The biggest loser

The Sacramento Bee has a database where you can check how much your city - or local redevelopment agency - stands to lose due to state budget cuts. SacBee

"I'm not dead yet!"

Earnings are up at the largest newspaper companies, beating back predictions - and some hopes - of utter doom in the industry. This is good news if you read a newspaper, better still if you work for one. It may also turn down the volume on some of the social media experts who think their version of change is inevitable.

As Howard Weaver at Ethaoin Shrdlu puts it:

Many of the people predicting the imminent death of printed news or counseling companies to shutter newspapers and spend all their money on the web are drinking their own bathwater. They have a vision – many times a clear and compelling vision – of what the shift to a digital, networked world will look like, but they’re in danger of leaping to conclusions that aren’t there.

I don’t believe untrained or unpaid volunteers alone can produce the kind of journalism on which democracy depends. I believe most people want and value good filters to separate signal from noise – and the best way we’ve ever found to do that is with professional journalists.

Weaver himself makes a leap, predicting that death of objectivity and an end to the role of news organizations as gatekeepers:

Transparency and fairness remain achievable goals; combined with the new plethora of views and opinions, that may be enough to support a consensus reality and common vocabulary for public affairs.

Find me the "consensus reality" on health care reform, Obama's birth certificate or racial profiling and I'll give you a pony. Also, does anyone think institutions of power, faith and money plan to surrender their roles as gatekeepers and speakers of "objective" truth? Isn't this the reason why journalists attempt to remain "objective" in trying to distill competing viewpoints into an impartial analysis?

Anyway, back to the financial picture. Alan Mutter makes the important point that these higher earnings follow steep one-time cuts and adjustments. To rebound, newspapers need advertising dollars to rebound, because there's little left to trim. There's also the fact that readers aren't going to subsidized substandard papers:

Newspaper readers, who by definition are among the most thoughtful members of society, are perceptive enough to know they are paying more today for newspapers that deliver far less news and advertising than ever before. They are doing so, to the extent they are doing so, in the hopes they can help the industry survive.

But their patience will not be infinite. If newspapers can’t find a way to do better by their readers, they are in danger of slashing themselves to oblivion.

Dear messenger, I blame you.

The players union for Major League Baseball has accused New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt of breaking the law for uncovering the names of another two steroid users in a story published yesterday. (via Romenesko)

Outside the bubble

Many more people spend much more time time reading a physical newspaper than reading the news on a paper's website, CJR reports:

For those of us of a certain small-but-growing subset—the blogging, commenting, techno-savvy, early-adopting, extreme-news consumers—it’s sometimes easy to forget that most people don’t live like we do. They don’t use RSS. They don’t Twitter. They don’t read twenty blogs a day. They (some 100 million or so) still actually pick up the newspaper and read it.

In a rough estimate of online versus print reading, CJR found:

Of the top five newspaper websites the average reading time online is 12.1 percent to print’s 87.9 percent. That widens to 8 percent online, 92 percent print when considering that more than one person reads each print copy.

The disparity illustrates why most publishers haven't heeded calls to junk the presses in favor of an online only presence. Such advice only makes sense if one doesn't own a press and wants to see the playing field leveled.

These numbers also show us why most of the advertising dollars still flow to print.

The quick survey does not, however, provide any details about whether online readership is increasing - and at what pace. Nor does it give us a sense of how many people have left print and online newspaper sites for alternative sources.

Cooper's California wake-up call

Reporter and USC prof Marc Cooper pens a cover story for The Nation about the undreaming of the golden dream. An exerpt:

California has always been as much a state of mind as a physical reality. The state's natural resources, along with its inhabitants' capacity to exploit them, made The Dream more likely than not. But now it's time to stop dreaming, says D.J. Waldie, who has the unique experience of living through this crisis as both an official of an LA suburb and a prizewinning author who plumbs the Golden State zeitgeist. "The middle class and the near middle class have been missing in action in paying for the sort of life they think California owes them," he said. "Instead, they believe that someone else should pay for the California Dream. Smokers. Drinkers. Gamblers. Millionaires. But not me.

"We have sold ourselves a vision of California, but we are not psychologically or emotionally prepared to make the hard choices. We prefer to point our finger at 'waste, fraud, immigrants.' Those are all straw men. It conveniently avoids the question of what we want and what we want to give up."

California has never been able to live up to its promise, but now seems ready to embrace its dysfunction.

Racism by reflex

There's plenty of conscious racism out there, but research suggests we're still biased despite our best intentions. From the Boston Globe:

The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. sparked allegations of racism, followed by fierce denials that race played a role in the 911 call or the police response to the report of a possible break-in at his Cambridge home. But social psychology research indicates that regardless of people’s stated attitudes about race, unconscious racial biases can influence their behavior in surprisingly powerful ways.

That means that people who are not racist may unknowingly behave in ways that reflect racial stereotypes, even when they may disagree with such ideas. One study found that doctors with more unconscious bias against blacks were less likely to give African-American heart attack patients clot-busting medication than white patients. Another found that when participants in a computer simulation were told to shoot criminals but not unarmed citizens or police who appeared on the screen, more black than white men were incorrectly shot. Other work found that children perceived ambiguous, but aggressive behavior as more threatening if the perpetrator was black. ...

“I think our data, obtained from millions and millions of people, show a real disparity between who we think we are, who we say we are . . . and what actually goes on in our heads,’’ said Mahzarin R. Banaji, a Harvard psychology professor who is a leader in studying such implicit bias.

Read the full article here.

Four in the morning

1. News sites can now track when readers cut and paste text from articles. It should add another dimension to measurement's of story popularity; it's probably also a good tool to track content pirates. Nieman Lab

2. Rubber-neck journalism: A "story" made entirely out of tweets. Universal Hub

3. Something to dampen that Boston pride: two members of the 2004 and 2007 World Series champion Red Sox tested positive for steroids in 2003 - Manny Ramirez, now an LA Dodger, and David Ortiz. Ramirez suffered a 50-game suspension this year for a positive test. NYT

4. Who does the public blame in the Crowley-Gates affair? Most of them blame both men. ABC News

4.5 Some poor decision-making here: The beers of choice for tonight's picnic-table summit: Bud Light (Obama), Red Stripe (Gates) and Blue Moon (Crowley). Chicago Tribune

Ask the scienticians

Salon takes on the fuzzy science of Huffington Post's "Living" section:

This spring, during the swine flu outbreak, I was searching the Web for news when a blog post on the Huffington Post caught my eye. Titled "Swine Flu: Protect Yourself and Your Loved Ones," its author, Kim Evans, offered a unique prescription for swine flu, one she believed could "save your life": deep-cleansing enemas.

Suffice it to say, enemas don't offer anything in the way of protection from influenza. This isn't the first time HuffPo and "wellness" editor have been criticized from promoting bunk science.

One last question... any job openings?

This post from David Carr comes a year or two year too late, but the point he makes, riffing on the apparently false accusation that a New York Daily News sports reporter used his position to try to get a job with the NY Mets baseball team, is worth considering:

As newspaper people search for an exit from an industry that is rapidly shrinking, their beats would seem to be a fertile place to look for a job. Asked about the episode, Stephen J. A. Ward, the director at the Center for Journalism Ethics at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Wisconsin, wrote in an email that he expects it will be a growing problem.

“It is very likely that more conflicts of interest (and concerns about journalistic independence) will arise in the months and years ahead because of the changing nature of journalism and its economic base,” he wrote. ...

