Grim Reaper: Newspapers Cut 3,500+ Jobs In Two Months
The last two months have seen a bloodbath at some of America's largest newspaper publishers, with substantial job cuts hitting a number of papers, including a high proportion of newsroom positions. The scythe has visited McClatchy, Media General, the Tribune Co., the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, among others.
Friday's edition of the P-D carried evidence that the paper's esteemed gossip columnist and her proofreading editors need a dose of current reality. She references a fundraiser organized by Jack (instead of his son John) Carney. Jack has been gone for 20 years.
It's one thing to work at a bank or a multinational corporation or a financial media company and advocate global free trade. It's another to be a truck driver for Anheuser-Busch Cos. in St. Louis and hear that a foreign giant with a weird name is taking over your employer. How do you make sense of something like that?
Cartoonists are disappearing like brunet anchors at Fox News -- about a hundred are scratching out a living today, compared with about double that a couple of decades ago.
Newsroom broadcasters took notice last April when CBS pink-slipped veteran meteorologist Paul Douglas at WCCO as part of a layoff affecting 100 staffers across the station group. If Douglas could get the ax, anybody could.
Located in North St. Louis , Ivory Perry Park is again experiencing a world of change. At one time the park was the site of Visitation Convent and Academy. When the convent moved out of the neighborhood, the area was sold to the city of St. Louis and renamed Visitation Park . As the surrounding neighborhood deteriorated and crime rates rose, the park was renamed again in 1989 after civil rights activist Ivory Perry. On July 21 at 7:00 p.m. (repeated July 27 at 4:30 p.m.) Living St. Louis producer Anne-Marie Berger takes a look at another change in the neighborhood: visible improvements as new houses are being built, and older deteriorated houses are being torn down. Families are once again taking their children to the park to play, and now the park sponsors an Ivory Perry Park Concert Series on every fourth Sunday of the summer.
Also airing on this episode of Living St. Louis, producer Patrick Murphy goes to St. Charles , which was until recently a boom area for building and selling houses. Murphy speaks with developer Tom Hughes and County Executive Steve Ellman about the ripple effect that the mortgage crisis is causing throughout the area, and how the elements of this ripple effect are detrimental to the home-developing industry. This segment is part of KETC’s community engagement initiative Facing the Mortgage Crisis (www.ketc.org/mortgagecrisis), a project connecting a wide variety of community organizations with residents who need those resources.
Adore him or abhor him, the cigar-smoking crank who holds court on air three hours a day, five days a week is, undeniably, an American institution. This election season, he has become something more: the personification of a rift in the Republican Party over its presumptive nominee for president, John McCain.
Fox’s Brit Hume to Stop Anchoring ‘Special Report’ After Election
Brit Hume, the pre-eminent political anchor on the Fox News Channel, intends to step down from his nightly newscast after the presidential election, three people close to him said this week.
Just When You Thought The Bar Couldn't Get Any Lower
A new Japanese export is luring U.S. consumers: Television game shows that inflict pain, suffering and humiliation for a laugh. The show ranked 10th on its June debut with 8 million viewers, according to weekly ratings from Nielsen Co.
Having lined up $765 million in financing and an equity partner, Oak Hill Capital Partners announced today that it has completed its acquisition of eight Fox O&Os for approximately $1.1 billion.
Local media advertising is “in the tank”, says Wachovia – across all media.
The Wachovia Securities team of media analysts produces a panoramic view with lots of grays and browns – not much sunshine in a report that begins “2Q didn’t finish well, poor start to Q3.” They say “local media advertising continues to flounder, likely accelerating to the downside towards the end of 2008.” (Cheery, eh?) But radio isn’t the real whipping boy here - newspapers and Yellow Pages are. Wachovia goes “underweight” on those, for separate reasons. The newspaper category was looking even more sickly as the month of June moved on, and Wachovia’s expecting to lower their estimates on the publicly-traded newspaper companies yet again. For the Yellow Pages – “we believe the local ad environment has and will continue to deteriorate”, right into 2009. (And ask a user just how expensive Yellow Pages ads are.) Radio comes out as a “market weight”, though Wachovia’s not sugarcoating the news: “Radio continues to suffer a 1-2 punch with secular concerns aggravated by a deteriorating economy.” Wachovia sees the big-market/small-market dichotomy in radio and says companies with exposure to big markets – like Radio One, CBS, Citadel – are “most at risk of missing Q2 and Q3 estimates.” While smaller-market specialists like Saga and Cumulus “should fare better.” How about other media, in regards to local advertising? Wachovia rates outdoor as “fundamentally sound.” Online recruitment has weakened. And the only “overweight” – surprisingly – goes to ad agencies.
NAB announced today the finalists for the NAB Marconi Radio Awards honoring radio stations and on-air personalities for excellence in broadcasting. The winners will be announced on September 18 at the NAB Marconi Radio Awards Dinner & Show held during The NAB Radio Show at the Austin Convention Center.
The finalists include:
Large Market Personality of the Year Cornbread, WIL-FM St. Louis, MO
Historically, stations were paid, often handsomely, for carrying networks’ programming. Usually the amount of compensation was based on such factors as how strong the station was in its market and how important that market was to the network.
Former White House press secretary Tony Snow -- who once told reporters "I'm a very lucky guy" -- died at the age of 53 early Saturday after a second battle with cancer.
Less than three months after The Capital Times in Madison, Wis., dropped its daily print format for a Web-based report, another Wisconsin daily is following the trend.
