McClatchy is laying off the equivalent of 1,600 workers, and others are having salaries cut as part of a restructuring.
The four McClatchy newspapers in Washington state are The Olympian, The News-Tribune, The Bellingham Herald and Tri-City Herald.
Some well-known papers owned by the firm around the country include The Kansas City Star, The Sacramento Bee and The Miama Herald.
McClatchy has some very fine reporters here, around the country, and in its DC bureau. This is a shame.
Jon, do you have a newspaper subscription?
Don’t worry, Puddy knows you don’t have the brass marbuls (Major League) to answer Puddy!
For many years, the proportion of the newspaper budget that has gone into reportage and writing seems to me to have been in decline, esp. if you measure pay by the relationship of reporters and writers salaries to the income of comparable people in other professions. If I am correct than it was inevitable that the enterprise(s) would collapse.
I find it difficult or impossible to believe to believe that there is not a demand for local news. The question is what is it worth to the consumer and how does one pay for it?
In the current chaos how can one determine what people will and will not pay for? One answer is to look in a mirror. In my own case Huffington has become my major news portal. I look there first thing in the morning for links to more traditional media. Besides whatever HP is making from click throughs, I suspect eventually HP will become a part of the NYT or WP .. or even merge with Politico to offer both the free portal service AND content that people will be willing to pay for.
If I am correct, then we should expect to see real competitors for HP soon. Drudge is sort of a competitor .. in the sense that the NY Post competes with the NYT. However, Drucge and Huff represent a very limited taste of what could exist. A group of similar minded folks are founding something si ilar to the Huff for Seattle, we call this the Seattle PUB.
PUBS are like the Huff or Drudge .. a mix of portal and multi author blogs with some overall editorial point of view. The analogy to Drinking Liberally is intended. Imagine something based on a mix of fairly rational but very well informed people who represent some of the intellectual, political, social and corporate mix that is Seattle?
The Pub will not be right or left. Among our contributors we already have a profound social activist working in the African American community, an economist, a member of the Nobel committee who studied in Seattle, two working artists, a Seattle Historian, a leading environmental scientist, a biblical literalist, a militant atheist, a Microsoftie, … etc.
Hopefully a lot of folks will see our effort as appealing to their POV and use SP as a portal. The underlying challenge, however remains can a PUB, like HP, Drudge, or generate money to support reporting and writing. All of the SP and most of the HP writers are not paid. We hope to bring traffic to our contributors websites and blogs where different for profit models can be developed by individual entrepreneurs.
Finally, the effort of Seattle PUB is obviously synergistic with Goldy’s effort to create an interactive web of blogs and SP will be part of the JOA.
According to the Right Wing, the only reporting should be posting partisan talking points, and only Republican Partisan Talking points. It is a shame that also live and local, whether it is Liberal or Conservative, whether it is TV, Radio, or the Newspapers, because news has to be profitable. Also,the does not know geographical boundaries, whether political or geographical, or international.
Up in Canada, advertising revenue is declining so much on over the air broadcasting is threatened. I am not just talking about government owned CBC, but also private corporations like CTV. CTV is pushing for one-year license renewals with the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission, instead of the normal 7. They are also dumping a few stations, one of them is CKX in Brandon, Manitoba. Which seems like just another farming town on the prairie, but a CFB is in that area, home to an Infantry Brigade that has seen some time in Afghanistan. Something live and local would want to cover, oh wait, according to the Conservative Media in this country, that should not be covered. In Canada, they allowed the media to record the returning home of fallen soldiers from Afghanistan, and it has turned into a ritual that Ottawa cannot stop. People line the highway from CFB Trenton to Toronto paying their respects as the procession goes by, with traffic coming to a halt(even on the overpasses). The CBC in it’s charter has a rule on high amount of Canadian Content in it’s programming, but if we had heavy foreign investment in our media that outsourced programming from other countries, I would demand the same rule for PBS to have a high degree of American content. Also, what has CTV dumping the A-Channel chain, is that these stations don’t have to pay to be on cable, so they are a liability compared to the cable channels they own.
