Deadly duel for N.Y. tabs

Those saying Rupert Murdoch wants to buy Newsday to squeeze the New York Times are missing the point: His immediate goal is weakening the New York Daily News so he can, once and for all, dominate the Big Apple.While a beefed-up Murdoch presence in the New York market undoubtedly would cause new troubles for the already troubled New York Times Co., the publisher with even more heartburn than

Reading is so passé

Reading on the web could become almost as retro as, well, reading a newspaper. (Not that there’s anything wrong with reading a newspaper.)A pair of companies promoting beta versions of their technology this week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco showed how they can create audio and video from simple text, thus obviating the need to read.After wrestling a bit with Dixero.Com, I got it to render

Web ad sales slump at newspapers

As if plunging print advertising sales weren’t bad enough, newspapers also suffered a significant slowdown in new media revenues in the first three months of this year.Nearly overshadowed by the double-digit print declines reported widely throughout the industry, the interactive slowdown results from the stubborn determination of most publishers to try to sell online advertising to the very same

Drive-by surfers peril news sites

While more people than ever may be visiting newspaper websites, they are sticking around less this year than they were in 2007.That’s the troubling problem the Newspaper Association of America failed to mention this week, when it reported that the number of unique visitors at its members’ websites increased 12.3% to an all-time high of 199.1 million in the first three months of the year.But an

ASNE's senselesss newsroom census

Although it’s finally pointing in the right direction, I wouldn’t put any faith in the annual newsroom census just released by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. In a confounding statistical mélange of apples, bananas and bowling bowls, the association – which ought to know better – would have us believe that only 1,000 journalists (less than 1.9% of the work force) lost their jobs at

What went wrong at JRC

Teetering near default on a tower of debt and days from being booted off the Big Board, Journal Register Co. shows how strategic missteps and bad luck can imperil even as good a business as this highly profitable chain of community newspapers.For all that’s wrong with JRC – and there is a quite lot, to be sure – the company’s 19.3% operating profit not only compares quite favorably with those of

Congrats, with an asterisk

Like the baseball Barry Bonds swatted into the stands to break the all-time homerun record, there ought to be an asterisk on the Pulitzer Prizes awarded to journalists this year and for the foreseeable future.Unlike Bonds, who has been accused of using illegal steroids to enhance his performance, the writers and photographers who earned the industry’s highest honor did nothing inappropriate to