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The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado’s oldest newspaper, has been put up for sale by its parent company. Citing worsening financial conditions and an expected loss at the paper of roughly $15 million this year, the E.W. Scripps Co. said it would seek a possible buyer in the next 30 days. Scripps CEO Rich Boehne, who took the helm of the company in July, made the announcement to the newsroom this morning. He told the editoral staff the decision “would have been unthinkable just a few months ago.”

It was supposed to be a joke. As an endless parade of corporate beggars marches to Washington in search of handouts for their beleaguered industries, some of us in the news business snarked that journalists would be next in line. I launched a Newspaper Bailout Countdown Clock on my blog after The New York Times Company's bonds plunged into junk territory in October. A few weeks later, columnist Jon Fine published a tongue-in-cheek memo in BusinessWeek outlining a federal newspaper rescue proposal. The jibes were meant to be facetious critiques of for-profit enterprises demanding massive taxpayer expenditures under the guise...

Insiders are telling me that end-of-year stats regarding DVD sales of 2008's major movie titles are looking like a disaster areas. The guesstimates are that even blockbuster titles like Iron Man and Hancock will be down 30%. Interesting that studios which earlier claimed their film biz was near-recession proof are now blaming the economy rather than new digital media delivery options.

The New York Times Co. reported a steep drop in third-quarter profits on Thursday, the latest gloomy earnings report in an industry battered by online competition and falling print advertising revenue. The New York Times Co. said net profit fell by 51.4 percent in the third quarter to 6.5 million dollars, or five cents per share, from 13.4 million dollars, or nine cents per share, in the same period a year ago. The company, which owns About.com, The Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune and 16 other daily newspapers besides the flagship The New York Times, said overall advertising revenue fell...

Two prominent Orange County businessmen have expressed interest in buying The Orange County Register, the longtime, family-owned flagship newspaper of Freedom Communications Inc. Newport Beach billionaire businessman George Argyros and Lawrence M. Higby, chief executive officer of Apria Healthcare Group Inc. who also is a former chairman of the Los Angeles Times Orange County edition, have had what was described as preliminary talks about making a bid for the Register. Scott Flanders, Freedom’s chief executive officer ... noted that with the financial difficulties facing the company, he is having discussions with a lot of people. ... A possible bid for...

Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in the country, is preparing to trim 3% of its workforce -- or 1,000 employees -- through cuts and attrition. Gannett Vice President of Corporate Communications Tara Connell confirmed the reductions to E&P Thursday afternoon, adding that decisions on staff cuts would be made at each property based on financial targets and performances. The McLean, Va.-based company publishes more than 80 dailies, including USA Today, and 900 non-dailies. Gannett corporate is expected to review and approve the decisions. The Gannett Blog, run by former Gannett editor and reporter Jim Hopkins from Ibiza, Spain reported Wednesday...

Hollywood is once again on the brink of war. This time the big movie studios and TV networks are skirmishing with their actors, whose union contracts expire next month. Unless both sides can agree on how to split future Internet revenues, the industry faces the terrifying prospect of its second prolonged talent strike of the year. Peter Chernin vows it won’t happen. Snip….. As that strike dragged into February, Chernin took action. One morning he and Disney Chief Robert Iger showed up at the negotiations at L.A.’s secluded Luxe Hotel bearing a crucial concession: The studios would give writers a...

The New York Times Co.'s continued struggles with declining advertising revenue prompted Standard & Poor's to caution Friday that it is inching closer to cutting the company's debt ratings. S&P said it placed all of the Times' ratings, including its key long-term corporate credit rating, on CreditWatch with negative implications. In plain English, that means the rating agency is leaning heavily toward a downgrade unless current financial trends at the company improve. S&P currently assigns the Times a long-term corporate credit rating of BBB. A one-notch downgrade would bring the rating down to BBB-. But in a research note Friday,...

NEW YORK, Oct 17 (Reuters) - Moody's Investors Service on Wednesday cut its ratings on Belo Corp (BLC.N: Quote, Profile, Research) into junk territory, and said it may cut them again, citing the newspaper publisher's limited ability to improve free cash flow in a challenging environment for newspapers. Belo's use of a bank facility with a material adverse change (MAC) clause to pay out a maturing bond issue is also consistent with a junk-rated company, Moody's said in a statement. Moody's cut Belo's senior unsecured debt one notch to "Ba1," one level below investment grade, from "Baa3." "The long-term ratings...

Radio host Don Imus is going to sue CBS for $120 million, according to a draft copy of the complaint obtained by ABC News' Law & Justice Unit. The suit is expected to be filed next week. A draft copy of Imus's lawsuit says that the network expected him to be controversial and irreverent under the terms of his contract. And he claims Imus's show was on a five second delay that allowed the network to censor him if they wanted. The draft points out that Imus wasn't fired for two weeks after the remarks were made. Meanwhile, four former...

