Dramatic Losses Force Union-Tribune to Lay Off Employees
By ROB DAVIS Voice Staff Writer (voiceofsandiego.com)

Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008 | The San Diego Union-Tribune laid off 27 employees Tuesday afternoon, including at least five newsroom staffers, the latest cut in a company that has reduced its workforce by 10 percent in the past month.

On top of the layoffs, the Union-Tribune has bought out 76 employees since late December, laid off an additional 14 press room workers and told 18 advertising artists their positions would be outsourced later this year.

The layoffs mark a seminal moment for the local newspaper: visceral evidence of the extent of the company’s financial struggles. While the newspaper has previously acknowledged the challenges posed by an industry-wide financial downturn, it has addressed them through less painful methods, either by enticing employees to leave with voluntary buyouts or by not filling vacant positions.

In a memo to employees, Gene Bell, president and CEO of Copley Press, the La Jolla-based company that owns the Union-Tribune, said the company needed to transform into “a new media company that will regain its footing as an independent and powerful force in the future of our region.”

“Not since the merger of the Union and Tribune over 15 years ago have we faced such wrenching changes,” he wrote. “At the same time, never in our history have we faced revenue losses as dramatic as those of the last 12 months.”

Bell did not say how large the losses were. Those figures are not public because Copley Press is privately held. If the company fails to bring its costs in line with revenues, “we face a slippery slope of ever more difficult measures,” Bell wrote. “Our goal is to avoid sliding down that slope and, instead, to convert our many competitive strengths into new strategies. … [W]e cannot succeed without conserving and redirecting our resources.”
Related Links

Gene Bell’s Memo to Employees

Shrinking Union-Tribune: ‘Doing Less With Less’

Three current or former newsroom staffers confirmed the layoffs include film critic David Elliott, reporter David Washburn, director of photography Andy Hayt, photographer Sean DuFrene and assistant sports editor Michael Rosenthal.

Their layoffs come after the newspaper failed to meet its goals for employee buyouts in December. It aimed to cut 83 positions, but 76 employees took the offer, which included as much as a year’s salary for the most veteran workers.

Copley Press has made cuts throughout its newspaper holdings in the last two years. Citing the burden of estate taxes from company matriarch Helen Copley’s 2004 death, her son, David Copley, sold off smaller newspapers in Ohio, Illinois and the Los Angeles area in 2006. The company began trimming staff at the Union-Tribune in late 2006, when it bought out 45 of its most senior employees.

In total, the Union-Tribune’s newsroom, once estimated at about 360 employees, has lost at least 51 staffers from the layoffs and two rounds of buyouts. Copley Press’s 10-member Washington, D.C. office has been cut in half, losing reporter Marcus Stern, who broke news of the scandal that led to the resignation and jailing of disgraced former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. That coverage won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in 2006.

The cuts have come as the Union-Tribune has continued to struggle to stabilize its plummeting print circulation. The newspaper has lost 19 percent of its Sunday subscribers since 2004.

“Many of us are fortunate to have grown up in a marvelously stable and consistently profitable business,” Bell told employees in the memo. “Unfortunately, all communications media now face destructive competitive forces seldom seen before. Newspapers are not immune.”

Drew Schlosberg, a Union-Tribune spokesman, wrote in a statement that the layoffs marked “difficult times” at the newspaper.

“Any decision to reduce staff is painful,” he wrote, “especially at a family owned business where it means saying goodbye to longtime friends and exceptionally talented colleagues.”

By Paul E. Steiger
3085 words
29 December 2007
The Wall Street Journal
A1
English
(Copyright (c) 2007, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

It was the fall of 1999, and the newspaper I edited, The Wall Street Journal, was awash in money. Thanks to the dot-com boom and the lush advertising it generated, we were running the presses at full tilt nearly every day, yet had to turn away ads for lack of space.

Even as the good times rolled, two non-newspaper names kept coming up. I recall being stunned to learn that the main place where our own readers checked stock prices was the finance section of Yahoo. A couple of kids from Stanford had launched a search engine called Google. Already, many of my colleagues were using it.

Less than six months later, the tech bubble began to deflate. Hundreds of dot-coms died, taking with them their ad budgets. But the Web industry pushed forward, and within a few years it shredded newspaper business models that had held sway for decades.

That high-tech jolt to my industry wasn’t something I could have imagined on the July day in 1966 when I walked into a factory-like building in San Francisco to start work as a 23-year-old reporter for the Journal. Vintage Linotype machines spat out hot-metal versions of stories a line at a time. An industry of family-owned newspapers was setting off on a momentous period of growing power and profit.

On Thursday I’ll pack my last box and take leave of a place where I’ve spent 26 of my 41 years in journalism, including 16 as managing editor of the Journal. (The other 15 years, 1968 to 1983, I was a reporter and then business editor at the Los Angeles Times.) Today, all around me is an industry in upheaval, with slumping revenues and stocks, layoffs, and takeovers of publishers that a decade ago seemed impregnable. Just this month, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. completed its acquisition of Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s publisher, and real-estate magnate Sam Zell gained effective control of Tribune Co.

The Journal’s editors have asked me to retrace my experiences of the past four decades in search of insights into how all this has happened, what may happen next and the implications of all this change for readers, the nation and society at large.

For readers, the implications are clear: a stark contrast of feast and famine.

The cornucopia of national, international and business news, sports, and especially opinion available free on the Web is rich beyond historical parallel. Anyone with a fact, a comment, a snapshot or a video clip can self-publish and instantly compete with the professionals.

At the same time, the vast array of investigative reporting and foreign correspondence assembled at American newspapers over the past several decades is being cut back at all but a few publications, as papers succumb to the pressure to cut costs.

Many journalists and academics see in these cutbacks a threat to the democratic ideal of a well-informed public. Some urge turning to philanthropy or an expansion of public television as a way to fill the gap. Others have begun to argue for a government subsidy for newspapers — an unlikely prospect for now.

Less clear is how the industry will ultimately be transformed.

Many papers are seeking to leap ahead in adapting to the movement of readers and advertisers to the Internet. This means tightly holding down costs of print publications while leveraging metro papers’ principal unique assets: local reporting staffs and local ad-sales teams.

Cash from newspapers’ own Web offerings has grown fast but needs to grow faster, because at current rates it will be years before it makes up for the slumping inflow from the still-much-larger print side. As Google, Yahoo and similar Internet enterprises suck away ad dollars, many newspaper companies hope to gain new revenue by forming once-unthinkable partnerships with each other and some of these same rivals, particularly Yahoo.

