This blog is mainly about the spectacular train wreck at The Sacramento Bee and its parent company, the McClatchy Company. But I also post about current events, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, politics, anything else that grabs my attention. Take a look around this blog, hope you enjoy it.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Monday February 16 -- Got news or an update?
If you have news or a question, leave it in comments. . .
26 comments:
Anonymous
said...
I saw an ad in the Classifieds of the Star Telegram this weekend that was looking for Account Executives for their "New Weekly Entertainment Publication". Does anyone have any updates on this? Is it their "Go" Friday section that is going weekly, or is this a brand new venture?
This is from Business Journal: _____________________
At least Pruitt’s off the wall
Gary Pruitt, president and chief executive officer of The McClatchy Co., has been removed from the “Wall of Shame,” a made-up memorial on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” hosted by Jim Cramer.
Cramer took Pruitt off the Wall Jan. 27 because the once high-flying Sacramento company’s stock had fallen below $1 a share. The stock has closed below $1 on each trading day since Jan. 15. On Tuesday, the stock was 59 cents a share, down 98 percent since Sacramento-based McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) bought No. 2 newspaper publisher Knight Ridder in March 2006. At that time the stock was worth $44.31 a share. The New York Stock Exchange has notified the company that it’s in danger of being delisted.
Cramer, a former hedge fund manager, best-selling author and co-founder of TheStreet.com, put Pruitt on the Wall of Shame last March when the stock was valued at $9.07 a share. He called McClatchy’s acquisition of Knight Ridder one of the worst he’s ever seen.
Cramer abruptly pulled Pruitt off the wall of “courageous destroyers of value” late last month.
“He has turned this once proud newspaper organization into a penny stock,” Cramer said, on the video. “We don’t talk about penny stocks on this show. ... No reason to keep him up here anymore.”
Reached at his office in Sacramento, Pruitt declined to comment.ainti
This is a new weekly publication that will fall under the guise of the new Targeted Publications director. They just hired a rep to become the manager. It is going to try and compete against FW Weekly.
-Mix it up with The Bee's editorial board.- February 15, 2009
Shame on the Flash Report
“Now Fleischman is using his blog to suggest that [esteemed reporters] in the Sacramento Bee's newsroom are having their [credibility undermined] because the [editorial page is publishing opinions], and is using emails to let readers know about those opinions. That is shameful, especially for someone who drapes himself in the cloak of the First Amendment.”
"This is a new weekly publication that will fall under the guise of the new Targeted Publications director. They just hired a rep to become the manager. It is going to try and compete against FW Weekly."
-When is Star Telegram trying to launch this? Seems like this is odd timing considering the pending layoffs.
SacBee comment: "Didn't Melanie Sills just run a column asking reporters and readers "journalistic ethics"? The concern was whether reporters - journalists - should be involved in political activity."
Shockingly underreported is the story about the two satellites crashing. First -- how in the hell did this happen? Think about it. There are whole agencies tracking this kind of stuff.
Second -- this debris field has extremely serious implications for shuttles, the space station, Hubble and other spacecraft -- for hundreds of years. It is truly a monumental problem and a monumental failure. Maybe McClatchy can take a person off the close Gitmo beat or the Iraq failures beat and investigate this.
.." The New York stock exchange has notified the company that it's in danger of being deloused. " ..Well, if any company needs delousing, it's McClatchy. Hope they start with the head louse, but they can't get rid of them all or there'd be no McClatchy.
The following is a lightly edited version of an e-mail I sent last Friday, 13 February 2009, to Jim Rosen, McClatchy's DC correspondent for the company's seven-odd daily newspapers in North and South Carolina.
Background: Conditions of a single building barely standing on the campus of J. V. Martin Junior High School in Dillon, South Carolina, were celebrated in a piece of agitprop titled "Corridor of Shame" a few years back that was perpetrated by a SC Democratic Party loyalist. Images of the poor condition of a building that could have been demolished years ago subsequently served as a centerpiece in a lawsuit filed against the SC General Assembly over funding for public education.
Insofar as President Obama alluded to the school in his first Presidential press conference on 9 February 2009, and inasmuch as Senator Obama visited the J. V. Martin Junior High School campus for about two hours one afternoon in August 2007 and featured a photo from that visit in his campaign's nomination acceptance video in Denver last year, this story merits national consideration. But if the story is going to be treated by the likes of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Bill Robinson (a McClatchy employee with The State newspaper in Columbia, SC), you would hope they'd get things right.
