Free Republic

For the month of July, Site Analytics shows Free Republic as having 6,187,862 visits (1,320,954 unique visitors).MSNBC.com had 5,224,538, down 16.9% (2,002,914 unique visitors).

Even in an industry accustomed to bad news, the recent cutbacks at USA Today exposed a harsh reality: For many former readers, newspapers have become so passé that it's become hard even to give them away. Last month, the Gannett-owned publication announced it was laying off about 130 people, shifting its emphasis from its iconic print edition, and devoting more resources online. USA Today has experienced a sharp circulation drop, even among people who get the paper free -- the business travelers who make up more than half of its readership. As road warriors know, copies of USA Today have...

Earlier this week, we gave you a few staggering factoids on the state of the U.S. newspaper industry. You know, cheery stuff like how there have been roughly 35,000 newspaper job losses or buyouts since March 2007. Or how 166 newspapers have either shut down or stopped putting out a print edition since 2008. Or the fact that the U.S. print sector lost more than 24,500 jobs between September 2008 and September 2009. Good times. It's all from a new report by the World Association of Newspapers and Newspaper Publishers. The stats seem even more bananas when viewed in the...

On July 2 of last year, Politico broke a startling story: The Washington Post was planning to host off-the-record salons at which sponsors would pay to mingle with D.C. eminences and Post writers. The dinners--the first of which had been advertised in Post fliers as an “exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done”--were to take place at the home of Katharine Weymouth, the Post’s publisher. Weymouth, granddaughter of legendary Post owner Katharine Graham, had only been on the job for a year and a half. Now she was...

The advertising hits just keep on coming for TV stations, networks and programmers -- and not in a good way. Overall, broadcast television ad revenues were down 22.6% to $8.8 billion in the third quarter, versus the same time period a year ago, according to the Television Bureau of Advertising. Local TV stations slipped 28.1% to $3.1 billion, with network TV off 21.5% to $4.7 billion. The best news came with syndicated TV, which dropped a modest 7.2% to $1.0 billion. The period was particularly rough compared to the broader nine-month period in 2009 to date, per TVB. Over this...

A Harley biker is riding by the zoo in Washington, DC when he sees a little girl leaning into the lion's cage. Suddenly, the lion grabs her by the cuff of her jacket and tries to pull her inside to slaughter her, under the eyes of her screaming parents. The biker jumps off his Harley, runs to the cage and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch. Whimpering from the pain the lion jumps back letting go of the girl, and the biker brings her to her terrified parents, who thank him endlessly. A reporter has...

Paper taking donations for Web content This holiday season, you have several options of where to donate your money: Salvation Army, Toys for Tots, soup kitchens. But have you considered the Miami Herald? It's not quite a charity case yet, but the paper of record in the Magic City is accepting handouts if you have any spare change. Starting today, users of the Herald's Web edition can make donations to the paper on each story. A link at the bottom of each story directs users to "Support ongoing news coverage on Miamiherald.com." Through the link, you can pay any amount...

NEW YORK, Nov 24 (Reuters) - The Washington Post (WPO.N) is closing its last U.S. bureaus outside the nation's capital as the money-losing newspaper retrenches to focus on politics and local news. "At a time of limited resources and increased competitive pressure, it's necessary to concentrate our journalistic firepower on our central mission of covering Washington and the news, trends and ideas that shape both the region and the country's politics, policies and government," the newspaper's top editor, Marcus Brauchli, wrote in a memo to employees that was obtained by Reuters. The Post will close its bureaus in Chicago, Los...

Time Warner Inc's (TWX.N) magazine division Time Inc plans another round of job cuts as advertising declines erode revenue, a source familiar with the unit said on Thursday. The job cuts at Time Inc -- which publishes Time magazine, People, Sports Illustrated and Fortune -- would be at about the same level as the division cut last year, the source said. Time Inc. cut more than 600 positions, or more than 6 percent of its workforce, in that round. The company declined to comment, though a spokesman for Fortune magazine separately said that it plans to shave the number of...

