News Corporation confirmed today that it is considering a restructuring to separate its business into two distinct publicly traded companies.A press release from News Corp. • Revealing that it is consid… oh you can read the quote! That’s like the entire statement, verbatim. (ht Matt)
[Chairman Arthur] Sulzberger, working with the board and search firm Spencer Stuart, initially put together a list of fewer than a dozen candidates to lead the company, according to the people familiar with the matter.
Executives on the list who have been discussed included aspirational picks such as Google Inc.’s Eric Schmidt and Eileen Naughton, the people said. Schmidt’s digital-media credentials were attractive to Sulzberger, who wants an executive with significant online experience, according to the people.
Schmidt, 57, stepped down as CEO of Mountain View, California-based Google in April 2011, while remaining chairman of the company. Naughton, a top sales executive at the Web- search giant, was president of Time Warner Inc.’s magazine division before joining Google in 2006.
Sulzberger declined to comment on the CEO search, as did Google and Akamai. The Google candidates are unlikely to take the job, one of the people familiar with the situation said.
Schmidt may just be a pie-in-the-sky candidate for the Times, but as Josh Sternberg pointed out in a March article, media companies are starting to think like tech companies. If Schmidt, on an off chance, decided to move from Mountain View to NYC, it’d be the most blatant admission yet that this is the case. (Now, by the way, might be a good time to look back at the New York Magazine’s piece on the departure of Janet Robinson, the company’s last CEO.)
I’ve been meaning to write a piece about this. We were talking earlier about the daily gaffes and Twitter and the news cycle, and I’m totally as much to blame for helping that atmosphere as anyone. We all engage in tweeting and commenting and hammering these guys when they say something off message. It’s created a crisis for political journalism. People genuinely do not think it is in their interest — both White House and campaign officials, both campaigns, it’s not a partisan thing at all, it’s Democrats and Republicans — they genuinely do not believe it’s in their interest to talk in an unguarded way. Because even if they trust you to get the context 100 percent right, it doesn’t matter, because they know that a liberal or conservative blog, or a campaign ad, will just grab something out of context and run with it and create some damaging meme.
I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and it’s worse now than it’s ever been. If you think about it from their perspective for a second, you can’t totally blame them. Lately I’ve realized it’s harder than it’s ever been, and these campaigns want to exercise complete and total message discipline. In the current media environment, that’s the whole game. There’s pretty serious tension between running a campaign and running a transparent and open White House. We often complain about this, and rightfully so, but we have to recognize some of the blame here.
What are the odds the Etch A Sketch gaffe would’ve become a thing had Twitter not existed?
musingsbymattheous says: Can you please stop acting like The Huffington Post is a legitimate news source? They’re worst than Fox News.
» SFB says: FWIW, they have more Pulitzers than Fox News does. (One.) While we have our disagreements with HuffPo’s style of aggregation and approach at times, they are a legitimate news source and they do their own original reporting. If they do something questionable (which happens from time to time), we’ll call them out on it, just like we do with Fox News or any other outlet. Just because you don’t like something doesn’t make them illegitimate; it just puts them up for more scrutiny. — Ernie @ SFB
When I was asked to do this, we were always clear it would be temporary — daily newscast anchoring is not what I am built do do. But that doesn’t mean I’m not disappointed the program didn’t perform better.CNN anchor John King • Discussing the end of his “John King, USA,” which will get replaced with another hour of Wolf Blitzer doing his “Situation Room” thing. King will instead focus on the campaign trail — which he feels is his greatest strength. It’ll be his fourth presidential campaign with CNN. His show will continue through June 29.
Journalism Riches
Over at at Journalism Jobs a company is looking for US-based journalists to write cover and feature stories that will be placed in the “weekly, hyperlocal sections of a major metropolitan newspaper.”
For your efforts: $24 for a “cover story”, $10-$12 for “news and features”.
Via Journalism Jobs:
The job pays $24 per piece. Stories are two-source interviews on topics selected well in advance by our editorial team. Story lengths average 650 to 700 words, and each assignment requires the writer to include three hi-res photos from sources. An assignment editor will provide you with a story template and data to help write each piece. You contact sources, conduct interviews, mix in the data and write to spec.
If you’re doing the math on those cover stories, that’s three cents per word.
We feel dirty too.
For comparison’s sake, you can make $20-$30 per visit donating plasma, and you can do that twice a week.
Outside Wit’s Inn, someone called up NOLA.com on a smartphone and tried to watch a video of Amoss that had been posted earlier in the day — a video addressed to the paper’s readers, in which Amoss promised the new, smaller news operation’s future might be digital rather than print, but it would be just as bright. The video, however, was not formatted to play on smartphones.This story about the layoffs at the Times-Picayune is devastating for way too many reasons. (via maura)
Here’s how four newspapers in the same chain as the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which is downsizing to three days per week, covered the same round of layoffs this morning. Anyone else think it’s telling that the Alabama papers all buried the story, while the Times-Picayune played it up as their centerpiece?
Everybody blames the Internet for the decline of newspapers, but the Web is only the most recent of electric interruptions to have disturbed their profitability, which began with radio in the late 1920s and was followed by broadcast television, car radios, transistor radios, FM radio, and cable television. Newspapers were in so much advertising trouble in September 1941 that Time magazine ran a piece about their “downward economic spiral.” Press scholar David R. Davies argues in his 2006 book The Postwar Decline of American Newspapers, 1945-1965 that daily newspapers were in serious trouble by the mid-1960s, because, among other things, they had failed to hook the baby boom generation. Los Angeles Times press reporter David Shaw sounded the alarm in a 1976 piece in his newspaper. It began: “Are you now holding an endangered species in your hands?” Update the figures and change a few dates and the names of the principals in Shaw’s piece and you could almost pass it off as a 2012 diagnosis of newspaper industry ills.Jack Shafer, Reuters. The Great Newspaper Liquidation. (via futurejournalismproject)
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A second source close to Mashable confirms that executives have been working on a deal with CNN. This source speculates that the deal is 80% likely to close.
We don’t know if the deal has closed yet, nor do we know price. Obviously, it may fall apart. This report, for example, won’t help negotiations. We only know that Mashable executives are preparing for a sale.
This has actually been rumored for a while — Reuters’ Felix Salmon suggested this was going to happen back in March, though there’s no word if the $200 million acquisition price he suggested will actually pan out. Word is that some of the site’s sections would merge into CNN proper.
Fareed Zakaria and Bruno Mars look a lot alike, according to Mediaite’s list of cable news doppelgangers. Among the major differences we see: One can write an article about the dangers of using grenades in war zones, and the other would catch a grenade for ya.
So we’d like to make at least one more magazine together. Not an issue of GOOD—something different. We’re calling it Tomorrow. It’s going to be about what’s next, what’s on the cusp. We want to get out of our comfort zone and push others to do the same. We want to meet and introduce you to great people. We’ll have more details soon, so check back here later this week.
Sounds awesome.
Insta-follow. Of note: According to the blog post, magazine was profitable before they were canned. So what’s up with that?
wow
caveat that the story is more complex than this: people get TV from other sources (including satellite and their telcos) and they aren’t seeing the same decline. But still, it’s nice to see e.g., Time Warner Cable getting what’s due. Or to stop getting what’s not due, or something.
(via UH OH: New Nielsen Data Says People Are Turning Away From TV - Business Insider)
I noticed a small error in your chart! Here is an amended version:
The best graphic response since the graphic was invented.
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