Belo building walls

The Dallas Morning News plans to put stories written by the staff or about the Dallas Cowboys behind a paywall. Wire service copy and stories less than 150 words would be available for free on the newspaper's website, according to News Tech. From the story:

Seven-day-a-week print subscribers will still be able to see all of dallasnews.com's content free of charge. The Morning News charges new subscribers up to $33.95 per month for home delivery, and $37.95 for mail delivery, among the industry's steepest subscription rates for a general-circulation daily.

The Morning News is owned by Belo, which also owns the Press-Enterprise in Riverside. It would seem logical that if the paywall succeeds in Dallas that something similar would be erected out here.

An old-fashioned war in San Francisco

David Carr of the New York Times headed out to San Francisco to visit Bruce Brugmann, editor and publisher of the Bay Guardian, and talk with him about the old-fashioned newspaper war that threatens to bring down either his paper or the SF Weekly, part of the Village Voice Media chain.

The Guardian recently won a court case against the Weekly, having alleged that the chain paper tried to run the Guardian out of business by selling ads below cost. The Weekly was ordered to pay $22 million to the Guardian, but Village Voice Media isn't ready to pay. So the fight goes on, at considerable expense to both properties, at a time when alternative weeklies, perhaps more so than traditional newspaper, are simply struggling to survive.

The war is a throw-back to a bygone era in San Francisco, when media giants like the Examiner and Chronicle tore at each others' proverbial throats. Today, the Guardian and Weekly throw punches even as most of the crowd heads for the exit.

Or, as Andrew O'Hehir, former SF Weekly editor, describes the battle, it's “like some kind of Greek myth where the two protagonists are still fighting over a city that died 85 years ago or something."

Comings and goings

From Gorkana:

Pat Maio has joined the North County Times as an Economics Reporter, where he’ll also cover agriculture, financial services, tourism and small business. He was most recently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California. He has also held reporting jobs for Dow Jones Newswires, the Financial Times Group, the San Bernardino Sun and Desert Sun, among others.

Pelisek leaves for the Daily Beast

Christine Pelisek, who broke the Grim Sleeper story, has left the LA Weekly for Tina Brown's Daily Beast. The post from LA Observed is here.

Question

Whatever happened to the Orange County Register's experiment in outsourcing copy desk and layout functions to India? The plan, announced in June 2008, was to do this for a month and then evaluate the results. But I don't remember hearing about the results - maybe I just wasn't paying close enough attention. Or maybe I just forgot.

Newsweek like a house on fire

Journalists are running from Newsweek as fast as they can. The latest escapee is Michael Hirsh, the magazine's national economics correspondent (and former chief diplomatic correspondent). Fareed Zakaria recently bolted for Time magazine. Investigative reporter Michael Isikoff left for NBC News. Deputy managing editor Evan Thomas announced his retirement earlier this month, as did Editor John Meacham. But it's not just the stars. According to Gawker, Digital GM Geoff Reiss, editorial director Mark Miller, and digital executive editor Gabriel Snyder have also departed.

Sidney Harman, Rep. Jane Harman's rich husband, bought the debt-laden magazine and threatened to outsource some of the work. The loss of big-name journalists could hurt the magazine's content, but could also stave off some layoffs, given that they probably earned fancy incomes. Still, it must be a fear fest inside the Newsweek offices these days.

Do young people still become old people?

In an interview with the Economist, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen explains the dilemma all newspaper face as succinctly as I've ever heard :

The cost of changing settled routines seems too high, but the cost of not changing is, in the long term, even higher. A good example is the predicament of the newspaper press: the print edition provides most of the revenues, but it cannot provide a future. I know of no evidence to show that young people are picking up the print habit. So if the cost of abandoning print is too high, the cost of sticking with it may be even higher, though slower to reveal itself. That's a problem.

Currently, old people keep print alive. Yet, young people inevitably turn into older people. I wonder if there is any evidence to show young will pick up the print habit when they gray? Or has too much changed? Perhaps our massive technological revolution has made it impossible to predict what younger generations will do. Maybe we'll return to print as a way to ground ourselves in the tangible; or maybe print is simply too inflexible to carry the news in way we'll want to ingest it.