Inflation-adjusted numbers show papers are even worse off than you think Martin Peers had a smart Heard on the Street in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal on the critical question of how much of the recent plunge in media companies’ fortunes has been a cyclical decline versus a secular one. It’s obviously some of both, but the mix will decide what the next five years look like for magazines and newspapers, the critical providers of original reporting in the country. Alas, I’ve crunched some numbers on the industry and they’re beyond ugly. First, some definitions. A cyclical decline is one due...

The Gannett Company, owner of the nation’s largest newspaper chain, will go through another round of layoffs soon, with an announcement possible in the next few days, executives said Tuesday. The company’s United States and British newspaper divisions eliminated more than 10,000 jobs in 2007 and 2008, including about 2,000 layoffs last fall, and Gannett executives have said repeatedly that they expect more downsizing, including layoffs. The company, which also owns a chain of television stations and Internet ventures, ended last year with 41,500 employees, including 35,800 in its newspaper divisions. On Gannett Blog, a former Gannett editor who closely...

We hear Platinum Equity has been doing some serious tire kicking at the bankrupt Sun-Times Media Group, which is not only ready but eager to deal. Platinum Equity is a Beverly Hills-based private-equity company that, in its own words, finds itself "typically working with 'strategic sellers' that seek to shed a non-core asset in order to refocus their business operations." The STMG is willing to shed everything -- in one swoop or in bits and pieces. This March Platinum Equity bought the formerly prosperous, influential San Diego Union-Tribune -- for what online newspaper analyst Ken Doctor said was reportedly a...

Washington Paper Hires Right-Leaning Pundits, Reporters to Take on the 'Nanny State' For the first few years of George W. Bush’s presidency, Mark Tapscott was a journalist without a newsroom, shouting from the sidelines about his industry’s swift decline. Tapscott ran the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Media and Public Policy, and trained reporters in the use technology for research and crunching numbers. When he considered how few conservatives, libertarians, or real skeptics of federal power were working in newsrooms, he saw a problem that was making the growth of government possible. “The [Freedom of Information Act],” wrote Tapscott in a...

Suppose someone pulled the plug and a couple of million people didn't care. That may be what the TV industry is discovering nearly a week after the U.S. broadcast industry converted from analog to digital broadcasting. Days after their analog TV signals went dark, 2.2% of U.S. households still haven't bothered to hook up to digital reception, according to estimates released Wednesday by Nielsen Co. Even more troubling, the estimates are based on households in Nielsen's national and local TV ratings panels, which means that more than 2% of Nielsen's panel is reporting zero TV usage in the days following...

Linked at Drudge: EVENING NEWS RACE WEEK OF JUNE 1, 2009 NBC 7,960,000 ABC 7,150,000 CBS 5,180,000* *Lowest Total Viewer delivery since NIELSEN records kept

The Clarke Courier was a small newspaper for a small place. Its circulation was but 2,240, but in a county of just 14,000 people, that meant that if you wanted to know what was going on in Clarke, you had better check the Courier. No more. The Courier last week became Virginia's first paid circulation newspaper to die in the epidemic of closings, layoffs and cutbacks that are part of the dismantling of the American news infrastructure. It won't be the last. More than 10,000 journalism jobs have disappeared from U.S. newspapers so far this year, a pittance compared to...

HEY GLOBE readers, can you spare some time? Discuss COMMENTS (110) Tell me. What does this newspaper mean to you? As you've no doubt noticed, we've become one of the biggest stories in town. The New York Times is threatening to close the place down unless it gets $20 million in concessions from the Globe unions. We're suffering from a double whammy: A bad recession and a self-defeating business model. Troubled times have sent advertising revenues plummeting. Meanwhile, we're selling the paper with one hand and giving it away on Boston.com with the other. That's never made any sense -...

