AP scoops the big boys

The websites of the New York Times and Washington Post were the last among the major national media today to report that John Edwards is dropping out of the presidential race.It took the NYT seven minutes to top its site with the Associated Press scoop that cleared the wires at 9.08 a.m. Eastern time. The Washington Post got the story on its site a moment earlier.Before the Edwards story appeared

How activists aim to help NYT

The activist investors seeking four seats on the board of the New York Times Co. are trying to help rescue an endangered public trust, not challenge the ownership of the company, says one well informed source.“The next three to five years hold great risk and great opportunity for the New York Times,” says an individual familiar with the efforts of Firebrand Partners and Harbinger Capital Partners

Don’t shoot the messengers

Chris Harte and Brian Tierney aren’t enemies of newspapers. They are just messengers reporting the danger the industry will face if it doesn’t adjust its economics to the new realities of the marketplace.Sniping at them won’t change the message. So, hold your fire and listen closely to what they have to say:Newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer and Minneapolis Star Tribune are getting

Pulp friction

Profit-pinched newspapers trying to save money by cutting back on the newsprint they consume will be hammered by a 23% increase in the cost of whatever paper they do buy this year, fears one analyst.If Paul Ginocchio of Deutsche Bank is right, newspapers that already have trimmed page sizes, eliminated stock tables and scrapped op-ed sections will have no alternative but to pay the sharply higher

‘Who’s Mike Royko?’

One of the simple pleasures of blogging is getting called from time to time by journalism students who are looking for a couple of quick quotes for a term paper.I am happy to oblige, because no one else wants to listen to my stories about the olden, golden days of the newspaper business. While the students may not be universally thrilled by what I have to say, I find it fascinating to learn what’

Back to the chopping block

For all the cost-cutting at newspapers in 2007, the trauma may continue in 2008 as the industry faces a potential drop of some $3 billion in print advertising sales for the second year in a row.With economic harbingers pointing to recession-like conditions in 2008, many publishers are urgently recalibrating their budgets to reflect the growing concern that sales will decline more steeply this

State of play

Staff cuts at the sheriff’s department and debate over a new toilet tax made the front page this morning at the Opelousas (LA) Daily World, but there was no mention of the New Hampshire primary.The stories were different but the situation was the same at papers like the Dodge City (KS) Daily Globe, the Waynesboro (VA) News-Virginian, the Pierre (SD) Daily Journal, the Santa Clarita Valley (CA)

Common un-wisdom, redux

Hillary Clinton’s surprise victory in the New Hampshire primary proves that the job of political reporting will be even more treacherous this year than discussed in this prior post.Succumbing to the collective wisdom of the surveys and the pundits that prevailed less than 48 hours ago, I, like just about everyone else, bought into the idea that Hillary was going down to her second defeat after

Common un-wisdom

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the immortal Chicago Tribune headline screaming “Dewey Defeats Truman,” pundits and pollsters still have a tin ear for the sentiment of the American electorate.While it is amusing to see modern voters defying the expectations of the quants in the same way they led Gallup and the Tribune to believe Thomas E. Dewey was headed for the White House in 1948, the

Many barbarians, few gatekeepers

One of the last of the great gatekeepers of the news died this week and the tragedy is not merely in his passing but also that we almost certainly will not see his like again.Daniel T. Sullivan, who died at 88 on Wednesday, was the chief of the copy desk of the Chicago Daily News, when I, fresh out of college, was put in his care as a rookie copy editor in 1970.He went on, as he noted in a “hold

Hop off the bus, Gus

With one journalist traipsing around Iowa for every 100 expected caucus-goers, you have to ask yourself, “Don’t most of the these reporters have something better to do?” Indeed, they do.While I am as interested as anyone in whether Barack Ob-literates Hillary or Huck Romps Romney, I can’t see the point of concentrating more than 2,500 representatives of our resource-constrained news organizations

$23B zapped in news stock value

The market value of the American newspaper publishers entering 2008 as independent, publicly traded companies has fallen by $23 billion, or 42%, since the end 2004, the year before the wheels started coming off the industry.Nearly half the slide in the market capitalization of newspaper stocks came in 2007, when the shares lost a collective $11 billion, or 26%, of their value. Thus, newspapers