Journalism 2.0: It's for you

The Knight Citizen Network funded by the Knight Foundation has come out with a digital literacy guide for the information age in a 132-page must-see PDF file. It’s a resource for journalists and an intriguing look at the new wave of journalism which is even exciting for old timers. It will almost make you wish you could go back to work again.

The title is:

Journalism 2.0:
How to Survive and Thrive
A digital literary guide for the information age.

The author is Mark Briggs, a recovering sports writer who discovered what the Internet could do for journalism in 1998 and has been sharing his enthusiasm with whomever will listen (and some who won’t) ever since, contributing to textbooks, seminars and conferences on the topic. His day job is Assistant Managing Editor for Interactive News at The News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington. He has served as Editor of thenewstribune.com since 2004, when he was hired as Strategy and Content Manager for Interactive Media.

The foreword for the booklet was written by our own Philip Meyer who is the Knight Chair in Journalism in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His 1973 book, “Precision Journalism,” was listed by Journalism Quarterly as one of 35 significant books of the 20th Century on journalism and mass communication. The fourth edition was published in 2002. His most recent book is “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age,” published in 2004. Posts on his work have appeared in previous posts on the Retirees blog and website.

You can learn about some strange acronyms such as FTP (File Transfer Protocol), MB (megabytes) and RSS (Really Simple Syndication). They sound strange to us, but they are just incidentals in the news communications of the future which is already upon us. Learning we always be necessary.

Here’s a quote from the booklet:

The problem is that
everybody wants progress
but nobody wants change.

– Ulrik Haagerup, editor in chief of Nordjyske Media, Aalborg, Denmark

Click on the headline and download the PDF

What kind of news do people really want?

It’s almost fifty pages long, but well worth the read: a recent study by the Pew Research Center for People & the Press synthesizes 165 separate national surveys and finds that American news preferences have remained “surprisingly static” over the last twenty years. Tucked behind this central conclusion, however, is a suite of more intriguing observations about readership and audience habits.

Overall, the study found the percentage of people who follow the news “very closely” dropped from thirty percent during the 1980s to twenty-three percent during 1990s - but then jumped back to thirty percent during the twenty-first century. That swing has less to do with changes in information technology (from broadcast, to cable, to online) than with changes in world events - or “reality” as study author Michael J. Robinson described it. The dip in public attention during the last decade of the twentieth century was likely the result of relative peace and economic prosperity in the United States, he wrote: “The ’80s were more ‘interesting’; the ’90s, less so; the ’00s have been most interesting so far.”

The study broke down news in nineteen separate categories and then six “super categories.” Not surprisingly, war and terrorism have consistently ranked at the top of the stack since 1986, where the study begins. So have bad weather, and natural or manmade disaster stories, although the latter stand out for having witnessed a precipitous drop in public interest, one of the rare instances of significant change. In contrast, money news is the only category that has grown notably more popular with time. Crime, health, and politics have consistently ranked as mid-level interest categories. Science and technology, foreign news that is not directly related to the U.S., and tabloid and entertainment news have consistently ranked lowest in the public eye.

It is disheartening that only about a quarter of the American public, on average, finds news compelling on a daily basis. But contrary to popular belief, “there is scant evidence that during the last century - despite major changes in the news ‘menu’ - the American audience has moved toward a diet of softer news. News tastes have become neither less nor more serious since the 1980s,” Robinson concluded. As this singular observation indicates, the study, overall, is a mixed bag of the reassuring and the dismaying. Reading it leaves an impression not unlike the feeling of having broken even in a game of high-stakes poker - mostly frustrated, but a little relieved.

Click on the headline to read the full report in Columbia Journalism Review.

Ott Gangl has moved his website

Ott Gangl has a new server for his website. It is at

http://corrr1.com/

Save that in your bookmarks or favorites. You will find some great photos from Gangl there. Here’s the intro to Ott’s site:

My name is Ott Gangl, I am a retired Akron Beacon Journal Photographer and I have hundreds of pictures to give away, which is the reason for creating this web site. In a house cleaning move, rather than destroying the prints, I will try to give them to the subjects depicted or to their families. All pictures are ten years old or older. Most are about 8x10 inches in size, but I have many which are up to 16x20 inches and mounted.

