Four in the morning

1. Another consequence of cutbacks at newspapers: Fewer papers are spending the time and money to fight for public access to court trials. The story mentions the Riverside Press-Enterprise, which helped set the standard for access to court trials in a pair of cases in the 1980s. NYT

2. One company - and I know there are others - thinks jargon and misdirection are the new news. From the NYT:

...the suburban newspaper is at the vanguard of the industry: reporters at The Journal News don’t work in a newsroom, they are part of an “Information Center”; they don’t cover beats, they cover “topics”; and in a new wrinkle to an old story, the staff was not being laid off, but becoming part of a “comprehensive restructuring plan."

Apparently, you no longer need to leave the newspaper to work in PR. NYT

3. Hard-hitting journalism is expensive: A jury awarded a doctor who was the subject of several articles in the St. Petersburg Times $10 million in a libel lawsuit. Even if the paper wins on appeal, the lawyers have to be paid. St. Petersburg Times

4. The Hartford Courant had some trouble managing both aggregation and attribution - it was taking stories from other papers posted to its website and then putting them in the newspaper under a Courant byline. Courant