On another note, Rosen is asked to list media outlets that are practicing journalism the right way. Here's his answer:

Particularly good at what they do: Advertising Age. Gawker. Wired. Voice of San Diego. The New Yorker. The Economist. (Disclosure: You're The Economist!) Rachel Maddow. Frontline. The New York Times. West Seattle Blog. Texas Tribune (Disclosure: I'm an advisor there). "To the Point" with Warren Olney. The Atlantic. "This American Life". The Guardian. Jon Stewart. There are probably some regional newspapers doing a great job that I simply don't read, but fewer than before.

Wedged in between the Texas Tribune and The Atlantic... annoyed to follow Rachel Maddow, gratified to proceed "This American Life."

Clock ticking for Tribune Co. execs

As bankruptcy proceedings drag, time is running out for Tribune Co. bosses to maintain control of their destiny, the Chicago Tribune reports.

Fire at former Press-Telegram building

A fire damaged the former Long Beach Press-Telegram building on Pine Avenue. Two firefighters were hurt, one went to the hospital with a back injury. Arson investigators are on the scene; they believe the fire started in the old press room.

The building was slated to be turned into condos but the project stalled because of the bad economy.

Cause you can't fit as many people into a smart phone

As Gannett goes mobile with USA Today as part of a massive restructuring plan, it is also going smaller in terms of staff. As AP reports:

The makeover outlined Thursday will result in about 130 layoffs this fall, USA Today Publisher Dave Hunke told The Associated Press. That translates into a 9 percent reduction in USA Today's work force of 1,500 employees. Hunke didn't specify which departments would be hardest hit.

The reorganization plan aims to make the paper more adaptable to smart phones and iPads. These changes will also create a different way of organizing news production and bring advertising into the room. Again, from AP:

The newsroom instead will be broken up into a cluster of "content rings" each headed up by editors who will be appointed later this year. The newly created content group will be overseen by Susan Weiss, who had been managing editor of the Life section. As executive editor of content, Weiss will report to USA Today Editor John Hillkirk....

In a move that may raise conflict-of-interest questions, Weiss will have a "collaborative relationship" with USA Today's newly appointed vice president of business development, Rudd Davis[.]

I don't know what a content ring is, but I do know that everyone is collaborating these days. Competitors collaborate. News and salespeople collaborate. Media owners are hoping the collaboration orgy produces enough new streams of revenue that a sustainable business will emerge. It is, of course, ugly to watch.

Earlier: Gannett announced new copy desk hubs for its other newspapers and the launch of a new high school sports site.

What Mike Allen is reading

A link in Mike Allen's Playbook column on Politico.com has Simon Owens wondering what exactly it is that he's reading. Allen obviously copied the wrong link into the story, which takes you to this site. It's not as weird as it might first appear, though. Assuming he reads Japanese, Allen apparently is thinking about taking a trip to Japan.

News Corp-ification of the L.A. Times?

I was tempted to say the "Disney-fication" of the Times because Tribune Co. creditors want former Disney CEO Michael Eisner to lead the company when it emerges from bankruptcy. But it would be Jeff Shell, former News Corp. executive and now Comcast big wig, who would have the more hands on role of chief executive, taking over from Randy Michaels.

All of this is informed speculation, given the uncertainties of the bankruptcy proceedings. But Eisner confirmed he's buying up Tribune debt. From the LA Times:

Eisner was unavailable for comment, according to his spokeswoman. But he told Variety in a wide-ranging interview Monday that he has been accumulating Tribune debt. “You are talking to somebody who is buying debt in the Tribune Co. The salvation of the newspaper is some kind of pay arrangement [online], which will evolve into something significant,” Eisner said in the interview.

Shell, 44, a Los Angeles native who runs Comcast’s cable channels group from the company’s headquarters in Philadelphia, declined to comment. Earlier in his career, Shell worked for Disney on the strategic planning staff when Eisner ran the company.

Tribune owns six newspapers, including the LA Times and Chicago Tribune, and 23 television stations.

Getting the Bell story*

Paresh Dave at Neon Tommy writes about how reporters at the Los Angeles Times broke the story on the salary scandal in the city of Bell. It all started with a tip from the District Attorney's public integrity division...