I will post a new page of pictures periodically in a GALLERY section. These pictures are for your viewing pleasure only and are not available to the public.

These pictures were taken on many different occasions, whatever I would see, wherever I would go. You may click on a page to look at thumbnails of the pictures, they will be numbered consecutively below the thumbnails and dated where known. If you recognize yourself , e-mail me and you may have the original print for free. If you recognize someone you know, have them call or e-mail me and they may have the print. Click on the thumbnails to see a larger version of the picture. When you e-mail me please give particulars as to why you think it is you or someone you know that is pictured, and also any other pertinent information about the shot.

These photos are copyrighted and are for personal use ONLY

The photographs may NOT be used in flyers or publications or be duplicated without permission. Use in an album or displayed in a home or place of work is OK.

Time and inclination prevents me to look for particular pictures among the unsorted boxes of prints and since I saved only extra prints of people who interested me, and many, if not most of the pictures are not Beacon Journal related, please just look if a picture of you shows up here. I have no access to the Beacon Journal archives.

Bosley picks 2 for top SC honors

Two veteran journalists who chronicle community life in different ways — one in words, the other in photos — were honored Thursday by their colleagues at The State (Columbia, SC).

Allison Askins, 46, the newspaper’s food writer; and Neighbors photojournalist Tracy Glantz, 41, received the annual Hampton and Gonzales awards in ceremonies at the newspaper.

Askins and Glantz were nominated by their peers and selected by Scott Bosley, executive director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Bosley said Askins is “blessed with the creativity to see things in intriguing ways, even everyday things we often take for granted. Like food.”

Bosley noted that Glantz “has the drive to find stories on her own and patience to build relationships that make her subjects especially compelling.”

Each received a $1,000 cash award and trophy, along with the distinction of having their names added to a sort of newsroom “hall of fame” that goes back to 1968.

Click on the headline to read the story by the newspaper’s Dawn Hinshaw

Newspaper Ads Fall 8.6 Percent in 2Q

By Seth Sutel, AP Business Writer
NEW YORK (AP) -- Advertising revenues at newspapers fell 8.6 percent in the April-to-June period of this year, as an accelerating decline in print ads more than outweighed gains in online advertising, an industry group reported Friday.

Print-only advertising at newspapers slumped 10.2 percent to $10.5 billion in the second quarter of the year, marking the fifth consecutive quarter of declines, according to figures compiled by the Newspaper Association of America.

Online advertising at newspapers continued to grow, rising 19.3 percent to $795.7 million, although that was a slower rate than the 22.3 percent gain recorded in the first quarter and the 35 percent gain in the fourth quarter of last year.

At the same time, the share of online ads as a portion of all newspaper revenues continued to rise, making up 7 percent of total revenues in the first quarter, compared with 5.4 percent in the same period a year ago.

On a combined basis, print and online advertising combined fell 8.6 percent compared with the same three-month period a year ago to $11.3 billion, following declines of 4.8 percent in the first quarter and 2.2 percent in the fourth quarter of last year.

Newspapers still make up the largest category of overall advertising expenditures in the United States, but advertisers are steadily shifting money out of print advertising to the Internet as people increasingly go online for information and entertainment.

A study released by the media investment firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson in early August predicted that overall Internet advertising spending, including the ads on Web sites of traditional media outlets, will overtake print newspaper advertising in 2010 as the largest advertising category.

8% of Americans have their own blogs

"Eight percent of Americans currently have their own blog," said Tom Mularz, senior vice president at Synovate. "This is surprising given that a few years ago hardly anyone knew what a blog was."

Loyalty to specific blogs is relatively strong with 46 percent of blog readers reporting that they visit the same blogs regularly compared to 54 percent who search for new or different blogs.

Awareness and usage of blogs, along with people writing their own correlates to age, with younger people being more active. Close to 90 percent of people ages 25 to 34 know what a blog is, compared to 65 percent of those 65 and over. Seventy-eight percent of those ages 18 to 24 who are aware of blogs have visited a blog, compared to 45 percent of older Americans.