U.S. Bill seeks to rescue faltering newspapers

He's right. I have a growing category of stories on The War on Guns I call "Authorized Journalists." I use it to illustrate pervasive media bias and ignorance when it comes to reporting on guns and gun rights-related stories. I then use that to stick it to mainstream reporters and columnists attacking bloggers as unreliable and blaming us for dinosaur media failing to adapt to a changing environment. My message is basically this: You guys blew the trust you were given. If we did not have alternative media, stories would go unreported, under-reported, misrepresented and outright fabricated. You were supposed...

With print revenue down and online revenue growing, newspaper executives are anticipating the day when big city dailies and national papers will abandon their print versions. That day has arrived in Madison, Wis. On Saturday, The Capital Times, the city’s fabled 90-year-old daily newspaper founded in response to the jingoist fervor of World War I, stopped printing to devote itself to publishing its daily report on the Web. (The staff will also produce two print products: a free weekly entertainment guide inserted in the crosstown paper, The Wisconsin State Journal, and a news weekly that will be distributed with the...

They're angry at their demanding editors. They're angry about the mushrooming workload in shrinking newsrooms. They're even angry about other angry journalists. But these angry journalists are happy they can now vent their frustrations to the rest of the world, courtesy of angryjournalist.com, a sort of online complaint board allowing ink-stained wretches to gripe anonymously. Ironically, their anger is partly fueled by the Internet, which has forced newspapers and television networks to reinvent themselves with painful consequences for their staffs. There's the veterans complaining about newsrooms stretched thin by executives requiring reporters to produce stories for old and new media....

I'm sure you've all heard of the recent scandal in New York where the Governor (Eliot Spitzer, Democrat) was caught up in a call girl ring, but there was another scandal before that in which the Governor's political rival, State Senate majority leader Joe Bruno (Republican) found out that Governor Spitzer was using the State Police to spy on him: "I've been in government 31 years and I've never experienced anything like this," said Bruno. "I was stunned to learn Governor Spitzer is using the fine men and women of the New York State Police to conduct surveillance on me,"...

A usual round of media self-criticism turned into a schoolyard brawl last week, as editors, reporters and bloggers traded insults over a front-page article in The Washington Post, all at the very online water cooler where they usually get their news about the industry. The Post article, which ran on Nov. 29, was about rumors of Barack Obama’s ties to the Muslim world. snip Then things got really ugly. On Dec. 10, Chris Daly, a Boston University journalism professor, posted an entry on his blog that turned the debate over the merits of the article’s reporting into a debate over...

McClatchy November Revenue Slides 9.2 Percent As Classified Ad Spending Slows SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) -- Newspaper publisher McClatchy Co. said Thursday revenue fell 9.2 percent in November, primarily from a sharp drop in classified ads as jobs and real estate listings continue to migrate online. Assuming McClatchy owned a stable of newspapers it acquired from Knight Ridder in both periods, revenue fell 7.9 percent last month. That figure also excludes from the comparison the Minneapolis Star Tribune, which was sold in May. Advertising revenue on this pro forma basis fell 8.6 percent. Without adjustment, the decline was 9.2 percent. Classified...

IN many towns and cities, the newspaper is an endangered species. At least 300 daily papers have stopped publishing over the past 30 years. Those newspapers that have survived are struggling financially. Newspaper circulation has declined steadily for more than 10 years. Average daily circulation is down 2.6 percent in the last six months alone. Newspapers have also been hurt by significant cuts in advertising revenue, which accounts for at least 75 percent of their revenue. Their share of the advertising market has fallen every year for the past decade, while online advertising has increased greatly. At the heart of...

NEW YORK Newspaper executives have complained for years that the yardstick used to measure audience -- paid print circulation -- was unfair especially when compared to the likes of television and radio. Those media have always touted audience share to advertisers so why shouldn't newspapers? Finally after years of debate, the industry is moving towards tracking its total audience which encompasses all its products (especially online viewership) -- not just how many people plunk down some coins for the newspaper. The change will be reflected next Monday, when the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases numbers for more than 700 daily...

