Back in March we linked to a haunting photo gallery put together by a designer at the San Jose Mercury News.
The gallery dramatically recorded the emptying out of print journalism newsrooms in The Great Purge of 2008, and was seen by thousands of people — much to the chagrin of Merc management.
Martin Gee, the man […]

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I know more about particle physics than finance, but I remember bidness people talking about how even the biggest economic downturns produce winners.
For a batch of reasons, I guess. They sell before the collapse, they get into companies relatively immune to market forces. They hoard precious metals then scoop up bargains as the market hits […]

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I’ve been thinking about this for several months now, through the lens of my own layoff and the much bigger picture of the print journalism world’s free-fall — and the daily revelations of more big cuts here, there, everywhere.
At what point should a newspaper editor say, “I’m not going to be the guy who guts […]

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This was the Russo-Japanese War of newspaper collisions. Little-noted beyond the immediate participants, but messy and decisive, all the same, concluding with one side crippled and the other enormously stronger and recognized as a major regional player for the first time.
The Russo-Japanese War began in 1904 and ended with Russia humiliated and on its way […]

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This comes from one of my sources about comings and goings — well, goings, almost entirely — in the newsroom of the combined operations of the San Bernardino Sun and Inland Valley (Ontario) Daily Bulletin.
Another solid middle-manager is on the way out of the Berdoo office, to be replaced by … anyone?
The escapee this time […]

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Well, nobody much rose to the bait of the rumor tossed my way, of Hearst perhaps about to take over operations of the L.A. Daily News. Nobody within LADN, and that probably is telling. A rumor always is hottest at its source.
I labeled it a rumor in a post a day ago, and that’s what […]

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A former colleague of mine was in a press room yesterday when a rumor came through that Hearst is looking to buy/take over/run the L.A. Daily News, currently the big dog of MediaNews’ L.A. News Group.
Anyone know anything about this? This is complete rumor, as of this minute. I don’t see anything about it anywhere […]

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It appears that while trying to keep track of all the titled players in the San Bernardino Sun/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin upheaval … I really could have used a program.
Someone with knowledge of the situation wrote to correct some of the information on the blog item directly below this one.
The overall concept is unchanged: Things […]

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I had heard rumblings about continued upheaval in the offices of the San Bernardino Sun and Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. Two papers led by Steve Lambert, the guy who fired me two months ago.
But I haven’t seen either paper with any regularity since then, and my contact with survivors of those two papers has been […]

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Apparently, the L.A. News Group newspapers still are struggling to publish.
This is Day 2 and it may be next week — Day 6 or 7, that is — before LANG’s overworked and underpowered (and shared) Unisys computer system comes up.
(See techie updates over at the Reporter-G blog.)
A former LANG layout editor told me the issue […]

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