George Costanza knows shrinkage!
Posted on 07/19/2006 6:13:57 AM PDT by abb
On the evening of July 17, The New York Times announced plans to cut the width of its pages by one and a half inches, or 11 percent.
On July 18, New York Times stock dropped from 23.18 cents a share to 22.67 cents--a decline of 2.2 percent.
In joint memos announcing the page shrinkage, executive editor Bill Keller and Times president Scott Heekin-Canedy both described the smaller format as “reader-friendly.” Mr. Keller also described it as the emerging “industry norm,” which was true: Whatever readers may or may not think of the floppy (or generous) old broadsheet size, the newspaper business has agreed that it is too much--a symbol of archaic inefficiency.
Cutting, then, has become an efficiency ritual: a way of demonstrating that a newspaper is not too attached to … well, to newspaper.
Or to employees. When the smaller Times appears in April 2008, according to plan, the company will have consolidated its printing at its College Point facility, closing its Edison, N.J., plant and eliminating 250 of 800 printing jobs. Pressmen’s Union No. 2 signed a 12-year contract extension with The Times in 2004, agreeing to a 50 percent reduction in its ranks by 2017. Those cuts were supposed to have come through gradual buyouts, after one major initial cutback.
Mr. Keller wrote in his memo that the announcement had come late in the day so that the company could first break the news to the production workers when they arrived for the night shift.
“We just found out,” said John, a pressroom clerk at the Edison plant, who declined to give his last name, when reached by phone July 18. “We’re just trying to digest this.”
The Times’ own news story about the move described papers cutting size industry-wide “as the price of newsprint climbs and newspapers lose readers and advertisers to the Internet.” But correlation is not causation--and in this case, it’s not even correlation. Last year, Slate’s Jack Shafer, following on the work of Philip Meyer in the Columbia Journalism Review, noted that inflation-adjusted newsprint costs are well below their historic peaks.
And trim-size reductions are not a flexible reaction to a sometimes-volatile newsprint market. They’re just cuts. If The Times chose to cut its pages in half, it could budget 50 percent less newsprint. For the ultimate savings, try printing no newspaper at all. (See: losing readers and advertisers to the Internet.)
“This is a business that is in utter panic,” a senior Times staffer said. “And it’s not a well-run business, so Bill’s sort of stuck.”
Mr. Keller used his memo to deliver a bluff, Panglossian reassurance that the paper would not be diminished by getting narrower. Though the pages themselves will be 11 percent smaller, Mr. Keller wrote, the paper will add pages, so the overall loss of space will be more like 5 percent. Citing “flabby or redundant prose” in the paper’s current form, Mr. Keller declared, “I’m convinced that, with good editors and a little time, I could take 5 percent out of any day’s paper and actually make it better.”
“People are depressed,” said another senior Times staffer. “I’m sure you can squeeze 5 percent out of everything. That’s what they always say.”
“It’s an insult to the people doing substance here,” the staffer said.
And the individual parts of the paper are not as fungible as the total amount of space. The two-page spread of editorials and opinions, for instance, can’t instantly pick up another quarter-page to recoup its three-inch loss. Editorial-page editor Gail Collins said her department has no specific plan yet for the smaller format. “I’ve told people up here, of the things to worry about in the near future, this would not be in the top 25,” Ms. Collins said. Restaurant critic Frank Bruni shared that sense of acceptance. “If these are realistic real-world adjustments we need to make to navigate these times, I don’t think anyone has a problem with that,” he said.
“Do you succeed in reading 95 percent of the paper every day?” Mr. Bruni said. “It suggests to me that we could lose 5 percent and probably live.”
A Times spokesperson wrote via e-mail that answers about page distribution among sections “are yet to be determined.” So what is The Times minus 5 percent? The paper’s current motto runs to 31 characters and spaces. Shaving off roughly 5 percent: “All the News That Fit to Print.”
Jodi Rudoren, The New York Times’ new deputy metro editor for regional coverage, said she has been shopping for a home in Hoboken or Jersey City. The Times itself is less interested in life across the Hudson: Unlike her predecessors, Ms. Rudoren will not be in charge of putting out a weekly New Jersey section.