We don't know about you, but we're sick of having to dig for context every time a newspaper reports monthly sales--so we've put it all in a handy online spreadsheet.  We will now be analyzing monthly revenue info for The New York Times (NYT), Dow Jones (DJ), Lee Enterprises (LEE), The McClatchy Company (MNI), Gannett (GCI), and Tribune (TBC)--the latter until the Sam Zell deal closes and it disappears into invisible, private equity slash-and-burn mode. We won't bore you with the July details--you can see them for yourself--but the industry totals are below.  Also, the bottom line:  Every day we...

NEW YORK, June 15 (Reuters) - U.S. newspaper executives will meet next week in New York to wrestle with one of their biggest challenges: persuading investors to stick around. But there will be some conspicuous absences at the annual Mid-Year Media Review hosted by the Newspaper Association of America. Los Angeles Times owner Tribune Co. (TRB.N: Quote, Profile , Research) and Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. Inc. (DJ.N: Quote, Profile , Research) will skip the meeting. One is going private, the other may get bought. Shareholders at both companies lucked out after the surprise bids helped their...

June 3, 2007 -- As you can see from the chart above, Katie Couric’s first nine months at CBS aren’t exactly going as planned - in fact, she’s costing CBS an arm and a leg and a whole lot more for each viewer she hangs onto in her shrinking audience. And last week the $15 million- a-year anchor got even more expensive....."

Most people think the Nielson ratings only apply to primetime programming; however, this is a complete fallacy. Network news plays a frequently forgotten but always important roll itself. A few days ago the final May Sweep totals were announced, and let’s just say it wasn’t pretty for ‘CBS Evening News With Katie Couric.’ According to Variety, the perky anchorwoman managed an average of just 6.1 million viewers. That’s the lowest Tiffany network total since they began tracking the news in 1991! ABC’s ‘World News With Charlie Gibson’ led the way with 7.95 Million, while NBC’s ‘Nightly News With Brian Williams’...

For those who prefer their news fair and balanced instead of imbalanced and biased, the demise of the Big 3 networks’ evening newscasts can’t come quickly enough. Though their imminent end seems unlikely (see the reasons at the end of this post), the latest May sweep results strongly indicate that their march towards irrelevance may be completed sooner than originally thought. All the happy talk at evening news sweep winner ABC should not obscure the fact that over 6% fewer Americans watched the evening newscasts during the May 2007 sweep than did during the May 2006 sweep, and that...

According to the scoreboard, CNN's Paula Zahn attracted just 378,000 total viewers on Wednesday, shedding more than 300,000 viewers from her 7pm lead-in. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann more than doubled Zahn. Bill O'Reilly had eight times as many viewers. Nancy Grace also came out ahead. Zahn hasn't managed to deliver more than 400,000 viewers since last week. On Monday, she averaged 386,000 (and 163,000 in the demo). On Tuesday, she averaged 399,000 (and 123,000 in the demo). Now she's down to 378,000. Is this Zahn's worst performance ever?

What a difference an election makes. No one issued a memo or formal declaratory judgment, but guess what? It's now okay to meet with lobbyists again on Capitol Hill. They still can't buy a staffer a peanut butter sandwich and a Dr. Pepper, but K Street representatives have morphed from crooks to counselors, from the "culture of corruption" incarnate to strategic "stakeholders." Yes, influence peddlers are back in vogue in this city, at least according to the media.     Let's be clear. No seismic shift in the actual work of these advocates occurred in the past few months, but the press...

