Digital First Media now a MediaNews and Journal Register mashup

Digital First Media's inhalation of the MediaNews Group and the Journal Register Company has resulted in a new management team, with executives from the two newspaper companies being reassigned as Digital First officers under CEO John Paton.

Journal Register CFO Jeff Bairstow was named president of Digital First Media; Jim Brady becomes editor in chief, having previously served as the Journal Register's editor-in-chief, and David Butler, who headed MediaNews Group's California papers, is now executive editor of Digital First.

The three members of the Journal Register's journalism advisory board also become the advisory board for Digital First. They are well known media critics Jay Rosen of New York University's journalism program, CUNY professor and BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis, and Emily Bell of Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism.

Here's the memo announcing the changes:

Digital First Media, which jointly manages MediaNews Group and Journal Register Company, announced today the appointments of key executives in sales, content and operational positions.

“With today’s announcement we are putting into place the very best team to lead both MediaNews Group and Journal Register Company in implementing our Digital First strategy,” said John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media. “I am excited about the depth and breadth of talent we have assembled from both companies as we continue to work to serve our communities and growing audience. Like all legacy media companies making this important transition to Digital, we have a long way to go to fulfill that promise. Today marks an important first step.”

Jeff Bairstow was named President of Digital First Media. Mr. Bairstow, joined Journal Register Company in 2010 and was, until recently, Journal Register Company’s Chief Financial Officer. In his new role, Mr. Bairstow – who was also named President of MediaNews Group – will oversee daily operations across Journal Register Company and MediaNews Group.

“We have a tremendous opportunity to leverage the knowledge of these two companies – both in traditional journalism and digital product development – into a unified leadership team that will drive the necessary digital transformation to power our growth,” said Mr. Bairstow.

Ron Mayo was named Chief Financial Officer of Digital First Media. Mr. Mayo will retain his duties as CFO of MediaNews Group in addition to his new role.
Named as Executive Vice Presidents of Digital First Media were:

-       Jerry Grilly, who will continue to serve as President and Chief Executive Officer of The Denver Post; Steve Rossi, who is responsible for the company’s California operations; and Tom Wiley, who has served as a group publisher for Journal Register Company.

-       Arturo Duran, who joined Journal Register Company in 2010 as Executive Vice President for Digital, was named Chief Digital Officer.

-       Kirk MacDonald, who has served as The Denver Post’s Executive Vice President of Advertising, Marketing and Digital Sales since July 2009, was named Executive Vice President of Sales. Adam Burnham, who has served as Journal Register Company’s Vice President of Local Sales, was named Senior Vice President of Local Digital Sales.

-       William Higginson, who has worked for Journal Register Company since its founding and most recently served as President, was named Executive Vice President of Operations.

Jim Brady, who was named Journal Register Company’s Editor-in-Chief earlier this year, was named Editor-in-Chief of Digital First Media. David J. Butler, who has served as Vice President of News for MediaNews Group and Editor of the San Jose Mercury News, was named Executive Editor.

Named as Vice Presidents of Digital First Media were: Jonathan Cooper, who recently served as Vice President of Content for Journal Register Company; Sara Glines, who recently served as Vice President of Field Operations for MediaNews Group; and Joe Miller, who has served as Journal Register Company’s Vice President for Real Estate, was named Vice President for Real Estate.

Bob Mason, who has served as Journal Register Company’s Chief Technology Officer since 2010, has been named Chief Technology Officer for Digital First Media.
Robert Monteleone, who has served Chief Human Resources Officer for Journal Register Company, was named Chief Human Resources Officer for Digital First Media.

Along with the management appointments, Mr. Paton also announced appointments to the Digital First Media Advisory Board. Named to the Advisory Board were: 

-      Jeff Jarvis, Associate Professor and Director of the Interactive Journalism program and the new business models for news project at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism.

-     Emily Bell, Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. 

-      Jay Rosen, Ph.D, professor and former chair of the journalism program at New York University. 

Mr. Jarvis, Ms. Bell and Mr. Rosen had previously served as members of Journal Register Company’s Advisory Board.