Well, they haven't. My e-mail was prompted by Mr. Rosen's heartening story (filed in the late stage of negotiations over the final "recovery and re-investment" legislation) that the unelected proprietors of Dillon District #2 might not be getting their grubby fingers on any Federal funds--a prospect now questionable, given the interventions of House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, who does not even represent Dillon County in Congress.
My edited e-mail follows:
Dear Mr. Rosen:
Thank you for your article which appeared below the fold on the front page of today's [13 Feb 09] edition of The State newspaper. This is likely the best news I will come across all day.
I write, though, mainly to alert you to deficiencies in your reportage. I have shared these concerns with your confreres at The State (notably Bill Robinson) in the past, to no avail, and though I don't expect much of a shift from you, frankly, allow me to belabor a few points briefly.
At least one gaffe in President Obama's Monday night press conference came in his turning "J. V. Martin Junior High School" into an antebellum structure (a very curious gaffe, even for him, if one cares to meditate on it even briefly); the President spoke distinctly of an edifice "built in the 1850s", whereas we citizens of Dillon County, and especially those of us who have actually taught classes in the very edifice he spoke of, know full well that the monstrosity dates only to 1896. (Pedantic nonsense on my part, I am sure: next!)
You being DC correspondent for McClatchy newspapers in the Carolinas, Mr. Rosen, I have to ask here whether you yourself have visited the school campus at issue. It probably doesn't matter: Bill Robinson has visited the campus a few times, and he himself has reported time after time, even after I challenged him over the phone time after time, the same egregious misrepresentation of fact that crept into your item. I put J. V. Martin Junior High School within quotation marks in the paragraph above because you may well know, as I well know and as Bill Robinson well knows, that not even President Obama has spoken of the entire school campus; we are all speaking of one building on the school campus. We are not talking of the main building on the campus, the chief building on the campus, or the largest building on the campus, and we certainly are not speaking of the entire school campus itself.
I worked at J. V. Martin Junior High School in the 1980-81 school year, Mr. Rosen. In October 1980, the main building of the campus burned to the ground, and its replacement--a sturdy two-story red brick edifice, completed about 1984 (which I worked in through the 1985-86 school year)--stands in its place to this day. It is this building that remains the main, chief, and largest part of "J. V. Martin Junior High School" to this day; but we hear weeping and lamentation over the execrable 1896 building time after time in out-of-town reporting as if the one building were the entire school.
The most odious feature of your reportage, however, is the stark glaring omission that Dillon County has not one single solitary elected school board member. Every member of the Dillon County Board of Education sits on his or her rump by virtue of appointment to office; not one of them has been elected to office, and they each and all continue to this day to refuse to submit to election. The unelected members of the DCBE in their turn have appointed each and every member of the local boards of trustees for Dillon District 1 (Lake View), Dillon District 2 (Dillon proper), and Dillon District 3 (Latta, where I reside). These masters of their microcosmic universe are the personages--THE ONLY PERSONAGES--responsible for the continuing existence of the execrable 1896 building, Mr. Rosen, because, not being subject to the accountability ostensibly offered by the ballot box, they mismanage school policy with impunity.
It is appointed and unelected school boards that have helped Dillon County earn the distinction of having the highest county percentage (15.7%, per the 2000 Census) in the state of citizens lacking even a ninth-grade education. It is appointed and unelected school boards that have helped Dillon County achieve a bare 33.6% of citizens who have completed high school or earned their GED. It is appointed and unelected school boards that have propelled Dillon County to a stunning figure of 39.4% of citizens who have never graduated from high school or earned a GED. It is the same appointed rabble's mismanagement of public school administration that has permitted the 1896 building to continue to stand as a monument to poor-mouthing.
Public schools in Dillon County, South Carolina, I submit, Mr. Rosen, merit no public support whatsoever as long as all school board members and boards of trustees are appointed, as long as none of them is subject to election. The one man in position to effect change is the present head of the Dillon County Board of Education, Richard Schafer, whom I have invited publicly (courtesy of The Dillon Herald, our local semi-weekly nuisance) to resign; but Mr. Schafer has been appointed and re-appointed to office continuously since 1989 and displays no intention of allowing elections of County or local school board members. (That he is also a prominent figure in County and State Democratic Party intrigues I am sure is purely coincidental.)