Initially, [reporter Jeff] Gottlieb called the L.A. County District Attorney's Office to see if there was any trouble in Maywood. As it turned out, there wasn't. But the District Attorney's Office did acknowledge that a neighboring city, Bell, had city council members who were oddly earning more than $100,000 annually.

Presented with brand new information, [reporter Ruben] Vives' attention shifted from Maywood to Bell.

The two reporters will recount the tale Thursday at the LA Press Club.

*Update: Speaking of Bell, residents have finally begun a recall effort. BASTA (Bell Association to Stop The Abuse) is behind it.

Perception is reality, SEO style

Search engines are like public restrooms. They're only as safe and sanitary as the last people who used them.

For example, the "mosque at Ground Zero" became the most common way to search for information about a controversial Islamic center proposed two blocks from Ground Zero. It was neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero, but search engine optimization doesn't care about accuracy and so the search results reflect the most common perception. This perception is then reflexively reinforced because the search engine points anyone looking for more information to links with the "mosque at Ground Zero" phrase. And anyone wanting to get hits has to use some form of the phrase to get noticed.

There is no search engine janitor.

Poynter has more about this here.

NPR's Project Argo getting underway

National Public Radio's $3 million Project Argo will officially launch September 1. The idea behind the project is for national headquarters to invest in local news reporting that benefits both local affiliates and the national news shows. The money comes from Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is being used to create a network of local blogs (twelve so far).

One of the new blogs funded through Project Argo is at KPCC (or Southern California Public Radio, as the Pasadena-based station prefers to be called). The blog is titled Multi-American and is written by former San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Leslie Berestein Rojas. Here's how she and the blog are described:

Leslie most recently covered immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border for the San Diego Union-Tribune. She has retraced the steps of migrants along desert smuggling trails, investigated immigrant detention contractors, and told the stories of families left behind in Mexico’s migrant-sending towns. A native of Cuba raised in Los Angeles, Leslie has also written for Time, People, the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times. She has reported from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

Multi-American is both a news project and a discussion forum. It’s also part of a partnership between Southern California Public Radio and NPR involving a dozen public radio stations around the country, among them 89.3 KPCC, in which we’re experimenting with filling the gaps left in news coverage by a shrinking media industry. KPCC’s Jason Kandel is managing and editing the project.

Nieman Journalism Lab has a list of the other blogs around the country. There are two in San Francisco for some reason.

FiveThirtyEight hearts the NYT

Nate Silver's successful and indispensable FiveThirtyEight blog has bred with the New York Times. Their offspring is here.

Twitter to become even more annoying

Twitter is hiring a sales team to sell advertising on the chatter site. CNET (via Nieman Journalism Lab)

A new look in San Diego

The redesigned San Diego Union-Tribune launched last week (h/t fishbowlLA). Apparently old people don't like it - but will continue subscribing as long as they don't fuss with the comic strips.

Coincidentals

The mayor-president of Baton Rouge kicked the local newspaper's two government reporters out of the city's press room and said the decision had nothing to do with the a recent story about how much money the city is wasting on a security surveillance system. The need for more space is so pressing that the mayor-president, Kip Holden, has yet to decide who might move into the press room - maybe an intern? But he is sure it won't be anyone from the press. The Advocate (via Romenesko)

Four in the morning

1. Sidney Harman is full of ideas for making Newsweek a more successful magazine, including discounts on books written by Newsweek writers, connecting dots, and, "has a fundamental respect for the business aspects of the operation, who doesn't think this is somehow an artistic undertaking totally separate from the real world." WSJ

2. The Tribune Co. bankruptcy negotiations have broken down. Does this mean debtors want to see the contract even more before they're willing to make a deal? ChiTrib

3. Star Trek nerds bypass Riverside exhibit, for now. Press-Enterprise

4. Amid the travails of bankruptcy, the Los Angeles Times has a scrappier feel these days, with what feels to be a more robust watchdog-approach to local reporting than in recent years. For all the good work, Tribune has decided to get the newsroom new time clocks. Ed Padgett

How they rocked Bell

Next Thursday, Aug. 26, Los Angeles Times reporters Ruben Vives and Jeff Gottleib will be guests of the LA Press Club to explain how they found the story on the outrageous salaries being paid to Bell's city council and top administrators. The group meets at the the Steve Allen Theater, 4773 Hollywood Blvd., and the program starts at 7 p.m. Free for members, $15 for the rest of us.

