This week in bankruptcy news

Freedom Communications, owner of the Orange County Register, has filed a reorganization plan in a Delaware court and expects to emerge from bankruptcy at the end of March. From the Register:

Under the plan, Freedom’s secured debt would be reduced from $770 million to $325 million. Unsecured creditors would split an initial $32.2 million but would be able to pursue a lawsuit against the company board and insurance companies in an effort to recoup up to $25 million more.

The Hoiles family, which has owned the flagship Register newspaper since 1935, would have no ownership. The lenders have already named a new board of directors that will take over when the company emerges from bankruptcy. According to the court filings, Osborne will be the post-bankruptcy CEO. He has been interim chief executive since last summer.

MediaNews Group, meanwhile, will file its bankruptcy plan sometime in early March and already an affiliate of the Tribune Co. has filed a preemptive challenge. From the Denver Business Journal:

According to the objection, GreenCo paid $2.4 million in 1998 for an irrevocable option to buy all of the assets and business operations of the Los Angeles Daily News, which is owned by MediaNews Group. The option, which was due to expire in 2010, has never been exercised, and GreenCo says it’s owed at least $8.4 million under the terms of the contract.

Spare news

Local television news has been in decline for some time, but recently announced cutbacks at ABC and CBS news divisions shows an industry in decline. And, as with newspapers, industry leaders are telling themselves the same lies about how less is more. From the Wall Street Journal:

ABC has been experimenting with smaller newsgathering teams in far-flung locations. On late-night show "Nightline," staff sometimes shoot and edit their own material, a practice [ABC News president David] Westin cited in announcing his cuts.

"Maintaining the quality, or enhancing the quality, but for much less money—I think that is a very viable business model," Mr. Westin said.

NBC News also makes use of several "backpack" reporters. But NBC has no immediate plans to change its mix of traditional- and digital-reporting techniques, Mr. Capus said: "You have to pick your spots."

An inquiry into an investigation of an investigation of a church

The Church of Scientology dislikes the St. Petersburg Times. And pretty much every other news outlet that looks too closely at its operations. But especially the Times.

And, so, church officials hired a couple of well-respected journalists to investigate the Times' 2009 coverage of the church. The well-respected journalists hired a well-respected editor, Missouri journalism professor Steve Weinberg, to oversee the project (Weinberg distances himself from the church here). The report is now complete and in the hands of the church, which is supposed to either release it whole and unedited, or not at all.

Much debate has focused on whether journalists should hire themselves out to push back against the work of other journalists. In defending their work, the church's investigative team says they maintained editorial independence and followed strict ethical guidelines.

But the real test of whether this project serves as journalism will be in how the report is used. Already, the church appears to be making selective use of the findings in a public-relations assault. Here's part of a statement from Weinberg and team:

During an interview with the Washington Post, Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis discussed a portion of the findings of our independent review, and, in doing so, did not accurately portray the full scope of our work. We have urged the church to release the complete report of that review.

Because our full report has not been released, any characterization of our work is premature and purely speculative.

Why would anyone expect the church to act like a newsroom and disseminate the findings in a fair and impartial manner? The project is and always was about PR.

Who blogs?

According to the infographic here, bloggers are mostly college-educated men who make too little money at their real jobs.

Sounds right to me.

(found via a female blogger at fishbowlLA)

"Transformation" another way of saying "You're fired"

ABC News plans to cut several hundred jobs in its news division, first through buyouts and then layoffs if necessary. ABC News president Drew Westin has recast the shrinking payroll as a "fundamental transformation" of the news division.

From NPR:

Westin said it was important for ABC to seize the moment as an opportunity to redefine how it operates. Instead of maintaining expensive gold-plated bureaus dotted around the globe, ABC now relies on digital journalists in eight foreign countries who can record footage themselves or work in concert with a crew on assignment. It has added several digital national reporters as well.

I hope they're the right eight countries.

Reporters investigating reporters

The Church of Scientology has hired a team of reporters to investigate the St. Petersburg Times' reporting on the Church of Scientology, Howard Kurtz reports. It's an unusual PR move, but one that will probably become more common as journalists look for ways to make a living.

I wonder who will investigate the team that the church hired to investigate the investigators at the Times?

