Mariotti didn’t have to be a jerk

Sports columnist Jay Mariotti is well within his rights to resign from the Chicago Sun-Times, but he didn’t have to be a jerk about it.Instead of quietly arranging his departure by giving his editors sufficient advance notice to manage a smooth transition, he boorishly announced his decision to the competing Chicago media by babbling into every microphone in sight that “I don't think either paper

Publishers need to invest in new plant

U.S. publishers could boost revenues and improve the competitiveness of their newspapers by investing in modern production facilities, says Peter Klaue. He is the founder of Peter Klaue Media Consultancy in Hamburg, Germany, which provides strategic consulting and M&A advisory services for the publishing industry.By Peter KlaueOne of the reasons U.S. newspapers are in a significantly worse spot

Obama end-runs the media

Barack Obama’s veep text blast is not only the greatest advance in political public relations since the fireside chat but also a more important wake-up call for the mainstream media than the one many reporters got at 3 a.m. Saturday.Just as Franklin Delano Roosevelt bypassed the press by directly addressing citizens over the radio, the savvy Obama media team has developed a direct connection to

Big Board set to boot GateHouse

GateHouse Media was warned late today that it must come up with a plan to raise the price of its stock or will be dropped from trading at the New York Stock Exchange.If GHS is kicked off the Big Board, it would become the third newspaper publisher this year to be delisted at the exchange. Journal Register Co. (JRCO) and Sun-Times Media Group (SUTM) previously withdrew from trading at the Big

How 2 mak room 4 mor nws

With newshole shrinking, one way to get more content in newspapers would be to bring back the streamlined spelling that was championed for 40 years by the Chicago Tribune until an un-foresighted editor scuttled it in 1974.The Tribune’s bold effort to rewrite the English language commenced in 1934, when Col. Robert R. McCormick, the publisher, tasked his staff to eliminate errant vowels, purge

Fourth publisher the charm for LAT?

The fourth publisher since 2000 could be the charm for the Los Angeles Times.Eddy Hartenstein has a shot at success, because, unlike his three predecessors, he has the decided advantage of not being a newspaper guy.Accordingly, he is under no professional or personal obligation to preserve, protect and defend his track record or the practices of an industry whose business model has not changed

Game-changing newspaper buyers

With a growing number of newspapers on the market at a time they most likely will fetch historically low prices, somebody is going to start buying some of them. But don’t count on the usual suspects.Start thinking, instead, about such unconventional potential purchasers as the multibillion-dollar investment funds created by countries like Singapore or the sheikhdoms of the United Arab