The survey found that there are more women bloggers than men, with 20 percent of American women who have visited blogs have their own versus 14 percent of men.

When it comes to reading blogs 39 percent read them less than once a month, another 28 percent visit them monthly, 15 percent visit them daily and 5 percent read them several times a day.

Blogger Note: Love our 5 percent.

Click on the headline to read the full story on Webprobnews.com

A BJ promo ad from 1986

This promotion ad in the Beacon Journal was one in a series of in-paper promotion ads that won a top award in the 1986 Ohio Newspaper Advertising Executives statewide competition among daily newspapers. Click on the ad to enlarge for a better view.

Here’s the copy block for the ad promo for Bill O’Connor:

When Bill O'Connor attends one of the 120 or so movies and 80 theatrical productions he sees each year, he approaches his job as critic for the Beacon Journal in this way:

He states, "I approach the movie or play as the late James Cagney approached acting. Cagney said, "You look the other fellow in the eye and you tell the truth." "So, too, in a movie or play, we should be told the truth about the world portrayed, whether that truth be painful, funny, or insightful."

"It's when the truth is hedged or there is no truth, that the critic has to howl.”

Bill O'Connor did his undergraduate work at St. Francis College, and he took a Master's degree at Bowling Green University. He spent ten years as an instructor of English and drama with Montana University.

In addition, he has published two novels, Bums and Hershey Bars and The Legend of Horn Mountain and publication of a third, The Wicked Dwell Near Thee, is in negotiations.

Bill O'Connor knows his way around a stage and, so, when you're reading his reviews in the Beacon Journal that's one more way you know about movies and plays that try to tell the truth, those that fail, and those that succeed.

Akron BeaconJournal
the way you know

PD gets heat for hiring another white guy (Pluto)

Note well. This report is from the Cleveland Scene

The Plain Dealer is under fire from black journalists after adding another white guy to its roster of sports columnists, a team that now has the diversity and sex appeal of a Golden Girls shower scene.

In a letter last week, Roxanne Jones, an ESPN VP. and member of the National Association of Black Journalists, criticized the hiring of former Akron Beacon Journal columnist Terry Pluto. He is white, male, and the love child of a Whose Line Is It Anyway? skit gone bad.

In her letter, Jones criticized the PD's poor minority hiring record, which includes the time editors got drunk and approved Bud Shaw's Sunday Spin column. The paper should have at least interviewed some black candidates for the job, she wrote.

Editor Susan Goldberg, formerly of the more diverse San Jose Mercury News, admits her paper is whiter than a Shelley Long movie marathon. "I came from a much more diverse newsroom," she tells Punch. "Just visually, it stood out to me." Only 14 percent of the editorial staff are minorities, she says, not including editorial writer Kevin O'Brien, who comes from Planet What the F%&# Is He Talking About?

But hiring Pluto, the best-known sports columnist in Northeast Ohio, was a no-brainer. Goldberg didn't need the charade of interviewing others. While the paper plans to cast a wider net for other jobs, "This is an exception . . He's a major player here."

The paper's mistake will not be Pluto's race, Punch predicts, but his religion. The born-again columnist once penned a piece confessing his porn addiction. Despite this serious miscalculation -- That's way too much information, Terry! -- the PD has also agreed to let Pluto pen a regular religion column.

Published: August 29, 2007

Vikings Will Not Buy Star Tribune Property

Here is a memo from Star Tribune publisher Par Ridder to Jim Romensko of Poynter Online.

By Par Ridder
Publisher and CEO

The Minnesota Vikings have advised us that they do not intend to buy the four blocks of Star Tribune property around the Metrodome. To date there is no change to the legal status of the purchase agreement as previously announced.

While we had reached agreement on a deal in principle, the collapse of the I-35W Bridge and the turbulent credit markets have caused the Vikings to reevaluate their plans.

As you know, in anticipation of this sale, we have started work on the 425 Portland Building that will make it possible for us to move all the Star Tribune employees out of the Freeman Building and into the Portland Building.