And it’s even more scary once you run the scenario beyond the cozy confines of baseball. Reporters are covering government officials all over the country. What if, instead of reporting out corruption and mis-and-malfeasance on their beat, a reporter in imminent danger of layoff suggested to the targets that she or he could help fix the problem from the inside rather than writing a big old expose about it?

Also worth considering: Taking a job with the industry one covers is not a new phenomenon nor is it unethical on its face. The worry here is that desperation could lead to some bad decisions.

Comings and goings

Los Angeles Daily News reporter Jason Kandel is moving to KPCC to become online managing editor. His departure leaves an opening for an online breaking news reporter at the DN. LAO

Surf's not up

The average time we spend on the Web has plateaued at about 12 hours per week, according to an annual survey, up from less than six hours a week in 2004. Faster Broadband speeds are given partial credit, since people don't have to sit wait as long for pages or videos to load. Researchers also say people are more accustomed to what's on the Web, meaning they are just surfing around but go online to find particular sites.

All of this could be an anomaly, of course, but the researchers seem to think we've hit a high water mark. Also, the survey uses self-reported data, and people do tend to play down how much time they spend on leisure activities, such as watching TV.

Some good news in the report for newspapers and magazines, though:

The report, released Monday, also indicates relative stabilization in other media channels, most notably newspaper and magazine reading.

Then there's this exchange with one of the study's analysts:

Ad Age: Some traditional media have actually shown less decline than what one might think, from the headlines. People reported no change in their TV habits from 2004 to 2009; they reported a 6% drop in magazine reading, although it appeared flat over the past year; and while newspaper reading has dropped 17% since 2004, it appears flat over the past year.

Ms. Rousseau-Anderson: Yes. Many people expected huge drops but as mentioned above, people aren't deserting traditional media and fully jumping to digital yet.

Terminator

Scientists have created a walking robot that can put itself back together again. NYT

Mets GM beans NY Daily News reporter*

New York Mets General Manager Omar Minaya announced today that he'd fired vice president of personnel Tony Bernazard for bad behavior and poor judgment, including an allegation that Bernazard had challenged minor leaguer players to a fight.

Then Minaya turned his attention to New York Daily News sports writer Adam Rubin and essentially accused him of biased reporting on the bullying incident to get Bernazard out of the way so he could get a job with the team.

Here's what the New York Times had to say about today's weird press conference:

Minaya said he had questioned the validity of recent articles about Bernazard’s behavior in The Daily News, which first reported the incident involving the minor leaguers. Minaya said the reporter who wrote those articles, Adam Rubin, had previously asked Minaya and other Mets executives about getting a job with the team in player personnel.

The implication from Minaya, although he did not directly state it, was that Rubin had a vested interest in making Bernazard look bad because he himself wanted that type of job.

Bernazard was close to Minaya, who hired him, and even closer to Jeff Wilpon, the team’s chief operating officer. But in what became an almost surreal event, the dismissal of Bernazard was pushed to the side at the news conference as Minaya pointed a finger at Rubin.

“I’m absolutely floored,” Rubin said afterward, as other reporters crowded him, seeking his reaction to Minaya’s comments. “I don’t know how I’m going to cover the team anymore.”

*Updated, 7/28: NYDN reporter Adam Rubin pens a column denying Minaya's charges, says his story was "solid."

As the Times turn

Today's a day of turnover at the Los Angeles Times. LA Observed reports one arrival and two departures at the paper:

Steve Gellman was named the new publisher of LAT magazine. Jack Klunder, head of circulation at the Times, and a former LANGer, is leaving for points unknown. And Gawker Media announced that LATimes.com entertainment editor Richard Rushfield will become its West Coast editor.

Four in the morning

1. Out of work? The San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group (Pasadena Star-News, SGV Tribune, Whittier Daily News) wants your story for a new feature called "faces of the recession." - "Our goal is try to help you get back on your feet again in the midst of a tough recession." Star-News

2. The New York Times reports on National Public Radio's efforts to add more news content to its website, which has NPR affiliates - of which KCRW is one - worried that listeners and resources will be drawn away from local stations. NYT

3. Ron Kaye at OurLA.org has obtained pension records for the Los Angeles police and fire departments and listed the 286 highest earners - all pulling in over $100,000 a year. OurLA.org

4. Newspaper company A.H. Belo, whose publications include the Press-Enterprise in Riverside and Dallas Morning News, posted a $7.1 million loss in the second quarter of the year. Stock prices are up slightly, however. Dallas Morning News

Cutting costs

Faced with dwindling revenues - or projections of dwindling revenues - newspapers across the country have resorted to cuts as a way to prop up their bottom lines. Oftentimes, the longest knives have been reserved for the newsrooms, which have seen a mass of layoffs, buyouts and reduced benefits in the last few years.

A study from the University of Missouri suggests all the chopping has done little to save money and might be costing some publishers - at least at smaller papers. Consider this finding:

Data from small newspapers with an average circulation of 13,000 showed that a 1 percent cut in the newsroom reduced expenses about $10,000 but led to a revenue drop of $23,000 and a profit decline of $3,000.

Researchers at Missouri's Reynolds Journalism Institute combed through data from more than 300 newspaper with a circulation under 85,000 and compared the relative cost in revenues and profits of slashing personnel from different departments. Here's what they concluded:

The authors advised that newsrooms should be the last department cut. When cutting costs, newsroom cuts are by far the most damaging to revenues – and the longer the reductions occur, the greater the acceleration of damage.

Too late now for many papers. As the study says, three-quarters of all newspapers have trimmed their newsrooms by at least 10 percent.

Here are more detailed findings:

1. Newsroom cuts are the most costly on revenues. A one percent cut in newsroom expenditures led to a .44 percent drop in revenue. A one percent cut in the ad sales force led to a revenue drop of .24 percent. A one percent cut in the distribution force led to a .08 percent drop in revenue. In dollar amounts, the picture is even more clear. Data from small newspapers with an average circulation of 13,000 showed that a 1 percent cut in the newsroom reduced expenses about $10,000 but led to a revenue drop of $23,000 and a profit decline of $3,000. A 1 percent cut in advertising sales force reduced expenses by $8,000 but led to a revenue drop of $12,500 and a profit decline of $600. Finally, a 1 percent cut in the distribution department reduced expenses by $6,400 but led to a $4,000 drop in revenues, while showing a slight gain in profits.

2. The bigger the cuts, the impact on revenues gets progressively worse. For example, a 10 percent cut in newsroom expenditures led to a 5 percent drop in subscription revenues, while a 50 percent cut in newsroom expenditures led to a 30 percent drop in subscription revenues.

3. Newsroom cuts are the most costly on profits. A 5 percent cut in news expenses led to a 1 percent drop in profits, while a 5 percent cut in advertising department budgets led to a .3 percent cut in profits. A 5 percent cut in distribution budgets led to a .2 percent drop in profits. Similarly, a 50 percent cut in newsroom expenses led to a nearly 40 percent drop in profits, compared to a 22 percent drop in profits if the advertising department faced a 50 percent cut.

The capitalists are coming

So-called paywalls are coming to the Internet as surely as George Hearst came to Deadwood. We'll look back on this time of bickering between the AP and bloggers and the Jarvises and traditional journalists with a mix of nostalgia and regret once the big-monied interests move in, buy up the property and build their grand gates and fences. They're just waiting for the digital frontier to get settled before they move in to stake their claim.