Building walls

Despite Jeff Jarvis's incessant pleading, the New York Times plans to start charging for online content. The Times will follow the model of the Financial Times in which readers will get a certain number of stories free and then start getting charged.

Once the New York Times puts up pay walls, many smaller papers will consider doing the same. Given the number of bankruptcies, layoffs, consolidations and death spirals in the industry it's very likely that the smaller papers are ready to experiment sooner than later.

Whether this signals a wholesale shift from free content to pay content will depend more on what entertainment sites do.

What would Google name it?

Blogger and change-opportunist Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine is writing a book about how knowledge and abundance will remake all that we've known before and he wants you to help him come up with a title. (via Simon Owens on Twitter)

Four in the afternoon

UCLA Bruin gets the wraparound treatment ... Kumar goes to the White House ... Jarvis astride his hobby horse ... Kinsley on the news after newspapers

Afternoon links

The Claremont League of Women Voters is hosting a panel called "Print Journalism and the Challenge of the Internet" on Saturday, March 21. Panelists include Peter Weinberger, publisher of the Claremont Courier; Steve Lambert, general manager of the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group, and Larry Pryor, professor of journalism at USC.

MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton likes the thought of owning all of the major dailies in Bay Area, including the emperiled San Francisco Chronicle. "Consolidation" is the watchword.

Shuttering newspapers does have consequences for democracy: political incumbents gain an even greater edge, a study shows.

Alan Mutter and Jeff Jarvis debate whether the newspaper is a dying institution in today's "Dust Up" in the Los Angeles Times.

Jarvis on Stanton on Twitter

Los Angeles Times Editor Russ Stanton is speaking today at "The Future of News" conference at Harvard Law School, where BuzzMachine's Jeff Jarvis just tweeted the following:

Stanton says they are going to cut the circ of the Sunday magazine in half in April to go just to the demos advertisers want.

Jarvis also twittered this...

Stanton says pay for news is "not a practical or realistic solution to our woes."

and this...

Russ Stanton is talking about how he brought the LATimes to the web as innovation officer.

Read all of Jarvis' TFON Tweets here or watch the conference here.

Ad delivery system failure

Ezra Klein at the American Prospect gets tired of seeing "I told you so" listed as a qualification for curing what ails the newspaper industry:

Over at BoingBoing, Clay Shirky engages in a bit of self-congratulatory schadenfreude for predicting the collapse of the newspaper business model back in 1993. And no doubt: He was prescient. But like a lot of folks (many of them named Jeff Jarvis) who write these posts, there's an odd lament laced through the triumphalism: If only they'd listened.

-snip-

What's never quite explained is what would have happened had everyone treated lay Shirky's utterances like aural treasure. Because I believe in Shirky's original analysis. "The price of information has not only gone into free fall in the last few years, it is still in free fall now, it will continue to fall long before it hits bottom, and when it does whole categories of currently lucrative businesses will be either transfigured unrecognizably or completely wiped out, and there is nothing anyone can do about it," he wrote. And he was right then. There was nothing anyone could do about it. More content aggregation and web chats and transparency would not have altered the fundamental force ripping apart the industry. Newspapers were built on local advertising monopolies. The internet deprived them of those monopolies. Less important than an individual's ability to access the BBC's news feed was his ability to access Craigslist's classifieds. In the internet age, midsize newspapers are an inefficiency. And they are being eliminated.

Jarvis had no answer for this, and nor, so far as I know, does Shirky...

The cult of buzz*

Ron Rosenbaum has had enough of Jeff Jarvis the grave dancing new media consultant. It's about time, in my humble opinion. I commend anyone interested in the future of newspapers, and news gathering, to read the entire article. Here's a lengthy passage to tide you over:

But Jarvis doesn't seem to recognize distinctions of value. Or to have heard of Gresham's law. (Trash drives out value.) Listen to his blog reaction to the recent bailout/economic meltdown:

Why wasn't the government better at listening to the market? Did it ever ask what it should do? That's not the way government thinks, but it's the way it should learn to think.

