Tomorrow’s Election Day. You may not have heard.
Living in the city I cover is normally a good thing: It spurs me on to work harder, exposes me to stories that might not otherwise appear on my radar and makes me more accountable to my readers, whom I can run into at the store, in restaurants or even when picking up a prescription at the pharmacy.
But it makes Election Day a little strange. As a result of my job I am, I think, one of the more educated voters around, but I also have had personal dealings with nearly all the candidates, and while I keep my personal feelings off the page — in 2004, representatives of two rival city council candidates both tried to have me fired, since I was clearly in the tank for the other guy — it confuses things when going into the polling booth.
I should vote for the best candidate, certainly, but what if he’s a complete jerk? Should that make a difference? I will be dealing with him (or her) for four or more years, after all. How about how good of a quote someone is? Or how time-consuming it is to interview them?
In the end, though, it almost doesn’t matter: Every year, Jenn and I go to lunch — this year, we’re going to go to breakfast, to try and beat at least some of the crowds at the polling station — and go through the sample ballot, and she quizzes me about each of the candidates, going beyond what I’ve written about them previously, to the sort of stuff I mention above.
And then she goes and cancels out most of my votes anyway.
First they came for Monitor Radio. And now it’s the print edition.
From the Washington Post:
The Christian Science Monitor is about to pull the plug on its print edition, just as the venerable newspaper is about to turn 100.
The money-losing paper announced yesterday that it will stop publishing next April, except for a weekly edition, and shift its emphasis to the Internet.
“Everyone who grew up with print, and everyone who worked in print like me, you feel a little sad,” editor John Yemma said in an interview. But he said the Church of Christ, Scientist, which has heavily subsidized the $26 million annual cost of running the Boston-based paper, wants to stem the flow of red ink.
The Monitor’s circulation is just 52,000 — down from 160,000 two decades ago — and its early deadlines are crippling. Since most copies are sent to subscribers by snail mail, all copy must be turned in by noon for the next day’s edition.
“The cost of producing it, printing it and distributing it is pretty high,” Yemma said.
But the Monitor, which concentrates on analysis, has a strong news team: 95 editorial staffers; eight foreign bureaus in an age when mid-size papers are shutting theirs; and eight domestic bureaus, including a nine-reporter Washington office.
The church has made a series of bad bets over the years, including pouring cash into a television station and a radio operation, both of which ultimately flopped. And Yemma said he will have to cut at least 10 percent of the staff when the print edition shuts down.
The Web site is drawing 1.5 million unique visitors a month, but Yemma said he must boost that if the brand is to survive. “There’s no magic bullet,” he said. “You just have to do high-quality journalism and post constantly.”
I have mixed feelings about this.
First, I think this is the direction that most dailies will eventually take, especially as older readers, the ones most wed to dead tree editions, start dying off. (It’ll probably happen before that, actually, when they’re no longer profitable enough to advertise to specifically.) So if CSM goes this way first, it doesn’t necessarily mean the beginning of the end for the publication, although if they’re too far out in front of the marketplace, it certainly could be.
Secondly, they’re still just about the best journalism around, even if the name is off-putting to a lot of folks. (It’s amazing how many people think they’re a religious paper and won’t even give them a chance as a result.)
Here’s hoping the CSM has another 100 years in it.
If you’ve ever tried to look up a news article written before 1996, it’s as though those events never happened — my few articles from prior to the Web exploding onto the scene posted here are my only early articles online … for now.
Following in the footsteps of its earlier moves to digitize book content (but hopefully avoiding some of the missteps that attracted the ire of some publishers and authors), Google is digitizing older newspapers and putting them online. The goal, of course, is yet more content they can put ads alongside, although some newspapers are looking forward to selling people reprints of classic issues.
Although Google is starting with the largest newspapers, the company says it plans to reprint smaller newspapers as well, and is working with microfilm companies to accomplish that.
I don’t know if we’ll ever see my old work from the News Messenger or Dear Newspapers online (and I’m not entirely sure if I want to see all those articles again — I had a bumpy first few years as a writer and as a reporter), but I can certainly see the value to an informed citizenry whose digital memory, at the moment, only extends back a maximum of 13 years.
This story is a follow-up to a story I wrote last week about a homeless man who returned a purse with nearly $1,000 inside to a Rancho Cucamonga woman. Due to a bit of a mix-up, I wrote up this follow-up, having missed (along with the editor who green-lit the story) that the Jane-on-the-spot Beatriz Valenzuela already did one on Sunday. (The story did not get posted to the Daily Press’ Web site.)
So here, for posterity’s sake, and so that people can know what finally happened with Chris, is the rest of the story:
(more…)
Media General, the corporation that owns The Potomac News (my former employer), is cutting almost 11 percent of its work force:
The 750 job cuts are paired with other operating cost reductions, as the company faces a slumping U.S. economy and a deepening recession in Florida, where it has numerous operations, Marshall N. Morton, the company’s president and chief executive said in a news release.
“Media General continues to implement its announced performance improvement initiatives across all parts of the company,” Morton said. “Our efforts to reduce operating costs have necessarily included personnel.”
The publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Tampa Tribune and Winston-Salem Journal said it expects annual savings of $40 million from the job cuts, which will be fully realized next year. Media General will post severance charges of between $4 million and $4.5 million in the second quarter.
Staff reductions, which will decrease the total number of employees to 6,150, are spread across publishing, broadcast and corporate operations. The company did, however, increase positions in its interactive media division as it focuses on the Internet.
The newspaper industry’s woes aren’t confined to Media General, by any means: More than 100 Washington Post journalists are taking a buy-out.
Sad times.
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