Or, as Barry Diller said:

...Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, joining the refrain of media moguls who say an era of free Internet content is ending.

The media and technology executive, whose company runs the Ask.com search engine and the Match.com dating service, said it’s “mythology” to view the Internet as a system of free communications.

“It is not free, and is not going to be,” Diller said today at the Fortune Brainstorm conference in Pasadena, California.

Silence in the courtroom

A federal judge in Los Angeles "took the highly unusual step of closing a two-day trial" dealing with the killing of Jewish Defense League activist Earl Krugel. The LA Times reports:

Constitutional scholars and press-freedom advocates deemed the broad secrecy accorded the trial by U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson perplexing -- and a likely violation of the 1st Amendment.

Terry Francke at Californians Aware notes:

The Times apparently learned of this closure only after the fact. In the old days of an abundant reporting staff, that would not have happened, and Times lawyers would have almost certainly filed a challenge to the order immediately.

Temple City pol pleads guilty to perjury

One-time state Assembly candidate and former Temple City council candidate Scott Carwile has pleaded guilty to perjury and has agreed to testify against other Temple City officials charged in a corruption probe that has already taken down one councilman and threatens two others, Mayor Judy Wong and former mayor Cath Wilson.

Tune in, turn off or drop out?

Not since roll up windows came to the automobile has pent up rage had a better release valve than news sites allowed reader comments. Rather than scream uselessly at the television or stab at the newspaper with a butter knife, the enraged and repressed can adopt anonymous handles and type out all manner of obscenity and epithet. Ask any reporter who's covered illegal immigration or gay marriage and they'll you how quickly, and predictably, the trolls descend.

This leaves news sites with a few choices - turn off comments on stories that raise sensitive issues (and shut out thoughtful commentary in the process), shut down comments altogether, or make some effort to manage comments.

Patrick Thornton at Poynter recently asked various publishers what they do. First he defined the problem:

Stories that elicit hateful and racist speech -- those dealing with immigrants, homosexuality and crime, particularly sexual assault -- are the first to go. "What makes crime comment threads go sour?" Publish2's Ryan Sholin asked on Twitter, and then answered: "Racism, hate, dislike of the police, and racism, I'd say. Also, racism." ...

Melissa Coulter, community editor of the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, and Brianne Pruitt, Web editor at The Wenatchee World in Washington, both said on Twitter that their news sites do not allow comments on sexual assault stories because of the risk of someone posting the victim's name. ...

Stephanie Romanski, Web editor of The Grand Island Independent's site, said on Twitter that her news org removed all commenting from the site and now has a "tweet this" link that enables users to take the discourse to Twitter. In a blog post in May, she explained why her news org decided to turn off commenting:

"We are also sending away the headaches that go with it and the drivel that can sometimes negate the integrity of the journalism. The latter is something our publisher has always pointed out regarding comments -- the ones who post rumors, the ones who post incorrect facts, the ones who tread the fine line between personal attack and playing by the rules -- those kinds of comments, he feels, can drag down a story and therefore our reputation."

-snip-

Not everyone, however, agrees with limiting comments even on controversial stories. Mathew Ingram, communities editor at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, said in an e-mail that his paper usually only closes comments on stories involving legal issues around contempt of court or libel. Ingram believes that a lot of important discourse is lost by limiting comments to only uncontroversial stories.

In another post, Thornton argues more active engagement is needed to prevent the threads from turning into "comment ghettos." That may be true, but it strikes me as impractical and unwise to ask reporters to get involved with defending a story, or responding to anonymous posters bent on suckering the writer into a rabbit hole.

Meanwhile, in San Berdoo...

Bill Postmus, former assessor for San Bernardino County, pleaded not guilty yesterday to nine felony counts and one misdemeanor charge, including grand theft, misuse of public funds and perjury. Postmus, 38, and a handful of his lieutenants have been accused of running a private political shop out of the assessor's office while on the public payroll.

Duane Gang, politics reporter for the Press-Enterprise, was on "Which Way, LA?" yesterday to talk about what this means for the county and for the county's Republican Party, of which Postmus was a prominent and influential member.

The P-E also reports that Postmus on Wednesday described the District Attorney is "sex-obsessed" for including detalis of his sex life in investigative documents. At least one of Board of Supervisors appears to have picked up the line of thought. On Thursday, Supervisor Neil Derry called for an investigation of DA Mike Ramos for alleged "improper relationships with female subordinates and colleagues." This gave Postmus the chance to respond with yet another press statement.

Maybe just a coincidence, but one of the men charged in connection with the Postmus investigation is Jim Irwin, Derry's former chief of staff.

Howard Jarvis turns on Assemblyman Adams

The latest adjustments to the California budget look like something out of a slasher movie - blood spilling everywhere. But that hasn't slowed anti-tax advocates from pursuing their mission of punishment for the handful of Republican legislators who dared endorse tax increases in the last round of budgeting. Now, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association has "formally" endorsed the recall effort of Assemblyman Anthony Adams, R-Claremont, for "brazenly [violating] his pledge to his constituents not to raise their taxes."

From the Jarvis Political Action Committee's press release:

HJTA-PAC President Jon Coupal said the PAC's action is based both on principle and on the practical. "Voters have every right to toss out politicians who lie in order to gain office and who demonstrate they have no intention of defending the interests of those who elected them," said Coupal. "Blocking further damaging tax increases requires we have lawmakers the taxpayers can trust, and Adams has proven he cannot be trusted."

Four in the morning

1. The corrections, NYT edition. Gawker

2. The LAPD, police union and mayor of LA rely on bad statistics and an erroneous study to prove that the early release of prisoners will launch a crime wave. Witness LA

3. The not-so-black-and-white of race relations and racial profiling in America. NYT

4. Is Ann Arbors new online only paper forward thinking? Or a convenient way to mask a major slash and burn job? Chicago Tribune

OK in the OC

In an interview with his own business section, Orange County Register Publisher Terry Horne is downright optimistic in his assessment of the paper's future, to the point that he declared: "we’re not thinking about having to downsize anymore."

Horne added:

The Register was profitable in 2008 and is profitable in 2009. In this economic environment, the fact we’ll have double-digit operating margins this year speaks to the strength of the Register’s position and its link to the community. There is zero chance the Register will close its doors. Orange County will have a newspaper. Those people who say newspapers are dead are wrong. What’s happening is newspapers are changing. Those that don’t, will die.

(via Romenesko)

AP content tracker

The Associated Press has announced plans to tag and track online content to protect it from digital pirates. From AP:

The beacon is meant to be a policing device aimed at deterring Web sites from posting AP content without paying licensing fees. The AP and its member newspapers contend unlicensed use of their material is costing them tens of millions of dollars in potential ad revenue. ...

The AP board of directors argues something has to be done to protect its content because the cooperative's revenue is falling for the first time in years. Revenue is expected to be around $700 million this year, down from $748 million in 2008, in part because of reductions in the fees it charges newspapers and broadcasters, whose advertising revenue has been shriveling as more marketers shift to less expensive options online.

Dean Singleton, chairman of the AP board and CEO of MediaNews Group, said this is a way to ensure journalism will "survive and thrive."

The New York Times has an explainer on what the contract tracker will do here.

The City of Industry gambit

The budget deal struck by the governor and the leaders of the state Legislature included a provision to allow cities to extend the lifespan of redevelopment zone by 40 years, provided the cities pass 10 percent of their earnings on to the state. Observers argue the provision is designed to help out one specific project, the planned NFL stadium in the City of Industry.

