In recent weeks, LinkedIn, the networking website, and the Council of Economic Advisers have reported that the press is “America’s fastest-shrinking industry”, measured by jobs lost; the Newspaper Association of America has shown that advertising sales have halved since 2005 and are now at 1984’s level; and the Pew Research Center has found that for every digital ad dollar they earned, they lost $7 in print ads.
As media from television to billboards bounce back from the recession, newsprint is being left behind. Zenith Optimedia this week predicted that internet advertising would pass newspaper advertising next year around the world – but in the US, where internet penetration is high and newspaper audiences are shrinking, digital will overtake newspapers’ and magazines’ combined ad sales this year, eMarketer estimates.
“There’s no doubt we’re going out of business now,” one unnamed executive told Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which predicted a future of shrinking newsrooms, print deliveries only a few days of the week and more papers closing altogether. A USC Annenberg School study reached the stark conclusion that most printed US dailies would be gone in five years. . . .
In their recent book, "The Death and Life of American Journalism," Robert McChesney and John Nichols tracked the number of people working in journalism since 1980 and compared it to the numbers for public relations. Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, they found that the number of journalists has fallen drastically while public relations people have multiplied at an even faster rate. In 1980, there were about .45 PR workers per 100,000 population compared with .36 journalists. In 2008, there were .90 PR people per 100,000 compared to .25 journalists. That's a ratio of more than three-to-one, better equipped, better financed.
How much better?
The researcher who worked with McChesney and Nichols, R. Jamil Jonna, used census data to track revenues at public relations agencies between 1997 and 2007. He found that revenues went from $3.5 billion to $8.75 billion. Over the same period, paid employees at the agencies went from 38,735 to 50,499, a healthy 30 percent growth in jobs. And those figures include only independent public relations agencies -- they don't include PR people who work for big companies, lobbying outfits, advertising agencies, non-profits, or government. . . .
We certainly hope that is not the case. In fact, "Fair Game," based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions - not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false. In reality, as The Post's Walter Pincus and Richard Leiby reported, Ms. Plame did not work directly on the program, and it was not shut down because of her identification.
The movie portrays Mr. Wilson as a whistle-blower who debunked a Bush administration claim that Iraq had tried to purchase uranium from the African country of Niger. In fact, an investigation by the Senate intelligence committee found that Mr. Wilson's reporting did not affect the intelligence community's view on the matter, and an official British investigation found that President George W. Bush's statement in a State of the Union address that Britain believed that Iraq had sought uranium in Niger was well-founded.
"Fair Game" also resells the couple's story that Ms. Plame's exposure was the result of a White House conspiracy. A lengthy and wasteful investigation by a special prosecutor found no such conspiracy - but it did confirm that the prime source of a newspaper column identifying Ms. Plame was a State Department official, not a White House political operative. . . .
But it's especially painful when the slip-ups involve the highly read and heavily scrutinized White House pool reports.
The New York Times's Helene Cooper had her goof Wednesday night when she misidentified Sen. Bill Nelson in a report from President Obama's Miami fundraiser, calling him Sen. Ben Nelson. She also said that POTUS was the one with the wrong name, not her.
She quickly corrected the goof in an e-mail featuring the subject, "Ack! Pool correx."
"Turns out potus was right and pool was wrong," wrote Cooper. "Its bill nelson not ben. Blame the mojitos. Please disregard all refs to ben."
A little drinking on the job? An earlier pool report from Cooper on Wednesday evening declared, "your pool is awaiting their mojitos at the Fountainebleu" (aka Fontainebleau).
As daily newspapers continue to shed Washington bureaus and severely slash their staffs, fewer reporters than ever are serving as watchdogs of the federal government. Rare is the reporter who is assigned to cover one of the many federal departments, agencies or bureaus that are not part of the daily news cycle. . . . Networks and cable television news outlets certainly have reporters in Washington, but they concentrate on politics and the story of the day out of the White House, the Capitol and the most visible departments, such as Defense, State, Justice and Homeland Security. National Public Radio has beefed up its Washington coverage the past several years, and its reporters--many of them former newspaper writers--do have time for enterprise. Yet when it comes to departments, it sticks to the same handful as television. . . .
Oprah Winfrey’s interview with former vp candidate Sarah Palin scored the talk show host her highest rating in two years.