Shiny things that make us drool

Why are we still amazed at too-clever-to-be-true online pranks and why do we reward the perpetrators with yet more attention when the obvious hoax is found out?

Why am I even thinking about this?

Hyperlocal hypersports and the nationalization of local news

Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in America, plans to launch 100 "hyperlocal" high school sports sites that will be patched together on the HighSchoolSports.net platform. PaidContent writes:

This current sports effort will begin this month in 38 Gannett media markets, including Atlanta, Washington, DC, and Denver, CO. The full rollout is expected to be completed by the end of 2010.

This patchwork approach to coverage (also AOL's model for its Patch sites) is probably the future for newspaper chains and national media companies, as they go smaller, more local and more niche with their coverage but use their vast resources and broad name recognition to create a regional or national networks based on common themes. It's sort of what the fragmentation of the small- and medium-size newspaper was heading for anyway.

Is it hard to imagine MediaNews, Belo and Gannett partnering on a regional high school sports network that pushes scores and updates to mobile devices while feasting on what's left of the auto and mall advertisers in Southern California?

It would make sense under this model for other popular beats - cops, courts, schools, weather - to be strung together and published on similar platforms. Readers might turn to a regional or national Gannett-run network to get their local police blotter, for instance. The model uses fewer journalists, offers a single focus and yet still allows the company to sell ads on a regional or national level.

It's not the greatest news for journalists, given that the coverage is almost certain to lead to fewer jobs, require less skill, offer less interesting experience, and create a box that eschews enterprise or creativity.

Here's how Ken Doctor sees it in his examination of AOL's Patch:

The fact that Patch is getting such recognition, and discussion, is another indicator of how thoroughly journalism has fallen on hard times. The announcement of the hiring of a single journalist in a single community? That was the stuff of internal newsroom memos not too long ago. It’s as if the news industry is struggling to rebuild itself, cell by cell, just as researchers are figuring out how humans themselves can regenerate lost limbs and organs.

At the same time, Doctor points out that the oxymoron of national chains doing hyperlocal is probably the way of the future. Here's why (again, using Patch as the example):

It seems to me that scale is a plus in a couple of ways: 1) national ad sales (witness the Pepsi Refresh campaign running across the current sites) and 2) technology costs, with one centralized production and presentation system, one that should be able to get to market quicker with tech innovations. In two important ways, though, scale will be of a lot less help — and these are core to the site’s promise and success: 1) local content production and 2) local ad sales. Patch, with its organizational structure, will get some efficiency boost through regionalized ad selling and some content sharing (as sites with a common school district may combine coverage, for instance). In the main, though, the hard work of gathering local news and selling local merchants isn’t greatly helped by the national brand.

"Nixonian dragnet" in L.A. County

Open-government activist and attorney Terry Francke has penned a blistering column chastising the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for launching an investigation into leaks to the L.A. Times about the county's troubled child welfare agency.

Francke writes:

...the state’s largest county, which may be doing the state’s worst job in child welfare, is reacting to newspaper reports on the heartbreaking results of its failures by loosing the hounds to find who in its ranks furnished reporters with the facts.  In blithe dismissal of the Brown Act, the board of supervisors majority even initially used an unlawful closed session to hear, discuss and approve top bureaucrats’ request for the witch hunt.

The pretext for this Nixonian dragnet is that laws for the protection of minors’ privacy have been violated. While that may or may not be the case, the question pales beside the issue of whether those laws are anything more but a pious cover for the most secretive and potentially destructive archipelago of government power in today’s society—the joined-at-the-hip realm of the juvenile dependency court and child welfare systems.

The faces of the Register

All reporters and columnists at the Orange County Register will have to have their mug shots taken and the pictures will run with every one of their stories, according to a memo obtained by LA Observed. The memo, written by deputy editor Brenda Shoun, offers this rationale for the mugs:

Recently-released MORI research recommendations told us that we need to better promote our talented writing staff. Images were specifically called out by the research team as a good way to do this. 