In some ways, what’s happening to the newspaper industry is a return to its past. Less than 50 years ago, American newspapers were in the main relatively small, narrowly profitable, family-owned, locally focused and hotly competitive.

As a kid reporter in California in the ’60s, I heard tales from newsmen and photographers about how, just a few years earlier, they had sat in cars, engines running and radios tuned to police bands, trying to get an edge in covering the next murder. The national and international news would be handled by the wire services. Lurid local photographs on page one were what sold newspapers in that era.

A certain fast-and-loose, devil-may-care attitude often prevailed. I remember walking past a photographer’s open car trunk and noticing that he carried a well-preserved but very dead bird among his cameras and lenses. The bird, he explained, was for feature shots on holidays like Memorial Day. He’d perch it on a gravestone or tree limb in a veterans’ cemetery to get the right mood. Nowadays such a trick would get him fired, but in the 1950s, this guy said, there was no time to wait for a live bird to flutter into the frame.

Then, beginning in the 1960s, the industry morphed into a series of mini-monopolies. First, mounting costs forced a shakeout — mergers and newspaper closings that typically left one city paper preeminent in the morning market and another in the evening.

For a while, the evening franchise had a slight edge: People had more time to read then. In a twinkling, that advantage disappeared, crushed by a phenomenon that can be summed up in two words: Walter Cronkite. More and more families gathered in front of the tube at the dinner hour.

The morning papers then got a boost, a surge in women readers. As baby boomers reached school age, their mothers could sit back for a moment with a second cup of coffee and read sections aimed squarely at them.

Soon, in city after city, the leading morning newspaper came to dominate and often eliminate its rivals, reaping comfortable margins in the process. Before long, these were linking up in multibillion-dollar, multi-city chains, building publicly traded companies with rising profits and stocks. Some acquired TV stations as well.

Many of these information behemoths invested heavily in quality, expanding their reporting locally, nationally and internationally. This was good business as well as a boon to readers, because it raised barriers to entry for would-be competitors.

The result was a golden age of American journalism. In New York, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles, of course, yet also in Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Milwaukee, Atlanta, St. Louis, Des Moines, Louisville, St. Petersburg and more, daily papers were willing to send reporters far afield in pursuit of stories exposing corruption or explaining the world. Newspapers opened or expanded Washington bureaus and added reporters abroad. Some stationed them not just in London, Moscow and Tokyo but in places like Sydney and Sao Paulo.

As their financial strength and staff size increased, they became fearless in pursuing corruption. A 1964 Supreme Court decision, New York Times v. Sullivan, protected publishers from libel judgments by public officials even if what was published was inaccurate, so long as the paper didn’t know the article was inaccurate and wasn’t reckless about what it published.

The news operations of the three main television networks in those days followed a similar pattern. As profits grew, they added to staff and launched foreign bureaus and investigative projects. The Sunday-night magazine program CBS launched in 1968, “60 Minutes,” set a new standard for expensively produced and deeply reported video journalism.

The public seemed to approve. Intrepid journalists proliferated in films like “All the President’s Men,” depicting Washington Post reporters’ exposure of Watergate. Enrollments in journalism schools surged, as well as applications for reporting jobs.

They were heady times indeed. When the L.A. Times investigated suspected gasoline hoarding during fuel shortages in 1979, one reporter got the idea of flying over refineries and tank fields to look for evidence. As the editor running the coverage, I asked my bosses for approval to hire helicopters or small planes for a story. The answer: Go right ahead.

In the end, we didn’t. Our reporting showed that most of the hoarding was by people like our own readers, who’d taken to driving with their gas tanks always full. But the lesson was clear: When it came to getting an important story, don’t worry about the cost.

I don’t remember exactly when cracks began to appear in this halcyon life. At most big papers, circulation, revenue and profits grew through the 1970s and 1980s and into the 1990s, with recessionary pauses that weren’t excessively fretted over.

Around the time of the 1980 slump, L.A. Times editors were told they needed to impose modest spending restraints. I figured out I could meet my target just by eliminating first-class travel on my group’s reporting trips, then allowed on flights of more than three hours or so. I was quite proud of myself until the next day, when the top editor of the entire paper, who only occasionally visited our floor, strode straight to my desk. “I like flying first class,” he said with a grin. “You’re setting a bad example.” I found another way to reach my goal.

In the mid-1980s, when I was a deputy managing editor at the Journal, the Dow Jones CEO almost apologetically imposed limits on our then-ample spending, in the face of cyclical advertising cutbacks by financial firms. As the CEO quipped, referring to then-managing-editor Norman Pearlstine, “We gave Norm an unlimited budget, and he exceeded it.”

In those days, we worried quite a bit about television. Survey after survey showed that, with each year, more Americans were getting their news there. While that made circulation growth tougher to achieve, ad revenue continued to rise, as newspaper readers generally had better incomes.

Cable TV added a new worry, because here was a medium that could target smaller, exclusive audiences and thus pose a greater challenge to print. Even so, newspaper revenue continued its growth.

Then in the 1990s came the digital networks and the Internet, unleashing forces that would ultimately undermine newspaper business models that had been so supportive of journalism. First came dial-up, then a few years later the Internet, and by 1995, dozens of newspapers, including the Journal, had online editions.

Early leaders of the Journal’s online edition privately referred to it as “the paper killer,” to the great annoyance of print colleagues when they found out. But the phrase was apt: The Web could deliver words and numbers at nearly the speed of light without the cost of printing, paper or delivery trucks, all searchable and archivable.

In response, newspapers sought to do three things: cut costs, diversify and, above all, embrace the new technology and dominate it. After all, in the 1940s and 1950s, the leading radio networks had become the leading television networks. Why couldn’t newspapers copy that model?

They certainly tried.

Cost-cutting first followed a path set in the 1970s, of using computers to eliminate jobs downstream from the newsroom. Today, nothing but electrons stands between the minds and hands of the journalists and the photographic image used to produce a printing plate. But those cuts often weren’t enough, and publisher after publisher turned to hiring freezes, buyouts and ultimately layoffs. The reductions have fallen particularly heavily on foreign and investigative or “project” reporting, which are among the most expensive categories to produce.

Diversification typically took the route of investments in television stations, cable systems, satellite, book publishing and other domains at least notionally related to newspapers. Some were successful, some not.

