Wilkes-Barre Times Leader Publisher Richard Connor says things are hunky fuckin' dory at the TL. "Hey, Ma, things are all right here at home," he writes.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Richard Connor: Knight Ridder was stupid to sell to me
Wilkes-Barre Times Leader Publisher Richard Connor says things are hunky fuckin' dory at the TL. "Hey, Ma, things are all right here at home," he writes.
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Then why is there a hiring freeze?
There's a hiring freeze? What about the copy desk job in the paper?
I heard there was a hiring freeze too. not sure about the jobs posted.
Thought this AP story was interesting...
AP urges news industry to embrace online
By SETH SUTEL, AP Business Writer Fri Nov 2, 3:34 AM ET
NEW YORK - Tom Curley, CEO of The Associated Press, called on news executives Thursday to "stop pining" for the past and adapt to the new ways that news is being distributed and consumed.
Curley said in a speech that news organizations should quit thinking like gatekeepers of information and reach out to people who are accustomed to receiving news in real time online and customizing the ways they see and read it.
"Editors need to stop pining for the old world and intensify the leading to the new one," Curley told a fundraising dinner for the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship, a program at Columbia University for business journalists.
At the same time, Curley said news organizations were partly to blame for the troubles they are experiencing in adapting to the new realities of the news business being wrought by the explosion of Internet use.
"The first thing that has to go is the attitude," Curley said. "Our institutional arrogance has done more to harm us than any portal."
Curley has led AP, a news cooperative owned by its 1,500 daily U.S. newspaper members, since 2003. He called on traditional media companies to cooperate more with online portals such as Yahoo Inc. and said there was still a place for "appointment media" such as evening newscasts or home-delivered newspapers, "but it is a smaller place."
Newspaper publishers have been seeing declining advertising revenues as more readers and advertisers migrate to the Web. Their own revenues from online advertising have also been growing, but not fast enough to make up for the declines in print advertising.
"Our focus must be on becoming the very best at filling people's 24-hour news needs," Curley said. "That's a huge shift from the we-know-best, gatekeeping mentality. ... Readers and viewers are demanding to captain their information ships. Let them."
He also defended Rupert Murdoch, who was the subject of considerable negative coverage during his campaign to acquire Wall Street Journal publisher Dow Jones & Co. for $5 billion. Curley said Murdoch was "vilified," but that his News Corp. media conglomerate "has been a hugely successful, long-term operator."
Even before formally taking over Dow Jones, Curley said, Murdoch has "changed financial journalism in this city for the better. People at other organizations ... have begun to make decisions to invest or redeploy — decisions they had postponed for years."
KRI and Tony Ridder have the last laugh as circulation continues to plummet (see latest fas-fax).
Connors is now publisher, ad director, editor,and soon to be CFO. Anyone dseen him delivering newspapers in the back mountain yet? Just as McClatchy took a write down, Connors soon to drown in his own editorial psycho babble.
I wonder if the equity investors who have the majority stake in the TL have the same feelings. Their are no signs that the TL is doing well other than the editorials that Connors writes. Given the state of the industry and the amount of debt that was taken on to purchase the TL, I doubt seriously if the situation is as rosy as the phantom editor paints. Just ask the advertising team if they have been meeting their targets? OH ... and KRI did not sell to him McClatchy did.
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