My guess is this has less to do with promoting the talented staff than it does with a readership survey that made vague calls for more transparency and accountability from the newsroom.

Nevertheless, the mug shots could be a good way to promote the talented writing staff within the paper so that no one forgets a talented reporter's name when memos go out:

Also, if we have somehow forgotten a name please forgive us. The list was assembled in haste.

It's all about giving

Only one day left in KCRW's semi-annual pledge drive. If you haven't given yet, here's some motivation.

Four in the morning

1. Journalism warning labels. Tom Scott

2. Toxic David takes on corporate Goliath. McClatchy

3. The other SXSW. Poynter

4. USC's Andrew Lih wants to "wikify" fact checking (if you think Wikipedia gets all the facts straight, you're gonna love this idea). Nieman Journalism Lab

Censoring the news

Tracy Wilkinson, Mexico bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, writes about the trend of "narco-censorship" among Mexico's reporters:

It's when reporters and editors, out of fear or caution, are forced to write what the traffickers want them to write, or to simply refrain from publishing the whole truth in a country where members of the press have been intimidated, kidnapped and killed.

Closer to home, the teachers' union in Los Angeles plans to boycott the Los Angeles Times over a story that linked teacher performance to student test scores:

"You're leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test," said A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has more than 40,000 members.

Your Daily News columnists

LA Observed has posted the new columnist lineup for the Daily News of Los Angeles. The link is broken, so I'm quoting LAO's post:

Former editorial writer and reporter Kerry Cavanaugh returns from a nine-month fellowship at Columbia University to take over a new Tuesday front page column spot. "Cavanaugh has always sought to give voice to Valley residents. Now she plans to answer their questions about the news of the day, and find the truth amid the bureaucratic, bizarre and bewildering world of government," editor Carolina Garcia says in a front-page note that ran Sunday.

Also, Al Martinez bumps up to the front page two days a week — Mondays and Fridays — and Doug McIntyre stays on Sundays and Wednesdays. Editorial page editor Mariel Garza's column "examining state and regional politics and trends" will return to the Sunday opinion pages after being dark for awhile. They are "veterans with a unique and inquisitive perspective who will write about Valley issues and who will attempt to unravel complex governmental topics," says Garcia.

Ambinder, Madhani to National Journal

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder and Aamer Madhani of USA Today have been hired to lead the National Journal's White House coverage. Madhani is scheduled to join the National Journal next month and Ambinder will join after the November elections.

This is part of a massive talent hunt by the National Journal, which recently named Ron Brownstein as the editorial director of the National Journal Group.

Some of the other recent hires at the Journal include, "the Wall Street Journal's Yochi Dreazen, Sue Davis and Fawn Johnson; Politico's Josh Kraushaar and Coral Davenport; and Campaigns and Elections' Jeremy Jacobs.

Four in the morning

1. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. is building a "newspaper" for your iPad and mobile phone. LAT

2. The science of the crime lab isn't so scientific. News Observer

3. Marketplace described as Twitter on radio (meant in a good way). Nieman Journalism Lab

4. Blogger goes inside Mexico's drug war. AP

Riverside newspaper sues to open pension records

The Press-Enterprise of Riverside has sued the San Bernardino County retirement system to force the release of records for all former employees earning pensions of more than $90,000 a year.

From the story:

The action filed by The Press-Enterprise asks a judge to order the San Bernardino County Employees' Retirement Association to disclose the payments

The association initially "denied in whole" a California Public Records Act request from the newspaper for the "names, monthly payment, annual payment, job title, government agency and department" of all individuals receiving at least $90,000 in annual retirement benefits from the association.

The retirement association denied an initial request to turn over the records. The executive director cited privacy concerns, saying, "We are dedicated to preserving the confidence and trust of our members."

To newspaper contends that the records are public documents under state law. Attorney Alonzo Wickers, who represents the Press-Enterprise, had this to say: "Given the extraordinary public interest in this information and given the incredible burden pensions are placing on local governments in California, such as in Bell, there is really just a tremendous interest in access to this public information."