From the Los Angeles Times:

...adding decades to the life of the redevelopment area would allow Industry to use hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to build roads, sewers and other facilities to help accommodate the stadium and commercial projects, said Christine Minnehan, legislative director of the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

The County of Los Angeles has already moved to sue the state to block the provision from taking effect. The San Gabriel Valley Tribune quotes County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky:

Opponents said the state is violating the Constitution because redevelopment money is only allowed to be invested in blighted neighborhoods.

"They've done their job," Yaroslavsky said of Industry's redevelopment agency. "They've removed their blight. Instead you're providing subsidies to private landowners."

Bonuses for Tribune Co.

Tribune Co. has filed a motion in bankruptcy court asking for permission to pay between $21.5 million and $66.7 million in performance bonuses to about 700 managers. The amount includes $3.1 million for 9 of the company's top 10 executives, according to Phil Rosenthal at the Chicago Tribune.

Anticipating some blow back, Tribune Co. CEO Randy Michael and CAO Gerry Spector sent a memo to employees yesterday announcing the broad outlines for the bonus plan, adding that "Incentivizing employees is essential to Tribune’s future success." From the memo:

Importantly, this is a pay-for performance plan that pays nothing if our companywide and/or business unit operating goals are not met. The plan is more conservative than in past years in that it requires the company to meet its 2009 operating goals before recipients are eligible for any payout, instead of allowing for a smaller payout in the event of reduced operating performance. In fact, a full payout can only be achieved by significantly exceeding the company’s 2009 operating plan.

Tribune Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2008. The company's properties include the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.

Second hoax this week for HuffPo

For the second time in as many days, Huffington Post has published a hoax story on its website. In the latest example, caught here by Gawker, Huffington Post picked up a sarcastic story from CurbedNY about a ridiculous proposal to build an airport in New York's "blighted" Central Park. Gawker writes:

Combine HuffPo's hunger for traffic with its ugly habit of lifting content from other websites, and this is the amusing result; apparently the sarcasm in the original Curbed item was too subtle for the website's editors.

If the concept doesn't seem an obvious satire on its face, there's always the over-the-top website, which calls Central Park a "blighted urban space" that needs to be "reclaim[ed]" and assures that Tavern on the Green will "be given the option of applying for a franchisee lease in the concourse food court."

Huffington Post has since made note of the hoax on its website.

Yesterday, HuffPo followed TMZ and a few others in reporting that mixed martial arts fighter Kim "Kimo" Leopoldo had died. The story came as quite a surprise to the still-living Leopoldo.

Sanfield leaving the Daily Breeze

Daily Breeze executive editor and interim publisher Phillip Sanfield told his staff today that he will be leaving to become the media relations director for the Port of Los Angeles. Here's the memo:

Colleagues,

Like many of you, I’ve spent my entire adult life working for newspapers. After a few years working in the Coachella Valley, the past 26 years has truly been a love affair with The Daily Breeze and the South Bay.

I now have a terrific opportunity to switch gears. In a few weeks, I’ll be joining the Port of Los Angeles as its director of media relations. It’s the perfect time for me, both professionally and personally, to make a change.

I sincerely thank you for your effort, support and confidence. I took the helm as editor after the Breeze was put up for sale three years ago and I have been so proud of how our team has confronted the challenges our industry faces.

I owe a debt of gratitude to all my Breeze colleagues, past and present, for an inspiring ride here. I wish all of you good health and success.

Phillip

Sanfield was bumped up to the position of interim publisher last month after Mark Ficarra left for a job at the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Progressive ad network

In a first, the publishers of Mother Jones, Air America and The Nation have banded together to create a network that will sell advertising on all their of their websites. Nieman Lab

TMZ's not so awesome scoop

TMZ got a lot of attention for being the first to report Michael Jackson had died, but I still waited for the Los Angeles Times to post something before I was completely sure of the story. Why? From yesterday's LA Observed:

TMZ threw its supposed standards out the window and mistakenly "confirmed" the death of mixed martial arts fighter Kim "Kimo" Leopoldo — based on web chatter. He's alive and well.

A couple other outlets posted the bad information, but TMZ seems to have simply covered over the mistake by redirecting the link that went to the false story.

BANG cuts newsrooms

As expected, the Bay Area News Group (aka BANG) has eliminated 17 newsroom positions in its East Bay division through a combination of buyouts and layoffs. The affected papers include the Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune and Tri-Valley Herald.

The San Francisco Weekly got hold of the list of names last Wednesday.

Those taking buyouts:

• Dave Carpenter, copy editor
• Pat Craig, theater critic
• Mike DeCicco, copy editor
• Christine Harrington, Alameda clerk
• Ben Hawkins, copy editor
• Karen Holzmeister, Hayward-based reporter
• Paula King, east Alameda County reporter
• Kathleen Kirkwood, online news supervisor
• Christine Morente, San Mateo reporter
• Jeremiah Oshan, copy editor
• Kimberly Wetzel, west Alameda County reporter

Those getting laid off:

• Mike Lucia, Hayward-based photographer
• Mike Martinez, Tracy-based reporter
• Jenny Starks, sports reporter
• Ginny Stemler, librarian
• Jolene Thym, food editor
• Steve R. Waterhouse, Fremont-based prep sportswriter

Institutional memory

A real life example of the importance of institutional memory in a newsroom from Larry Altman at the Torrance Daily Breeze. He dug into the past of a murder victim and found something the cops had missed. From the story:

A broker found slain inside a Westchester house was the brother of a woman who killed a San Pedro couple she victimized in a real estate fraud case that bilked them of $2 million.

Ricardo M. Contreras, 45, a real estate agent and notary public, was not criminally charged in that case that sent his sister to prison for two life terms, but was accused in a wrongful death lawsuit of notarizing many of the fraudulent documents that she used in the scheme.

Rosalba Contreras' con emptied the bank accounts of Valentine and Elvira Partida, an elderly couple whom she attacked with a hammer and razor before setting their 30th Street house ablaze.

A police detective investigating Ricardo Contreras' death said Monday he was unaware of the 1998 slayings committed by Contreras' sister until questioned by a reporter. There was no immediate evidence tying the cases together.

(via LA Observed)

Does new Capitol Hill social network fail the ethics test?

J.P Freire at the Washington Examiner contends that the National Journal has crossed a few ethical lines with its new social-networking site for Capitol Hill staffers called 3121, comparing it to the pay-to-play scandal that embarrassed the Washington Post a couple weeks ago.

The private site uses special software to keep out prying eyes, giving Capitol Hill insiders a private and secure site where they can chat and collaborate. Advertisers - including lobbyists and special interest groups - are given the opportunity to target and tailor ads to one of their most important constituencies: congressional aides and the members they serve.

The problem here isn't the service, Freire argues, but the organization that's providing it. National Journal is first and foremost a news organization charged with covering the very people who would use the confidential site and would be profiting by giving interest group access to the very same people:

While cloud collaboration on legislation may provide a viable solution to many logistical woes for Congress, should a journalistic enterprise be providing a "secure" platform for it that provides "privacy"?

Freire adds:

And what of the advertisers who participate? Who can they access? "Sponsoring 3121 goes beyond traditional advertising, giving you the opportunity to reach the people creating legislation within their online community. Being associated with this new feature will allow you to build connections and start a valuable conversation with a targeted group of some of the most powerful people in the political world." (emphasis mine)

Advertisers will also have the opportunity to present a question to the key legislative aides. "National Journal Group will develop a new poll that will be online only and it will survey our group of 3121 beta-testers ["a highly targeted group of Capitol Hill staffers"]. The sponsor will be listed and and will also have the opportunity to develop a question."

