The Louisville Courier-Journal has been accused by irate readers of "pushing the ol' homosexual agenda" for publishing this photo of two Louisville Cardinals baskeball players totally being gay with each other. The paper's ombud says there will be no apology and asks what is so wrong about publishing photos of hot student athlete-on-student athlete action. [Courier-Journal via Romenesko]
Anyone have pics or stories from Thursday's party for Wall Street Journal staff? Given the bureau chiefs, flown in for their annual pow-wow, were just told that investigative reporting was being pushed to the weekend, or inside pages, one has to imagine there were some forced smiles. Email nick@gawker.com.
You wondered what qualifications Garry Steckles, a St. Kitts restauranteur, brings to his job as a consultant for the Chicago Sun-Times, which is facing imminent layoffs. Apart from being childhood friend of the Chicago newspaper's editor-in-chief, "I worked [at English newspaper Shields Gazette] from 1960 to 1964, on the sports desk... full time, straight out of school, at 30 bob a week," he writes via the comments section of an English news blog.
It's Thursday, and what's back in style this week, according to the NYT Styles? For certain men, vests "feel right again." (Did they ever feel wrong?) A few important points: the three-piece suit's "strength is also its weakness," but standing alone, the vest "kicks things up a notch." Vests were at Christmas parties, and are all up in the clubs. And also! Vests let men show off the size of their "drop," a sort of sexy waist-to-chest ratio. Perhaps most importantly, "you can feel your cellphone vibrate in it much better than in your jacket." What else has the Styles section proclaimed back for men in the last year?
In 2007 the Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize, Risser Prize and SPJ award for some serious regional reporting about ocean pollution and migrant workers and uranium mining. So what sorts of stories did latimes.com readers actually click on that year? A sex-change journal, Paris Hilton in jail, something about Kelly Clarkson and lots of national news. Obviously readers want a site "heavy on local news and politcs" an ingenious LA Times editor concludes. Riiight. The sorts of stories they should be running instead, after the jump.
One person who won't be hit by layoffs at the Chicago Sun-Times: Garry Steckles. The newspaper "consultant" is a restaurant owner in Saint Kitts, and spends as much time as he can on the beach, but "help[s] out" at the newspaper whenever he's needed. And he's just been promoted, so he's exempt from the job cuts. His secret? Steckles grew up with Editor-in-Chief Michael Cooke. [Chicago Reader]
Those poor British newspapers, with their inconvenient deadlines, and fear of missing the story. Hillary Clinton's surprising victory in the New Hampshire primary came too late for newspapers such as The Times and the Daily Telegraph. So their reporters filed stories based on polls putting Barack Obama comfortably ahead. Here's the Telegraph's story, but Rupert Murdoch's London Times was even more confident that Hillary Clinton would go down. (Anyone have a screenshot?) The media tycoon, who recently brought the Times' editor in to his latest acquisition, the Wall Street Journal, can't be too irate. He was the source, after all, for the New York Post splash that Dick Gephardt was John Kerry's chosen running mate.
John Carroll (pictured speaking) became a newspaper martyr when in 2005 he resigned as editor of the Los Angeles Times rather than implement budget cuts demanded by the penny-pinching corporate overlords. But that wasn't enough for David Simon, creator of The Wire, the HBO drama about crime, politics and the media in Baltimore. Simon, a former reporter at the Baltimore Sun, still blames Carroll for "single-handedly destroying" the newspaper; he's the model for the bland manager of Simon's television show who urges staff to do "more with less". [Baltimore Sun via Fimoculous]
Here's one explanation for Zachary Roth's tearful exit from the New York Observer. The media beat at the elite Manhattan newspaper used to be a stepping stone to journalistic greatness; it brought a reporter into contact with most of the people who dispense media jobs. And young reporters like Warren St John (now of the Times) and Gabriel Snyder (now of W) made the most of it. Now the Observer contends with dozens of blogs like this one. It's harder for editor Peter Kaplan to attract bright young things; and harder for them to impress once they're there.
Did you watch The Simpsons last night? Probably not, no one really does anymore! But no one really reads newspapers anymore either. Above, Nelson pwns an industry.