Gay marriages remain on hold*

Judge Vaughn Walker has decided to keep gay marriages on hold until at least Aug. 18, giving opponents of his landmark ruling to overturn Proposition 8 time to appeal their case to the Ninth Circuit.

*Update: Here's how the Los Angeles Times reports it:

A federal judge Thursday refused to permanently stay his ruling overturning Proposition 8 but extended a temporary hold to give supporters time to appeal the historic ruling.

U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker, who overturned the measure on Aug. 4, agreed to give its sponsors until Aug. 18 to appeal his ruling to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. No new marriages can take place until then.

Walker's decision came after supporters of the same-sex marriage ban warned that they would take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary to ensure that his ruling did not take effect.

City of Bell and home rule

Sacramento wants to be the solution to the city of Bell's homegrown problems, and has proposed a bill to penalize, through a heavy state-income tax, city council members who take excessive salaries. Whether the legislation would have force in charter cities (cities formed by local referendum rather than state rules) remains unclear. The more interesting parts of the legislation are a requirement that cities vote in open session on staff contracts and stop issuing bonds if council members are earning too much money.

Meantime, the LA Times has a story laying out the evidence that Bell Councilman Luis Artiga lives in Chino, where he owns a home - a home for which he's received a homeowners' tax exemption. Council members have to live in the city they're elected to represent.

If you like Long Island and journalism...

The days of cutting are over at Newsday (for now). The Long Island newspaper plans to add 2,600 pages of news each year and will hire an additional 34 reporters to help write the stories. The paper's editor in chief is "very excited." Here's the story.

If you'd prefer something snarkier, Gawker is hiring a booker.

Four today

1. Even if Sam Zell bankrupted the Tribune Co. employees' retirement fund, he doesn't have to pay for it. Bloomberg (via LA Observed)

2. It was not "Bring Your Rifles To Work" day at the Attleboro Sun Chronicle. Providence Journal (via Romenesko)

3. Health insurance flack fights back against Gannett stories on executive compensation. (N.J.) Daily Journal

4. Stan retires. KTLA

Comings and goings (catchup)

A departure I missed a couple weeks back: James Wagner, who covered Diamond Bar and the City of Industry (including the city's NFL bid) for the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, has moved on to cover high school sports for the Washington Post. Wagner came to the Tribune in June, 2009. Before that he was in metrpo at the Los Angeles Times and interned at the Wall Street Journal.

Comings and goings

City Hall reporter Dan Abendschein has left the Pasadena Star-News to become editor of AOL's Patch site for Altadena. Abendschein wrote on his Facebook page that he was told to leave the newspaper a week earlier than planned because of an apparent conflict between his new job and his duties at the Star-News - the town of Altadena is in the Star-News coverage area.

Pasadena Now discovers the green screen

Pasadena Now, the online "hyperlocal" news site that purportedly pays writers in India to rewrite city press releases, and which has broken such hard-hitting stories as: "Prominent Pasadena business executives and community leaders are accused of 'Having a big heart for Jerry’s Kids'," is planning to launch a TV network, fishbowlLA reports.

James Macpherson, the visionary who founded Pasadena Now, told fishbowl's Matthew Fleischer that green screens plus L.A. talent equals high-quality productions for cheap:

One great example is the green screen + virtual set dynamic. Formerly the territory of CNN's and ESPN's, now this tool is common.

LA is loaded with talent and knowledge. Our objective is to produce compelling content with highest production value at lowest cost. We are very fortunate that a leading So Cal special effects studio has offered to assist us with technology and the use of a studio.

We hope to present a mix of video styles, from user-generated videos which we curate and edit, to studio-shot programs, to live streamed important civic events.

Nix leaving the Breeze

Daily Breeze reporter Denise Nix is leaving the paper to work for the child-advocacy group First 5 LA. Nix covered the courts for the South Bay newspaper and won this year's distinguished journalist award from the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to the Breeze, Nix worked for the Los Angeles Daily Journal and the Associated Press.

Here's part of the goodbye memo from city editor Frank Suraci:

Denise's award this year from SPJ capped off a stellar career here at the Breeze. Not only has she done a yeoman's job tracking all our court cases and handling the day-to-day grind, but Denise has covered some major cases for us over the years as well as helped initiate our popular Crime+Courts blog with Larry [Altman].