And as for David Miller's claim that the editorial side of National Journal will not be involved: "A survey of reporters and editors at National Journal Group will be undertaken to get their views on new media."

Roll Call to buy Congressional Quarterly

Roll Call has agreed to buy Congressional Quarterly for an undisclosed amount. The two Capitol Hill-centric news organizations will be combined into a single entity overseen by Roll Call editorial director Mike Mills. (h/t Romenesko)

LA, NFL continue a courtin'

Officials at Majestic Realty, the company behind the proposed pro football stadium in the city of Industry, claim that they are wooing 7 NFL teams - Jacksonville, Buffalo, Minnesota, St. Louis, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Diego - in their quest to bring a team back to Los Angeles. Minnesota and Oakland are locked in to their stadiums until 2011, and the others are looking for better terms. Whether any of this means a team is likely to break for L.A. remains to be seen - team owners have often used the Los Angeles courtship dance as leverage in renegotiating contracts.

Back on the IE

Some bad HTML had kept this blog from loading properly on some versions of Internet Explorer. A few readers wondered whether the blog had been blocked. Fortunately, or unfortunately, I'm not that controversial. The HTML problem has been fixed and the blog should be back to normal. Please let me know if the glitches continue.

New sports editor at the Times

LA Observed reports that Mike James will takeover as sports editor at the Los Angeles Times. James replaces Randy Harvey, who earlier this month was promoted to associate editor of the paper - a move that hastened the departure of executive editor John Arthur.

Keeping the connected connected

The National Journal, which publishes National Journal, Hotline and CongressDaily, has launched a beta version of a new social-networking site for Capitol Hill staffers called 3121 (also the phone extension of the Capitol switchboard). The site is exclusively for Senate and House staffers and purports to give them a chance to talk and collaborate on a secure network. The full version of the site is set for launch in mid-September.

From the About page:

3121 is also a tool for collaboration: through our recommendation engine and with flexible, easy to navigate group pages, 3121 acts as a tool to help people better connect with relevant staffers to get their job done.

3121 puts you in control and allows for a customizable dashboard and customized news. The more you get to know the system and the more we get to know you, the more 3121 will rearrange and deliver you what you need, when and where you need it. From news on your issue and Member, to positioning your own profile and collaboration tools front and center, we give you what you need to make it your own.

(h/t Bloggasm)

Cox sells N.C. papers

Cox Enterprises sold its 13 North Carolina newspapers to Cooke Communications, Editor and Publisher reports. Cox announced last December that it would sell off its holdings in N.C. and Colorado and put the Austin American Statesman on the auction block.

Critical mourning

An ardent critic of mainstream media standards, Glenn Greenwald contemplates Walter Cronkite's journalistic legacy and concludes with this:

In the hours and hours of preening, ponderous, self-serving media tributes to Walter Cronkite, here is a clip you won't see, in which Cronkite -- when asked what is his biggest regret -- says (h/t sysprog):

What do I regret? Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn't make them stick. We couldn't find a way to pass them on to another generation.

It's impossible even to imagine the likes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw and friends interrupting their pompously baritone, melodramatic, self-glorifying exploitation of Cronkite's death to spend a second pondering what he meant by that.

The preening ponderous might not take the time to reflect on Cronkite's words of regret, but there's an interesting debate about them, the proper role of journalists, and Greenwald's thesis, in the comments section.

Four in the morning

1. The new FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, is a techie, a broadband-for-everyone proponent, and not so interested in Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunctions. WashPost

2. As part of the "individuated news" experiment, MediaNews Group has paired with Printcasting to try to sop up more local ad dollars. NYT

3. If the public won't pay for City Hall coverage it seems the politicos skulking about City Hall will - at least, that's what Seattle start-up Publicola is finding out. Nieman Lab

4. Lionel Rolfe dishes on his ongoing beef with David Ulin, editor of the LA Times book pages. Random Lengths

Comings and goings

God Blog author and former LANGer Brad Greenberg is heading to UCLA Law School. In a Friday post, he says he plans to keep up with the blogging even as he studies the finer points of contract law and civil procedure in the Fall.

LA Observed notes that Las Vegas Sun reporter Alexandra Berzon, fresh off her Pulitzer Prize win, will head west to join the Wall Street Journal's Los Angeles bureau. Last month, Drex Heikes, Berzon's editor on the four-part series that won the award, announced that he would be leaving the Sun to take over as editor-in-chief of the LA Weekly in August.

Vacation

I've been on vacation the last week. Normal posting will resume Monday.

-- Post From Phone

New photo shop

Pro Photogaphy Network, LLC, a freelance shop run by former Los Angeles Times photogs, sent out a press release announcing that it's open for business. LA Observed has the release here: http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2009/07/ex-lat_photogs_hang_out_s.php

Here's a post from this blog from last month about the PPN and efforts by former Times writers and editors to start a freelance network for reporters: http://reporter-g.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-online-publication-brewing.html

-- Post From Phone

Let's be friends

Romenesko looked through emails uncovered by The State newspaper in its ongoing investigation of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's affair and disappearance and discovers some news outlets offered friendly ground for an interview.

From Romenesko:

The State on Monday received nearly 600 pages documents -- e-mails and phone call records -- related to Gov. Mark Sanford's disappearance. (The e-mails were sent before it was clear where he was or what he was doing.) The paper reports:
* A Fox News correspondent wrote to Sanford's communications director, Joel Sawyer: "Having known the Governor for years and even worked with him when he would host radio shows for me -- I find this story and the media frenzy surrounding it to be absolutely ridiculous! Please give him my best."
* OpinionJournal.com associate editor Brendan Miniter, in an e-mail to Sawyer, called the WSJ's first-day coverage bunk. "Someone at WSJ should be fired for today's story. Ridiculous."
* A Washington Times staffer wrote in an e-mail that "if you all want to speak on this publicly, you're welcome to Washington Times Radio. You know that you will be on friendly ground here!"

Read the entire post here: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45

Read The State story here: http://www.thestate.com/local/story/862957.html

-- Post From Phone

Freedom isn't always free

Freedom Communications, publisher of the Orange County Register, plans to charge $3.95 a month for an online-only subscription to its Valley Morning Star newspaper in Texas. Those without a subscription will be able to access the site for 75 cents a day.

This is the first time a Freedom paper has charged for online access. The plan is laid out in a story that seems like it was written by the PR department.

Here's the story: http://www.valleymorningstar.com/news/online-55592-access-star.html

-- Post From Phone

When no one speaks up

Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander digs into the details behind the paper's unethical health care salons to find out how an obviously bad idea could have gotten so far. In simple terms: nobody spoke up.

The story is here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/11/AR2009071100290.html?sub=AR

-- Posted from phone

New Hampshire paper closing

The Eagle Times in Claremont, New Hampshire is shutting down tomorrow. From the Wall Street Journal:

Publisher Harvey Hill sent an e-mail to staffers Thursday saying Friday's edition of the paper will be its last.

He told employees he did his best to keep the daily paper going, but the economy and changes in the newspaper industry have made it impossible to survive. He said employees will get their last paycheck next week and will have health coverage through the end of the month.

