Four Thursday

1. Todd Ruiz, still lounging in Bangkok, has a post up about election-time agitprop in Thailand. Reporter in Exile

2. Jennifer 8 Lee talks about the potential for Google+ (Circle me, bro!). Jennifer 8 Lee

3. LA Times reporters on tweeting. LAT Readers' Rep (via Romenesko)

4. Fox News founder Roger Ailes once mused that TV was the way the GOP could get around the pesky news media: "People are lazy. With television you just sit—watch—listen. The thinking is done for you." Romenesko

Long Beach Press-Telegram update

Three newsroom employees at the Long Beach Press-Telegram lost jobs this week as their departments were absorbed into the Daily Breeze. According to the Long Beach Post, sports columnist Frank Burlison and photographers Steven Georges and Diandra Jay received pink slips. (This post clarifies an earlier post.)

One big BANG

MediaNews Group owns two clusters of newspapers in California: the Los Angeles Newspaper Group (LANG) and the Bay Area News Group (BANG). In the past decade, mergers and consolidation have turned the individual papers into something of a news blob, with each newsroom producing its own pages in semi-autonomous fashion, but often sharing substantial resources, including inside news and business pages, copy editors, photo, and advertising.

The Bay Area News Group, which owns newspapers in the East Bay, Silicon Valley and San Jose, has finally shed the pretension of autonomy and has named itself a single editorial entity.

According to a memo obtained by blogger Richard Brenneman, the BANG papers, led by editor Dave Butler, will now share a single managing editor for print, Bert Robinson, and a single managing for online, breaking news and photography, Randall Keith. Robinson and Keith served in similar capacities at the BANG flagship, the San Jose Mercury News.

Sports, photo and business will similarly fall under a single BANG editor.

This will mean more sharing of content between papers, though it's not clear if further staff cuts will follow. The papers, which include the Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times, will retain their editorial boards to run opinion and commentary.

From the memo:

Beginning today, we are taking another significant step in streamlining our organization to maximize our operating efficiency. Continuing the process that began with the creation of the Bay Area News Group, the news divisions of all Bay Area News Group newspapers will now operate under a single, common management team under the direction of Dave Butler, editor of the Mercury News and vice president for news for MediaNews Group. This move follows similar consolidations in our other divisions. 

Dave’s appointment and the announcement of the first official BANG-wide news management team are logical next steps in our efforts to make full use of the breadth and depth of the entire group. While a less-formal arrangement has been in place for some time, our recently negotiated labor agreements recognize complete consolidation. 

This reorganization will have an immediate impact on top management, and it’s with regret that we also announce that [BANG Executive Editor] Kevin Keane and [BANG-Easy Bay Managing Editor] Pete Wevurski are leaving the company today. Please join with me in thanking them for their years of service and wishing them well in their new adventures.

The rest of the memo is here.

AP to expand news bureau in North Korea

The Associated Press, reporting on itself, reports:

The Associated Press and the North Korean state news agency have signed a series of agreements, including one for the opening of a comprehensive AP news bureau in Pyongyang, the organizations announced Wednesday.

The AP story does not address possible censorship or explain any restrictions that will be placed on AP's North Korea bureau.

MySpace is a bargain

The Wrap reports that News Corp. has unloaded MySpace.com for $35 million to Specific Media. Layoffs are expected to be part of the deal. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. bought the social network in 2005 for $580 million.

Other LANG layoffs

In addition to the seven people who lost jobs in LANG's San Gabriel Valley group, I'm told the Los Angeles Daily News cut a position in its circulation department, and three or more newsroom staffers at the Long Beach Press-Telegram were laid off. I believe the PT layoffs are part of a consolidation plan announced in April, but I'm still awaiting details.

Update on layoffs in the San Gabriel Valley

Here's an update on the layoffs at the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group: Seven people total lost their jobs: two of them were on the business side, five from the newsroom. The affected newsroom employees are Hector Gonzalez, Eric Reed, Karen Lee, Coye Sloan and Steve Wytucki.

Add: Gonzalez was the city editor at the Pasadena Star-News, one of the three papers in the SGVN chain. His position will not be filled. Metro Editor Frank Girardot will continue as the primary editor for the paper.