We'll miss her hard work and dedication but wish her all the best in her new venture.

Four today

1. Reuters is looking for News Ninjas to do New & Cool stuff. Context: Forge (via Nieman Journalism Lab)

2. The Society of Environmental Journalists awarded Charles Duhigg of the New York Times first place for his woefully under-read series on toxic water. SEJ (via Romenesko)

3. Google and Verizon are for net neutrality ... sort of. Time

4. If you ate paste in first grade, you're probably eating paste now. Gawker

Trib execs accused of pushing bad deal

The court examiner appointed to analyze Sam Zell's leveraged takeover of Tribune Co. has pieced together through "a tangle of e-mails, documents and recollections" a report that purports to show former and current Tribune executives used flawed revenue projections to push a through deal that was doomed to failure.

From the Trib-owned Chicago Tribune:

The densely-packed pages show participants on all sides of the deal trying to explain how a transaction weighed down by almost $13 billion in debt could unfold amid ample evidence of a collapsing economy and the steady erosion of the advertising dollars Tribune Co. thrived on.

Although only confidence flowed from deal participants in 2007, the report shows that what held the complex, two-stage transaction together was mostly fear of getting sued if it fell apart. The banks that had agreed to finance the deal wanted out, the documents show, and in the offices of Sam Zell, the Chicago real estate magnate who orchestrated the LBO, debate ensued over whether to bail.

Desperate to unload nearly $13 billion of debt, Trib execs, with the assistance of a small valuation firm, relied on anomalous revenue projections to prove the deal would survive under its own weight. The examiner takes particular umbrage at the decision to toss a final $3.6 billion of debt on top of the load even as the economy headed toward recession and newspaper advertising dollars disappeared. The deal went through, the Tribune Co. spiraled into bankruptcy, and the deal-makers shrugged.

Spotty

I've had a spotty record when it comes to posting on this blog recently and things promise to get even spottier, as I'll be out of town the next few days. Nonetheless, I will try to give you a reason to click here; meantime, check out the archives to see how I've evolved.

Citizen journalists will always miss the Bell

In a column posted on LA Observed, Ellen Alperstein argues that "citizen" journalists missed the Bell salary scandal precisely because it's the kind of story only professional journalists would pursue (even if it takes them a while to get around to it). Here's an excerpt:

Even though citizen journalism is a wonderful addition to the collection and dissemination of news and community development, it isn't going to replace the kinds of stories people need with regularity to expose civil servants gone wild, hold them accountable and effect positive change of a profound and sustained nature.

There was a lot in the first L.A. Times story about Bell you could have found out yourself. But you're not going to, and neither is anybody else who doesn't have the financial support of a publisher willing to fund the effort society requires to make informed decisions and protect public resources from egregious misappropriation. This isn't new, and you're tired of hearing it and what it costs. But it bears repeating because malfeasance never sleeps and because people who live free don't know what they have until they don't have it.

Meantime, the whole "hyperlocal" movement contends that it can find better stories than the crumbling mainstream media. Let's look at a couple stories from AOL's WestHollywoodPatch, which has paid writers. The links were passed on to me by a West Hollywood friend who claims he suffered a brain injury trying to read them:

West Hollywood Gets Its Groove
Q & A: Fire Capt. Fred Selmo

Shocking news out of Bell

The city that doesn't know how to follow the state's opening-meetings law also doesn't know how to follow the state's public records act, the LA Times reports.

Rep. Jane Harman to get good press in Newsweek*

Sidney Harman, who made his money on the harmon/kardon speaker brand, has bought Newsweek from the Washington Post Co., the New York Times and others report. Harman, 91 and soon to be 92, is married to California Congresswoman Jane Harman, who represents parts of the South Bay and chairs the influential House Intelligence subcommittee.

*Update: Jack Shafer at Slate has collected several attempts at humor, posted on Twitter, about the $1 purchase price (the deal is more complicated than that, of course). Harman's age is the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. For instance: @dan_mccleary Sidney Harman is 90. Maybe he thinks he is buying a Newsweek subscription.