But thank you again for letting us know that the rank ineptitude of our County's appointed public school overseers is not going to be rewarded--quite yet.
Once President Obama puts signature to paper in Denver, we will begin to discover the depths to which the bill succeeds in rewarding local political patronage systems such as those that have operated for decades here in humble Dillon County, South Carolina. Perhaps possibly maybe Mr. Rosen will care to set President Obama's--and his own--record straight in the days to come; but the McClatchy method of reporting the actual circumstances prevailing in Dillon County to date inspires no confidence.
According to job recruiting site that was posted today, San Louis Obispo www.sanluisobispo.com seeks web editor. I thought this was mass layoff week, not a time for McClatchy papers to be hiring.
(Crain’s) — The Chicago Tribune fired 20 members of its newsroom Thursday as it continues to cut costs amid declining ad revenue.
The total, disclosed in a memo to employees late Thursday, brings cuts over the last year to more than 200, or nearly third of the paper’s news-gathering and editing staff.
They are adding staff for the new weekly at the FWST. It's just plain dumb. They keep adding products hoping that they get it right. People are so desparate that you have reps stealing accounts from other reps with no real regard for any type of sales ethics.
Here at the Star we were told we will be going through ethics training by the Publisher in our sales meeting. He also mentioned we will be putting out another publication besides INK and wants us do what we can for it to reach 100 pages.
No mentioned was made about the primary product just stuff about online and the need to be better than other papers inside and outside MNI.
Oh this is the last week for the finance employees who lost their jobs to our vendor in India.
News on job cuts will be either late this week or next week.
26 comments:
I saw an ad in the Classifieds of the Star Telegram this weekend that was looking for Account Executives for their "New Weekly Entertainment Publication". Does anyone have any updates on this? Is it their "Go" Friday section that is going weekly, or is this a brand new venture?
http://sacramento.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2009/02/16/story9.html?b=1234760400^1778477&ana=e_vert
This is from Business Journal:
_____________________
At least Pruitt’s off the wall
Gary Pruitt, president and chief executive officer of The McClatchy Co., has been removed from the “Wall of Shame,” a made-up memorial on CNBC’s “Mad Money,” hosted by Jim Cramer.
Cramer took Pruitt off the Wall Jan. 27 because the once high-flying Sacramento company’s stock had fallen below $1 a share. The stock has closed below $1 on each trading day since Jan. 15. On Tuesday, the stock was 59 cents a share, down 98 percent since Sacramento-based McClatchy (NYSE: MNI) bought No. 2 newspaper publisher Knight Ridder in March 2006. At that time the stock was worth $44.31 a share. The New York Stock Exchange has notified the company that it’s in danger of being delisted.
Cramer, a former hedge fund manager, best-selling author and co-founder of TheStreet.com, put Pruitt on the Wall of Shame last March when the stock was valued at $9.07 a share. He called McClatchy’s acquisition of Knight Ridder one of the worst he’s ever seen.
Cramer abruptly pulled Pruitt off the wall of “courageous destroyers of value” late last month.
“He has turned this once proud newspaper organization into a penny stock,” Cramer said, on the video. “We don’t talk about penny stocks on this show. ... No reason to keep him up here anymore.”
Reached at his office in Sacramento, Pruitt declined to comment.ainti
This is a new weekly publication that will fall under the guise of the new Targeted Publications director. They just hired a rep to become the manager. It is going to try and compete against FW Weekly.
-Mix it up with The Bee's editorial board.-
February 15, 2009
Shame on the Flash Report
“Now Fleischman is using his blog to suggest that [esteemed reporters] in the Sacramento Bee's newsroom are having their [credibility undermined] because the [editorial page is publishing opinions], and is using emails to let readers know about those opinions. That is shameful, especially for someone who drapes himself in the cloak of the First Amendment.”
[esteemed reporters] Bhahahahahahahaha
http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/the_swarm/
So, no layoff news at the S-T. The wait goes on.
Not newspaper related but mass layoff related:
Fortunoff Lays Off 300, Faces Lawsuit
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/3040122
"This is a new weekly publication that will fall under the guise of the new Targeted Publications director. They just hired a rep to become the manager. It is going to try and compete against FW Weekly."
-When is Star Telegram trying to launch this? Seems like this is odd timing considering the pending layoffs.
SacBee caught in biased agenda AGAIN
Re: “Mix it up with The Bee's editorial board.”
