middle East expert who is smart and well-informed — but who strikes me as less sensible, partly because I often disagree with him.

The effect of The Daily Me would be to insulate us further in our own hermetically sealed political chambers. One of last year’s more fascinating books was Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.” He argues that Americans increasingly are segregating themselves into communities, clubs and churches where they are surrounded by people who think the way they do.

Almost half of Americans now live in counties that vote in landslides either for Democrats or for Republicans, he said. In the 1960s and 1970s, in similarly competitive national elections, only about one-third lived in landslide counties.

“The nation grows more politically segregated — and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups,” Mr. Bishop writes.

One 12-nation study found Americans the least likely to discuss politics with people of different views, and this was particularly true of the well educated. High school dropouts had the most diverse group of discussion-mates, while college graduates managed to shelter themselves from uncomfortable perspectives.

The result is polarization and intolerance. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor now working for President Obama, has conducted research showing that when liberals or conservatives discuss issues such as affirmative action or climate change with like-minded people, their views quickly become more homogeneous and more extreme than before the discussion. For example, some liberals in one study initially worried that action on climate change might hurt the poor, while some conservatives were sympathetic to affirmative action. But after discussing the issue with like-minded people for only 15 minutes, liberals became more liberal and conservatives more conservative.

The decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we’ll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected “news” acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays.

So what’s the solution? Tax breaks for liberals who watch Bill O’Reilly or conservatives who watch Keith Olbermann? No, until President Obama brings us universal health care, we can’t risk the surge in heart attacks.

So perhaps the only way forward is for each of us to struggle on our own to work out intellectually with sparring partners whose views we deplore. Think of it as a daily mental workout analogous to a trip to the gym; if you don’t work up a sweat, it doesn’t count.

Now excuse me while I go and read The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page.

Roger Cohen is off today.

The Daily Me, NYT, 19.3.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/
opinion/19kristof.html

As Cities Go

From Two Papers to One,

Talk of Zero

March 12, 2009
The New York Times
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

The history of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer stretches back more than two decades before Washington became a state, but after 146 years of publishing, the paper is expected to print its last issue next week, perhaps surviving only in a much smaller online version.

And it is not alone. The Rocky Mountain News shut down two weeks ago, and The Tucson Citizen is expected to fold next week.

At least Denver, Seattle and Tucson still have daily papers. But now, some economists and newspaper executives say it is only a matter of time — and probably not much time at that — before some major American city is left with no prominent local newspaper at all.

“In 2009 and 2010, all the two-newspaper markets will become one-newspaper markets, and you will start to see one-newspaper markets become no-newspaper markets,” said Mike Simonton, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, who analyzes the industry.

Many critics and competitors of newspapers — including online start-ups that have been hailed as the future of journalism — say that no one should welcome their demise.

“It would be a terrible thing for any city for the dominant paper to go under, because that’s who does the bulk of the serious reporting,” said Joel Kramer, former editor and publisher of The Star Tribune and now the editor and chief executive of MinnPost .com, an online news organization in Minneapolis.

“Places like us would spring up,” he said, “but they wouldn’t be nearly as big. We can tweak the papers and compete with them, but we can’t replace them.”

No one knows which will be the first big city without a large paper, but there are candidates all across the country. The Hearst Corporation, which owns The Post-Intelligencer, has also threatened to close The San Francisco Chronicle, which lost more than $1 million a week last year, unless it can wring significant savings from the operation.

In a tentative deal reached Tuesday night, the California Media Workers Guild agreed to less vacation time, longer workweeks and more flexibility for The Chronicle to make layoffs without regard to seniority. Union officials say they have been told to expect the elimination of at least 150 guild jobs, almost one-third of the total, and management is still trying to negotiate concessions from the Teamsters union.

Advance Publications said last fall that it might shut down The Star-Ledger, the dominant paper in New Jersey, but a set of cutbacks and union concessions kept the paper alive in much-downsized form.

The top papers in many markets, like The Star Tribune in Minneapolis, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New Haven Register, belong to companies that have gone into bankruptcy in the last three months.

The owners insist they have no intention of closing publications, but the management making those assurances may not be in charge when the companies emerge from reorganization.

Other publishers, like the Seattle Times Company and MediaNews Group, owner of The Denver Post, The San Jose Mercury News and The Detroit News, are seen as being at risk of bankruptcy. Many newspapers — from The Miami Herald to The Chicago Sun-Times — have been put up for sale, with no buyers on the horizon.

Ad revenue, the industry’s lifeblood, has dropped about 25 percent in the last two years (by comparison, automotive revenue for Detroit’s Big Three fell about 15 percent during the same period, although it has accelerated recently), and that slide, accelerated by the recession, shows no sign of leveling off in 2009.