Last month, in a cost-cutting move, The Times rolled out a combined regional weekly--lumping together the formerly separate New Jersey, Connecticut, Long Island and Westchester sections. With the change, The Times eliminated the four autonomous weekly editors and a batch of regional weekly staff-reporting jobs.
“You have to look where the bread is buttered,” one metro staffer said. “And for The Times, the bread is buttered in covering Lebanon, Iraq and Washington. The Times is not known for how we cover Maplewood, N.J.”
Earlier this year, Ms. Rudoren wrote for The Times about adopting a new married name--and byline--by combining her past name, Wilgoren, with her husband’s old surname, Ruderman. Now she will be directing coverage of a portmanteau territory: New Jernecticichester Island, a hazy area just outside the city, like the middle ground of the old Saul Steinberg view from New York.
And where past region editors were fully in charge of the bureaus, parceling out stories between the daily metro report and the weeklies, Ms. Rudoren is only in charge of the metro section report; the combined weekly is edited by former Trenton bureau chief Jennifer Preston, who reports directly to metropolitan editor Joe Sexton.
Mr. Sexton declined to discuss the regional overhaul; Ms. Preston did not reply to a message seeking comment. “The same reporters provide copy for both,” Ms. Rudoren said. “I had a long meeting with Jennifer Preston, and we’ll work together.”
Staffers for the old regional weeklies are not happy at the consolidation--particularly in the case of the New Jersey Weekly, the most robust of the four operations.
“Of course the news hole is smaller,” said Trenton-based metro reporter Laura Mansnerus, who worked at the New Jersey Weekly before being assigned to metro recently. “It has to be--you’re dividing four sections into one. The total is going to be less.”
The squeeze in New Jersey began last year, when reporter George James retired and wasn’t replaced. Ms. Mansnerus said that staffers at the New Jersey Weekly were tightly knit.
“It was our own little planet. I got to do almost anything I wanted to do,” she said. “[Former New Jersey Weekly editor] Mitch Blumenthal is a madman when it comes to news.
“It was great able to reach around the state. I think we did really serious coverage. I think we did especially good political stuff,” she said.
Now, the coverage will be more general-interest, less local-interest--on the model of the national desk, where Ms. Rudoren worked as Chicago bureau chief.
This is Ms. Rudoren’s first editing job in her eight years at The Times. She was managing editor of the Yale Daily News, but she came to The Times from the Los Angeles Times as a metro reporter, then moved on to cover the Presidential campaigns of Howard Dean and John Kerry.
“I always thought I’d be an editor eventually,” Ms. Rudoren said. “It’s happened a little earlier than I expected, and a little earlier than many people at The New York Times.”
“I do think that for the region, I have something to offer, having done national reporting,” Ms. Rudoren said. “The regions, in a way, are the part of New York that is most like the rest of the country. We have too few people covering too much territory. And you have to find the best local story with the widest resonance, that has the deepest impact. The story that people will cry over and talk about.”
Since June 23, when The New York Times disclosed a secret Bush administration program to track international bank transfers, conservatives have called for the paper to face prosecution. Republican Congressman Peter King said The Times should be prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act, and taking it a step further, one radio host, Melanie Morgan, declared that Times executive editor Bill Keller should get the gas chamber if found guilty of treason.
How seriously is The Times taking the demands for prosecution?
Not very. According to Times sources with knowledge of the paper’s legal strategy, Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen have not retained lawyers. Mr. Risen was recently represented by Cahill Gordon during the civil suit brought by Wen Ho Lee, but according to a source with knowledge of matter, Mr. Risen has not retained the firm this time around.
Additionally, The Times’ preferred First Amendment attorney, Floyd Abrams, hasn’t been called into action. “The Times has not retained me,” Mr. Abrams said. “My sense is they’ll wait and see what happens before taking any additional steps.”
Mr. Lichtblau declined to comment, and Mr. Risen did not return calls seeking comment. Times in-house counsel George Freeman did not return calls seeking comment. But a Times spokesperson said the paper hasn’t heard from the government about the banking story or the paper’s earlier coverage of N.S.A. wiretapping: “We have not been received subpoenas nor have we been contacted by the government. Beyond that, we don’t have anything to add.”