Comments experimentation

I'm testing a feature called Intense Debate on the comments section of the blog. I'll be out of town for the next week and posting will be light, so I figured now is as good a time as any to see whether readers like it, or hate it. Please let me know what you think - you can email me at reportergblog@gmail.com or leave a comment here.

Cuts underway at Gannett newspapers

The expected layoffs at the nation's largest newspaper chain are now underway. Gannett Blog is keeping a running tally of the layoffs - USA Today and the Detroit Free Press are exempted. Between 1,000 and 2,000 people are expected to lose their jobs. As of now, the total is 1,041.

Liveblogging at the Daily Journal

As the Senate hearings for Supreme Court-nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor get underway Monday, Los Angeles Daily Journal reporter Lawrence Hurley will be in the hearing room liveblogging from start to finish. This might be a first for the legal newspaper. The blog updates will remain behind DJ's paywall, however.

What's the use?

In this month's American Journalism Review, Paul Farhi considers the good, bad and ugly of Twitter as a tool for journalists.

He writes:

News organizations and reporters have been quick to adopt Twitter for an obvious reason: Its speed and brevity make it ideal for pushing out scoops and breaking news to Twitter-savvy readers. The Oregonian in Portland may have been the mainstream media pioneer in this regard; it began posting its own links and aggregating citizen tweets about flooding and road closures during heavy storms in central Oregon in late 2007, when Twitter barely had 500,000 users nationwide. Other newspapers have subsequently used Twitter to post swift-changing updates following natural disasters in their areas.

Reporters now routinely tweet from all kinds of events – speeches, meetings and conferences, sports events. In February, a federal judge gave his blessing to Ron Sylvester of the Wichita Eagle to use Twitter to report on a trial of six suspected gang members, the first time tweeting had been permitted inside a federal courtroom. Sylvester tweeted frequently from the trial, providing a nearly contemporaneous account. On the other hand, not all tweets are equally useful. Tweets from reporters covering the heavily choreographed political conventions last summer produced plenty of snark and trivia, but little in the way of important or interesting news.

Once a Twitter user has developed a reputation as a news source, that person will inevitably have to take more care - or suffer the consequences. Farhi continues:

In late March, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles tweeted a juicy tidbit from a conversation he'd had with an unnamed source: "Frequent contributor tells me the New Yorker is considering switch to biweekly or monthly. Recession pains."

A scoop? Nope. "I just threw it out there," Charles says. "It was a careless, journalistically irresponsible thing to do." Within 10 minutes, he says, "it seemed like the whole Internet went crazy. It was terrifying."

When Charles was reliably informed via e-mail a few minutes later that his tip was wrong, he sent out another tweet knocking down his original post. But by then Charles' comment had been retweeted by others, and the story was out there. Reporters from the Chicago Reader and New York Observer quickly picked up on it, drawing full denials from New Yorker Editor David Remnick.

Charles says his original message was "naïve" and that he shouldn't have spread a rumor. But as he points out, that's not the end of it. With their intimacy and immediacy, social networks can put journalists in murky territory: "Am I a reporter [when tweeting]? Am I an editor? Am I a critic? Or am I just talking among friends?"

These last questions get at the heart of the matter. Twitter is a communication tool and, like other communication tools, it can be used for a variety of purposes. It's up to the users to define its use because the platform isn't going to do that for them. Sometimes it's social, sometimes it's media, sometimes it's personal, sometimes professional. Over time, we're bound to develop common-sense rules, just as we have with email and cell phones and our own mouths - judging when to speak and what to say depending on the circumstances.

(h/t fishbowlLA)

Partners in journalism

Increasingly, large newspapers and newspaper chains have agreed to partner with nonprofit news organization to provide them with supplemental or specialty coverage of complex issues of the day. In one of the more recent pairings, McClatchy Newspapers has teamed with Kaiser Health News to keep a watchful eye on the health care debate.

The I Team

Imagine an elite team of investigative journalists sitting poolside (or maybe in front of the Wii), waiting for the red phone to vibrate, whereupon they'd spring into action, jumping into their faded blue 1993 Honda Civic full of food wrappers and Thomas guides and sputter off to the latest hot spot of corruption, disaster or injustice.

That's sort of the idea behind the "mobile strike force" recently discussed at the first conference of the Nonprofit Investigative News Network. It's also been called "swarm journalism." Lois Beckett at the Nieman Lab spoke with the founder of the Center for Public Integrity about the concept:

“The idea of swarm coverage using investigative reporters is a novel concept. We think of most investigative reporting as sort of project oriented, many months, painstaking culling of information.” Of the “mobile strike force” idea, [Chuck] Lewis said, “I think there would be great excitement, not only from the member organizations. I think the public would appreciate it deeply and I think there would be funding that would materialize.”

Intriguing, although Beckett's Rambo analogy doesn't seem quite right. Rambo definitely was not a team player.

Bad exposure

The New York Times Magazine has been forced to pull a photo essay from its site after a reader discovered that at least one of the photographs - and clearly more, according to further analysis - were digitally altered. The photographer, Edgard Martins, has yet to comment. The Times photo editor has posted the following comment:

A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com entitled 'Ruins of the Second Gilded Age' showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, 'creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.

A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com.

A tough first half

Some ugly numbers for traditional media in the first half of 2009, courtesy of the Vocus Media Database. According to the company's tally, 123 news television shows were canceled along with 186 radio shows, most of them in smaller markets. The magazine industry saw 154 launches and 556 closings.

Major daily newspapers have been shuttered as well, but much of the contraction has been seen in the bureaus. From the Vocus media blog:

The newspaper industry was hit by significant closings in the first half of 2009 (the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Baltimore Examiner and Seattle Post-Intelligencer all ceased publishing a print edition), but legions of daily newspapers haven’t folded. The vulnerability of the newspaper industry cannot be measured only by the number of shuttered papers, however. Newspapers across the country also closed 110 bureaus, according to the Vocus Database. Some of the bureaus were in Washington, D.C., but many were in areas close to the parent newspapers, a trend that would never have occurred during more robust times.

Possible job cuts at Palm Beach Post

Trouble ahead at the Palm Beach Post reports Bob Norman at The Daily Pulp:

Once again, there's a major reorganization happening at the Palm Beach Post. This time, all the editors and managers are being forced to reapply for their positions, and job titles are changing. Among the new titles: "Watchdog Editor," "Money Editor," and "Multimedia Editor," according to a source at the newspaper.

A commenter yesterday reported on this blog that six of the 23 managers will lose their jobs by August 14, but I couldn't get that confirmed.

What rough beast is this?

Joe Mathews, formerly of the LA Times and now with the New America Foundation, takes a stab at interpreting the logic behind Sarah Palin's resignation as governor of Alaska and finds it shows a hyper awareness that America has entered the age of hyper politics. Mathews goes so far as to call the move brilliant, at least when compared with the sad displays Mark Sanford and Bobby Jindal made in their respective 2012 presidential campaigns. By contrast, Palin will be able to fortify herself financially and politically, unburdened from the distraction of governing, as the campaign drags into 2010.

Citizen advertising reps

Should bloggers sell ads on their web pages, rather than rely on passive tools such as GoogleAdsense that throw up ads based on keyword searches? Drew Grant at ASSME asks a few people the question and gets a few answers. The best:

...our own boss Aaron Gell chimes in: What writer/bloggers will quickly find out if they begin selling their own ads is not simply how hard ad teams work it but how much shit they eat and (thankfully) protect editors from. While it’s probably true that bloggers without any scruples whatsoever are now in a position to cash in by pimping out their reputations to the highest bidders I can’t see how it doesn’t instantly pervert truth, honest discourse and all we hold dear.