Fact-finders as artifacts

Chris Hedges take his turn trying to articulate what's being lost as newspaper newsrooms shrink:

We are losing a peculiar culture and an ethic. This loss is impoverishing our civil discourse and leaving us less and less connected to the city, the nation and the world around us. The death of newsprint represents the end of an era. And news gathering will not be replaced by the Internet. Journalism, at least on the large scale of old newsrooms, is no longer commercially viable. Reporting is time-consuming and labor-intensive. It requires going out and talking to people. It means doing this every day. It means looking constantly for sources, tips, leads, documents, informants, whistle-blowers, new facts and information, untold stories and news. Reporters often spend days finding little or nothing of significance. The work can be tedious and is expensive. And as the budgets of large metropolitan dailies shrink, the very trade of reporting declines. Most city papers at their zenith employed several hundred reporters and editors and had operating budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The steady decline of the news business means we are plunging larger and larger parts of our society into dark holes and opening up greater opportunities for unchecked corruption, disinformation and the abuse of power.

Four Tuesday

1. News Corp.-owned MySpace is about to be sold for an astonishingly low $30 million and will probably devoured (half the staff could be laid off). No one is surprised. And no one has heard of the potential buyers. All Things D

2. The merging and consolidating at AOL-Huffington Post begins in earnest this summer. Many of the AOL landing sites will be folded into Huffington Post - Politics Daily gets rolled into HuffPost Politics, for example. As a result AOL's brands will drop from 53 to 20 and HuffPost will expand from 28 to 36 sections. TechCrunch

3. AOL's streamlining reminded me of a 2009 post I wrote. Maybe I was on to something. Reporter G

4. The New York Times Co. has partnered with USC to offer online extension courses. This is about branding and making money. Only one of the 40 courses has to do with journalism. Inside Higher Ed (found via LA Observed)

All the winners

The list of LA Press Club winners is here (.pdf). The awards ceremony was held last night.

Layoffs in San Gabriel Valley

At least five, and as many as seven, newsroom employees have lost their jobs in the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group. Layoff notices went to three from the copy desk, one photographer, and the city editor at the Pasadena Star-News.

The layoffs come as the papers' owner, Denver-based MediaNews Group, is being asked to up its offer for the Orange County Register.

The newspaper group includes the Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune and Whittier Daily News.

Four Friday

1. Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi gets slammed for arm-chair reporting on GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann - and the word "plagiarism" gets thrown about. City Paper

2. People like Andy Carvin and NPR wants to capitalize on that. Nieman Journalism Lab

3. Gene Weingarten skewers self-branding and journalists patronizing their readers. Washington Post

4. A Patch reporter doesn't break a story. fishbowlLA

No opinion

Should newspapers cut their opinion and unsigned editorials? I'm sure op-ed editors have all sorts of thoughts on that. A flack at Fast Horse, Jorg Pierch, said it risks alienating readers who can already find plenty of opinion elsewhere. And it would save money, according to new media consultant Mark Potts. Poynter

MediaNews acquires another newspaper - no, not that one

MediaNews Group is still in the merger business. The Denver-based newspaper chain has acquired The Gardner News, a family owned newspaper that circulates in central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. Terms of the deal are confidential.

MediaNews is the leading contender to buy the Orange County Register, though talks between MediaNews and Register-owner Freedom Communications recently stalled over price.

Four today

1. If you like the smell of news print (and who does) you can buy a candle and pretend its still 2004. refinery29

2. We were already a curation nation. Nieman Journalism Lab

3. Gannett axes 700 employees from its newspaper division. Romenesko

4. David Carr reviews James O'Shea's tell-all about the Tribune Co.'s disastrous deal to buy the LA Times. NYT

Layoffs at the Union-Tribune

The San Diego Union-Tribune laid off five news staffers yesterday. The San Diego Reader has the story.

Four Wednesday

1. More layoffs at the Oregonian, though not on the news side. Willamette Week

2. Online journalism lets you feel the pleasures of being a rodent inside a plastic ball. Wired

3. Pandora Radio follows Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn, GroupOn and Twitter into the tech bubble that's not a bubble. NYT Dealbook

4. LA>Forward goes dark because of cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. LA Observed

Merger talks between MediaNews and OC Register break down

A disagreement over price has stalled merger talks between MediaNews Group and the Orange County Register. MediaNews, which owns nine newspapers in Southern California, had put together a financed deal to buy the Orange County newspaper, but Register owner Freedom Communications wants a better offer for its flagship property, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Freedom owns eight television stations and more than 100 daily and weekly papers, according to the Journal. It's probable MediaNews only wants the newspapers - and possibly only the Register - and that could mean Freedom wants more time to negotiate better deals for the remainder of its assets.