Sources inside the paper suggested that in the event of a real legal crisis, The Times will have learned from its awkward strategy in the case of former reporter Judith Miller--in which it staged a public crusade on press-freedom grounds to keep Ms. Miller from testifying about confidential sources, then saw Ms. Miller cut a deal to testify after 85 days in jail.
“The Times is never again going to get on its high horse and say, ‘This is nothing but a First Amendment case,’” one senior Times staffer said.
Ms. Miller’s lawyer, Robert Bennett, said that reporters should retain criminal-defense attorneys in leak investigations.
“In any major criminal investigation,” he said, “it’s always a good idea to have an experienced criminal lawyer who has only one interest in mind, and that is you.”
--G.S.
copyright © 2005 the new york observer, L.P. | all rights reserved
somewhat related...
U.N. Drama Unfolds,
Times Runs Wire Copy
By: Niall Stanage
Date: 7/24/2006
Page: 10
The story had everything: secret agents, political intrigue, personal betrayal and cash. Lots and lots of cash.
Yet, for all that, a remarkable trial that ended last week in a Manhattan courtroom—a proceeding that implicated figures in the highest echelons of international politics—was barely mentioned in the major American press. If it weren’t for the journalistic wing of the conservative movement, outlets like the National Review Online and The New York Sun, it might not have been covered at all.
Take the events of last Thursday, for example. After two weeks of testimony, a jury took only a few hours to convict a South Korean national, Tongsun Park, of acting as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The conspiracy of which he was a part ran for 10 years, ending in late 2002, and helped one of the world’s worst regimes maintain its grip on power.
But The New York Times did not assign a reporter to his trial, its total coverage amounting to a brief wire report on the day following Mr. Park’s conviction. Of the other major national dailies, The Washington Post ran a single news-brief item, the Los Angeles Times not a word.
Given the stakes—and what the Park trial clearly demonstrated about the seamier side of the U.N.—it hardly made sense.
The most innocent explanation is that the major newspapers had simply moved on to other things, frustrated by the apparent complexity and opacity of the oil-for-food scandal, of which the Korean fixer is only one colorful part.
But some critics contend there may have been another factor: a combination of sullenness and embarrassment on the part of what bloggers gleefully disdain as “the mainstream media.”
“The oil-for-food story began on the Op-Ed page of The Wall Street Journal. The U.N. denied it had done anything wrong for the longest time, and most of the press followed its lead,” said James Bone, New York correspondent of The Times of London. “Many of the major newspapers came to the story late and are embarrassed by it.”
(Mr. Bone covered the trial via his own blog, entitled UN Eyes Only, which is carried on his newspaper’s Web site.)
As it turns out, many of the accusations made by the right-wing publications and polemicists who have covered the scandal since the beginning—and who oppose the U.N. on ideological grounds as a meddlesome instrument of global big government—have been accurate.
The U.N. is compromised. It is open to corruption. And it did enjoy a curious and sometimes cozy relationship with the Baghdad regime.
Naturally enough, major American newspapers defend themselves vigorously from criticisms of their coverage.
The New York Times’ foreign editor, Susan Chira, said in an e-mail, “There is absolutely no ideological agenda about the coverage of the oil-for-food trial.”
The U.N. set up the program ostensibly to alleviate the suffering of Iraq’s civilian population under sanctions. Saddam Hussein was permitted to sell oil and use the proceeds to buy humanitarian and medical supplies.
But the program left too many decisions—like to whom they would sell the oil—in the hands of the Iraqi regime. Mr. Hussein and his aides received millions of dollars in kickbacks and wound up enriched and entrenched in power as a result.
The trial of Tongsun Park was one of the first oil-for-food cases to come before a U.S. court. And it revealed for the first time the depth of the chicanery that took place even as the program was being formulated.
During the trial, Mr. Park’s co-conspirator, Samir Vincent, now a cooperating witness on behalf of the government, said he considered himself and Mr. Park “the architects” of U.N. Resolution 986, which set up the oil-for-food program. Both men, it bears repeating, have now been proven to be undeclared Iraqi agents.