Publishers’ Internet ventures almost always had limited success, at least at the outset. Part of the problem was that those in charge of print advertising and circulation were suspicious of their counterparts on the online side, and vice versa. At the Journal, I saw it often.

At one point, the print folks suggested that online subscriptions be awarded free to print subscribers. It was an idea, the online folk retorted, that relegated their site to “toaster status,” as in savings banks giving away cheap gifts for opening an account.

In turn, the online people wanted renewal mailings to print customers to include a line soliciting a paid subscription to the Journal’s Web edition. The print side resisted mightily, fearing that adding any new option to the form would cause some customers to delay responding long enough to trigger a costly follow-up mailing.

A bigger problem was that newspapers often sought to copy fairly closely on the Web what they did in print, rather than offer new products taking full advantage of digitization. The most creative new products came mainly from enterprises with little connection to newspapers. And soon, if you named almost any bit of data you used to rely on papers for — sports scores, weather, stocks, movie times — there were Web sites offering more information faster, and free.

The decisive blow may have been Google’s, with its powerful search engine that would either give you a quick answer to a question you had or steer you to sites that could. The irony, of course, was that some of the most useful of those sites were newspapers’.

Papers remained quite profitable, for the most part. But as the future began to look increasingly troubled, one publisher’s stock after another got hammered, starting around the turn of the century.

Especially hard hit were publishers of prestigious newspapers. Dow Jones stock was at less than half its high before News Corp. made its successful bid for the Wall Street Journal publisher last spring. Times-Mirror fell more than 50% before being acquired by Tribune Co., which in turn has fallen around 45% from its high. Knight Ridder fell 20% from its high before its acquisition by McClatchy, which now trades at around 80% below its peak. New York Times Co. is near an 11-year low. Washington Post Co. is about 20% below its top.

Some publishers with less-prestigious papers have done better. Scripps and Cox have diversified successfully into cable networks and cable systems, respectively. Thomson sold all its newspapers and became a financial-market, legal and medical data company before reaching a merger agreement with Reuters this year. News Corp. leveraged its Australian newspaper business to acquire not only newspapers but also a movie studio, television, cable, satellite TV and Web interests around the world. It picked up the prestigious Times of London along the way, and the Journal after its transition to a global media company.

Why this divide? It could be that operators of high-prestige newspapers were more reluctant to risk the franchise, even under a level of financial duress that would provoke many managements to bet the farm in pursuit of a radical opportunity.

What happens next? Change, rapid and largely unpredictable. Nearly every company in the industry needs major new revenue, big cost reductions or a healthy dollop of each. The people and entities to watch most closely are:

– The entrepreneurs, Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Zell. Mr. Murdoch has vast experience in media generally and newspapers in particular, controls major financial resources and has big plans to expand the Journal — in print and online, domestically and overseas. Mr. Zell used financial engineering to control Tribune Co. with minimal investment of his own, has little media experience and isn’t likely to spend much on his new properties. Both are decisive investors and operators. They aren’t always successful, but it’s unwise to bet against them.

– New York Times Co. Mr. Murdoch has said he’ll use the Journal to steal a portion of the general-news and cultural-news franchises of Times Co.’s eponymous flagship newspaper. But entities fight hardest defending their home turf, and the Times has both a strong, growing Web site and a Sunday edition that remains an advertising monster. It will be under pressure to follow some of the cost cutting its sister Boston Globe has done. Pure conjecture: Assuming that New York Mayor and Bloomberg LP owner Mike Bloomberg isn’t U.S. president-elect a year from now, would he and Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. consider putting their two enterprises together?

– Hearst Corp. After the inheritors of William Randolph Hearst’s empire lost their bet on evening papers in the 1960s, they bulked up their revenue from magazines like Cosmopolitan, diversified smartly in TV (including a 20% stake in ESPN, now worth roughly $6 billion), and stayed in newspapers but with a close eye on profit. With four metro papers, like the Houston Chronicle and San Francisco Chronicle, and eight smaller ones, Hearst is in the vanguard of figuring out ways to exploit newspapers’ local-reporting strengths, both in print and online.

Hearst has helped forge a partnership involving a consortium of newspaper companies and sometime-nemesis Yahoo. The idea is that together they can offer advertisers total coverage of various metropolitan areas, and feed readers back and forth. Question: Are these going to be best friends forever or a cobra and a mongoose?

Final word: Next week I move over to a nonprofit called Pro Publica as president and editor-in-chief. When fully staffed, we will be a team of 24 journalists dedicated to reporting on abuses of power by anyone with power: government, business, unions, universities, school systems, doctors, hospitals, lawyers, courts, nonprofits, media. We’ll publish through our Web site and also possibly through newspapers, magazines or TV programs, offering our material free if they provide wide distribution.

Pro Publica is the brainchild of San Francisco entrepreneurs-turned-philanthropists Herbert and Marion Sandler, who along with some other donors are providing $10 million a year in funding.

The idea is that we, along with others of similar bent, can in some modest way make up for some of the loss in investigative-reporting resources that results from the collapse of metro newspapers’ business model.

Union-Tribune Cutting More Newsroom Employees
By ROB DAVIS Voice Staff Writer

Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2007 | A year after buying out 19 of its most senior newsroom employees, The San Diego Union-Tribune is again reducing its news staff. This time, the cuts are deeper.

The newspaper aims to cut 43 employees in a newsroom of approximately 360 people, a 12 percent reduction in reporters, editors and photographers. Forty employees from other departments are also being targeted in a company of 1,422.

In a Monday memo to employees, the newspaper outlined a menu of staff cuts its management wants to make: nine metro reporters (from a pool that one newsroom source estimated at 75), three columnists, three critics, two photographers and 12 editors or supervisors. If voluntary buyouts are not successful, the memo said the paper would take an “involuntary” approach — layoffs.

The cuts come as the local newspaper’s print circulation has dropped precipitously, echoing a nationwide trend. As people grow more comfortable reading newspapers online, they’re canceling their print subscriptions. Since 2004, the paper has lost 19 percent of its Sunday subscribers, despite aggressively marketing the product, offering two Sunday papers for the price of one.

“This is obviously an organization that is fighting for survival,” said Dean Nelson, director of the journalism program at Point Loma Nazarene University. “We’ve all watched papers become fractions of themselves and send themselves into irrelevance. That’s the risk. Will there be a paper? Yeah. Will there be a good paper? That’s the question.”