Average paid weekday circulation of the nation's 20 largest newspapers for the six-month period ending in March, as reported Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The percentage changes are from the comparable year-ago period. 1. USA Today, 2,278,022, up 0.2 percent 2. The Wall Street Journal, 2,062,312, up 0.6 percent 3. The New York Times, 1,120,420, down 1.9 percent 4. Los Angeles Times, 815,723, down 4.2 percent 5. New York Post, 724,748, up 7.6 percent 6. New York Daily News, 718,174, up 1.4 percent 7. The Washington Post, 699,130, down 3.5 percent 8. Chicago Tribune, 566,827, down 2.1 percent...

U.S. media job cuts surged 88 percent in 2006 from the previous year, a downsizing trend expected to continue this year, a survey said Thursday. The media industry slashed 17,809 jobs last year, a nearly two-fold increase from the 9,453 cuts in 2005, outplacement consultancy Challenger Gray & Christmas said. The figure was the industry's largest annual job-cut total since 43,420 media job cuts accompanied the collapse of the technology bubble in 2001, the survey said. "A sea change in the way people get and read news, not to mention the way they search for jobs, used cars and consumer...

A former managing editor of The New York Times who was forced to resign amid the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal has died. Gerald Boyd was 56. His wife says Boyd was diagnosed with lung cancer in February and has been sick for most of the year. Boyd and executive editor Howell Raines were brought down by the scandal caused by the journalist they had groomed, and by criticism of their management style. Boyd resigned in 2003. Boyd was the first black journalist to work the many jobs he'd held at The Times, including metropolitan editor and managing editor. And at...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A federal judge has ruled The New York Times may not rely on information from a columnist's confidential sources in its defense against a libel lawsuit filed over the newspaper's coverage of the 2001 anthrax attacks. Former Army scientist Steven Hatfill, once identified by authorities as a "person of interest" in the anthrax mailings that killed five people in late 2001, is suing the Times for libel for a series of articles written by columnist Nicholas Kristof. U.S. Magistrate Judge Liam O'Grady issued the ruling Friday as a sanction against the newspaper for refusing to disclose the...

"Media Death Watch" has always been my favorite title thread on Freerepublic. I love to see a left wing newspaper/anchorman(babe)/TV special go down in flames. It proves the point that the MSM or DBM is of no concern to most of us. We (Republicans) live busy lives, making a living, raising our families, hunting, fishing, enjoying the fruits of our labor. Our news is from Rush, Hannity, Drudge, Newsmax, Townhall, Freerepublic. The title of this thread is my starting point of optimism in the elections. The outrage felt by millions over the Kerry remark, biased media, slanted polling and thousands...

Some layoffs are "unavoidable" at Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, which owns The Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com, publisher Brian P. Tierney told employees in a memo today. Tierney blamed a "permanent" decline in national newspaper advertising that has forced cutbacks at other newspapers and media companies. The size of the layoffs will depend on the outcome of union contract negotiations, Tierney wrote. Contracts covering 2,000 workers expire Oct. 31.

Walter Cronkite will introduce Katic Couric on the new CBS EVENING NEWS next week, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. Cronkite is just one of many superstars, and broadcast legends, that will help the former TODAY host splash onto the nightly news scene. "It's going to be a who's who of Americana," a top CBS source said on Sunday. Cronkite will do the introduction of Couric on opening night only, the source said. CBS brass dismiss the suggestion that adding Cronkite is an attention-grabbing stunt. "This is a bold statement of continuity and 'trust,' a commitment to the quality of the...

ON Hardball NBC anchor Brian Williams was asked by Chris Matthews if it was suprising that British muslims that had been exposed to western values, and where even British citizens would still hate us so much they would be willing to give up their lives to kill us. What was Brian Williams pontification? He said "we have guys on our side like that too. They are called Army Rangers and Navy Seals." What kind of mind would make that comparison. The question was what kind of hatered would overcome even a westernized muslin to want to die just to kill...

PITBULL JOURNALIST GOES SOFT ON IRANIAN MADMAN: 88-year-old CBS journalist says Iranian president a 'reasonable' man on Sean Hannity's ABC radio program... Points out Ahmadinejad not anti-Jewish... just anti-Zionist state. Says many Jews in Iranian Parliament, in great positions in Iranian life... Believes Ahmadinejad sincere in his hope for peaceful coexistence between Iran and West... Troubled by comparisons of leader to Hitler... Marvels at Ahmadinejad's civil engineering degree, 'intellect', 'savvy'... Asks viewers not to bring 'prejudices' to Sunday night '60 MINUTES' broadcast... Proclaims 'discussion' was sincere and not for propaganda purposes... Developing...

The Project for Excellence in Journalism is out with its annual report, "The State of the News Media 2006," and its findings are pretty grim for TV news. Viewership for the nightly news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC dipped to 27 million in 2005, a 1.8 million (6 percent) year-to-year drop that was "an acceleration of the pace of decline in recent years," the group found. The combined audience has shrunk by 48 percent since the advent of cable news programming in 1980 even while the U.S. population grew by nearly a third. Last week's Nielsen ratings offered further...