Matt McHale was a near contemporary of mine. We got into sports journalism about the same time, and we left it within a week of each other, each laid off* by the L.A. News Group earlier this year. Matt died today in Connecticut. He had fallen ill in late May, three months or so after […]

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I take no pleasure in the cuts at the Los Angeles Times. Even though the Times was the main competition for most of my journalism career, and it’s a test to avoid the instinctive “what’s bad for them is good for me!” mind-set of days gone by. This was the newspaper derisively known as “The […]

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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, […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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