It's also possible bids from Platinum Equity, which owns the San Diego Union-Tribune, or Los Angeles Times-owner Tribune Co., might have given Freedom a new sense of its value. However, regulatory hurdles stand in the way of any merger with these companies.

From the Journal:

A March deadline for bids on Freedom's assets came and went before the unsuccessful discussions with MediaNews. Freedom is now in talks with other possible buyers, the people said. 

-snip- 

People familiar with Freedom's finances said the company's newspapers could fetch about $350 million, or roughly four times their earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Freedom's television stations could be worth about $400 million, or about eight times such earnings, these people said. 

Those figures fail to take into account corporate overhead expenses, and pension and tax liabilities, said some people familiar with the negotiations.

Date set for San Bernardino Sun union election

Newsroom employees at the San Bernardino Sun will decide on July 7 whether to establish a union. The National Labor Relations Board has identified 17 employees as eligible to vote in the election. Senior Editor Kim Guimarin sent two memos (here and here) outlining the process and making clear that management does not want the newsroom to unionize. From the memo:

As we have shared, during the next five weeks there will be a series of informational meetings during which you will learn more about the process, i.e., voting procedures, union representation, and the union itself, the collective bargaining process, and why it is in your best interest as well as the Sun's to cast a ballot on June 7 and vote NO.

The Sun is owned by the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, a division of Denver-based MediaNews Group.

Four Monday

1. Andrew Breitbart tells the L.A. chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition that objectivity in journalism means surrender, and unveils plans to start a Big Jerusalem site. fishbowlLA

2. An ad in today's Miami Herald congratulations the Miami Heat, which lost the NBA championships. Miami New Times

3. AOL's Patch sites are busy, but not with muckraking stories. LAT

4. ABC's Chris Cuomo embarrasses himself as he rationalizes paying sources. Poynter

From hell

James O'Shea, who was fired in January 2008 as editor of the Los Angeles Times, has a new book out later this month called "The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers." A companion website is coming soon.

The book is a retelling of the history that led to a disastrous merger between the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and the layoffs and bankruptcy that followed. I have a copy on my desk - it was delivered late Friday - but I haven't read it yet. The chapter titles give one a good sense of what's inside, as "Otis Chandler's Legacy" gets tarnished by "Market-Driven Journalism" and the inevitable march to "Zell Hell" begins.

"It would be easy to condemn the people who caused this modern tragedy as venal and evil," O'Shea writes in the preface. "Thousands of friends and colleagues the world over have lost jobs because of the way the industry has been managed. Some were venal, all right. But most of the people who led newspapers to this point in history were smart and thoughtful. They thought they were doing the right thing, and that's what makes the story of what happened so terrifying. It shows disaster could happen to anyone in any industry."

The book will be out June 28.

The FCC discovers local journalism is (f)ailing

A report commissioned by the FCC finds what everyone in the journalism business already knows: There is a dearth of good, in-depth local reporting. AOL-Huffington-Patch is not going to reverse the trend, either (though AOL-Huffington-Patch disagrees). From a Poynter summary of the report:

The FCC report says that newspapers and TV news networks have half the staff that they had in the 1980s and that newsrooms now stand at pre-Watergate employment levels. As a result, local news coverage is in trouble. Courts, schools, legal affairs, environment, state government and education once were priority beats. Now they lack reporters to cover them. The number of newspapers with bureaus in Washington has declined. Local news coverage of religion “is all but gone[.]”

While NPR gets good marks, local radio news coverage is following the trend of having too few people following the reports of other outlets. Again, from Poynter:

Despite the abundance of local media outlets, Waldman said, there is “a shortage of media reporting.” In Baltimore, for example, there are 53 news outlets, but a Pew study  said most of the content came from one TV station and The Baltimore Sun. “So far the news media is not filling this key need” to report news and not just repeat what others have reported, Waldman said. About 15,000 reporters have left newsrooms in the last decade in America, he said.

Shop talk at the San Bernardino Sun

Reporters have begun organizing a union effort at the San Bernardino Sun, two sources tell me. This means contacting union representatives and circulating cards for an election. I don't know how far along they've gotten, but LANG, the paper's owner, has taken notice. At least two executives talked to management at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, the Sun's sister paper, about how a bad union would be. More when I hear it...