The prosecution’s case rested almost exclusively on the story Mr. Vincent had to tell. But what a story it was.
He testified that during a 1996 meeting, Mr. Park asked him for $10 million “to take care of expenses and to take care of some people.” Mr. Vincent understood “some people” to be a reference to the U.N. Secretary General of the time, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
A version of Mr. Park’s remarkable request was acceded to by Baghdad. Soon, Mr. Vincent found himself in his native country’s oil ministry, being presented with $450,000 in bundles of $100 bills.
The day after his return to the U.S., he handed $100,000 over to Mr. Park in an unnamed Manhattan coffee shop. Two further payments—of $400,000 and $500,000—were made by him to Mr. Park from Iraqi funds, he said.
One document that surfaced at the trial purported to record Mr. Boutros-Ghali expressing regret to the Iraqis that he had been unable to “neutralize” the then chief weapons inspector of the U.N., Rolf Ekéus.
Another of Mr. Vincent’s notes bore a message allegedly to be sent to Mr. Boutros-Ghali through Tongsun Park: “Iraq very appreciative of what he has done and future deals will be even sweeter.”
Mr. Boutros-Ghali denies any wrongdoing whatsoever.
The episodes described during the trial involve the U.N.’s present as well as its past.
Maurice Strong was current Secretary General Kofi Annan’s special envoy to North Korea until the oil-for-food scandal began to lap around his feet last year.
Fresh details about a check for almost $1 million that Mr. Strong was given by Mr. Park emerged at the trial. The court also heard evidence that Mr. Park covered Mr. Strong’s private office expenses for several years.
Mr. Strong, like Mr. Boutros-Ghali, denies any wrongdoing. But, at the least, it is odd that people at the very highest level of the U.N. enjoyed such a close relationship with Mr. Park.
(Three decades prior to his current travails, Mr. Park was caught up in the so-called Koreagate scandal, accused of trying to buy support for South Korea in Congress and eventually testifying in exchange for immunity.)
During the course of the legal proceedings, these puzzling transactions have been laid bare—for anyone interested enough to write about them.
“This case was fascinating to me because it showed the diplomacy we never see,” said Benny Avni, who covered the trial for The New York Sun. “It showed the dirty diplomacy, what is going on behind the striped suits. It showed where the striped suits were being laundered.”
To Mr. Avni, the lack of major media coverage was symptomatic of a lack of interest among many in the press corps in looking too deeply at the U.N.’s failings.
Correspondents with major newspapers, however, bridle at the suggestion that there is anything timid about their coverage of the institution. While noting only that it “wasn’t my decision” not to send a reporter to cover the Park trial, Warren Hoge, The New York Times’ U.N. correspondent, insisted that his paper had been vigorous in its reporting of the oil-for-food story.
“The evidence I can give you is the amount of space we gave it,” he said. “It was page 1 always; it had great space. Just look at the copy. There is not a single suggestion that The New York Times went softly on this story.”
The Times’ early coverage of the oil-for-food program, though, was largely driven by one of its most controversial reporters, Judith Miller. A search of The Times’ online archive up to the date on which Ms. Miller’s final pre-imprisonment article was published yields 54 matches for the terms “oil-for-food” and “Judith Miller,” and 45 for “oil-for-food” and “Warren Hoge.” A LexisNexis search up to the same date showed that 237 New York Sun articles mentioned oil-for-food and that 101 of them were written in whole or part by Mr. Avni.
In the course of emphasizing the toughness of The Times’ coverage, Mr. Hoge also added, “There are some newspapers that do that with a distinct editorial slant. We didn’t do that because we don’t do that.”
Mr. Avni, of The Sun, replied that the U.N. coverage pointed up the advantages of an agenda-driven take on the matter. “If an ideological agenda is shedding some light on some shady and improper business, then good,” he said.
Mr. Avni, declining to “name names,” also recalled a conversation he said he’d had with a Times reporter some months back:
“I said to him, ‘We are covering the U.N. much more aggressively than you are.’ And he said, ‘Right, but we are covering the Bush administration much more aggressively than you are.’ We find faults where we are looking for faults, and they want to find faults where they are looking for faults.”