KCRW gets new general manager

The Santa Monica College Board of Trustees today announced that Jennifer Ferro will succeed Ruth Seymour as general manager of KCRW. Ferro, 41, currently serves as assistant station manager. She takes over on on March 1.

From the press release:

Ferro has worked in all areas of the station’s operations, including programming, marketing, new media, technology development and fundraising since joining the KCRW staff in 1994. She first came to the station as a volunteer arts reporter in 1991. Ferro’s independent spirit impressed Seymour, who hired her as an assistant. She was promoted to Assistant General Manager in 1997.

“I’m thrilled to be able to get the opportunity to lead the best public radio station in the country and I’m excited to work with the station’s incredible staff on the challenges and opportunities in front of us. It’s a dream job,” Ferro said.

"Jennifer is an ideal choice to lead the station forward,” said outgoing manager Ruth Seymour. “She brings her own unique approach and vision to KCRW. She's innovative, courageous and independent. She's an experienced programmer, producer and fundraiser. She will make a terrific manager and I look forward to a KCRW under her leadership."

A farewell party for Seymour was held on Thursday.

(Photo credit: Marc Goldstein of KCRW)

Comings and goings

*Downtown News reporter Anna Scott has taken a job with the Los Angeles Daily Journal. She's set to start there March 1.

*Frank Girardot, metro editor for the three-paper San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group, will take over as editor of the Pasadena Star-News. Here's part of the memo:

This is a homecoming for Frank. He worked at the Star-News for many years in the 1990s, so he knows the community well. He's just the man we need in Pasadena to be the public face of the Star-News and ensure the community regards the Star-News as its indispensable source of local news. City Editor Hector Gonzalez and the entire editorial staff of the Star-News will report to Frank.

*San Gabriel Valley Tribune reporter Rebecca Kimitch was promoted to political editor for the paper.

*Pasadena Star-News reporter Alfred Lee has accepted a job with the Los Angeles Business Journal.

Tribune's trickle-down bonus plan

Tribune Co. has until March 31 to file its reorganization plan in Chapter 11 bankruptcy court. Meantime, it was big bonus day yesterday for a Tribune Co. employee at the South Florida Sun Sentinel. Here's the memo from execs Randy Michaels and Gerry Spector:

Yesterday morning at the Sun Sentinel, Publisher Howard Greenberg handed out one of the largest spot bonuses in Tribune's history-$25,000 and a 7-day cruise to the Caribbean-to Bob Simons, a production maintenance manager for the newspaper. Last spring, as the Sun Sentinel was replacing some outdated equipment, Bob did something we want all our employees to do-he spoke up. He suggested that there was another supplier the company should talk to before finalizing the purchase.

Bob's suggestion wound up saving the Sun Sentinel more than $1 million. But, the story doesn't end there. The Los Angeles Times was engaged in a similar process, replacing equipment at its printing plant. The vendor Bob suggested helped out there, too, resulting in additional savings.

Bob acted like an owner would-he took initiative and he helped save the company a lot of money. Our success as a company going forward is going to be defined, in part, by everyone acting a little bit more like an owner, and we've told our managers that when they find outstanding performance to highlight it and reward it. You'll see more spot bonuses in the months ahead.

One person really can make a difference. Just ask Bob.

Layoffs at the Ventura County Star

The layoffs continue at the Ventura County Star. Sports columnist David Lassen got word Tuesday that he'd been fired - a month shy of his 25th anniversary with the paper. He's posted a two-part farewell to readers (links here and here). Here's an excerpt:

The meeting was brief, mostly because I was stunned. I was told the envelope contained the “involuntary separation plan,” information on filing for unemployment, and my final paycheck — two weeks’ pay en lieu of two weeks’ notice, plus settlement of outstanding vacation time. And details of the severance package — which could be worse, but could obviously be a whole lot better for someone cast out into a state with 10 percent unemployment, and a resume of work in a dying industry that dates to age 14. ...

I e-mailed the Lakers to cancel my seat request for Thursday’s game with Boston, one of four assignments that had already been on my schedule. The other three were high school playoff games — exactly the kind of thing that are supposed to be crucial to the “hyperlocal” strategy that is the buzzword of most newspapers, but that would no doubt go uncovered now, because there was one less person to cover them. ...