Barack Obama has spent days rejecting charges of flip-flopping on Iraq, but the presidential contender on Wednesday owned up to changing positions on another issue -- letting his daughters be interviewed on television.
iChannel and Bonneville International Corporation recently announced their first-ever “i-FEST” – a concert event for independent music artists and fans – which will take place on Saturday, August 16, 2008 at the Family Arena in St. Charles.
i-FEST 2008 will feature a line-up of 12 Independent Artists from the St. Louis region currently featured on iChannel.fm and the iChannel HD Radio Network. This show is also headlining a special reunion of one of the local favorite group “Greenwheel”.Featured bands also scheduled to appear include “Tomorrow’s Rumor”, “Northside's Sweet Revenge”, “Building Rome”, “Ocean Rivals”,”Walk Sophie”, ”Go Van Gogh”, “The Feed”, “Standpointe” and the winners of the recent iChannel $5,000 Video Search promotion “The Marquette Weekend”.
Tickets for i-FEST are $15.00 in advance of the concert starting July 11, and will be $17.00 at the door. A special internet pre-sale begins on Tuesday July 8th at 5pm CST and will run through Friday, July 11th. Pre-sale tickets for i-FEST go for $10 each and are available online at www.ichannel.fm. iChannel is asking fans to i-FEST and the “Battle of the Bands” shows to bring any non-perishable dry or canned goods for donation to the charitable organization "Live Feed" (www.livefeed.org) to support their effort to collect food for the needy.
NBC will broadcast all of its Summer Olympics coverage in high definition and NBC and its sister cable networks will provide coverage of every one of the 34 Summer Olympics sports when the Games are televised for 17 days beginning Aug. 8.
The XM/Sirius Merger: What It Means For The Diehard Sports Fan
Aren't you just giddy about the possibility of having access to just about every major sporting event in the country? Perhaps the best part of all this is that almost every major sporting event in this country, and possibly the world, can be at your disposal for less than $20 a month.
For roughly $3.5 billion in cash, NBC Universal and its partners have gained the ownership position of the Weather Channel and its weather-related services.
Last week, Fox News aired nasty Photoshopped pictures of two Times journalists responsible for a story about Fox losing ground among younger viewers. But it sounds like the cable network may have done much worse to another Times reporter, Tim Arango, who wrote a similar article in March. In his column for tomorrow's paper, Times media columnist David Carrrecounts tales of Fox's dirty-politics-style PR tactics against journalists from his paper, the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and others. One story, in particular, stands out.
Local Journalists Named 2008-09 Midwest Health Journalism Fellows
The Association of Health Care Journalists has named the 2008-09 class of the Midwest Health Journalism Program, an annual fellowship program for reporters and editors from Kansas and Missouri.
The local fellows are:
Mary Jo Feldstein, Reporter, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Sandra Jordan, Reporter, St. Louis American
The aim of the program is to provide established journalists with the tools needed to improve the depth and amount of coverage focused on critical state and local health issues. The result should be a better-educated public and more accountability for policymakers, say the program planners.
Training includes:
a seminar on health policy and reform efforts in Kansas City in July
a four-day reporting boot camp in Columbia, Mo., in August
a three-day workshop at the CDC in Atlanta
a state government day in Topeka or Jefferson City early in the year
a four-day trip to Health Journalism 2009, to be held in Seattle in April
a seminar on covering rural health issues in mid-2009.
Each fellow will be provided an appropriate mentor from the 1,000-plus membership of AHCJ to discuss story ideas, best sources and story approaches throughout the year.
KETC/Channel 9 Earns 2008 IABC St. Louis Bronze Quill Award
KETC/Channel 9 earned an Award of Merit in the St. Louis Chapter of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) 2008 Bronze Quill Awards, it was announced at a ceremony on May 22.
KETC public relations manager Terri Gates and brand manager Matt Huelskamp won in the category Special Publications for the Your Stories: St. Louis Remembers World War II brochure, or toolkit, which was widely distributed last year to encourage war veterans and others to preserve their World War II memories. The Bronze Quill Awards recognize the best communication efforts in the region and are judged by other IABC chapters around the country.
On July 7 at 7:00 p.m. Living St. Louis producer Anne-Marie Berger , videographer Scot Page and KETC board member Jeffrey McDonnell get a taste of what life is like aboard an aircraft carrier when they visit the USS John C. Stennis as guests of the U.S. Navy. Berger describes military life from a distinctly civilian perspective, including the sensation as a C-2 cargo plane passenger experiencing a “catch” landing and catapult takeoff from the ship’s deck.
Also airing on this Living St. Louis episode, producer Jim Kirchherr uses archival footage to explore the history of Transcontinental Air Transport, a passenger airline and precursor to TWA. It opened for business in 1929, and was the first commercial air-travel company founded to provide coast-to-coast service in a mere 48 hours, and for only $350. Passengers would travel via plane by day and train by night.
Finally on this episode of Living St. Louis, producer Patrick Murphy speaks with attorney Andy Miofsky about foreclosure issues in Granite City. Miofsky describes the Illinois foreclosure process, which allows people being foreclosed to remain in their homes longer. In contrast, the process in Missouri can happen in as quickly as 30 days. This segment is part of KETC’s community engagement initiative Facing the Mortgage Crisis.
The Fox News channel has gained wide attention today in the blogosphere for airing photos of two New York Times staffers that appear to have been doctored to portray the Timesmen in an unflattering light.
