Friday, July 7, 2006
Bad news
Rumors of the coming death of the Santa Barbara News-Press may not be exaggerated.
Today the firings and resignations of six of the paper's top editorial figures was a subject of a story in the L.A. Times. It begins,
Five top editors and a veteran columnist have resigned from the Santa Barbara News-Press, saying Thursday that the newspaper's billionaire owner had been meddling improperly in the editorial content of the 151-year-old publication.
Editor Jerry Roberts was escorted from the newspaper's headquarters before noon as several staff members cried and others hurled obscenities at the new publisher, Travis K. Armstrong, the latest in a series of people to run the paper under controversial owner Wendy McCaw.
And gets worse from there.
Could it be that mixing editorial with news just won't fly with these seasoned journalists? A new era has begun at the News-Press where officeholder bashing and the fate of meerkats, pigs and salamanders will rule the front page and more often than not be placed above the fold. Maybe even above the banner...
Before the bloodbath, Nick Welsh provided extensive background on the saga. Here's what he said about it yesterday.
As of today, Thursday July 6, every senior editor in the paper’s news department had quit, five in all. Resignation tendered. Executive Editor Jerry Roberts returned from a vacation in Crete and turned in his resignation about 9 am. He was then escorted out of the News-Press building by Human Resources chief Yolanda Apodaca . On the way out, tearful reporters and editors hugged Roberts and wished him well. As this happened, Travis Armstrong, Roberts's nemesis at the News-Press, emerged from his office to make sure that Roberts left, reportedly saying something to the effect of, "Roberts you've got to go." According to one report, Armstrong—who appointment as publisher of the News Press last Friday precipitated Roberts' resignation—clasped his hand around Roberts' arm to help escort him from the building. This was greeted by a chorus of "Fuck You, Travis!" from the News-Press employees bidding Roberts good bye. The chorus reportedly continued for some time; one of the louder voices in that choir belonged to Metro Editor Jane Hulse, who likewise had submitted her resignation that day. After Armstrong escorted Roberts—the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and who’d worked for the News-Press nearly four years—he came back to escort Hulse from the building too. The day before longtime newsroom editor Don Murphy--a 19-year veteran of the paper--walked out, and at some time so did managing editor George Foulsham, who’s been with the News-Press now just less than a year. Business Editor Michael Todd, who'd been placed on indefinite unpaid suspension last week, also resigned. Persistent but as yet unconfirmed accounts indicate that News-Press columnist Barney Brantingham, a 46 year fixture at the News-Press, also quit. Early Friday moning, Sports editor Jerry Spratt also quit.
By the way, it was Michael Todd who wrote an excellent piece about a talk I gave recently, here in town. As anybody who has been quoted often in the press knows, they usually get something wrong. Mike didn't. He was terrific. We'll miss him. And Jerry. And especially Barney, who is a beloved figure in town. Think about it. The guy was here for 46 years. Barney is to Santa Barbara what Herb Caen was to San Francisco.
By the way, I include no links to the Santa Barbara News-Press because they put nearly the entire paper behind a paywall. In other words, they don't want our fucking links. Which is a stupid fuck-you both to the town and to themselves. (How many dozens of dollars do they make per year selling stories at $2.50 a pop? How much do they waste in authority, as well as advertising revenues, by preventing search engines from finding and monetizing all the paper's editorial online?)
What a waste.
And it doesn't look like there's a damn thing anybody can do to change it.
I'll keep our subscription. But the death watch is on.
In an unrelated but equally typical development, Knight-Ridder is already dead.
Bonus observation: It sucks in OC too.
Perspective
From 0 to 1 in 100 Years. In Linux Journal. The gist:
Why should we depend on companies that accelerate into the future with one foot on the brake pedal while they park in the middle of intersections and charge us to cross them?...
"Broadband" is like "long distance": just another name for transient scarcity. We want our Net to be as fast, accessible and unrestricted as a hard drive. (And in time even that analogy will seem too slow.)
The only way that will happen is if the Net becomes ubiquitous infrastructure -- something which, in a practical sense, nobody owns, everybody can use and anybody can improve.
J.P., as he so often does, adds substance to pionts I merely suggest. He does that again in Preventing Path Pollution, where he says,
We've all heard the phrase that control has passed from the centre or core to the edge. But for some reason we spend too long believing that the edge is about new devices and even new software.
The edge is about people. Control has passed to individuals.
I just got a call from an old friend David Beaver, who is involved with the World Space Center. David just finished reading The Cluetrain Manifesto, and was especially impressed with how it starts: People of Earth...
The levers that matter most are human, and their best angles on the world are all on its edge. Such as: where we're all standing, right now.
Wherever your there is, you can only get there from here.
Confusion for the sorry
The problem with today being yesterday has been solved. I just moved a bunch of today's posts from yesterday to today. Hope that solves things.
Just wondering
Ari Rosenberg in Online Publishing Insider:
To be clearer, search marketing is not Internet advertising. The brilliance of search is how it induces a direct marketing opportunity while simultaneously helping consumers achieve their immediate goals. That is why consumers love search/Google. Regardless of how you feel about the 800-pound baby gorilla, consumers love that big monster and the big monster loves ‘em right back, consistently placing the consumer’s needs above all others.
A few questions.
Do you search Google (or any engine to see what people are advertising?What is the ratio of "exposures" to actual click-throughs of AdWords "sponsored links"?Regardless of that ratio, is not the sum of unclicked ads not wasted?What happens when we find a better way for demand to attract supply, rather than just for supply to "create" or "attract" demand?
It isn't too late
That number is too low
Mark Collier: The 'real' world... has never heard of Doc Searls, or Robert Scoble, or Jason Calacanis (99.9% of the country really have no idea who these people are).
The end of the beginning
Terry Heaton: Nashville TV Station to Put Bloggers on the Air. This isn't the usual bloggers-as-story thing. It's the market at work:
In an unprecedented industry move, Nashville ABC affiliate WKRN-TV announced tonight that it would begin paying local bloggers for approved video stories they submit and running those stories on its Website and in its newscasts. WKRN president and general manager Mike Sechrist told a "meet-up" of local bloggers that he could envision the day when a daily program would be made up entirely of material submitted by the community.
Then Terry follows that up with a pointer to a story in Online Media Daily about a tendentious study that shows most students prefering mediated lives as couch (or desk) potatoes. The pull quote:
CONSUMERS MIGHT HAVE MORE POWER over when and where they experience media than ever before, but they appear to enjoy content more--and pay closer attention to it--when they relinquish some of that control. That's one of the conclusions of a recent study by Byron Reeves, a professor at Stanford University and Kevin Wise, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Once again, the "push" rationale rears its empty head.
Two pieces that put "push" in perspective are When Push Comes to Shove: How the Mainstream Media Miss the Boat on 'Push' Technologies, and Shoveling Push Media: WIRED Wants to Fertilize Your Inner Potato.
I wrote both more than nine years ago. The first couldn't find a publisher. The second appeared in the June 1997 issue of Linux Journal, and became one reason why I returned to full-time journalism after a 24-year hiatus.
After all these years it's no longer amazing to me that all of us — and not just the mainstream media — continue to look at each other en masse as bovines, and to rationalize re-creating the same "content" and advertising wheels over and over again.
We're free now. We don't all know that yet, but eventually we will.
It isn't too late
That number is too low
Mark Collier: The 'real' world... has never heard of Doc Searls, or Robert Scoble, or Jason Calacanis (99.9% of the country really have no idea who these people are).