PE sports writer killed in accident

Long-time Riverside Press-Enterprise sports writer Paul Campbell was hit by a car and killed on Friday. He was 52. Here's the brief:

A 52-year-old pedestrian from Colton died this weekend of injuries he suffered during a Friday afternoon accident in San Bernardino, coroner's officials said this morning.

Paul Campbell was injured at 1:42 p.m. Friday by a vehicle that was backing out of a driveway near Inland Center Drive and G Street.

Campbell died Sunday at Loma Linda University Medical Center. He was a longtime member of the sports staff at The Press-Enterprise.

San Bernardino police are investigating the accident.

"Curation" feels a lot like reporting

Before the Internet, information flowed by word of mouth, through phone calls and memos, in books and by telegraph, in closing arguments and on TV. The job of a reporter was to sift through the information being generated by people with the power to affect other people's lives and to distill it into stories that explained what people were doing and why it mattered. Obviously, there are other types of reporting - travel, sports, etc., that are less concerned with the halls of power, but the idea of distilling information remains the same: a tour of Tuscany in 5,000 words or a recap of last night's double-header baseball game.

Even as reporters distilled the information they got from their notes, editors - especially crabby ones - worked to distill it further, whether through better story organization or by cutting extraneous information that didn't serve the narrative (or fit the page). Editors also curated the pages of their publications or contents of broadcasts by deciding which news mattered, which fit that day, what was the story to play first and which one needed to be held for more reporting.

Which is why I don't agree with the statement in a recent Newspaper Death Watch post about the revolution that is curation. Here's what Paul Gillin writes:

All of a sudden, “curation” is one of the hottest words in the Web 2.0 world. That’s because it’s an idea that addresses a problem humans have never confronted before: too much information. In the process, it’s creating some compelling new ways to derive value from content.

 Never confronted? The basic function of the brain is to curate information to make sense of what's going on around us. It's an idea that we've confronted from the start, although the Internet does demand that we develop new methods for curating information to ensure the important stuff isn't lost in a sea of inanity. Indeed, good curation by good curators (good reporting?) might find stories we'd never be exposed to had the Internet not offered us the glimpse.

Gillin's post goes on to talk about a search tool he's invested in that is supposed to make online curating easier.

Bell's cops making money, too

California Watch takes a look at the salaries for Bell police officers and finds that they were pretty well paid, too. From CW:

According to a salary list provided to California Watch, 18 of the 33 officers carried on the city’s books as “safety employees – patrol” are projected to earn more than $90,000 this year, overtime included.

The average pay of the 33 cops with OT is $118,900.

This is for a city of 37,000 people.

The Bell Police Officers Association is a big player in the government reform effort, having joined forces with the citizen group BASTA, which has called for the City Council to resign and opposes any effort to disband the city police force and bring in the Sheriff's Department.

(found via LA Observed)

Maywood's mysterious city manager, update

Angela Spaccia has resigned as the interim city manager for Maywood, the cash-strapped city that she helped to convince to turn over its administrative services to the neighboring city of Bell - a troubled city where, until a couple weeks ago, Spaccia had served as deputy city manager and was paid, along with other top administrators, an exorbitant salary.

Spaccia's sudden departure leaves Maywood with a skeleton staff in City Hall and without a city administrator to oversee it. But it also spares the Maywood City Council of the embarrassment of having to explain why she was continuing to serve as interim city manager after being fired from the city providing the services she was supposed to oversee.

From the Los Angeles Times:

In an e-mail to City Council members, Spaccia said she was resigning out of concern that the growing media attention would detract from Maywood's ability to move forward with the financial and structural reforms needed, said city spokeswoman Magdalena Prado.

Her departure from Maywood, though, leaves the city without a leader.

She had been serving as Maywood's top executive since February. For the first three months, she worked without any pay from Maywood as part of a mutual-aid agreement with the city of Bell. Beginning in May, Maywood began paying the city of Bell $10,000 a month for her services. That was part of a three-month contract that would have ended Aug. 12.

Spaccia oversaw Maywood's dramatic decision last month to lay off virtually every city employee and disband its Police Department. All day-to-day municipal operations were outsourced to Bell for $50,833 a month. Prado said that agreement would not be affected by Spaccia's departure.