Another private media concern in Canada facing tough times is CanWest Global, they area good operation, but greed got the better of them, and their newspaper division made a leverage buyout of another Newspaper Chain owned by a convicted felon(whose in one of our prisons by the way), and the loan payments are a big drain. CanWest Global owns Newspapers and TV Stations in most provinces, including Vancouver, BC.
http://www.brandonsun.com/stor....._id=126343
Do I want government subsidies for the newspapers, maybe the mail rates and subsidized newsprint they had at the early days of this country, but there can be interesting conditions done under the best of intentions. I’ll use the Canadian Pacific Railway for an example. In 1897, they needed money to complete a line, and they got it from the Canadian Federal Government, but it was a hard price that would hurt both Canadian Pacific and the government-built competitor Canadian National Railway(which was an umbrella corporation at one time for many one-time and some that are still, Crown Corporations of the Canadian Government, like Air Canada, the CBC, and the Marine Atlantic ferry company) for a century. The bargain, was grain rates would stay at 1897 levels, and not be adjusted for inflation. This was not changed until the 1980s, because of political pressure from the farmers, who voted Progressive Conservative, and to go against the Crows Nest Pass Agreement would be political suicide. I doubt a subsidized Newspaper would go that far, but just wanted to provide an example.
3 Actually, over-the-air broadcasting is falling apart about as rapidly here in the US as it is in Canada.
The public may in general not be entirely aware of it because, as has been until recently the case with newspapers, broadcasters have been reluctant to report their own demise for fear of accelerating the process.
This is a stunningly amazing comment.
Please show us where this has been said anywhere, or are you taking the place of Pelletizer for the most idiotic loony leftist ladder lander comment of the day?
FartyArt:
And you don’t think the Bill Burkett affair has nothing to do with it? If reporters reported the news instead of placing their own biases in it don’t you think people would want the real news?
How come there are so many studies regarding media bias if media bias didn’t exist? How come Americans know there is media bias toward the left? Why do you and other HA loony leftist ladder landers ignore these facts.
Told you all Jon has no brass marbuls in #1!
ArtFart, good point, although if they pull out of the mess they are in, I think a good Mark Twain quote would be reported, but that will not happen.
Also, some of the Canadian content on the CBC include a movie about 9/11 called Diverted. It was about the people in Gander, Newfoundland who stepped up when they were called upon. As US Airspace closed, there were nearly 40 of the flights approaching the North American Continent were diverted to Gander, because it had three things that were needed, a long runway, plenty of pavement to park the planes, and position. Over 6000 people were on those flights, and if the Canadian people did not step up, who knows where those flights would have ended up, maybe in the Ocean. Many were low of fuel, others had too much. I have seen the History Channel documentary on Air Traffic Control on 9/11, it was mostly from the American Prospective, with the FAA and NATCA represented, but they had a few controllers from NAV Canada(Canadian Air Traffic Control), mainly Gander and Whitehorse(a KAL 747 made a diversion there). The clip I heard of “Diverted” on a CBC News had an interesting quote from the “Mayor”(they fictionalized this character instead of basing it on the real guy), when he asked about hotel space for the passengers, and they told him only a few hundred. The response was “O.K, that leaves us only 6000 short, how about using the schools?” That story has not got much press in the US, and pretty much only covered in said History Channel documentary. That and the case over Alaska and the Yukon where a KAL 747 was nearly shot down because the pilot, speaking little English hit the hijack alarm as a response to the order to divert. By the time they cleared it up, it was too late to land at Anchorage and he had to land in the Yukon at a Runway that was long enough, but barely wide enough for a 747s Landing Gear.