Monday's episode of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" drew a 8.7 household rating and 13 share -- the best since Oprah had the entire Osmond family on the show in 2007.
That means Palin also topped Oprah's heavily viewed interviews with Whitney Houston at the start of the season. . . .
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL -- 2,024,269 -- 0.61%
USA TODAY -- 1,900,116 -- (-17.15%)
THE NEW YORK TIMES -- 927,851 -- (-7.28%)
LOS ANGELES TIMES -- 657,467 -- (-11.05%)
THE WASHINGTON POST -- 582,844 -- (-6.40%)
DAILY NEWS (NEW YORK) -- 544,167 -- (-13.98%)
NEW YORK POST -- 508,042 -- (-18.77%)
CHICAGO TRIBUNE -- 465,892 -- (-9.72%)
HOUSTON CHRONICLE -- 384,419 -- (-14.24%)
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER -- 361,480 -- N/A
NEWSDAY -- 357,124 -- (-5.40%)
THE DENVER POST -- 340,949 -- N/A
THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC -- 316,874 -- (-12.30%)
STAR TRIBUNE, MINNEAPOLIS -- 304,543 -- (-5.53%)
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES -- 275,641 -- (-11.98%)
The PLAIN DEALER, CLEVELAND -- 271,180 -- (-11.24%)
DETROIT FREE PRESS (e) -- 269,729 -- (-9.56%)
THE BOSTON GLOBE -- 264,105 -- (-18.48%)
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS -- 263,810 -- (-22.16%)
THE SEATTLE TIMES -- 263,588 -- N/A
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- 251,782 -- (-25.82%)
THE OREGONIAN -- 249,163 -- (-12.06%)
THE STAR-LEDGER, NEWARK -- 246,006 -- (-22.22%)
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE -- 242,705 -- (-10.05%)
ST. PETERSBURG (FLA.) TIMES -- 240,147 -- (-10.70%)
The Lloyd and Napoli simple equation (2007) was applied to both the Hispanic television and radio industries in these two specific cities.
(A) x (B) x (C) / N = D
∑ of D’s = M
A = Outlet (value = 1)
B = Potential audience reach (i.e. percentage of Hispanics in the market)
C = Content (provision of local news = 1; non provision of local news = 0)
N = Number of outlets owned by the owner
D = Diversity contribution of owner
M = Diversity metric for market
Take variable C. No weight is give to stations if they do not produce local and original news content or public affairs programming. They are given a weight of one if they produce any local and original news content or public affairs programming. In other words, the station could have hours of talk radio or make political comments between songs and they wouldn't be given any weight. Also network news for Univision Radio and Border Media Partners presumably at least occasionally carries local news stories that are of interest to local Hispanics (for example, something big might effect Hispanics in Texas and it gets covered), but the weight given to that news coverage is still zero.
The written discussion indicates that weight is only given to stations that are apparently 100 percent owned by people of Spanish heritage (Hispanics, Mexicans, Venezuelans, etc.). No weight is given to non-Spanish stations where the news director or the reporters are Hispanic. Presumably Hispanics own stock in Citadel or Westwood One or Disney, but those ownership shares do not count at all. I assume that this is what variable A stands for.
Take variable B. This is very strange because if there are no Hispanics in a market, the market cannot be diverse. You could have all the radio and TV stations owned by Hispanics and producing local news, but without any Hispanics in the area the variable B would equal zero and zero time anything else is still zero, so there would be no diversity.
Finally, even if you have 10 Hispanic stations that provided local news and were completely owned by Hispanics, if you had two companies owning five companies each, that would only count as two stations. This dramatically reduces any measure of diversity. In theory, some radio stations might have talk aimed at liberals and some at conservatives, but that wouldn't matter in terms of diversity.
The bottom line is that this definition of diversity dramatically underestimates the news and information provided by Hispanics to other Hispanics. Presumably the definition was chosen precisely to make diversity look as low as possible.
"In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution - a democratic revolution. To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela.
"The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled - worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government - worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.
"And we've had complaints about this ever since."
CARACAS, Sept 5 (Reuters) - Venezuela will pull the plug on 29 more radio stations, a top official in President Hugo Chavez's government said on Saturday, just weeks after dozens of other outlets were closed in a media clampdown.