Web sites like Craigslist have been to classified ads what the internal combustion engine was to horse-drawn buggies. The stock prices of most newspaper publishers have dropped more than 90 percent from their peaks.

And magnifying the problem, for many chains, is a heavy burden of debt that they took on, mostly in a spree of buying other newspapers from 2005 to 2007, just before the bottom dropped out of the business.

The Tribune Company, for instance, owner of The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and other papers, filed for bankruptcy in December, largely because of its debt load. The reality is that even though the economic climate is hard for newspapers, without their debt payments the publishers in bankruptcy would still make money, as do most newspapers around the country.

But profits are shrinking fast; taken together, major chains had an operating profit margin of about 10 percent in 2008, down from more than 20 percent as recently as 2004, according to research by John Morton, an independent analyst.

The recent closures and threatened closures point to an ominous new trend. For The Chronicle, The Rocky, The Star-Ledger, The Citizen and others, debt was never the problem and they belonged to solvent companies, but still they have been losing money.

Analysts say that many other major papers have also slid into red ink recently, including The Washington Post and The Boston Globe (which is owned by The New York Times Company).

The steady trickle of downsizing that sapped American papers for almost a decade has become a flood in the last few years. The Los Angeles Times still has one of the largest news staffs in the country, about 600 people, but it was twice as big in the late 1990s. The Washington Post had a newsroom of more than 900 six years ago, and has fewer than 700 now. The Gannett Company, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, eliminated more than 8,300 jobs in 2007 and 2008, or 22 percent of the total.

On Wednesday, The Miami Herald, once the celebrated flagship of the Knight Ridder chain, said it would trim an additional 19 percent of its already diminished staff.

Nearly every large paper in the country prints fewer pages and fewer articles, and many have eliminated entire sections. Bureaus in foreign capitals and even Washington have closed, and papers have jettisoned film criticism, book reviews and coverage of local news outside their home markets.

Many papers are sharing coverage with former competitors in an effort to save money. (The New York Times has also suffered from declining revenue, but has been able to avoid serious newsroom cuts so far.)

For more than two centuries, newspapers have been the indispensable source of public information and a check on the abuses of government and other powerful interests. And they still reach a vast and growing audience. Daily print circulation has dropped from a peak of 62 million two decades ago to around 49 million, and online readership has risen faster, to almost 75 million Americans and 3.7 billion page views in January, according to Nielsen Online.

But no one yet has unlocked the puzzle of supporting a large newsroom purely on digital revenue, a fact that may presage an era of news organizations that are smaller, weaker and less able to fulfill their traditional function as the nation’s watchdog.

“I can’t imagine what civil society would be like,” said Buzz Woolley, a wealthy San Diego businessman who has been a vocal critic of the paper there, The Union-Tribune, and the primary backer of an Internet news site, VoiceofSanDiego.org. “I don’t want to imagine it. A huge amount of information would just never get out.”

Not everyone agrees. The death of a newspaper should result in an explosion of much smaller news sources online, producing at least as much coverage as the paper did, says Jeff Jarvis, director of interactive journalism at the City University of New York’s graduate journalism school. Those sources might be less polished, Mr. Jarvis said, but they would be competitive, ending the monopolies many newspapers have long enjoyed.

A number of money-losing papers should “have the guts to shut down print and go online,” he said. “It will have to be a much smaller product, but that’s where we’re headed anyway.”

Industry executives who once scoffed at the idea of an Internet-only product now concede that they are probably headed in that direction, but the consensus is that newspapers going all digital would become drastically smaller news sources for the foreseeable future.

Until then, papers have turned to measures that would have been unthinkable just a year or two ago, including many that are weighing whether to begin charging readers for online access, as The Wall Street Journal does.

Starting March 30, the major Detroit papers, The Free Press and The News, will deliver to subscribers only three days a week, to save money on printing and trucking. The Christian Science Monitor will print its last daily edition on March 27, becoming primarily an online operation, with a printed weekly paper.

“It’s not so much that everyone has a great plan,” said John Yemma, editor of The Monitor. Rather, he said, “everybody is so desperate, they’re looking at every possibility.”

As Cities Go From Two Papers to One, Talk of Zero,
NYT, 12.3.2009,
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/
business/media/12papers.html

Google to Digitize

Newspaper Archives

September 9, 2008
The New York Times
By MIGUEL HELFT

SAN FRANCISCO — Google has begun scanning microfilm from some newspapers’ historic archives to make them searchable online, first through Google News and eventually on the papers’ own Web sites, the company said Monday.

The new program expands a two-year-old service that allows Google News users to search the archives of some major newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time, that were already available in digital form. Readers will be able to search the archives using keywords and view articles as they appeared originally in the print pages of newspapers.

Under the expanded program, Google will shoulder the cost of digitizing newspaper archives, much as the company does with its book-scanning project. Google angered some book publishers because it had failed to seek permission to scan books that were protected by copyrights. It will obtain permission from newspaper publishers before scanning their archives.

Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., will place advertisements alongside search results, and share the revenue from those ads with newspaper publishers.

Initially, the archives will be available through Google News, but the company plans to give newspapers a way to make their archives available on their own sites.

“This is really good for newspapers because we are going to be bringing online an old generation of contributions from journalists, as well as widening the reader base of news archives,” said Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and user experience at Google.

But many newspaper publishers view search engines like Google as threats to their own business. Many of them also see their archives as a potential source of revenue, and it is not clear whether they will willingly hand them over to Google.

“The concern is that Google, in making all of the past newspaper content available, can greatly commoditize that content, just like news portals have commoditized current news content,” said Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell, a research company.

Google said it was working with more than 100 newspapers and with partners like Heritage Microfilm and ProQuest, which aggregate historical newspaper archives in microfilm. It has already scanned millions of articles.

Other companies are already working with newspapers to digitize archives and some sell those archives to schools, libraries and other institutions, helping newspapers earn money from their historical content.

The National Digital Newspaper Program, a joint program of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress, is creating a digital archive of historically significant newspapers published in the United States from 1836 to 1922. It will be freely accessible on the Internet.

Newspapers that are participating in the Google program say it is attractive.

“We wouldn’t be talking about digitization if Google had not entered this arena,” said Tim Rozgonyi, research editor at The St. Petersburg Times. “We looked into it years back, and it appeared to be exceedingly costly.”

Mr. Rozgonyi said that the newspaper might be able to generate additional revenue from the digital archives by producing historical booklets or commemorative front pages. But he said that increasing sales was not the primary objective of the digitization program.

“Getting the digitized content available is a wonderful thing for people of this area,” he said. “They’ll be able to go to our site or Google’s and tap into 100 years of history.”

Pierre Little, publisher of The Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which has been published since 1764 and calls itself “North America’s Oldest Newspaper,” said many readers visit the newspaper’s Web site to look for obituaries and conduct research on their ancestors.

“We could envision that thousands of families would be attracted to our archives to search for people who came over to the New World,” Mr. Little said. “We hope that will be a financial windfall for us.”

Brad Stone contributed reporting.

Google to Digitize Newspaper Archives,
NYT,
9.9.2008,
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/09/
technology/09google.html

BULLETIN KILL

November 16, 2007

Filed at 11:53 a.m. ET

The New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN DIEGO -- Kill the last graf of BC-Marines-Haditha.

Army Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan of Fredericksburg, Va.,

was NOT convicted of abusing detainees

at Abu Ghraib prison.

The AP

BULLETIN KILL,
NYT,
16.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/
AP-Marines-Haditha.html

Marine Faces Charges

in Haditha Killings

November 16, 2007

Filed at 12:04 p.m. ET

The New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- The highest-ranking U.S. serviceman to face court-martial involving combat since Vietnam was due to answer charges Friday of failing to investigate the killings of 24 Iraqis, including women and children.

Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani was to be arraigned on charges of dereliction of duty and violation of a lawful order on allegations that he mishandled the aftermath of the Nov. 19, 2005, shootings in Haditha.

Earlier that day, the squad's convoy was struck by a roadside bomb, killing one Marine and wounding another. In the aftermath, squad members killed 24 Iraqi civilians, authorities have said.

Chessani was commander of the Camp Pendleton-based 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment that has been the focus of the largest prosecution of U.S. troops in the Iraq war.

The decision to send Chessani to trial came after a hearing officer blasted Chessani for failing to go to the scene of the killings immediately after they occurred.

''To not have made every attempt to be on scene as this action developed, or to not have at least reviewed this action in detail ... is in itself negligent,'' Col. Christopher Conlin wrote.

At Chessani's preliminary hearing in June at Camp Pendleton, several witnesses testified that Iraqis had complained to Chessani in the days after the killings and that he promised to look into what had happened.

But Chessani, of Rangely, Colo., said he never ordered a formal investigation because he believed the deaths resulted from lawful combat.

If convicted on all counts, Chessani faces up to three years in prison.

Chessani's civilian attorney, Brian Rooney, said the lieutenant colonel would reserve the right to enter a plea at a later date rather than at the arraignment, which is a standard practice when a case goes to court-martial.

''We fully intend to enter a not guilty plea,'' Rooney said.

Chessani is the most senior U.S. serviceman since the Vietnam War to face a court-martial for actions or decisions made in combat, said Gary Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor and judge who teaches law of war at Georgetown University Law Center.

He is the second colonel to be court-martialed over actions in Iraq. Army Lt. Col. Steven L. Jordan of Fredericksburg, Va., was court-martialed on charges of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. He was cleared of those charges but convicted on a lesser charge -- disobeying a general's order not to discuss the abuse investigation.