Lost amid the hoopla over the declining viewership for Katie Couric’s newscast has been a perhaps even more surprising development: The nightly news at her old network isn’t doing so well, either. A week after Couric’s “CBS Evening News” dipped to its worst viewership ever, NBC’s “Nightly News with Brian Williams” matched its worst viewership among adults 25-54 in at least the past 20 years, since Nielsen began using people meters in 1987. “Nightly” averaged 2.18 million 25-54s last week, the week ended May 13. The newscast also saw its total viewers average slide to its lowest point in months,...

There's been a lot of talk about how badly CBS is doing with its high priced ($15 million a year) Katie Couric as anchor of the "CBS Evening News." Back in 1976, ABC News made a big splash into the ratings tank by hiring (at the then unheard of $1 million a year) Barbara Walters to co-anchor its evening news with Harry Reasoner. Like Couric, Walters was then co-anchor of NBC's "Today" show where she had built up a reputation as an aggressive, go-getter and in the minds of some, a prima donna b***h. As a teenager, I remembered Walters...

FAS-FAX Preview: Circ Numbers To Take Another Big Hit By Jennifer Saba Published: April 25, 2007 12:30 PM ET NEW YORK Anyone thinking the declines in circulation should ease when the Audit Bureau of Circulations releases its spring numbers on Monday will be disappointed. According to industry sources, overall daily circulation for the six months ending March 2007 is expected to sink approximately 2.5% while Sunday will drop around 3.0%. Yet again, major metro papers are bearing the brunt of the responsibility for the declines. Papers that are showing daily drops of 5% or more, according to circulation sources, include:...

NEW YORK Potentially sacked with $13 billion in debt on top of weak Q1 results the Tribune Co. is planning a new wave of job cuts, sources told the Chicago Tribune. According to Michael Oneal at the Chicago Tribune, 100 positions at his paper could be targeted for buyouts. It's not known how many cuts Tribune plans to make company-wide. If not enough people step forward to take the packages, Tribune could result to layoffs. On Thursday, Tribune reported a net loss of $15.6 million in Q1. Operating cash flow fell to $238 million from $271 million compared to the...

The Los Angeles Times is expected to announce a plan Monday to cut slightly more than 5% of its workforce, or about 150 jobs, as profits at the newspaper and its Chicago-based parent company, continued to slide in the first quarter. Executives at the paper said they expect most of the cuts--including nearly 70 positions in The Times' newsroom--to come through voluntary buyouts. After the reductions, the newspaper will have a total of about 2,625 employees. Its news staff will drop to about 870, from 940. Job reductions have been widely anticipated since last fall, when Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson...

NEW YORK In what’s becoming a regular refrain, third quarter earning results are expected to be disappointing with few if any surprises, said a new report from Goldman Sachs. Even after chopping estimates for five newspaper companies, analyst Peter Appert wrote, "we expect further downward pressure on estimates coming out of 3Q results." They forecast a 6% average year-over-year decline in the industry’s 3Q earnings per share. The note waves off investors who might be attracted to the newspaper group’s low valuations and the financial restructuring of several companies. Goldman stamped the sector with an “underweight” rating. Analysts loweredtheir estimate...

he editor of The Los Angeles Times appears to be in a showdown with the paper’s owner, the Tribune Company, over job cuts in the newsroom. In a highly unusual move, Dean P. Baquet, who was named editor last year, was quoted yesterday in his own newspaper as saying he was defying the paper’s corporate parent in Chicago and would not make the cuts it requested. The paper’s publisher, Jeffrey M. Johnson, said he agreed with Mr. Baquet. “Newspapers can’t cut their way into the future,” he told the paper. The number of jobs at stake is unclear but the...

Couric Furious At CBS Suits. She Claims "They Are Stabbing Me In The Back." Katie Couric is not a happy camper this morning. The Suits at CBS have sent a strong signal throughout the news department that they have already lost faith in her. Here are the details as reported to me this AM from an old friend at West 57th. (Here beginnith the First Lesson.) “Promos” (short for promotional announcements) are advertisements a station or network runs to promote their own programs. A 30 second televised message advertising Veg-O-Matic is called a “spot” (short for spot advertisement.) A 30...

http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/060814roco02 Must read...