Cuts have touched nearly every facet of the company. Citing the burden of estate taxes from company matriarch Helen Copley’s 2004 death, her son, David Copley, sold off smaller newspapers in Ohio, Illinois and the Los Angeles area last year.

Related Links

45 Take Buyouts at U-T (Dec. 19, 2006)

U-T Buyout Offer
Since then, Copley Press’s 10-member Washington, D.C. staff has shrunk, losing at least six of its 10 staffers. Two key reporters who contributed to the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of disgraced former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham have left the Washington bureau.

The company could cut more reporters and editors. In the memo to employees, the newspaper said it had only outlined the “minimum” number of reductions it will make.

“As you know, we have taken a number of cost-cutting steps in response to the economic challenges facing our industry,” the memo to employees states. “… Still, it is clear that we must cut costs further. The [buyout program] is one of the several steps we will take to reach that goal.”

Employees can begin submitting applications for the first-come, first-serve buyouts on Wednesday morning. They’ll receive 2.5 weeks of pay for every year they’ve worked — with a maximum of a year’s salary and six months of health benefits. The 19 veteran employees who left last year got a richer severance package, which included 18 months of pay and a full year of health benefits.

“We must make significant changes in our business and aggressively move to bring our organization in line with the needs of the future,” Drew Schlosberg, a company spokesman, said in a written statement. “The voluntary separation program is part of this effort.”

Some employees are not eligible for the buyouts, an indication of the newspaper’s core strategy for future news coverage. Its environment and politics reporters, breaking news team, computer-assisted reporting specialists, sports columnists, copy editors and editorial cartoonist cannot take the buyout. Nor can employees of its Internet site, SignOnSanDiego.com.

“You can see what they’re saying they still value,” Nelson said. “And they’re obviously saying we can no longer be covering all things about this town. The fact that SignOn is protected I think says a lot. Because that’s where the future is.”

The reductions underscore a paradox that is common among newspapers today: They are cutting quality but hoping to improve their bottom line. Tim Wulfemeyer, a journalism and media studies professor at San Diego State University, said the Union-Tribune was taking a risk with that approach.

“If it continues to damage the quality of the product, it may end up in worse shape,” Wulfemeyer said. “When it all comes down to it, quality, credibility, believability and image is about 90 percent of what journalism has to sell to the public. When that starts to erode, people start to turn to other sources for their information.”

Reporters are invaluable to citizenry and this story doesn’t even get at that. ~~~ Samuel

From the ASSOCIATED PRESS

More than half of Americans say US news organizations are politically biased, inaccurate, and don’t care about the people they report on, a poll published Thursday showed.

And poll respondents who use the Internet as their main source of news — roughly one quarter of all Americans — were even harsher with their criticism, the poll conducted by the Pew Research Center said.

More than two-thirds of the Internet users said they felt that news organizations don’t care about the people they report on; 59 percent said their reporting was inaccurate; and 64 percent they were politically biased.

More than half — 53 percent — of Internet users also faulted the news organizations for “failing to stand up for America”.

Among those who get their news from newspapers and television, criticism of the news organizations was up to 20 percentage points lower than among Internet news audiences, who tend to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole, according to Pew.

The poll indicates an across the board fall in the public’s opinion on the news media since 1985, when a similar survey was conducted by Times Mirror, Pew Research said.

“Two decades ago, public attitudes about how news organizations do their job were less negative. Most people believed that news organizations stood up for America… a majority believed that news organizations got the facts straight,” Pew said in a report.

The Washington-based Pew Research Center describes itself as a nonpartisan “fact tank” that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world.

McCartheys to settle long court battle for Tribune ownership

By Paul Beebe
The Salt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated: 08/09/2007 07:28:42 AM MDT

A bitter seven-year legal fight over ownership of The Salt Lake Tribune ended Wednesday with a settlement that averts a September trial.

The McCarthey family, which owned the paper for almost a century, agreed to end all lawsuits against Tribune owner MediaNews Group and other defendants in return for an undisclosed amount, according to a statement released by MediaNews. The payment will be made from a settlement fund that some but not all of the defendants will contribute to.

The McCartheys will relinquish an option the family received in 1997 to buy back the paper after they sold its parent company, Kearns-Tribune, to Telecommunications Inc. (TCI). The $731 million deal was arranged to obtain the profits from a hefty appreciation of TCI stock owned by Kearns-Tribune.

TCI was later bought by AT&T, which briefly flirted with the idea of selling the paper to the Deseret Morning News. When that sale went nowhere, AT&T sold The Tribune to MediaNews in 2001 for $200 million. The family and their company, Salt Lake Tribune Publishing Co., filed a lawsuit to block the sale – touching off a long series of legal maneuvers that would ultimately lead nowhere for the McCartheys.

“We are appreciative that the McCarthey family, the Deseret Morning News, Management Planning and others were willing to come together to resolve this seven-year dispute over ownership of The Salt Lake Tribune,” MediaNews CEO and Tribune publisher Dean Singleton said Wednesday.

“The McCarthey family has a passionate love of The Tribune and what it means to Utah. We pledge to do our best to make all who love The Tribune proud as we strive to edit an outstanding newspaper for all who live in Utah.”

Phil McCarthey, spokesman for the heirs of Sen. Thomas Kearns, who bought the paper in 1901, said the family settled the dispute because they did not wish to face more years of legal skirmishes.

“After nearly seven years of litigation and a number of changes at the The Tribune, we have accepted a substantial settlement and are ready to move on,” McCarthey said.

“The nearly seven-year fight demonstrated our love and commitment to The Salt Lake Tribune.”

Tribune Editor Nancy Conway said the settlement begins a new chapter for Utah’s largest newspaper.

“I think it’s good for the community, it’s good for the paper and it’s good for the employees,” Conway said. “It’s just good to have this settled so we can leave all that behind and move forward and serve readers the way we need to.”

Jim Wall, president and publisher of the News was not immediately available for contact Wednesday. The McCartheys had accused the News in their lawsuit of conspiring to thwart their efforts to buy back the newspaper.

The agreement came less than a month before a trial was set to begin in a U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, where lawyers planned to ask a jury to overturn an appraisal that was used to set $355.5 million as the price the McCartheys would have to pay to buy back the paper, even though they said earlier this year they no longer wanted it.