Newspaper layoffs aren’t really that big a deal any more, in the grand scheme of things. There’s not anyone in the business who hasn’t seen a friend downsized, or a face-of-the-paper veteran summarily dismissed, even though those are the kind of people that give papers their distinguishing features, make them unique in a corporatizing climate of sameness.

The County Star's sports and features editors reportedly received pink slips this week as well, and the entire copy desk and design department got laid off as the Scripps-owned paper prepares to outsource all news desk functions to a "universal copy desk" in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Former San Bernardino Sun sports writer Paul Oberjuerge penned a farewell to Lassen here.

Books on journalism

Ken Doctor, who blogs at Content Bridges, has a new book out. "Newsonomics: Twelve Trends That Will Shape the News You Get" promises to take readers "inside the fast-changing landscape of shrinking newspapers and always-on digital news." I know plenty of journalists who don't want to be inside that fast-changing landscape anymore, but Doctor is an insightful observer and the book is worth checking out.

Tribune Co. bankruptcy update

The U.S. trustee's office has ordered an investigation into claims that the deal Sam Zell crafted to purchase Tribune Co. amounts to a "fraudulent conveyance" because it put the company on an inevitable path to Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Tribune owns the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, among other papers.

Atlanta mag objects to "objective reality"

The Atlanta Progressive News recently fired senior staff writer Jonathan Springston because he had the temerity to believe that reporters could be objective.

From the APN press release (via Creative Loafing):

At a very fundamental, core level, Springston did not share our vision for a news publication with a progressive perspective. He held on to the notion that there was an objective reality that could be reported objectively, despite the fact that that was not our editorial policy at Atlanta Progressive News. It just wasn’t the right fit. ...

We believe there is no such thing as objective news. Typically, mainstream media presents itself as objective but is actually skewed towards promoting the corporate agenda of the ultra-wealthy.

APN certainly has a right to pursue its political vision as it sees fit (although it's opinion about objectivity in news seems highly subjective). But we should expect these fissures in reality to grow and to consume more professional journalists.

The idea that there is a field of reason where all sides can meet is falling out of fashion. Increasingly, journalists are being asked to choose sides (usually partisan), which is especially difficult for people who subscribe to the belief that all sides are equally flawed.

Why some conservatives think journalism is liberal

Why do conservatives think journalism is, at its heart, a liberal enterprise? Aside from the fact that journalism's biggest takedown happened to be of a Republican president, the "conservative" journalism movement thinks most investigative reporters want the government to come in and solve any problems they uncover - at least according to columnist K. Daniel Glover:

Much investigative journalism has at its core a belief that government is the solution to whatever problems the investigations uncover. Conservatives who have seen how government creates more problems than it solves don't have any interest in doing work that will promote more government interference and less freedom.

Politics, the game

George Packer laments the shift to zero-calorie political writing in American journalism. New Yorker

Turning to cable news for political, corporate recruitment

The number of guest panelists on Fox News, as well as MSNBC, who plan to run for office is a bit alarming, the New York Times finds. This follows a story in the Nation about the number of panelists with outside contracts - lobbyists, corporate ties, PR consultants - who appear as pundits on cable news shows.

Gellman moves to Time

Pulitzer Prize-winner Barton Gellman, author of "Angler," is leaving the Washington Post for a job at Time magazine. Poynter

Interstate copy editing

E.W. Scripps plans to consolidate the copy desks for its California and Washington newspapers and locate the centralized desk in Texas, according to former Ventura County Star cartoonist Steve Greenberg.

He writes:

The E.W. Scripps Company, publisher of my former employer, the Ventura County Star, has decided to “consolidate” the desk functions — including the page designers — of its three West Coast properties (the Star, the Redding Record Searchlight and the Kitsap Sun in Washington) into one department in… Corpus Christi, TX. Yup, Texas.

At least 15 copy editors and page designers (some people do both jobs) dealing with news, features, business and sports will see their positions eliminated, along with the news wire editor. Supposedly they can apply for jobs in Corpus Christi… but then, that means living in Corpus Christi.

-snip-

What does this mean to the newspapers? It means there won’t be local people to catch local place names, history or other regional idiosyncrasies that good local copy editors can catch, nor any real “institutional memory” of local people and institutions.