At first everyone thought they were just blowing smoke, but the debunking of a Reuters photograph by a group of Web sites has launched a fiery online war in which bloggers have taken on the mainstream media. Bloggers, or writers on web logs, were the first to reveal that a Reuters photograph depicting plumes of black smoke rising over Beirut was doctored to enhance smoke above the city. The Web site www.LittleGreenFootballs.com is credited with first revealing the scandal, which has been dubbed Reutersgate, but the affair has spread far wider than the Reuters News Agency and into several of...

How Much Does It Cost to Buy Global TV News? The vast majority of the TV news pictures you see are produced by two TV news companies. Presented here is a case for how a large amount of money has been used to inject a clear bias into the heart of the global TV news gathering system. That this happens is not at question, whether it is by accident or design is harder to tell. You may not realize it, but if you watch any TV news broadcast on any station anywhere in the world, there is a better than...

8/1/2006 - This is a really interesting 60 minutes segment from a few yeas ago about how the Palestinians use their own camera crews and actors to basically set up war scenes in their favor. Their calling it Pallywood and I thought it was pretty relavent considering whats happening now in the middle east.

Infighting and Weak Ad Sales Hurt Both New Companies; Questioning a Media Fad 'I Have No Second Thoughts' On Jan. 3, Viacom Inc. Chairman Sumner Redstone stood on the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange and heralded the split of his media conglomerate. "The world has changed," he declared after he rang the opening bell. Seven months later, the world indeed has changed -- but not entirely in the way Mr. Redstone predicted. The decision to separate the fast-growing MTV Networks from the more mature CBS TV and radio operation coincided with a sudden slowdown in cable-TV ad sales....

"I think we'll have a newscast that evolves over time," Katie Couric told the press in Denver Thursday, on day four of her cross-country tour. Couric will spend time in San Diego today before heading up the road to Los Angeles for the TCA Press Tour this weekend. At the town meetings, Couric and potential viewers have been talking about the Internet, among other subjects. The AP reports: "The changes, she said, could include expanding segments and breaking traditional time constraints of newscasting. The network is also focusing on how the Internet can enhance the nightly news, offering a place...

Dow Jones yesterday offered a clue to the possible next editorial overseer of The Wall Street Journal, its flagship publication, as the company twinned an announcement of the retirement date of the newspaper’s managing editor with the creation of a committee to reassess the ways it delivers news across all its print and online properties. Paul E. Steiger, The Journal’s managing editor since 1991, will step down at the end of 2007, the year he turns 65, in accordance with the company’s retirement policies. Meanwhile, Paul Ingrassia, president of Dow Jones Newswires, will lead the companywide project as part of...

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A prominent businessman who turned the sale of the San Francisco Chronicle into a drawn-out legal drama six years ago is now suing to prevent McClatchy Inc. from completing a $737 million deal to sell three of the newspapers it picked up in its recent acquisition of Knight Ridder Inc. Clinton Reilly, a millionaire real estate investor, plans to file an antitrust lawsuit Friday that could derail or at least delay McClatchy's plan to unload the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times and Monterey Herald, according to his lawyer, Joseph A. Alioto. The lawsuit, to...

Normally genteel Santa Barbara convulsed with another round of recrimination Thursday over its daily newspaper — with owner Wendy McCaw accusing journalists who quit her newsroom en masse of using the paper to air their biases, while one of the defectors slammed the wealthy owner as an amateurish meddler. Much of the fighting was conducted on the front pages of the Santa Barbara News-Press and the alternative weekly the Santa Barbara Independent. Even one-time Washington political columnist Lou Cannon joined in the print-lashing of the daily newspaper's operators. While the week-old battle raged, an eighth News-Press journalist resigned Thursday and...