The McCartheys refused to pay that amount, saying the paper’s value was closer to their own appraiser’s estimate of $218 million.

In a hearing held July 19, Judge Paul Cassell urged the parties to attempt a settlement before the trial began. Discussions began a week later.

“The settlement happily ends a very long stretch of litigation. It’s disappointing that the objective of the family of regaining ownership of the newspaper was not achieved, but there has been a substantial payment to the McCartheys and their company that does vindicate their contractual rights,” said Patrick Carome, a lawyer representing the family.

Joel Campbell, a journalism professor at Brigham Young University, said he was disappointed that the payment to the McCartheys was kept secret.

“It seems ironic that a corporation that prides itself in open government, and certainly The Tribune has been active in preserving open government laws in Utah, would agree to keep this settlement under wraps and not allow the public to see what’s happened,” Campbell said.

Management Planning Inc., which performed the contested appraisal, will receive a payment from Kearns-Tribune. The amount wasn’t revealed.

A second trial had been tentatively set for February. In that trial, the family hoped to get a verdict that MediaNews and the News interfered with their right to buy back the paper.

Giving the finger *
Kevin Roderick

Anyone who has watched the regular KOCE reports from the Register newsroom in Orange County knows it’s hard enough to get print schlubs to give good television. It’s even more challenging to do a quality show when one of the newspaper’s editors all but moons the camera in the background. Now, it’s been a difficult week at the Register’s “content center,” with running layoffs hacking at morale. But the news director of KOCE doesn’t see the humor in some guy picking his nose on camera. His memo fingering the perp as a repeat offender, and warning the Register of consequences, is below:

Dear Colleagues,
We had an incident occur with a Register employee that is frankly inappropriate and unacceptable.

During an interview, which will air tonight, with Register reporter John Gittelsohn another Register employee walked over to the interview area, intentionally stood behind John, faced the camera, picked his nose, and wiped it on his shirt.

Unfortunately, this was part of our live-to-tape 30 minute broadcast which airs tonight at 6:30 for all to see. It is also scheduled to be posted on the Register website after it airs on Real Orange. I have attached a video still image for you to see right now.

I’ve spoken with Register Broadcast Engineer Don Nebel about this individual. Don has stated that when the lights for the camera go on and we begin interview segments, this individual makes it a point to be loud, disruptive, and perform antics for the camera. Don has “waived him off” on numerous occasions, however he continues to disrupt our segments and has now escalated his attempts to embarrass both KOCE and the Register.

We cannot continue to conduct interviews from the Register newsroom, with this employee present. I do not want to cancel the next 4 segments we have scheduled this week at the Register, nor do I want to ask Register reporters to take valuable time out of their day to travel to our studio to avoid this disruptive employee. But I will have to do one or the other, until I can be assured that this employee is no longer going to be a problem.

Michael Taylor
News Director, KOCE-TV

I don’t know the picker, but my Register sources say his name is C.P. Smith — and that he has offered to take one of the buyouts. (And had been accepted.) * Update: Smith is the Register’s page one editor, its former rock critic, and the husband of L.A. Times deputy editor Sherry Stern.

If you really want a laugh go to the link

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2007/08/giving_the_finger.php

Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch shows he knows how to handle inappropriate reporters and how to be discreet.

1. You’re on a panel to discuss the 30th anniversary of the Son of Sam, but wouldn’t you rather talk current events? Which do you care more about, the Lohan debacle or the Spitzer debacle?

I care more about and I’m more interested in the Spitzer debacle.

2. How’m I doing?

You personally? Since I’ve never met you it would be difficult to respond, but people say that to me all the time and my general response is, “You’re doing terrific, how bout me?”

3. Awesome! Are you gay?

When was the last time you performed oral sex on your boyfriend?

4. Well, I’m single now so it was a long time ago.

See, I don’t think you should answer that question. It’s an improper question, and so is yours. My sexual orientation is none of your business and whether or not you performed oral sex on your boyfriend is none of my business – Alison Rosen.

Goodbye to Newspapers?

By Russell Baker
Rupert Murdoch

When the Press Fails: Political Power and the New Media from Iraq to Katrina
by W. Lance Bennett, Regina G. Lawrence, and Steven Livingston
University of Chicago Press, 263 pp., $22.50

American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media

by Neil Henry
University of California Press,326 pp., $24.95

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins. It has lost too much public respect. Courts that once treated it like a sleeping tiger now taunt it with insolent subpoenas and put in jail reporters who refuse to play ball with prosecutors. It is abused relentlessly on talk radio and in Internet blogs. It is easily bullied into acquiescing in the designs of a presidential propaganda machine determined to dominate the news.

Its advertising and circulation are being drained away by the Internet, and its owners seem stricken by a failure of the entrepreneurial imagination needed to prosper in the electronic age. Surveys showing that more and more young people get their news from television and computers breed a melancholy sense that the press is yesteryear’s thing, a horse-drawn buggy on an eight-lane interstate.

Then there are the embarrassments: hoaxers like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass turn journalism into farce. The elite Washington press corps is bamboozled into helping a circle of neoconservative connivers create the Iraq war. What became of heroes? Journalists used to dine out on the deeds of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during Watergate; of David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Malcolm Browne in Vietnam; of “Punch” Sulzberger and Kay Graham risking everything to publish the Pentagon Papers. Instead of heroes, today’s table talk is about journalistic frauds and a Washington press too dim to stay out of a three-card-monte game.

Rupert Murdoch of course has long spread melancholy in newsrooms around the world, but it was the disclosure in May that the Bancroft family, which controls The Wall Street Journal, might be ready to sell him their paper for five billion dollars that really struck at journalism’s soul. The sale of another newspaper is common enough these days, but The Wall Street Journal is not another newspaper. It is one of the proudest pillars of American journalism. Like The New York Times and The Washington Post, it has for generations been controlled by descendants of a founding patriarch.

Family control has sheltered all three newspapers from Wall Street’s most insistent demands, allowing them to do high-quality—and high cost—journalism. It was said, and widely believed, that the controlling families were animated by a high-minded sense that their papers were quasi-public institutions. Of course profit was essential to their survival, but it was not the primary purpose of their existence. That one of these families might finally take the money and clear out heightens fears that no newspaper is so valuable to the republic that it cannot be knocked down at market for a nice price. Murdoch at the Journal is a dark omen for journalists everywhere. When the sign in the shop window says “Everything For Sale,” it is often followed by “Going Out Of Business.”