Infrastructure Minister Diosdado Cabello closed 34 radio stations in July, saying the government was "democratizing" media ownership. Critics say the move limits freedom of expression and has taken critical voices off the airwaves.
The powerful Chavez ally has threatened to close over 100 stations in total, part of a long-term campaign against private media that the government says are biased against Chavez's government.
"Another 29 will be gone before long," he told thousands of Chavez supporters at a political rally, without giving details which stations would be closed or when.
Cabello also said he was launching a new legal case against Globovision, the country's most prominent anti-government television network, accusing it of inciting a coup against Chavez. . . .
Conservatives have accused Lloyd, appointed by the Federal Communications Commission as the agency’s Chief Diversity officer in late July, of secretly wanting to reinstate the controversial Fairness Doctrine — a regulation the FCC abolished in 1987 that required broadcasters to present contrasting views on important and controversial issues. Conservatives radio hosts have said Obama wants to reinstate it, and that it would push them off the air.
In right-wing media, where Lloyd has been christened Obama’s "diversity czar," pundits rail against the former vice president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Massachusetts Institute of Technology law professor. . . . .
Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley has picked up the call. "Mr. Lloyd supports a backdoor method of furthering the goals of the Fairness Doctrine by other means," he wrote in an August letter to FCC chairman Julius Genachowski.
But in a 2007 report for the liberal Center for American Progress, where he was a senior fellow, Lloyd noted that conservative shows dominate the airways — but did not endorse the Fairness Doctrine.
"We call for ownership rules that we think will create greater local diversity of programming, news, and commentary," he wrote in a July article about the paper. "But we do not call for a return to the Fairness Doctrine."
Interestingly, we do not have any agreement at all on the question of whether it is a good plan to bring a gun to a gathering of angry and overwrought people. To be honest, I thought we might be able to nail this one down.
But no.
“The question is, why don’t people bear arms these days,” said William Kostric, when asked why he came to welcome President Obama to Portsmouth, N.H., on Tuesday with a protest sign and a loaded handgun strapped to his thigh. This turned out to be completely legal under New Hampshire law. . . .
About a dozen people carrying guns, including one with a military-style rifle, milled among protesters outside the convention center where President Barack Obama was giving a speech Monday—the latest incidents in which protesters have openly displayed firearms near the president. . . .
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) called on the Homeland Security Department and the U.S. Secret Service on Wednesday to provide tighter restrictions on citizens carrying weapons, openly or concealed, while in the vicinity of President Barack Obama.
Norton, who sits on the Homeland Security Committee, made the request after numerous news reports have shown groups of people brandishing firearms while outside of events held by Obama over the past several weeks.
“It is clear that if the Secret Service can temporarily clear all aircraft from air space when the president is in the vicinity, the agency has the authority to clear guns on the ground that are even closer to the President,” Norton said.
But the Secret Service says that Obama was never in danger when a group of about a dozen protesters brandished their firearms outside the Phoenix convention center earlier this week where he was speaking. . . .
Fox News is on track to have its most-watched year ever, showing significant ratings growth despite having just come off a highflying election year.
With the second quarter coming to a close, Fox News averaged about the same number of viewers as the top three other cable news networks combined. And while rivals including CNN (down 22 percent) and MSNBC (down 18 percent) took hits following last quarter's inauguration-fueled boost, Fox News (down 3 percent) remained nearly steady.
Compared with last year, the Fox News (averaging 2.1 million viewers, 509,000 adults aged 25-54 quarter-to-date) is up both 35 percent over last year in primetime viewers and 48 percent in the demo. CNN (805,000 viewers, 210,000 in the demo) fell both 16 percent in viewers and 29 percent in the demo. MSNBC (787,000 viewers, 259,000 in the demo) climbed 15 percent in viewers and was about on par in the demo. And CNN Headline News (553,000, 201,000) showed very strong growth, up 39 percent and 37 percent, respectively, and is on track for its best second quarter.
The new standings are strong enough to rank Fox News third behind USA and TNT among all ad-supported cable networks for the quarter among primetime total viewers. In its core demo, Fox News had eight of the top 10 cable news shows. It had similarly sunny increases for total day, while CNN and MSNBC were roughly on par with last year. . . . .