We are going to continue with the move since the costs savings of not operating two buildings plus the benefit of everyone under one roof are worth the disruption.

We will be working with Avista and our real estate advisors over the next few weeks to determine our next steps.

The current employee parking program remains the same for now, with the exception of the 2007-2008 Vikings home games. We do have a one-year lease with Impark to manage our parking lots during Vikings home games. (See todays Stribnet story for details.)

Thank you, Par

BJ started accepting credit cards in 1986

The Beacon Journal started accepting credit cards on September 23, 1986. Here's the article explaining the new service in the October/November 1986 Sidebar:

On Sept. 23, the Beacon Journal began accepting MasterCard and VISA for classified and retail advertising. Pay By Mail (PBM) subscriptions, carrier accounts or promotional items sold at the public service counter.

According to Tim Kucheman, credit manager, this move has been in the works for some time. "I can't think of anywhere I go that I can't use a credit card," says Kucheman, "so why not here?"

The system works just the same as it does at any other retail outlet where you can charge your purchases. The public service counter is equipped with a scanner which either denies or a gives approval for credit. It also identifies stolen cards.

The Beacon Journal pays a 2 per-cent per transaction fee to Bnak One, but accoring to Tim, this system is cost effective in that it elimininates the need for repeated billings and collection efforts on the part of the company.

Customers will be able to charge their classified advertisements by supplying the service representative with their card number over the telephone.

It is hoped that this service, which has been requested by our customers for some time, will enhance collections, and enable the advertising departments to increase sales.

Circulation efforts should benefit from the new service also. "Since we are promoting the PBM concept, we want to make it as easy as possible for customers to pay for their newspaper," said Tim.

Canadian buys New York Times table

It is a 26-foot, four-pedestal mahogany dining table that has seen most of the world's prime ministers, presidents, United Nations leaders and even the celebrity likes of Bono and Bette Midler.

When The New York Times's old editorial boardroom table went up for sale this month, it was a Canadian antiques dealer who won it at auction.

"It's hard to imagine who hasn't been around that table," said Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of The New York Times.

The item came onto the market as part of The New York Times's moving sale when the company shifted from its iconic 53rd Street location in downtown Manhattan, over to a shiny new office building on 8th Avenue.

Click on the headline to read the full story by Alwynne Gwilt in the Toronto Globe and Mail

Journalists were just reporters

This is the lead for an article in The Age, an online newspaper in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia:

Ink, ribbons, hot metal, blue pencils, spikes, stones, presses, plates, blue collars, scalpels, rulers, picture wheels, wire photos, carbon copies, cigarettes, tubs of photographic chemicals: newspaper offices used to be places where you would always get your hands dirty. Only snobs or big heads called themselves journalists. The rest of us were reporters.

Jim Usher was a cadet reporter in the 1950s. He asked his boss what the difference was between a reporter and a journalist. "He said a journalist had two suits, a reporter only one," Usher wrote in The Argus: Life & Death Of A Newspaper (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007), a collection of stories about The Argus, a Melbourne morning newspaper published from 1846 until 1957.

Thirty years later, when I was a junior reporter in New Zealand, I remember being told that one too. I never owned a suit, but I still considered myself a reporter by trade. I was one of the many hundreds of tradesmen and women who used to work with words. We sourced the best words we could from the best people, then we chipped and hacked and polished away at all that raw material to shape our little stories.

We were not alone in our work. Newspapers were also made by copytakers, proofreaders, copygirls and boys, compositors, press artists, printers, photographers, darkroom technicians. Words were worked over by many types of subeditor: down-table subs; top-table subs; wire subs; check subs; stone subs; sports subs; racing subs; business subs; foreign subs; features subs; supplement subs; layout subs; rewrite subs; chief subs; and copy tasters.

Click on the headline to read the lengthy article by Rachel Buchanan

About the alarming condition of news media

Journalists are by nature alarmists and believe the trade's best days are behind it -- the good work alas dried up roughly a generation ago, never to be seen again -- and now everything is going to pot.