Claudia Rosett, a former member of The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board, is now a freelance journalist who has become an authority on the oil-for-food scandal. She blogged the Park trial for National Review Online. She contended that emphasis on the ideological affiliations of the media that have covered the story most effectively is, ultimately, detrimental—because it can too easily divert attention from the scandal itself.
“The criticisms we’ve been hearing about the U.N. would have no traction if they were not grounded in fact,” she said. “The reason this has become a scandal is that the accusations have been proven true.”
copyright © 2005 the new york observer, L.P. | all rights reserved
Make it the width of toilet paper and put it on a roll...
Rules...
Worth repeating....
“This is a business that is in utter panic,”
I think I need to ping this one...
George Costanza knows shrinkage!
Eight more cuts just like that would be wonderful.
Citing “flabby or redundant prose” in the paper’s current form, Mr. Keller declared, "I believe our readers will find our conversion to New Speak ++good."
The basic concept of "fixed-format" news reporting is an anachronism in the modern world of advanced communications. There's simply no way to "break" a story on the front page of a newspaper, and newspaper stories by definition are old news the moment they hit the printing presses.
Eventually, the only newspapers to survive will be those that can successfully transform from a "news" format to an "insight/opinion/commentary" format. Newspapers already do this in their sports pages. The difference between an exceptional sports section and an average one is not in the factual information provided (they are reporting on the same things, and pretty much presenting the same facts) . . . it is in the quality of insight and commentary in the exceptional one.
HE WAS IN THE POOOOOOL!
As Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has titled one of his books, "BRING ME THE HEAD OF WILLY THE MAILBOY". While those responsible for the slow death spiral of the gray lady continue to indulge themselves, "the innocent are dragged out and shot". (that was the title of an editorial in Machine Design magazine but i can't remember the author's name.)
New Media reporters such as Michael Yon already provide me with "insight/opinion/commentary". The Inet enables Yon and his ilk to virtually eliminate production and overhead costs while offering an interactive multimedia experience orders of magnitude better than the 400 year old fishwrap experience.
Not an exceptional paper, just an exceptional editorial page.
Only reason I buy it . . .
So, the Sunday Times will get even bigger!
Bigger paper means bigger price.
"Classic example: The Wall Street Journal.
Not an exceptional paper, just an exceptional editorial page."
Disagree. I'm a 40-year buyer/subscriber of newspapers, and I'm now down to the Journal. I think it's impeccably produced--written, researched, edited. It leans conservative, yes, but it keeps that on the editorial page. Everything else is as well-done as anything in today's print press, and far, far better than most. It's not unfair to say that the Times's left-bias has insidiously taken over virtually every department of the paper, so reading even a sports story leaves one with the unpleasant feeling that one is trying to be manipulated and/or controlled. Which is why I left the Times behind forever.
If a few thousand freepers did this simple action this week and a few thousand new freepers, friends and relatives each following week, we will have a terminal impact on the NY Slimes acts of sedition. Please send this how to your blogs, friends, relatives and email lists. This action will serve as a cannon shot across the bows fo the other Dinosaur Liberal Fish Wraps re sedition will not be tolerated any more.
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Want to smash the NY Slimes?
How many of us own mutual funds which own NY Slimes stock and even worse have increased their NYT holdings this year. NYT investment by a mutual fund company is a terrible investment re the dollar loss in Stock value the last 2 years. Those investments are an attempt to keep the NY Slimes afloat with our mutual fund $'s. Now it is very evident that the NY Slimes is an agent and abettor of the al Qaeda Serial Killers. The Slimes is endangering the lives of our families, friends, innocent Americans and every warrior of ours. Go to this link to see if your mutual fund owns NYT. http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/invsub/ownership/ownership.asp When the MS Money stock home page comes up, enter NYT into the search area and hit enter and the following screen will show up re ownership of the NY Slimes stock: The New York Times Company: Ownership Information
Highlight the Mutual Fund Ownership and hit enter. If thousands of Freepers, whose mutual funds own shares of NY Slimes did the following:
We might have a lot more impact than trying to boycott companies which sell to the elite liberals of NYC and advertise in the NY Slimes. |
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