In the blurry world of new media it might seem that all bloggers are alike, but the question requires a good deal more nuance given the relationships bloggers have - quasi-independent with a fellowship? on the Gawker payroll while freelance blogging for a startup nonprofit? - and the content they create.

Even in the case of news sites the lines are getting blurred - often intentionally - with opinion driving what is covered and how. Rachel Sklar, who works for Dan Abrams' Mediaite, says transparency is enough when it comes to ad sales. For a more traditional journalist, transparency is a cop out - negotiating an ad sale with an institution you cover is wrong even if you confess it all to your readers.

Four today

1. Marketing-department journalism is on the upswing. CJR

2. Newspaper profits are down, but nowhere near out. RofaN

3. Dan Froomkin goes from Post to Post. Salon

4. The website gave them the name, but it's print that makes Politico profitable. Vanity Fair

Shifting priorities, shifting beats

As the U.S. military shifts its emphasis from Iraq to Afghanistan, the New York Times and other papers are moving reporters from Baghdad to Kabul.

Alissa Rubin will be leaving her post as Baghdad bureau chief for the Times to cover the fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Stephen Lee Meyers will take Rubin's place in Baghdad.

From the New York Observer:

Back in April, foreign editor Susan Chira told us the Times would be bulking up its Pakistan coverage.

“This is obviously the war that the president is focusing on,” said Ms. Chira then. “And troops are being shifted to there so we intend to gear up ... But we won’t leave Baghdad."

She also told us that many veterans of The Times’ Iraq coverage, including CJ Chivers, Sabrina Tavernise, Richard Oppel and Dexter Filkins, would be turning their attention to Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well.

Anti-pop news break

Despite what it looks like on television and news websites right now, the world is full of other newsworthy happenings. Iran, for instance. Listen to Borzou Daragahi, Reza Aslan, Juan Cole and Dion Nissenbaum discuss the growing political and religious divide inside Iran and world reaction on today's "To The Point."

Your cell phone is spying on you

A couple criminal cases in New York City highlight law enforcement's use of increasingly sophisticated cell phone tracking technology to keep an eye on suspects. From the New York Times:

...cellphone tracking is raising concerns about civil liberties in a debate that pits public safety against privacy rights. Existing laws do not provide clear or uniform guidelines: Federal wiretap laws, outpaced by technological advances, do not explicitly cover the use of cellphone data to pinpoint a person’s location, and local court rulings vary widely across the country.

In one case that unsettled cellphone companies, a sheriff in Alabama told a carrier he needed to track a cellphone in an emergency involving a child — she turned out to be his teenage daughter, who was late returning from a date.

For more than a decade, investigators have been able to match an antenna tower with a cellphone signal to track a phone’s location to within a radius of about 200 yards in urban areas and up to 20 miles in rural areas. Now many more cellphones are equipped with global-positioning technology that makes it possible to pinpoint a user’s position with much greater precision, down to a few dozen yards.

All apologies

Politico's story catching the Washington Post with its ethics down has caused repercussions inside and outside the newspaper. Post publisher Katharine Weymouth wrote a long letter to readers apologizing for a flier that promised corporate-sponsored off-the-record meetings between editorial staff, White House officials and paying lobbyists. She's also asked for an internal review of what happened and talked with the newsroom staff.

All the hullabaloo inspired Talking Points Memo to report that the Atlantic magazine has been holding corporate-sponsored salons since 2003. Atlantic Media publisher David Bradley responded with a long letter of his own.

Changes at SGVN

The San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group - the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, Pasadena Star-News and Whittier Daily News - has fused together its weeklies and special section staffs to create what is called "custom publications" and promoted Pia Orense to oversee them. Here's the memo:

I am pleased to announce the promotion of Pia Orense to editor of custom publications for the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group. As part of this move, we are combining the staffs of our weeklies and special sections into a single unit that will be responsible for all non-core and internet products. Over the course of the next several months, Pia will lead an effort to determine how best that unit can operate to produce our existing publications and create opportunities to launch others. She will also work closely with our ICPG unit in San Bernardino.

Please join me in congratulating Pia on her new role.

On the move

Mindy Farabee has announced she's leaving the Los Angeles Daily Journal and heading to sunny Scotland to study creative writing. FishbowlLA has the news here.

OurLA gets underway

Former LA Daily News editor Ron Kaye has formally launched his Our LA website - a beta version has been up for several weeks now. From Kaye's email message:

At OurLA, you will be the reporters and bloggers. You will create forums and help evolve the site into the one place on the Internet where all the important news of LA can be found and quickly accessed.

OurLA is a nonprofit run by myself without salary and a by a small number of paid and volunteer professionals. With your help we will manage the site by bringing together available content from community websites and blogs and the mainstream as well as provide in-depth stories on important topics.

We will also develop useful databases, a calendar of upcoming events, discussion forums and much more.

Kaye says he has raised some money to get the site going and will raise some more to keep it going. Meantime, he's asked readers/writers/contributors for a list of "all blogs and websites you know of that deal with LA civic and political issues, be they Neighborhood Councils, homeowners groups, issue-oriented organizations, service clubs or whatever else you find useful."

Four in the morning

1. Tribune Co., the owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, still ekes out a profit, although the margin has shrunk significantly since the company filed for bankruptcy in December. Chicago Business via LA Observed

2. Cowboys and tyrants. George W. Bush wants to display Saddam Hussein's pistol at his presidential library: "He wants people generations from now to see the gun and say, ‘He got the bad guy.’" . NYT

3. In praise of the copy editors and the proper punctuation they leave behind: "They're skeptics who revel in the arcane. They know the difference between median and mean, and can speak knowledgeably about topics from Methuselah to the Milky Way. They write headlines, design some pages, check facts and make sure assertions are supported. They spend entire careers working horrible night-shift hours." WaPo

4. Growing up in the "incarceration generation." - "Parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel, and distinctly American, childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents." NYT

East vs. West

The bicoastal, political bad-wrap battle is in full swing. New York Times Magazine's Mark Leibovich made the first in a piece profiling the candidates in the race to replace Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as head of dysfunctional state - the story is entitled "Who Can Possibly Govern California?"

The Los Angeles Times strikes back with "New York takes legislative gridlock to next level" by Mark Barabak and Richard Simon, which starts: "As California lawmakers stay locked in partisan gridlock, residents might take small solace in one fact: There is a legislative body even more divided, more hapless and more dysfunctional than the one in Sacramento."

Happy Fourth

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation...."

Read the document that led to all the fireworks here.

Layoffs at Contra Costa Times*

A July 1 memo from Bay Area News Group Executive Editor Kevin Keane to employees says the paper will layoff 18 people from the newsroom by midsummer.

Keane writes:

It goes without saying that this deep a cut on top of previous reductions will have a lasting impact on our newspapers and Web sites. Our preference would be to hold staffing at its current level until the revenue bottomed out, but we can't delay if we're to get through this downturn.

Before we finalize these cuts, however, we're asking for volunteers to step forward. These volunteers will receive an additional severance of up to eight weeks salary on top of the severance mentioned above - one week's pay for each year worked, up to eight years. Under the volunteer program, a 12-year employee would receive the maximum 20-week severance.

Read the full memo here.