For example, the city of Ojai (pronounced OH-high) in Ventura County has a now-closed burger shack, the O-Hi Frostie. An out-of-town copy editor likely wouldn’t accept the deviant spelling of the latter to see print even though it would’ve been correct. Would they know that “Mandalay Bay” and “RiverPark” are part of Oxnard? Would they think the name “Oxnard” is too weird and maybe it should be “Oxford” instead?

As Greenberg notes, MediaNews Group pioneered the consolidated copy desk, having merged multiple news desks into one for its Southern California papers and one for its Northern California papers. The company has yet to cross state - or international - lines.

(Comment on Greenberg's post: "Is it true that the Ventura paper is changing its name to the Ventura County Lone Star?")

Not plagiarism, just mixed up

Back in the olden days, when a writer took an author's words and pretended they were his own it was called plagiarism. Helene Hegemann, a 17-year-old writer in Germany has, with the ascent of some book critics, redefined this act of wrongdoing as one of authenticity.

A blogger first uncovered the fact that Hegemann's "Axolotl Roadkill" contained whole passages taken from another book called "Strobo." Hegemann's novel is up for a $20,000 prize at the Leipzig Book Fair.

From the New York Times:

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

An ingenious defense. "Originality" doesn't exist, but "authenticity," a word whose very meaning depends on the concept of being true to the original ("not false or imitation"), does.

Journalist Gerald Posner, who had to step down from his gig at the Daily Beast after acknowledging he had plagiarized the Miami Herald, will be pleased to know that he was actually being authentic by taking someone else's words. And the person who wrote the words he lifted was apparently unoriginal.

Four in the evening

1. Gannett will force employees to take a week furlough and will extend a wage freeze through April, at least. Gannett Blog

2. Poynter talks to Howard Saltz, MediaNews Group's vice president for content, about what to expect from the coming paywall. Poynter

3. The San Diego Union-Tribune hires a new editor: Jeff Light, formerly vice president of interactive for the Orange County Register. U-T

4. Ana Marie Cox, the original Wonkette, becomes Washington correspondent for GQ magazine. Politico

Profiting from the take down

Bill Lobdell, former religion writer for the Los Angeles Times, and Barry Minkow, former con man, have a novel idea for an online investigative operation - invest in companies, look for fraud, and then short sell the stock of the ones that are found to be corrupt.

Newspapers strictly forbid reporters from profiting off the subjects they cover, much less giving reporters a profit motive to take a company down. Lobdell and Minkow believe the answer to this ethical barrier is more disclosure. To prove the point, the website includes gems like this:

Minkow was his (sic) released from prison in 1995, and has made restitution to all his victims (and he's making payments on his one outstanding debt). Now, in addition to his work at the institute, Minkow serves as the senior pastor of Community Bible Church in San Diego.

The idea of transparency as an enabler of unethical behavior is troubling. Telling someone you're going to punch them in the eye doesn't give you the right to punch them. But is the ibzireporting.com unethical on its face?

It is if it wishes to judge itself according to the standards and ethics of traditional journalism, practiced by newspapers and other major media. Then again, there's a lot of perfectly legitimate behavior out there that traditional journalist's wouldn't be allowed to pursue.

So maybe the best way to approach this is to say that, however Lobdell and Minkow describe their venture, they're not doing journalism - neither are private investigators nor insurance claims adjusters, although all of them might uncover wrongdoing in the course of their business. What Lobdell and Minkow are doing is running a short-selling enterprise that might provide journalists with important tips, but is primarily designed to provide interested investors with a way to make money. Because the company will need to turn a profit, which means finding a reason to short sell a stock, readers will have a reason to be suspect of stories until verified by other sources. But if they want to say they're journalists first and foremost, they'll need to rely on more than simple disclosure to win the argument.

Read James Rainey's profile of the righteous-investor/reporter model in today's Times.

MediaNews paywall, coming soon

BusinessWeek has a reminder article that MediaNews Group plans to start charging for some content. The paywalls go up in May at papers in Chico, California and York, Pennsylvania.

Looking for the line

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt suggests the paper replace Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner because his son has joined the Israeli military. Hoyt says the appearance of conflict is enough to warrant reassignment:

The Times sent a reporter overseas to provide disinterested coverage of one of the world’s most intense and potentially explosive conflicts, and now his son has taken up arms for one side. Even the most sympathetic reader could reasonably wonder how that would affect the father, especially if shooting broke out.