Four today

1. Typical elitism. The New York Times has a social media strategy: "Don't be stupid." Business Insider

2. Wired and Planet Money visualize what the (sputtering) economic recovery will look like. Wired

3. MIT has a lab that matches television and ad content to what is being said about them online. AdAge

4. You don't have that many friends: The 150 rule for social media. NPR

Press-Enterprise publisher announces changes

The Press-Enterprise laid off 24 employees yesterday, including three newsroom employees - a city reporter and two web staffers. This morning, Publisher Robert Redfern sent out a staff memo (see below) announcing changes to the paper's business publications. Redfern does not reference the layoffs, but notes the "severe measures" taken by parent-company Belo in the last few years in response to falling revenues. Here's the memo:

Dear Colleagues,

As with others within our industry, we’ve had to take severe measures over the past several years in order to adjust our business to the economy and the marketplace changes. We continue to be very uncertain about what will happen with our local economy in this coming year, largely because we’ve continued to experience revenue challenges.

As a result, we’re being forced to make further adjustments in our business priorities. Some of these will impact The Business Press, which first published in September 1995 and has been part of our product portfolio for the past 16 years. Unfortunately, because of the economic downturn of the past three years, we’ve come to a point where we’re no longer in a financial position to continue publication. Consequently, June 6, 2011 will be the final weekly edition of The Business Press.

This means we are changing how and where The Business Press readers seek and consume B2B information each day. The business reporters of The Press-Enterprise will continue to cover the Inland Southern California business community, but now these B2B stories, analysis and in-depth perspective, along with blogs and calendars, will be appearing on PE.com and in the daily Business section.

This was a difficult decision to make in response to the current adverse business environment with which we in the newspaper industry continue to struggle. We understand that this current business climate can be difficult to deal with, and we thank you for your commitment to our Company.

Ron Redfern
Publisher

The Press-Enterprise has made a few newsroom hires in recent months, I'm told, so it's not clear if yesterday's layoffs actually shrink the news staff or keep it steady.

Ex-NPR chief lands at NBC

Vivian Schiller, who was forced out in January as president and CEO of NPR, will become chief digital officer for NBC News and MSNBC. From the press release:

...Schiller will lead the digital strategy for both NBC News and MSNBC to ensure future growth and innovation. Her responsibilities include strategic oversight of the network’s digital extensions on the web and in mobile, interaction with the Joint Venture that oversees the msnbc.com digital network, as well as providing direction to the network’s new emerging properties such as EducationNation.com and theGrio.com.

Schiller came to NPR from the New York Times, where she headed digital efforts there. Her departure from NPR came amid growing political pressures sparked by a series of management missteps, including the clumsy firing of commentator Juan Williams for insensitive remarks he made about Muslims. The NBC News job is considered by some to be a big step up for Schiller - perhaps proving the point that it's best to get fired in the public square.

New York Times gets new leader

Bill Keller has announced he'll step down as executive editor of the New York Times. The Pomona College grad says he wants to become a full-time writer.

The newspaper's managing editor, Jill Abramson, will succeed Keller. She is the first woman to hold that position.

Dean Baquet will leave his post as Washington bureau chief to become managing editor, the Times reports. Banquet served for a time as editor of the Los Angeles Times.

Layoffs in Riverside*

I'm told at least three newsroom staffers got laid off today at the Press-Enterprise in Riverside. More than two dozen employees were laid off company wide. I'll update when I get more information.

*Update: Three newsroom employees - a city reporter and two web position - were cut as part of a 24-person downsizing. 

Four in the afternoon

1. After turning Minnesota Public Radio into a powerhouse, Bill Kling looks for what's next. Citypages

2. NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard says goodbye, and remembers an ugly final year. NPR

3. Iraq and Somalia are the first and second most dangerous places in the world for journalists. CJR

4. Nikki Finke continues to rattle her keyboard at Mediabistro's Pandora Young. The Daily

Do "news" and "analysis" need couple's therapy?

Are news and analysis a boring couple who would do much better if they went their separate ways? Jonathan Glick makes the argument in today's Business Insider. I agree with the premise that analysis will remain valuable - and possibly gain value - as more breaking news consumption is done in bite-size, mobile chunks. And I agree with the premise that breaking news will increasingly be consumed in bite-size, mobile chunks.

But Glick's argument relies on a theory that news and analysis are distinct entities that can exist separately, even happily so. They can't. News and analysis are different expressions of the same newsroom-consumer relationship. Breaking news is the flirtation and analysis is commitment. Newsrooms need to do both well if they want to keep the fire burning.

Schmidt failed to conquer all of the Internet

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt regrets not dominating the social-network side of the Internet - one of the few places one can escape Google's gaze. Wired