There is a growing literature about the multitude of journalism’s problems, but most of it is concerned with the editorial side of the business, possibly because most people competent to write about journalism are not comfortable writing about finance. Still, it is on the ownership and management side that the gravest problems exist. The best discussion of trouble in boardroom and business office is found in newspapers’ own financial pages and speeches by journalists in management jobs. One document widely read among newspaper people is a speech delivered to the American Society of Newspaper Editors a year ago by John S. Carroll, formerly editor of the Los Angeles Times. It is an eloquent expression of the uneasiness many reporters and editors now feel about the future. Carroll titled his speech “What Will Become of Newspapers?” and, as the title suggests, his prognosis was not cheery.

He was especially alarmed about the breakdown of understanding between owners and working journalists and about the loss of common purpose that once united them. This has come about, he said, because the functions that were once the realm of strong publishers have been taken over by Wall Street money managers. The breakdown at the top began some forty years ago when local owners began selling their papers to corporations. As the nature of markets changed, power shifted from the corporations to investment funds, which make money by investing other people’s money in ways that make it multiply. It became hard to say anymore who or what a newspaper owner was. Owners ceased to be “identifiable human beings,” as Carroll put it. Sometimes the owner, who had once had a name—Otis Chandler of the Los Angeles Times, John Knight of Knight Ridder newspapers, Barry Bingham, of the Louisville Courier-Journal—became an it. Sometimes it seemed to be a room full of market researchers trolling the world by computer for profitable investment opportunities. Sometimes it was a fund manager with neither experience nor interest in journalism.

In this “post-corporate phase of ownership,” Carroll said,

We have seen a narrowing of the purpose of the newspaper in the eyes of its owner. Under the old local owners, a newspaper’s capacity for making money was only part of its value. Today, it is everything. Gone is the notion that a newspaper should lead, that it has an obligation to its community, that it is beholden to the public….

Someday, I suspect, when we look back on these forty years, we will wonder how we allowed the public good to be so deeply subordinated to private gain….What do the current owners want from their newspapers?—the answer could not be simpler: Money. That’s it.

Carroll is an authority on the subject. As editor of the Los Angeles Times, the owner to which he reported was the Tribune Company, a conglomerate which had mushroomed out of Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, self-styled “World’s Greatest Newspaper.” Before anyone guessed that the late-twentieth-century stock market boom was a bubble in the making, the Tribune Company had bought famous old newspapers hither and yon. Among them was the Los Angeles Times, then widely respected as one of America’s finest dailies.

Its reputation had been built a generation before Carroll’s arrival by Otis Chandler, a dynamic publisher willing to spend expansively, and sometimes extravagantly, to compete with the best in journalism. He could afford it because he belonged to the family that owned the paper. These were the descendants of Harry Chandler (1864– 1944), a California real estate tycoon, who had set up trusts for his children in the Depression years. It was a family that multiplied rapidly; at last count the Chandler trusts were thought to provide the main source of income for about 170 of Harry’s descendants.

In Otis’s time the number was smaller, of course, and though many resented his take-charge style and his indifference to the paper’s traditional right-wing politics, he was able to have his way with the Times as long as the other Chandlers’ money was not imperiled. Time passed, and Otis with it, and the Chandler heirs, who had never been wild about journalism anyhow, were courted by the Tribune Company. The deal was consummated in the year 2000 with the Tribune Company buying the Times and its parent Times-Mirror Company for $8 billion in stock and three seats on the Tribune board.

The Times-Mirror Company had itself been collecting newspapers (Newsday on Long Island, The Baltimore Sun, and The Hartford Courant, among others), and these all tumbled into Tribune’s basket in Chicago. Tribune was obviously a mammoth financial organization and hence extremely vulnerable when the market bubble broke and stocks, especially newspaper stocks, began declining. Carroll had the Times cruising successfully and was amenable to economizing when his Chicago bosses began asking him to cut editorial costs in 2003. Then he was asked to cut again. And again. He began objecting that the cutting was seriously damaging the paper, but Chicago insisted on more cuts. Eventually, in 2005, he resigned. The editor succeeding him was soon told that still more cuts would have to be made, and he resigned too.

Journalism was being whittled away by a Wall Street theory that profits can be maximized by minimizing the product. Papers everywhere felt relentless demands for improved stock performance. The resulting policy of slash-and-burn cost-cutting has left the landscape littered with frail, failing, or gravely wounded newspapers which are increasingly useless to any reader who cares about what is happening in the world, the country, and the local community. Cost-cutting has reduced the number of correspondents stationed abroad, shriveled or closed news bureaus in Washington, and crippled local reporting staffs which once kept an eye on governors, mayors, state legislatures, small-town rascals, crooks, and jury suborners. It has also shrunk the size of the typical newspaper page, cutting the cost of newsprint by cutting news content.

Newspapers report their own erosion in the business columns, doggedly recording inch-by-inch shrinkage of page sizes and job-by-job shrinkage of news coverage, but statistics alone cannot convey the true loss to the country. Besides the Los Angeles Times, the papers showing the ravages of extensive cost-cutting include many once ranked among the country’s finest: The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Des Moines Register, The Hartford Courant, the Louisville Courier-Journal, the San Jose Mercury News, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example.

The new-style owners are often puzzled when their editors and reporters make the traditional argument that journalism’s business is to provide a public service by supplying the information the citizenry needs for democracy to work. The new owners have a different view of duty. They are “sometimes genuinely perplexed to find people in their midst who do not feel beholden, first and foremost, to the shareholder,” Carroll says.

What makes these people tick? they wonder. The job of any employee, as they see it, is to produce a good financial result, not to indulge in some dreamy form of do-gooding at company expense…. Our corporate superiors regard our beliefs as quaint, wasteful and increasingly tiresome.
Carroll’s speech is invaluable for its working journalist’s grim view of how competitive market practices have changed the business; but Donald Graham recently provided a similar view from the owner’s seat. Graham is chairman of the board of The Washington Post, and his comment appeared on the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal in April when Wall Street had The New York Times under attack.

Carroll is saying that free-market capitalism doesn’t really work very well in the newspaper business, and, if rigorously applied, tends to destroy it. Astonishingly—he is an owner, after all—Graham seems to agree. His essay, only a thousand words or so in length, was notably angry in warning that Wall Street’s single-minded insistence on maximizing profits could be fatal to journalism.