I have enormous respect for Bronner and his work, and he has done nothing wrong. But this is not about punishment; it is simply a difficult reality. I would find a plum assignment for him somewhere else, at least for the duration of his son’s service in the I.D.F.

Times editor Bill Keller responds, "... our policies are designed to make us alert, not to preempt our professional judgment." He goes on to say that Bronner will be staying on the job because the family connections create no more of a problem than the other life experiences reporters bring to their beats:

Nazila Fathi, our brave Tehran correspondent, was hounded out of her native country and into exile by the current regime. Does that “conflict of interest” disqualify her from writing about Iran? Or does that, on the contrary, make her more qualified, knowing as she does how that regime operates? Would you prefer to have a correspondent in Tehran who had NOT been persecuted by the Iranian government?

Whatever side you come down on, it's good to see a public editor sparking a vigorous debate inside the newsroom and forcing news editors to be accountable, rather than letting them sweep this under a rug.

Carson City Council's muted meetings

California's open-meeting laws ensure the public has a right to speak at city meetings. But the mayor of Carson has taken to hitting the mute button, and that's prompted the Los Angeles District Attorney's Office to open an investigation, the Daily Breeze reports.

Carson City Attorney Bill Wynder is supposed to advise the council on the law, but chose to punt on the question of whether the mute button is a violation:

"I do not believe the mute button has been used in a way that violates the Brown Act but that's not my decision to make," Wynder said. "That's up to the District Attorney's Office. We'll give them the information they request."

(found via LA Observed)

O'Keefe doesn't like being investigated

James O'Keefe, the conservative activist who embarrassed ACORN with his pimp videos and who was arrested last week for allegedly trying to tamper with Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu's phones, is pushing back against media reports that suggest he's got extremist views. Simon Owens at Bloggasm reports being on the receiving end when he linked to a Salon story that said he had a "race problem."

News-Press ordered to pay former editor

An arbitrator has dismissed a wacky $25 million claim made by Wendy McCaw, owner of the Santa Barbara News-Press, against the paper's former editor, Jerry Roberts. In the same opinion, the arbitrator ordered McCaw's Ampersand Publishing to pay about $750,000 in legal fees to Roberts, who is now co-editor of the California political site CalBuzz. A judge will still have to confirm the opinion.

From AP:

Roberts said he felt vindicated by the arbitrator's decision and said he was grateful to those who supported him through the lengthy legal battle.

"The award is a decisive victory for ethical journalism," Roberts said in a statement. "Ethics, not money, was always the issue for me."

(found via Romenesko)

Comings and goings

LA Observed reports that the Los Angeles Times is losing Pulitzer Prize-winning auto critic Dan Neil and deputy Washington bureau chief Aaron Zitner to the Wall Street Journal.

It's not illegal when the government does it

The Alameda District Attorney's office has concluded that the secret taping of reporters by a spokesman for Attorney General Jerry Brown were not illegal, as the reporters were conducting interviews and therefore knew the contents of the conversation "could be published to the public."

California laws makes it illegal to surreptitiously tape record a phone conversation.

Investigative reporter wanted for press events

Mashable, a social media website, has a job opening for a "seasoned" investigative reporter to cover the Bay Area. The job comes with three key responsibilities, only one of which strikes me as having anything to do with investigation or reporting. See if you can guess which one:

*Sourcing original stories about the tech and social media world
*Taking regular meetings with companies in the area and going to press events
*Speaking at events and participating in press interviews

To get the job, candidates must have at least two years "at an established news organization doing investigative reporting."

Daily Journal is a "buy"

The stock pickers at TheStreet.com - a financial news site started by Jim Cramer - recommend its readers buy stock in the Los Angeles Daily Journal.

Here's the skinny:

The big risks for this company aren't in its business, but its stock. Daily Journal has a float around 1.4 million shares and daily trading volume under 1,000. That means the stock is extremely illiquid. But its price tag is attractive. The shares are significantly cheaper than those of media peers based on trailing earnings, projected earnings, book value and sales. This is a true under-the-radar pick as Daily Journal is an unknown on Wall Street. We rate Daily Journal "buy."