It seems Fox made the smart move by deciding not to air president Obama's 100th-day press conference. The network beat every other broadcaster, all of which were carrying the president's speech, in the ratings. Fox's new episode of Lie To Me drew 7.9 million viewers. Fox also got millions in advertising revenue by running a normal TV program instead of Obama's commercial-free address. In second place for the 8 p.m. hour was NBC's airing of Obama's speech, which pulled in 6.7 million viewers. Are people finally getting bored with Obama's frequent speeches? . . .
With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.
"This may not be the optimal choice for some major newspapers or corporate media chains but it should be an option for many newspapers that are struggling to stay afloat," said Senator Benjamin Cardin.
A Cardin spokesman said the bill had yet to attract any co-sponsors, but had sparked plenty of interest within the media, which has seen plunging revenues and many journalist layoffs. . . . . .
Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements. . . . .
The season finale of “Burn Notice,” entitled “Lesser Evil,” involves Michael Weston (Jeffrey Donovan) trying to keep both himself and Madeline Weston, his mom (Sharon Gless), safe from some angry spies. Madeline and Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell) are surrounded by those bad spies and Madeline makes what to many may seem like an obvious suggestion.Madeline Weston: Should I call the police?
Sam Axe: No, that would make it way too easy for them. Cops take us to the station — they know where we are and they know that we are unarmed.
The segment reminded me of an even even more politically incorrect show: “The Rifleman.” The episode entitled “The Anvil Chorus” aired on December 17, 1962, and is summarized this way: . . .
The first proposal was advanced by the Teamsters union, which holds 2,569 shares of the company. It asks Apple to report all of the company's direct and indirect political contributions and expenditures, twice annually. Apple's directors say the proposal is "unnecessary and unproductive" and would reveal information on its private negotiations with trade associations to its competitors.
The second shareholder proposal was advanced by the AFL-CIO union, which holds 500 shares of Apple. It asks the board to adopt heath care reform principles outlined by the Institute of Medicine. Apple's directors say the measure will not benefit the company, its employees, or its shareholders, and that health care reform is a matter for the new US President and Congress to address.
A third proposal has been made by individual with less than 100 shares in Apple, but is cosponsored by the New York City Office of the Comptroller (with over two million shares) and Green Century Equity Fund (with another nearly 8,000 shares). It asks the company to deliver a report on sustainability including all corporate strategies related to climate change, the environmental impacts of toxics and recycling programs, and all employee and product safety issues. Apple's directors say the company already reports much of this information on social and environmental issues on its website, and that additional reporting obligations are unnecessary.
The last shareholder proposal is from the AFSCME Employees Pension Plan, a public health union which holds over 21,000 shares in Apple. It request the company issue a shareholders' advisory vote on executive compensation. Apple's directors say that setting executive compensation is the job of the board itself, and that limitations imposed by shareholder voting could have an adverse impact on the company's ability to recruit and retain top talent. . . .
A once-timid group of social outcasts is emerging from the shadows in Hollywood. If the past year is any indication, Tinseltown may have to get accustomed to the loud presence of a growing minority.
After years of silence, conservatives are coming out of the closet.
Andrew Breitbart, the conservative founder of Breitbart.com and author of "Hollywood Interrupted: Insanity Chic in Babylon," is launching a Web site he hopes will help challenge the status quo in what he believes has been a one-party, left-tilting town. Set to debut on Jan. 6, "Big Hollywood" will be a place where center, right and libertarian-leaning celebrities and industry-insiders can weigh in on Hollywood politics, offer film, television and movie reviews, and have an open forum for political discussion.
"Our goal," says Breitbart, who lives in Los Angeles, "is to create an atmosphere of tolerance — something that does not exist in this town."
Breitbart has invited a number of conservative politicians, commentators and journalists to write regularly about the cult of celebrity, liberalism in popular culture, and politics. Among the names who will be contributing, he says, are Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va), political commentator Tucker Carlson, and former Tennessee Senator and Republican presidential contender Fred Thompson. . . . .
Its been rumored that Robert Downey Jr. Robert Downey Jr. is a closet Republican.
Actor Dennis Hopper is a conservative.
Actor Kelsey Grammer is a conservative.
Actor Gary Sinise is an out-of-the-closet conservative.
Actor Stephen Baldwin is conservative.
Actress Patricia Heaton is a conservative.
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