As for PuddyBud, I noticed the trend. When MSNBC started reporting differently than Fox News, Fox News people like O’Reilly were saying it was radical Anti-American Reporting, and that all righties were purged. Joe Scarborough had a great response, bringing up that he was a former Member of Congress from a Republican District(that should make him suspect, being a former Member of Congress, regardless of ideology or party) in the Florida Panhandle, and said that O’Reilly did not know what is a Conservative if he ignores him. I don’t like Scarborough that much, but I download the vodcast MSNBC puts out(wished it was longer than 10-15 minutes), just to see what he and Mika(the co-host) have to say. As for O’Reilly, had enough of him listening to him on the Spokane stations when I was at EWU.
Evergreerailfan glad you went there. I was waiting for the first person to take the bait… Now regarding Joe Scarborough, he’s their only conservative. Witness Rachel, Chris and Keith.
By the way, per slingshit they get paid by the American Taxpayer. So we the people can call PMSNBC and demand more favorable balanced coverage of the Obama Network, eh?
http://www.journalism.org/node/13436 – see snippet below…
* MSNBC stood out for having less negative coverage of Obama than the press generally (14% of stories vs. 29% in the press overall) and for having more negative stories about McCain (73% of its coverage vs. 57% in the press overall).
* On Fox News, in contrast, coverage of Obama was more negative than the norm (40% of stories vs. 29% overall) and less positive (25% of stories vs. 36% generally). For McCain, the news channel was somewhat more positive (22% vs. 14% in the press overall) and substantially less negative (40% vs. 57% in the press overall). Yet even here, his negative stories outweighed positive ones by almost 2 to 1.
* CNN fell distinctly in the middle of the three cable channels when it came to tone. In general, the tone of its coverage was closer than any other cable news channel to the press overall, though also somewhat more negative than the media overall.
* The distinct tone of MSNBC—more positive toward Democrats and more negative toward Republicans—was not reflected in the coverage of its broadcast sibling, NBC News. Even though it has correspondents appear on their cable shows and even anchor some programs on there, the broadcast channel showed no such ideological tilt. Indeed, NBC’s coverage of Palin was the most positive of any TV organization studied, including Fox News.
* At night, the newscasts of the three traditional broadcast networks stood out for being more neutral—and also less negative—than most other news outlets. The morning shows of the networks, by contrast, more closely resembled the media generally in tone. That might surprise some who imagined those morning programs were somehow easier on political figures. Overall, 44% of the morning show stories were clearly negative, compared with 34% on the nightly news and 42% in the press overall.
Then visit this one to Evergreenrailfan. http://www.journalism.org/node/13307
Hey I love it… I place the truth about media bias and WordPress claims it’s spam.
Toooooooooooooo
Damnnnnnnnnnnn
Funnnnnnnnnnnny
www. journalism. org/ node/ 13307
Remove the spaces EvergreenRailFan.
I have two posts for answers for EvergreenRailFan
www. journalism. org/ node/ 13436
www. journalism. org/ node/ 13307
Goldy’s filter thinks displaying media bias studies are spam.
Let’s see if Goldy has the marbuls to post my original ones.
3. EvergreenRailfan spews:
When you spew over the top generalties like this to start a post (WITH ZERO FACTS), you lose credability.
If you are going to make outrageous statements, at least cite some sources.
You have a hard time making a legimate point without endless paragraphs of drivel.
Did you graduate from 6th grade yet?
OK
we are all worried.
NOW ..
I would love to see some facts. As one example, I suspect the actual cost of broadcasting is tiny so why are stations going under? Id there debt to high? too much spent on management?
How much would it cost to support KIRO if all ti did was to broadcast Goldy and devote the rest to syndication?
tpm
If radio/tv ad revenues have dropped a great deal lately keep in mind that in recent times the typical media outlet was a virtual cash machine. Huge profit margins. So the question I would have is whether the real problem right now isn’t profitability per se, but that investors had gotten too used to sky-high profits (perhaps to cover heavy debt loads due to overly rapid expansion).
If this analysis is at all correct then current economic conditions could shake out the badly managed companies but leave the good ones standing.