Wait, did I get that right? The government should have "listened to the market," the same market that created this debacle and came close to destroying the economy? It's an example of his blind allegiance to the wisdom of the consumer, to quantity over quality and expertise. Everything else is elitism. He's the Sarah Palin of gurus. The crowd is always right.

But what makes him wined, dined, and comped by Dubai to fly to self-proclaimed summits all over the world? It's not just that corporations are dumb enough to waste what's left of stockholders' money to pay for someone to tell them to "listen to the market." No, it's Jarvis' pretensions to guru-hood, his gnomic "laws" and pronouncements. Firing people on the writing side because of the incompetence of the business side is a long tradition in the media business, and Jarvis gives management a New Age fig leaf with which to shift the blame from their own incompetence.

He offers chestnuts like, "The link changes everything," "Stuff sucks" ("Nobody wants to be in the business of stuff anymore. … Google's economy is more appealing"), "Atoms are a drag," and—yes, his contribution to the "X is the new Y" genre—"Small is the new big."

Yeah, down with stuff! Let them eat fake. Sleep in buildings not made with atoms. Everyone should be a new-media consultant, and then we won't need any media at all.

*UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis responds to Rosenbaum - make sure to read through the comments. Also, Simon Owens amplifies on Rosenbaum's column - again, read the comments, where Jarvis makes a surprise appearance.

News unit zappa

Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine says he's found a version of the thing he says will replace the news article as the "fundamental unit of news coverage."

The thing he has found is an interesting blog post by Mark Thompson called The Money Meltdown. It's a smart, clean-looking page of links to other people's work, including news articles, radio pieces and video clips. Basically, a collection of stories Thompson considers to be insightful reading/listening/viewing on the economic crisis.

Maybe I'm thick, but I don't see how a collection of stuff represents a "fundamental" unit. Thompson built his page on the original reporting of outside sources, all of which can stand on its own. Original reporting, then, is the fundamental unit.

Stitching together original stories to create a larger narrative arc is important, but it's not the revolution that Jarvis exhorts it to be. Online technology does allow for linkages that couldn't otherwise have been made at a single newspaper or television station of old, but unless some or all of that reporting is done under your own masthead, it's news coverage twice removed. As I argued in my unsolicited response to Alan Mutter's praise of Drudge Report, aggregation can be useful and illuminating, but it's hardly the thing we've been waiting for.

Silver-colored jumpsuits, jet packs and ubiquitous blogs

I get that the Internet has wrought, and will continue to wrought, changes in our lives that are substantial and meaningful. This includes the lives of journalists.

But I'm tired of writers who characterize the habits of anyone who doesn't want to embrace the latest pop trend as old fashioned or tired.

Funnily enough, most of the people I see saying this are usually graying men (Jeff Jarvis, Steve Outing) who seem to feel they only have a short time left to embrace the future.

So little time, in fact, that they can't waste it understanding history.

For some reason, it makes me wish Philip K. Dick were still alive and writing.

Jeff Jarvis loves/hates cliques

Social networking. Citizen journalism. Web 2.0. BuzzMachine is abuzz with buzz words.

A common theme in Jarvis' many posts is the power of the Internet to undo social orders he does not like and to give rise to new ones. Generally, he promotes an ostensibly democratic approach (that of the linked social network), but seems to gloss over the exclusionary, vindictive and lowest-common-denominator principles that often result from clique behavior.

What's cool in the future is what's successful (on the Internet) he tells us here: ...the lesson I prefer to take away is that the successful media brands of the future will be the ones that are owned and loved and promoted by their users (formerly known as their audience).

He's even excited about the future of air travel in the age of connectedness.

Jarvis has finally found a clique that embraces him and that he can embrace - indeed, that seems a major goal of Internet users these days. But he forgets about human nature and, sometimes, about being human.

He is right to think that the social order of today will be reorganized. But he has a tendency to believe the tools themselves will create a better society. I'm doubtful. Unless we commit ourselves to some higher principles, the new society will look a lot like the old one, only with the social pressures we suffered in high school finding new life in online.