Is this another sign that "niche" publications are the future? Maybe.

The legal journal does have a stable subscription base is able to charge high subscription rates because of its strong journalism and specialized content. The paper also saw a surge legal ads from a surge in foreclosure notices. Of course, the trade off is that the content is off limits to most readers because of the steep pay walls.

Four in the morning

1. God is dead... No, wait. The mainstream media is dead, and Andrew Breitbart is coming to collect the body (just as soon as that thing with James O'Keefe is taken care of). NPR

2. The Los Angeles Times shuffles a few editorial positions and hires former Daily News sports reporter Steve Dilbeck to blog about the Dodgers. LAO

3. The Twitter bullies are out. Nick Bilton at the New York Times is highly offended that New Yorker writer George Packer is leery of the new "information economy" that comes in the form of Tweets. NYT (Packer's original post)

4. The Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists has honored five journalists: Celeste Fremon of WitnessLA, Denise Nix of the Daily Breeze, Claudia Peschiutta of KNX 1070, Dave Lopez of CBS2/KCAL9, and Andrew Blankstein of the Los Angeles Times. SPJ

A library of books barred from Texas prisons

One thing prisoners have a lot of is time. One way to pass that time is to read. But prisoners in the Texas system have a short list to choose from, considering all the publications banned by the state's department of corrections.

From the Austin American-Statesmen:

Novels by National Book Award winners Pete Dexter, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx and William T. Vollmann have been banned in recent years. Award finalists Katherine Dunn and Barry Hannah are on the Texas no-read list, too, as are Pulitzer Prize winners Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren and John Updike.

Prisoners can't peruse certain books by Pablo Neruda and Andre Gide, both Nobel laureates. "Krik? Krak!" by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat, who last year won a MacArthur "genius" grant, is prohibited behind Lone Star bars. Books of paintings by some of the world's greatest artists — da Vinci, Picasso, Botticelli, Michelangelo — have been ordered out of state correctional facilities.

And just because a book is a best-seller in the free world doesn't mean it's available on the inside. Harold Robbins, Pat Conroy, Hunter S. Thompson, Dave Barry and James Patterson belong to the don't-read fraternity. Mystery writer Carl Hiaasen does, too, as do Kinky Friedman and Janet Fitch, whose "White Oleander" was an Oprah's Book Club selection.

John Grisham has had four blockbusters banned since 2005. And inmates will have to wait for parole before diving into "Precious," the book by Sapphire that last year was turned into a critically acclaimed movie.

Political connections don't seem to count for much, either. Her father may have been governor and president, but Jenna Bush's "Ana's Story: A Journey of Hope" made the banned list in November 2008.

For what it's worth

If journalists want the public to value journalism - and pay a price for it - then journalists need to start by valuing their own work, says Alan Mutter, a UC Berkeley journalism professor who blogs at Reflections of a Newsosaur.

From Mutter:

I hear from people almost every day who want to commission an article or reprint a post in exchange for the ephemeral compensation known as “exposure.”

Amazingly – or, should I say, outrageously? – most of the requests come from people who themselves are being paid for their work at either a for-profit or non-profit organization.

Instead of simply declining, I tell them something like this:

Quality journalism takes training, time and tenacity. Although it’s easy to fill space with words, pictures and videos that are produced quickly and on the cheap, down-and-dirty “journalism” is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. ...

The only way for journalists to fight back is to demand to be paid what they’re worth.

I've argued, perhaps less eloquently, variations on this theme myself in recent years. There are, of course, real challenges to getting journalists to fight as a team on this front: A. they're notoriously independent minded, B. some journalists are quite content to get "exposure" instead of "m-o-n-e-y," C. corporations can effectively divide and conquer through layoffs, cheap hires, cluster domination, and lowered standards, and D. a wave of anti-professional populism has swept through the country and journalism is a prime target (something else corporations have taken advantage of).

Aware of these practical problems, Mutter offers a practical solution in the form of a "freelance pay calculator." The calculator literally allows a journalist to assign value to his or her work. It can also give employed journalists an idea of how much they're worth in terms of salary.

Depressingly, the hourly pay rate Mutter uses in his example is higher than what many full-time newspaper reporters in Southern California receive.