His statement was provoked by a Morgan Stanley money manager’s efforts to break the two-tier stock structure that preserves the Sulzberger family’s control of The New York Times. This arrangement was built into the Times corporate structure when the company entered the stock market in 1967. It limits control of the company to people holding a preferred class of stock, most of whom descend from Adolph S. Ochs, who founded the modern Times in 1896. Its present publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., is Ochs’s great-grandson.

Morgan Stanley tried to start a revolt of unprivileged stockholders last spring, urging them to withhold their votes from the candidates the Times Company had nominated to sit on its board. Graham acknowledged that he was not a disinterested party, since The Washington Post also operates under a two-tier structure designed to preserve family control of the business. The Post took its modern form in 1933 when Eugene Meyer (himself an extremely important figure in Wall Street) bought it at a bankruptcy sale. Graham is Meyer’s grandson, but while his family fortune may have been rooted in Wall Street, he is clearly disturbed about the modern money world’s rough hand on journalism. To support Morgan Stanley’s attack on the two-tier stock structure, he wrote, “is to run crazy risks” with the future of The New York Times. Eliminate the two-tier structure, and “a line of buyers eager to purchase the company would form within minutes,” Graham wrote. “No one could say no. The line would include private equity firms, high-ego billionaires, international media companies lacking a famous property and lots more.” The New York Times, he predicted, would be “auctioned off like a side of beef.”

2.

Wall Street at the feeding trough receives little attention in Neil Henry’s genial and rambling survey of journalism’s troubles in these electronic times. After a career at The Washington Post, Henry is on the journalism faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and his book is concerned with the subjects that must worry young people starting out in the business: How does the Internet affect what we still call “the press”? Is “blogging” the journalism of the future? How can the journalist avoid being manipulated by the vast and deadly effective propaganda machinery of government and business?

He has no answers, and indeed no answers are possible yet to such questions. When new technology is changing everything, the only certain outlook is for a future entirely different from what anyone could have foreseen. Henry is content to let the sociologist Herbert Gans sound the downbeat note about journalism’s chances for a rosy electronic future:

The history of technological innovation does suggest that the cultural, social, and economic innovations expected from new technologies do not often materialize. Consequently, technology alone will do little to create a bright future for journalism.

How the Internet might replace the newspaper as a source of information is never explained by those who assure you that it will. At present about 80 percent of all news available on the Internet originates in newspapers, according to John Carroll’s estimate, and no Internet company has the resources needed to gather and edit news on the scale of the most mediocre metropolitan daily. Moreover, corporations like Google and Yahoo apparently have no interest in going into serious journalism. (Google has an automated news site, Google News, which sifts through hundreds of online newspapers and news agency reports; and Yahoo includes news agency reports on its Yahoo News site. But neither fields its own reporting staff or provides its own news coverage.)

At present the Internet is basically an electronic version of the ten-year-old boy on a bicycle who used to toss the newspaper on the front porch: an ingenious circulation device. Of course it is also an invaluable resource for research and fact checking. Today’s reporter with a laptop has nearly immediate access to material that once required lengthy and often futile searches in the paper’s “morgue.” It should only make reporting and editing better.

Blogging is a more interesting development, perhaps because bloggers are so passionate about it. It is a valuable restraint on careless and sloppy journalism, for the vigilance of the bloggers misses not the slightest error or the least omission, and the fury of their rage is terrible to bear. Committed bloggers insist that they are practicing journalism just as surely as a correspondent like John Burns is practicing journalism when reporting on the Iraq war from Baghdad for The New York Times. Anyone wishing to debate the point must be ready to argue all night and well into next week. What is indisputable is that practically every blogger can now be a columnist. With vast armies of columnists blogging away, it seems inevitable that a few may eventually produce something original, arresting, and refreshing and so breathe new life into this worn-out journalistic form.

Like so many who comment on journalism these days, the authors of When the Press Fails—three journalism professors—are angry about the press’s flabby performance at the time when Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz & Co. were stoking public appetite for war in Iraq. Everyone, including most journalists, seems to agree that the press did a rotten job, but whether a superb job would have defeated the neocons’ determination to have their war is another question. Following events fairly closely at the time, I thought nothing could stop them. For one thing, the lust for war had the public in its grip. For another, Congress, the one force powerful enough to resist presidential follies, though not always to prevent them, had ceased to function as an effective arm of government and was utterly useless for much of anything beyond cheering the President on. Senator Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat, accurately described Congress’s position as “supine.”

As if to prove his point, most Democratic senators with presidential ambitions, including Hillary Clinton, to her continuing mortification, voted for war. They were simply responding to the political necessity of a moment when patriotic demand for battle was running high. At such moments politicians almost always decide they would rather be president than right.

Finally, credit the administration with a masterful job of deception. It fooled its own secretary of state, Colin Powell. It even fooled itself about enjoying a swift flower-strewn triumph. Despite Congress’s humiliating performance, the idea that the press could have averted the disaster is slow to die. When the Press Fails does not endorse the notion but certainly flirts with it. It is “most interesting” that the press “remained a silent if often uncomfortable partner” in the “reality-bending exercise” with which the administration sold the war, the authors write.

The ideal of press independence does not mean that the resulting open public debate will necessarily shape or improve the course of policy. At the very least, publicizing credible challenges to dubious policies may give large numbers of citizens more timely information. And when those citizens hear their private and sometimes ill-defined concerns aired and clarified in the legitimating space of the mainstream press, they may begin to act as a public, instead of suffering in isolation with their own shock and awe as events unravel.

In such statements the book’s authors expect more of the press than it is built to deliver. Airing and clarifying Washington activities is surely healthy, but it is also a tedious process that may yield nothing better than public indifference. The Washington Post began airing and clarifying the Watergate affair in the summer of 1972, yet six months later Americans were still so uninterested that they reelected President Nixon with one of the biggest landslides in history. Were it not for the intervention of the little-known lower-court judge John Sirica, the Watergate scandal might have expired unnoticed.

While the authors may overestimate the press’s power, their analysis of the weaknesses of Washington journalism deserves close attention. Assignment to Washington is one of the highest prizes a newspaper has to offer, and not surprisingly the Washington press is an elite group: well-educated, well-paid, talented, at ease among the mighty, a bit smug perhaps about knowing secrets others don’t, but for the most part sensitive to an obligation to keep the public informed without fear or prejudice. Yet they failed this obligation during the Bush years, the authors of When The Press Fails contend, partly because of their tendency to defer excessively to power.

