Four Monday

The Los Angeles Press Club nominees are set. Some categories look surprisingly uncompetitive, but maybe that's not new. LAPC (.pdf)

2. As public media go online, the line that used to separate public and private sometimes blurs. PBS viewers, for instance, will see 15 and 30 second commercials if they watch PBS shows online. This should worry people depend on public television and public radio to avoid the pressures private companies have as they compete for ad dollars. PBS has already gotten into trouble over commercials from Goldman Sachs. Romenesko and PBS Ombudsman

3. Joe Biden goes a courtin' in the White House press room. NY Magazine

4. Turning every experience into a digital pose. NPR

Four in the morning

1. Liberal columnist Frank Rich bails on New York Times, goes to New York magazine. NY

2. A map of 17 "muckraking" bloggers having an impact on world affairs. Daily Beast

3. The Denver Post continues to sue bloggers for using its content without permission - and catches a destitute writer in its dragnet. Westword

4. Los Angeles Times reporters Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives win the Seldin Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for their city of Bell stories. USC

Remember unions? Harper's writers do.

John Arthur, liberal businessman and owner of Harper's magazine, is "locked in a bitter contract dispute" with his recently unionized staff, reports New York magazine. At least one editor, Ben Metcalf, has accused Arthur of retaliation and top staff have since left the publication.

The New York magazine story plays up the irony of a liberal boss fighting his liberal staff over a liberal cause: unionization. But the real trouble stem from vanity and a failure adapt to the changing times. From the sorry:

The current crisis began a year ago, when MacArthur fired the magazine's editor-in-chief, Roger Hodge. The two men had once been close, but their relationship had frayed as the red ink mounted: Newsstand sales dropped, MacArthur's appetite for losses waned, and Hodge tried to defend the staff from cuts. According to Harper’s' most recent tax filing in 2009, MacArthur invested $4.4 million into the magazine. (In 2006, his losses were only $2.9 million.)

In the months following Hodge’s ouster, the staff became alarmed when MacArthur’s name began appearing on top of the masthead (previously it had been underneath the editors' names, along with the business staff). Senior editors Bill Wasik, Luke Mitchell, and Jen Szalai departed, along with web editor Paul Ford. To fill Hodge's position, MacArthur appointed Ellen Rosenbush, Harper’s' longtime copy chief, as acting editor. The move struck many staffers as a way to have a more pliant editor in charge: Rosenbush helped edit MacArthur's monthly column in the Providence Journal and his book You Can't Be President. Staffers also complained that MacArthur’s business plan was doomed to fail. He seemed to show little interest in the web in general or the iPad in particular, at a moment when The Atlantic, its longtime thought-leader rival, had invested heavily online and had reaped benefits both in prestige and in financial viability. “He said no one will ever make money on the web,” one staffer told me on condition of anonymity. 

Ugly.

NY magazine can think of 13 reasons to dislike the Zell/Michaels era

Some are new (to me), some are old. The list includes radio stunts:

Radio stunts, like CA$H GRABS ("in which a viewer was led into a bank vault and allowed to scoop up dollar bills," sometimes cheered on by Hooters waitresses) were inserted into evening news broadcasts at member TV stations.

 And bonuses:

...the top level cronies of Zell and CEO Randy Michaels (he hired about twenty top managers from his former days as a radio manager and shock jock) received a total of $57.3 million in bonuses going into 2010. The previous year they only made $5.9 million in bonuses. 

There are 11 more, as you might have guessed.

NYT layoffs

New York Magazine has listed some of the journalists laid off by the New York Times. The paper has a goal of eliminating 100 newsroom positions and, after a round of buyouts, looks to hand out 26 pink slips this week.

Here's the list so far:

Eric Konigsberg — Culture
Sara Rimer — National
Christine Hauser — Metro
Josh Barbanel — Real Estate
Mitch Blumenthal — Continuous News
Kate Galbraith — Business
Allen Salkin — Styles
Monica Evanchik — Web

Ask the money man

Andrew Ross Sorkin, the popular New York Times financial writer who was recently profiled by New York Magazine, is answering readers' questions at the Times website this week. The link is here.

Going rogue

This week's New York Magazine profiles Andrew Ross Sorkin. He's 32 years old and makes more than most of his veteran colleagues in the New York Times business section. He's an editor's pet and a self-promotion man. He serves as the Times answer to the Wall Street Journal and, as such, is rewarded as a brand name within a brand name. He just published a best-selling book, "Too Big To Fail," about the financial collapse.

Some of his colleagues say he's far too chummy with his sources, cherry picks his stories and rides on the backs of better, more aggressive reporters without giving them credit or respect. They wonder if the doors he's able to open will now be closed to them. It's a mix of professional jealousies and changing values, as the traditional model gets turned into the old model, and the new model gets all the breaks.

From NYM:

Some of his antagonists in the newsroom wonder what, in the end, his privileged access is in the service of. “It’s the Jon Stewart question,” one senior Times staffer said, referencing Stewart’s memorable takedown of CNBC’s pre-meltdown boosterism. The squawking, which is loudest among the reporters on the business staff and not among higher-ups, has lately gotten louder, and meaner. As Sorkin’s career has burgeoned, he’s developed another audience of close readers: his colleagues, who comb the column for evidence of favor-trading. In conversations with me, several compared Sorkin’s relationship with the Wall Street elite to disgraced former Times reporter Judith Miller’s alliance with Bush-administration officials peddling bogus intelligence in support of the Iraq War. “She got too close to her sources,” a veteran Times staffer told me. “It was disastrously wrong and we let our readers down. This is the financial equivalent of that.” The analogy seems slightly strained. But certainly, Sorkin’s sources, the ones who have often been treated with kid gloves in his column, are the very actors in the executive suites who triggered the collapse, and closeness inevitably distorts reporting. Sorkin’s critics at the Times say that this effect weakened the paper’s financial coverage during the bubble. But access is one of the places where scoops come from—the career of legendary Times columnist James Reston, among many others, is testament to that. It’s a complicated balance in any newsroom.

Four in the evening

1. A memorable lede. New York Magazine

2. California's April tax receipts are underwhelming (i.e., budget trouble ahead). California's Capitol

3. Warren Buffet saw trouble for newspapers in 1992. It's a franchise thing. Slate

4. As newspapers shrink, someone at least is reporting neighborhood crime in Los Angeles. Eastsider LA

Twitter-dee-dee

Is Twitter for real or a fad? All I know is the service inspires bad headlines (see above). Also, New York Magazine has an interesting story about the company (via Romenesko):

You can forgive journalists their Twitter obsession. If you haven’t noticed, we’re in an economic clusterphooey of historic proportions, and many analysts are blaming the media’s failure, in particular, to create information-sharing services like Twitter. But Twitter isn’t making any money yet, either.