The Bay Area News Group newspaper chain is a division of Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group and includes the Contra Costa Times and Oakland Tribune. BANG plans to consolidate its copy desk functions with the San Jose Mercury News, which is expected to lead to even more layoffs at the latter paper.

(h/t themediaisdying)

*Update: This post has been clarified to show that the layoffs will affect all BANG papers, not only the Contra Costa Times.

Sarah Palin declares independence from Alaskan voters

A Republican governor is stepping down and it isn't Mark Sanford.

Sarah Palin today announced she will resign as governor of Alaska on July 26.

Listen to Palin's speech: Part 1 and Part 2. Or read the transcript here.

"I know when its time to pass the ball for victory," she says. "America is now more than ever looking north to the future."

She makes multiple references to "wasteful" ethics investigations. Which makes me wonder - what's coming next? Or, as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo puts it: What shoe is about to drop?

Update: Matthew Cooper at Atlantic offers three theories for Palin's sudden resignation: 1. More bad news coming. 2. She wants money. 3. She's completely impulsive. None of options excludes the others, of course.

Eureka!

A data mine gold mine for anyone wanting to keep tabs on California's shifting demographics, business trends, legal landscape, and most every statistic collected by the state. The state has created an online searchable data base full of info from births and deaths to water, maps and exports.

Here's some of what's included, according to Government Technology magazine:

• vital statistics such as population, birth, death, and marriage data;
• more than 50 million data records on education;
• imports and exports coming through California ports,
• traffic counts on state highways;
• driving statistics, fatalities, accidents and injuries;
• travel and tourism;
• water data; and the
• Cal-Atlas Web site, which provides geospatial data and allows others to contribute their geospatial data.

Happy mining.

Trying again in Denver

Another post-Rocky Mountain News publication is ready for launch.

The Rocky Mountain Independent, a daily web magazine run by former RMN staff, will make its debut Monday in the Mile High City. The site has enough money to last three months as it prepares a business plan and seeks out advertisers, Independent editors told the Associated Press.

Some of the same staff was involved with the failed InDenver Times, which stalled out in April.

LA Times shuffles top editors

LA Observed reports that the Los Angeles Times has undergone a serious masthead shuffle heading into the Independence Day holiday, starting with news that Executive Editor John Arthur is out of a job.

Times Editor Russ Stanton also announced several promotions. Sports editor Randy Harvey will takeover as associate editor of the paper. Obituaries editor John Thurber becomes manager editor for the print side and website editor Meredith Artley jumps to managing editor for online.

In a memo to staff, Stanton cited Arthur's opposition to these promotions as one of the primary reasons he's leaving:

Executive Editor John Arthur will be the leaving The Times after a distinguished 23 years here.

John and I did not agree on the need for the just-announced masthead changes, and we differ on the best approach to reaching our goals.

This decision was a difficult one. John has served in a host of leadership roles at The Times that have included assistant city editor in the Orange County edition, assistant national editor, editor of the Valley edition and managing editor with responsibility for the three regional editions as well as the national edition.

He later served as deputy Page 1 editor/nights, Page 1 editor, managing editor and, most recently, executive editor.

Four in the afternoon

1. Online advertisers and publishers are adopting policies to let consumers know that their online behaviors are being tracked - the companies hope self-imposed rules will hold privacy advocates and government regulators at bay. NYT

2. A federal judge has tentatively dismissed the case against a woman convicted of using MySpace to bully a 13-year-old girl, who later committed suicide. LAT

3. A new social networking site aimed at collecting news from non-news sources allows readers to assign credibility ratings to posts. Unfortunately, it doesn't always work out: "One recent post with a high credibility rating said the Ark of The Covenant was about to be unveiled." Reuters

4. Ombudsman at the Washington Post calls the paper's plan to sell access to reporters and editors "pretty close to a public relations disaster." WaPo

Post responds to Politico story*

Washington Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli sent out a memo in response to a Politico story that uncovered a flier offering lobbyists the chance to rub elbows with White House officials as well as Post reporters and editors in exchange for money. Brauchli said the newsroom would never take part in such a conference:

We will not participate in events where promises are made that in exchange for money The Post will offer access to newsroom personnel or will refrain from confrontational questioning. Our independence from advertisers or sponsors is inviolable.

A Washington Post spokesman also issued the following statement:

The flier circulated this morning came out of a business division for conferences and events, and the newsroom was unaware of such communication. It went out before it was properly vetted, and this draft does not represent what the company’s vision for these dinners are, which is meant to be an independent, policy-oriented event for newsmakers.

As written, the newsroom could not participate in an event like this.

We do believe there is an opportunity to have a conferences and events business, and that The Post should be leading these conversations in Washington, big or small, while maintaining journalistic integrity. The newsroom will participate where appropriate.

Here's my original post on this story.

*Update: The Washington Post has canceled the lobbyist conferences in response to newsroom uproar, Politico reports.

Politico: Washington Post selling access*

Politico's Mike Allen reports that the marketing department at the Washington Post has offered lobbyists access to its health care reporters and editorial staff, as well as members of Obama administration and Congress, at special salons for a price of $25,000 and up. Allen writes:

The offer — which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters — is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

Allen found out about the conferences when a lobbyist, claiming they represented a conflict of interest for the paper, turned over an advertising flier. Allen also reports that marketing staff might be promising a lot more than the newsroom is willing to deliver. Here's some of the language from the flier:

"Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization’s CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders …

“Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less. …

“Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters’ CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion. Underwriters appreciatively acknowledged in printed invitations and at the dinner. Annual series sponsorship of 11 Salons offered at $250,000 … Hosts and Discussion Leaders ... Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post ... An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done. ... A Washington Post Salon ... July 21, 2009 6:30 p.m."

*Update: The Post responds to the story.

More furloughs at MediaNews*

All LANG employees will be forced to take five days off between now and the end of September - those with vacation time will be able to collect vacation pay; those without will be forced to take an unpaid furlough.

From the memo:

For those with 40 or more hours in their vacation bank, simply take a week of vacation. Because we are heading into the summer months when most people utilize their vacation time, this option should prove to have little or no impact on the majority of employees.

For those with less than 40 hours in their vacation bank, you can do a combination of both options. An example for a full-time employee who works 40 hours per week; you have 24 hours accrued vacation, you can use your three vacation days PLUS take two unpaid furlough days to equal the total five-day requirement.

For those with little or no vacation hours in their vacation bank, you will need to take unpaid furlough equaling five days. Non-exempt employees have the option of spreading their furlough days over several pay periods or they may take all of the time off within a one-week period. It is up to you, but the time must be taken by September 26.

Exempt employees who do not have the equivalent of five days’ vacation in their vacation bank do not have the option of combining vacation with furlough. If you are exempt, and do not have at least one week of vacation, you must take a week of furlough. Your week of furlough must be taken at one time (all within the same week), and you cannot perform any work during that week. This requirement may not apply to some sales positions, so if you are in advertising sales, please see your manager for guidance.

(Read the complete memo here.)

LANG also plans to extend a vacation freeze instituted last April, which means employees won't be able to accrue anymore vacation time until at least the end of September.

When LANG, which is a division of Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group, first announced the vacation freeze, it encouraged employees to use their vacation days as soon as possible. Those who heeded that advice are probably regretting it.

*Update: MediaNews Group also sent out a press release today to knock down rumors that the company was considering a bankruptcy filing. The company says it is negotiating its debt with lenders, but adds that: "Proposals to the company's lenders do not include a change in control of the company, nor do they include proposals for any bankruptcy filings, as the rumors suggest."