Dear Journalists: Lucas Grindley, Operations Manager of HeraldTribune.com ("southwest Florida's information leader"), would like you to get paid like bloggers. Specifically, like us! Summing up a largely boring, wonky, Poyntery debate about the value of reporters and information and CPM, Grindley decries Nick Denton's pay model, as described by noted internet expert David Brooks, as a dangerous idea that "may favor sensationalism" (quelle horreur!). Then he decides the most fair model for our brave new media landscape is to give your content providers a set salary with page view bonus structure built in. Which sounds familiar! As Grindley says: "The point is a bonus system doesn't hurt anyone. But it might help retain top talent while also increasing page views and audience." Also possible: existential crises and mass resignations. Talent are a sensitive bunch.
E.W. Scripps COO Rich Boehne told a conference yesterday that Yahoo's HotJobs.com will account for as much as 5 percent of its newspaper revenues in 2008. That merely confirms what we've heard: The classifieds jobs site is the only part of Yahoo's newspaper consortium that's working. And that's likely because Yahoo bought HotJobs instead of trying to build it. HotJobs isn't the reason why Gannett, Tribune, Hearst, MediaNews, and Cox Newspapers are starting up their own one-stop shop for online advertising — it's the rest of Yahoo's unfulfilled promises. (Photo by Gastev)
Newspaper websites saw a 21 percent rise in revenue year-over-year to $773 million for the third quarter. The Newspaper Association of America reports this is the 14th consecutive quarter of double-digit growth on newspaper websites. Digital revenue also accounts for 7.1 percent of total sales, up from 5.4 percent last year. This is especially important because paper advertising revenue dropped 7.4 percent to $10.1 billion. Classified ads had the most significant losses, down 17 percent. Help wanted, real estate and car ads saw significant declines. Of course, with dead-tree readership down and online readership up, these numbers should shock no one. If anything's a surprise, it's that they aren't more pronounced. (Photo by AP/Mark Lennihan)
You'll recall a certain conference about blogging that went mostly unattended and unmentioned. Well, Read/WriteWeb's Alex Iskold actually went, and came back with a gem of a navelgazing thumbsucker, too. I'm not sure how using Google Trends, which tracks the frequency of searches on terms, gets you anything meaningful about "blogging" versus "newspapers," but I'm sure I don't care. This one's for the dead-tree lovers among us, baby.
Newspapers sales have fallen 3 percent year-over-year. With the exception of USA Today and the Los Angeles Times, the vast majority of major papers lost subscribers. This year the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the industry organization that reports subscriber information, included online readership in the report. In the last two years, half of 88 papers examined showed no change or an increase in combined print and online readings. That's good news for the news industry — online readers tend to be younger and more attractive to advertisers. That's fine. Maybe more papers should follow the New York Times' example — they may be just a fancy blog, but that's what the kids are reading these days. (Photo by AP/Mark Lennihan)
"No one reads newspapers anymore" was a line I heard over and over at this week's Web 2.0 Summit. "Did you see that one session where that one guy asked people to raise their hands?" Talk about a skewed data set. Buried in Valleywag's gloating over a tiny dip in print ad revenues at The Wall Street Journal was a more telling stat: The paper's print readership went up 8 percent in the past year after its publishers cut subscription rates. Average income for the Journal's two million-plus daily readers is around $200,000 a year, their average net worth over $2 million. Sixty percent are classified as "top management." If the wantrepreneurs packing Web 2.0 don't read the Journal, here's another way to look at it: Maybe they should start. (DISCLAIMER: I freelance for the WSJ. It always makes me laugh when Om Malik tells friends I don't have a real job.)
Scripps, the cable-TV, newspaper, and Web conglomerate, will split into two publicly traded companies, its board announced today. Scripps Networks Interactive gets the growing cable-TV channels, including HGTV, and all the Internet properties. E. W. Scripps gets stuck with 10 broadcast television stations and newspapers in 17 U.S. markets. The lucky Kenneth Lowe, Scripps' current CEO, will keep running Scripps Networks. And in the worst loss ever recorded for a rock-paper-scissors game, Richard Boehne gets to helm the company slated to be destroyed by YouTube and Craigslist. (Photo by neurmadic aesthetic)