Two thoughtul articles have appeared this week to say it isn't so. They deserve your attention.

Our own Scott Bosley, is quoted in one of the articles.

Bosley, executive director of American Society of Newspaper Editors , says that his organization does a job census each year at daily newspapers in the U.S. If it wasn’t for the growth in online jobs and new free dailies, Bosley thinks job numbers would have shrunk; instead, they’ve remained steady. As for hiring trends in the future, that depends on how well newspaper companies come up with successful business plans online.

“There are a lot of tries and experiments going on, but there’s no clear answer yet,” Bosley said. “I believe that there will be a clear answer, I’m an optimist about it, and I believe there will end up being more people practicing journalism — not journalism as we know it, but journalism which is good journalism.”

The first article by William Powers, media columnist for National Journal magazine, makes several points. One is that Paper is not dying. Paper is arguably the most successful medium in human history. People have been communicating on it for roughly 2,000 years, and there is plenty of behaviorial evidence to suggest that they're not about to abandon it.

The other view is by Mark Glaser on PBS Media Shift. Here’s what he writes:

If you follow the world of traditional journalism, you can’t help but notice the seemingly constant stream of layoffs and buyouts at news organizations. But media observers don’t often emphasize the flip side: As newspapers and broadcasters slice their senior-level workforce, they are also quietly building their digital and online teams.

For example, when I heard about job cuts at the New York Times Co. last winter, I took a quick look at the company’s online job listings, and saw a healthy supply of digital jobs still up for grabs. And while Tribune Co. has been in the news for all its devastating cuts to the L.A. Times staff, there’s still a selection of 85 interactive job openings at the parent company, including a handful at the Times. Similarly, the MTV cable networks have had far-reaching cuts and reorganizations , yet there are dozens of digital job openings listed online.

The staffing situation at traditional media companies is much more fluid than the simple cut-and-slash horror stories that play well in the press. The dire layoff scenarios at major news organizations are not as dire in smaller rural communities, where local newspapers and TV stations still perform well, or overseas where competition, audiences and ownership structures are different than in the U.S.

Sites such as JournalismJobs.com and mediabistro.com are far from hurting when it comes to media job listings.

“Right now we have 628 newspaper job openings in the U.S., from Alaska to Massachusetts to Florida to Indiana,” says Dan Rohn, former reporter for the Washington Post who has run JournalismJobs.com since the late ’90s. “It’s in small towns, and I think that’s because they’re owned by families or small chains that are successful and not being hit as hard. The big compainies, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, they are publicly traded and it’s a whole different ballgame. The small papers are still serving a need in their communities.”

Rohn says that big public media companies in tech-savvy and affluent areas like Boston and Washington, DC, push more tenured employees toward retirement and buyouts to save money, the better to please Wall Street investors and analysts.

So with news organizations here and abroad wanting to hire more versatile, multi-platform journalists, how are journalism schools reacting? Paul Grabowicz, assistant dean and director of the new media program at the Graduate School of Journalism at University of California-Berkeley, said that so many students were taking the Intro to Multimedia Reporting elective that the school decided to make it a required course for everyone.

“Rather than complain about the job cuts at media organizations, J-school graduates are actually finding themselves in plum positions if they have digital skills out of college.

“Students who are well versed in digital media often find themselves being placed in key positions in news organizations that are trying to ramp up their multimedia or online operations,” Grabowicz said. “So it’s not just that it’s becoming a requirement for a job; for many students it’s an opportunity to help lead a news organization in the transition to digital media. Which is pretty exciting.”

Read the article “In Praise of Paper”


Read about Media Shift on how the much buyouts and layoffs are being offset by hiring for digital media with many job offers.

What do you think?

Rx note from Bob Abbott

Still waiting for respomse from Cowman.  

I haven't heard from many non-typographical people about the importance
 of the prescription card in regard to their separation/retirement.
  This could be important!  

If any of the Guild people or other sectors of the CWA have
 anything...let me know.  Do you know of anybody else and their thoughts in regard
 to the prescription card?  Again, might be of help...

bob abbott
rabbott@mindspring.com

Old Mill Stream is making waves

The old mill stream at Findlay was about seven feel above flood stage Wednesday and could rise another half-foot or more. There was little romance from the Blanchard River to make anyone want to sing the old barbershop song “Down by the old Mill Stream” by Tell Taylor.

