Newspaper shares slid $23B in 6 months

The value of 11 newspaper companies traded on the public market since 2005 dove a combined $23.7 billion in the first half of this year, falling almost as much in six months as they had in the three prior years put together.Wall Street’s intensifying repudiation of the industry means that the companies in the group have lost a cumulative $49.7 billion in market capitalization in 3½ years,

S.J. Merc staff gutted by 62.5%

The lightning-round layoffs due to cut the newsroom of the San Jose Mercury News by another nine employees by tomorrow night means the staff will have been pared by fully 62.5% from its peak strength in 2000.The newspaper was perhaps the primary beneficiary of the Internet Bubble, when aggressive competition for dot-comers pumped its want-ad revenues to stratospheric – and, as it proved –

Little ado over Orlando's redo

Fewer than 0.05% of the readers of the Orlando Sentinel are fussed about the bold redesign of their newspaper, according to statistics provided by management three days after the debut of the new look.The response could mean any of the following::: 99.95% of the readers like the colorful overhaul, which would be great news for the newspaper.:: 99.95% of the readers didn’t notice, which not only

How close to default is your paper?

The newspaper industry shuddered last week when Bloomberg News warned that several publishers are in danger of default. And some are. But there are many degrees of defaultness and not all publishers are in equal danger of going down the drain.So, I have created not only the word “defaultness” but also a simple tool called the “Default-O-Matic” to help you see at a glance the degree of financial

Reader Jason writes: Is it better to leave a computer on all the time or shut it off when you done? If I leave it on, what settings (like hibernate) should I use?

Years ago the conventional wisdom was that leaving your computer on all the time would allow it to last longer before a crash. The culprit: Your hard drive. Frequent starts and stops would cause your hard drive mechanism to wear out much faster than if the drive never spun down. An old saying (possibly apocryphal) was that stopping and restarting a hard drive was the same as eight hours of regular running time.

I talked to the good folks at Seagate to find out if things had changed. According to the company, starting and stopping is not a huge problem with drives any more, and they can be safely shut off and on in order to save power. According to Seagate, you can expect a drive to last for three to five years of running time before dying, though obviously many drives last longer.

What's the big factor that causes drives to die early? Heat, says Seagate. Ensuring your computer stays cool through the proper use of fans is far and away the best thing you can do to keep your drive healthy. I'd imagine that shutting it down when not in use will only help. Naturally, shutting down your computer will also conserve electricity, so unless there's a compelling reason to leave it on (as with a server), you should probably shut down at night.

So, how should you shut down properly? It's completely up to you, really. If you do a full "Shut Down" (or "Turn Off Computer") your computer will be completely off, using no power at all. "Hibernate" and "Standby" are lower-power states that allow you to resume quickly into the Windows desktop. Standby simply powers down hardware components like the hard drive, monitor, and peripherals, but continues to provide power to RAM, so everything you were doing stays active. Hibernate is closer to a shut down: It saves an exact image of your Windows desktop, then powers the PC down. When you awaken from hibernation, everything is back where you last had it. Personally I'm not a big fan of hibernate, because if I'm going to shut Windows down completely I like to reload everything fresh into RAM, which helps system stability. I tend to use both standby (for shorter times away from my PC) and shut down (for more than a few hours of downtime) instead.

The case for a JOA in Miami

As odd a couple as they might be, Gary Pruitt and Sam Zell may want to buddy up to figure out how to reduce expenses to make the most of the sagging revenues at their struggling newspapers in south Florida.If they can modify their loan covenants, appease federal antitrust-regulators and navigate the myriad other details associated with an undertaking of this sort, the heavily leveraged owners of

Shared presses will squeeze deadlines

Plans to print two McClatchy titles in the plants of neighboring newspapers almost certainly will force earlier deadlines in the newsrooms of all four papers, which could compromise the quality of their coverage.In a development likely to become increasingly commonplace among publishers eager to reduce operating costs, MNI and privately held Pioneer Newspapers announced plans to shift the