Their “deference to power” was not a newly hatched product of the Bush era, according to the authors, but a habit “deeply ingrained and continually reinforced in the culture and routines of mainstream journalism.” It is a habit that makes Washington journalists vulnerable to manipulation by the powerful and indifferent to dissent and protest. Dissenters and protesters are often dismissed as “mavericks,” suggesting they are not to be taken too seriously.

At its most primitive, deference to power becomes the relentless coverage accorded the smallest triviality at the White House. The president himself is covered exhaustively even when he is not doing much more than getting on and off airplanes, vacationing, or shaking hands with visiting grandees. At a more sophisticated level it often shows in the press’s language. The word “torture” was used sparingly in reports about Abu Ghraib. President Bush insists that United States does not countenance torture. Nor was the press quick to countenance the word. News stories and photographs of what sounded and looked shockingly like torture were commonly described in the press as “abuses.”

At its most damaging, deference to power means a readiness to tell the narrative of government as the powerful tell it. The Bush people have talked of creating their own reality. The writers of When the Press Fails refer to this Bushian “reality” as a “script” and criticize the Washington press for accepting it as reality, even when, as during the Iraq war, “that script seemed bizarrely out of line with observable events.”

Contrary to popular impression, there was some very good journalism as the administration rushed toward war. There was articulate dissent, too, even at the Capitol when the war resolution was being rushed through Congress. The press simply did not give it much attention since, for one thing it came from people out of power—Senators Kennedy of Massachusetts and Byrd of West Virginia, for instance, both Democrats. To know of Senator Byrd’s warnings against the rush to war and his pleas for Congress to accept its constitutional obligations, one had to stay tuned to C-Span. In the Times and the Post, Byrd hardly existed. Though he is the senior member of the Senate and a human encyclopedia of its history, he was out of power and therefore easily ignored, whereas Ari Fleischer—voice of the White House—was inescapable on the networks.

Contrary to the impression that the entire Washington press was sleepwalking, there was also some good investigative reporting. Michael Massing, whose articles on poor press coverage of the run-up to war appeared in these pages, credits several reporters for The Washington Post and The New York Times with reporting that challenged the administration’s case. But too often, Massing found, their reports were tucked discreetly inside the paper.*

Walter Pincus and Dana Milbank at the Post, for example, wrote that the United States was preparing to attack Iraq on the basis of allegations against Saddam Hussein “that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved—by the United Nations, European governments and even US intelligence reports.” The story was squirreled away inside on page A13. Pincus told Massing the Post’s editors “went through a whole phase in which they didn’t put things on the front page that would make a difference.”

Massing gave especially high marks to Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, and John Walcott of Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau for sustained coverage that never accepted the administration’s “script.” But here was another flaw in Washington journalism: Knight Ridder’s reporting on the reality behind the “script” had no influence at all on the rest of the press; because Knight Ridder had no paper in Washington, its reporting was not read there.

This may reflect something worse than a Washington press corps asleep at the switch. John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for Knight Ridder, speaking recently of his bureau’s Iraq coverage, said the Washington press had had a problem worse than timidity and too much coziness with power:

There was simple laziness: Much of what the administration said, especially about Iraq and al Qaida, simply made no sense, yet very few reporters bothered to check it out.

It also took a little courage to irritate a White House pack famous for telling the world only what served their purpose and whim. Challenging the “script” invited punishment by White House enforcers. Knight Ridder reporters were barred from traveling on the secretary of defense’s airplane for three years because their coverage had differed from the “script.” Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote that Saddam Hussein had not been shopping for uranium ore in Niger, as the President told Congress, and his wife’s career at the CIA was destroyed by administration leaks.

Through the conservative right’s vast talk-radio amplifier, journalists who challenged the “script” were accused of bias, unpatriotic motives, indifference to the lives of American soldiers, and even treasonous intent. Talk radio can now deliver casual round-the-clock slander with impunity since, for one thing, there is not much public support for aggressive reporting anymore. For years, there has been an effective campaign by political conservatives to depict the press as a false messenger spreading negativity and poisoning minds with leftist bias. Books on the theme become best sellers. Political “hosts” on round-the-clock news stations repeat the message tirelessly.

Tne result has been a widening disconnection between public and press. It is evident in the public’s changed view of the working journalist. Once a cultural hero, he was glamorized in the movies by Clark Gable and she by Rosalind Russell. They were salt-of-the-earth, wise-cracking, sassy, but high-principled types. So were James Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Robert Redford, and Dustin Hoffman, all of whom did cinematic newsroom duty too. To be a journalist was to be a kind of proletarian hero worthy of Hollywood star power.

In American Carnival, Neil Henry sketches the modern “journalist” in all his “mishmash of guises,” and suggests why the public has withdrawn its affection. It has been a long time since Americans thought of a journalist as a working-class guy teaching a spoiled rich dame how to dunk a doughnut. To the average person today, Henry writes, “a Journalist is the television talker who is paid a considerable retainer to regularly make noise on cable news programs.” The person hosting the program is a Journalist, too, drawing down big money “not to seek out and report the news but to entertain an audience with a certain glibness and an argumentative personality.”

Today’s Journalist in Henry’s sketch is the TV commentator at a murder trial pronouncing guilt and talking of the maximum penalty before the evidence is in. Or she is a network TV star with a multimillion-dollar salary briefly pretending to understand the problems of working-class people. And there is “the inveterate Washington Beltway insider with shifting loyalties and ethics who works as a Pentagon spokesperson, political campaign adviser, or presidential speechwriter one year” and hires out next year as a network reporter or magazine correspondent worthy of trust. If in television, the Journalist is someone who may need “the eye tuck, the hair transplant, or the Botox injection” to create a false appearance of youth essential to reporting the truth persuasively.

Henry is clearly unhappy about all this. His assemblage of self-servers, frauds, political double-dippers, gasbags, mountebanks, spoiled reporters, and unprincipled swine make up that vague organism called “media.” How the press and journalism became entwined in this squalor is a long and complicated tale, but there seems to be no escape. Indeed, the press seems to have become only a minor player in Henry’s carnival, and there is even some question whether many people care. Nobody phones the paper expecting to find a hero anymore.

Anyone who did would probably get a recorded message on a computerized phone-answering machine system, as Henry did at several papers he called at random. He had a hard time reaching anybody at all. It was lonely on that telephone.