For a little reminiscing, click on the headline to read about Taylor in Findlay Living Magazine. There might be much more at the Findlay Public Library but an attempt to reach the library’s website yeilded only a brusk “Connection Timed Out.” If you don’t know the tune, you will have to google up your own.

Tell was born on a farm near Vanlue in 1876. It was in New York,that Tell began a career as a traveling salesman, singing in stores to sell sheet music.

Tell wrote hundreds of songs, with each one proving to be more successful then the other. On one of his trips to Findlay, in 1908, Tell decided to go fishing along the Blanchard River, as he often did. He began to think about his childhood and the romantic dreamer in him took over. He thought of the girl he once loved and of an old mill that once thrived but had since been abandoned. He went home and penned the words,

"My darling I am dreaming, of the days gone by,
When you and I were sweethearts, beneath the summer sky;
Your hair has turned to silver, the gold has faded too;
But still I will remember, where I first met you.

Down by the old mill stream, where I first met you
With your eyes of blue, dressed in gingham too,
It was there I knew, that you loved me true,
You were sixteen, my village queen, by the old mill stream."

For two years that song would lay in drawer all but forgotten. Two years later, Tell would finally publish "Down By the Old Mill Stream." It became his most popular song selling over 4 million copies.

Tell Taylor (October 14, 1876 - November 24, 1937) died in Chicago of a heart attack and was buried in Van Horn Cemetery, Findlay, Ohio.

Don't want a ho-hum obit

Don't want a hum-drum death that lacks any semblance of production value? Call the Miami Herald's Elinor J. Brecher, a veteran reporter who recently took over the newspaper's obit desk. She might just make you a post-mortem star.

Inspired by the recently deceased humor columnist Art Buchwald, Brecher is asking people who "understand their place in history" to contact her and sit down for a videotaped "pre-bit" wherein the future corpse will explain his or her life.

From the Herald's Friday edition:

The Herald is changing the way we approach news obituaries in both the print edition and on our website, MiamiHerald.com.

We want to include audio and/or video with the website version. We also hope that people who understand their place in the history and culture of South Florida will consider sitting for ''pre-bits:'' videotaped interviews to be shown on the site following the subject's death.

The absence of electronic material doesn't render someone unworthy of a news obituary. An interesting life stands on its own.

-- ELINOR J. BRECHER

Philadelphia Inquirer to sell building

Brian Tierney, chief executive officer of Philadelphia Media Holdings L.L.C., said today that the company would sell the Inquirer Building, which also houses the Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com, and downtown property to reduce debt and reinvest in the company's media businesses. The company will present the 18-story building for sale to real estate developers in an offering memorandum mailed nationwide in September. The company also is soliciting in the memorandum ideas for where to put the 950 journalists, ad people, executives, computer technicians, support staff and others who now work in the building, company officials said. The property comprises the 470,000-square-foot building at 400 N. Broad St. and the company's parking garage on Callowhill Street, between 15th and 16th Streets. The total area is 4.2 acres. The company and its broker, Jones Lang LaSalle, declined to say how much they were seeking for the property. The city's Board of Revision of Taxes has placed a value of $16.7 million on the real estate, based on its use as lower-grade office space and parking. The new local owners, which bought the newspapers and Philly.com in 2006 for $515 million, with more than $300 million of the purchase price borrowed, had planned from the beginning to sell the downtown property to raise cash, Tierney said. The company would need 250,000 to 300,000 square feet of space in a new building for the newsrooms, executive offices, advertising and other operations, a company official said.

Click on the headline to read the full story in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Blogger Note: Ken Krause notes in a comment on this post that the Inquirer story was written by former BJ business writer Bob Fernandez. D

Lexington editor joins Times Washington Bureau

Marilyn Thompson Joins Washington Bureau

For the past year Marilyn has run the Los Angeles Times' Washington investigative unit, heading numerous projects such as the recent series on U-Haul. Before that she was editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader in Lexington, Ky. She went to Lexington from the Post, where as deputy AME for investigations she co-edited a project on abuse by the D.C. police department that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1999. During her tenure as AME, the Post also won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

Marilyn's career as a Washington investigative reporter has been just as impressive, and she is eager to get back to it. She broke the first investigative stories on federal contracting fraud at Wedtech, which evolved into a national political scandal involving former Attorney General Ed Meese and presidential advisor Lyn Nofziger. (Jack Newfield of the Voice called her the Ida Tarbell of the 1980s.) In 2003, she uncovered the story of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the black woman in California who was Strom Thurmond's secret daughter.

Aside from this rather intimidating resume, Marilyn is a delightful colleague. I can attest to that from personal experience, as can others in the bureau, including Adam Nagourney, who worked with her at the New York Daily News.

Marilyn joins a bureau that has a great track record of enterprise reporting, from the beat writers who dig into earmarks and intelligence fiascos to the profile writers who are illuminating the presidential candidates. She also joins several hard-hitting investigators engaged in short- and long-term projects, a mix that is vital to building a tough and skeptical report.

I'd like to say how terrific it is that The New York Times continues to build its staff at what is obviously a rugged time in the newspaper business.

Dean Baquet

[Source: New York Times memo on Thompson appointment sent to Jim Romenesko (Poynter Online)

PD places second in readership poll

The Cleveland Plain Dealer posted the second highest readership for Sundays and third highest daily among newspapers in the country's 50 biggest metro areas, a new report shows.

The Sunday edition of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ranked first for the fourth consecutive year in a Scarborough Research survey that looks at how many adults in ma jor U.S. metropolitan center read their local newspapers.

The survey found that among 1,136,449 adults in the four-county Milwaukee area, on average 798,052, or 70.2%, read the Sunday edition of the Journal Sentinel. That is up from 69.7% last year. The Cleveland Plain Dealer posted the second-highest market penetration, at 61.3%.

Gary Meo, Scarborough's senior vice president for print and Internet sales, said newspapers with the highest penetration rates tend to be in markets that have some or all of these characteristics: colder climates, a well-educated population, an older population and little newspaper competition.

"My personal opinion is that certain newspapers are very good at covering their communities, and there is something about the culture perhaps that's interested in local news and local information and the newspaper just does the best job of doing that in a particular market,." Meo said.

The market penetration report measures how many people read the newspaper, not how many buy it. It includes people who, for instance, will pass the newspaper along to someone else in their household.

Percentage of adults who read Sunday editions
1. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: 70.2%
2. Cleveland Plain Dealer: 61.3%
3. Newsday: 59.2%
4. Columbus Dispatch: 57.5%
5. San Antonio Express-News: 57.4%
6. Orlando Sentinel: 57.1%
7. Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News: 56.6%
8. Indianapolis Star: 56.2%
9. Washington Post: 53.2%
10. Kansas City Star: 52.9%

Percentage of adults who read daily editions:
1. Newsday: 50.1%
2. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: 46.5%
3. Cleveland Plain Dealer: 43.2%
4. San Jose Mercury News: 41.6%
5. Portland Oregonian: 41.5%
6. Indianapolis Star: 39.5%
7. Florida Times-Union: 39.1%
8. Washington Post: 38.9%
9. Kansas City Star: 37.1%
10. San Francisco Chronicle: 36.8%

Rx note from Bob Abbott

Group:

I'm still waiting to hear from one individual and I need to personally contact at least one other person by phone. At that time I can compile the info I've received and present it to counsel.

Sorry it's moving so slow but that's the way of the world I guess. I would expect it'll be a week or two before I can get to the point of presenting the information to counsel. While it's not looking terribly good at this point I feel that we're laying a good foundation (or at least a solid starting point) should the BJ continue their immoral interpretations of our retirement/separation agreements.

Thanks for all your help...

It's not over until the fat lady sings...we'll hang tough...

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I'll keep you updated as to the situation as it unfolds.

bob abbott

rabbott@mindspring.com