Read the comments, who do they think they are fooling?
http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/the_swarm/2009/02/019643.html#Comments_Container
SacBee comment:
"Didn't Melanie Sills just run a column asking reporters and readers "journalistic ethics"? The concern was whether reporters - journalists - should be involved in political activity."
Too funny!
9:27 Yea The KC Star did the same thing. Crap is Crap.
You guys are loosers!!!!!
Shockingly underreported is the story about the two satellites crashing. First -- how in the hell did this happen? Think about it. There are whole agencies tracking this kind of stuff.
Second -- this debris field has extremely serious implications for shuttles, the space station, Hubble and other spacecraft -- for hundreds of years. It is truly a monumental problem and a monumental failure. Maybe McClatchy can take a person off the close Gitmo beat or the Iraq failures beat and investigate this.
anyone hear anything about potential layoffs at McClatchy Interactive in Raleigh?
.." The New York stock exchange has notified the company that it's in danger of being deloused. "
..Well, if any company needs delousing, it's McClatchy. Hope they start with the head louse, but they can't get rid of them all or there'd be no McClatchy.
Delousing! Now that's truth to power!
The following is a lightly edited version of an e-mail I sent last Friday, 13 February 2009, to Jim Rosen, McClatchy's DC correspondent for the company's seven-odd daily newspapers in North and South Carolina.
Background: Conditions of a single building barely standing on the campus of J. V. Martin Junior High School in Dillon, South Carolina, were celebrated in a piece of agitprop titled "Corridor of Shame" a few years back that was perpetrated by a SC Democratic Party loyalist. Images of the poor condition of a building that could have been demolished years ago subsequently served as a centerpiece in a lawsuit filed against the SC General Assembly over funding for public education.
Insofar as President Obama alluded to the school in his first Presidential press conference on 9 February 2009, and inasmuch as Senator Obama visited the J. V. Martin Junior High School campus for about two hours one afternoon in August 2007 and featured a photo from that visit in his campaign's nomination acceptance video in Denver last year, this story merits national consideration. But if the story is going to be treated by the likes of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Bill Robinson (a McClatchy employee with The State newspaper in Columbia, SC), you would hope they'd get things right.
Well, they haven't. My e-mail was prompted by Mr. Rosen's heartening story (filed in the late stage of negotiations over the final "recovery and re-investment" legislation) that the unelected proprietors of Dillon District #2 might not be getting their grubby fingers on any Federal funds--a prospect now questionable, given the interventions of House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, who does not even represent Dillon County in Congress.
My edited e-mail follows:
Dear Mr. Rosen:
Thank you for your article which appeared below the fold on the front page of today's [13 Feb 09] edition of The State newspaper. This is likely the best news I will come across all day.
I write, though, mainly to alert you to deficiencies in your reportage. I have shared these concerns with your confreres at The State (notably Bill Robinson) in the past, to no avail, and though I don't expect much of a shift from you, frankly, allow me to belabor a few points briefly.
At least one gaffe in President Obama's Monday night press conference came in his turning "J. V. Martin Junior High School" into an antebellum structure (a very curious gaffe, even for him, if one cares to meditate on it even briefly); the President spoke distinctly of an edifice "built in the 1850s", whereas we citizens of Dillon County, and especially those of us who have actually taught classes in the very edifice he spoke of, know full well that the monstrosity dates only to 1896. (Pedantic nonsense on my part, I am sure: next!)
You being DC correspondent for McClatchy newspapers in the Carolinas, Mr. Rosen, I have to ask here whether you yourself have visited the school campus at issue. It probably doesn't matter: Bill Robinson has visited the campus a few times, and he himself has reported time after time, even after I challenged him over the phone time after time, the same egregious misrepresentation of fact that crept into your item. I put J. V. Martin Junior High School within quotation marks in the paragraph above because you may well know, as I well know and as Bill Robinson well knows, that not even President Obama has spoken of the entire school campus; we are all speaking of one building on the school campus. We are not talking of the main building on the campus, the chief building on the campus, or the largest building on the campus, and we certainly are not speaking of the entire school campus itself.
I worked at J. V. Martin Junior High School in the 1980-81 school year, Mr. Rosen. In October 1980, the main building of the campus burned to the ground, and its replacement--a sturdy two-story red brick edifice, completed about 1984 (which I worked in through the 1985-86 school year)--stands in its place to this day. It is this building that remains the main, chief, and largest part of "J. V. Martin Junior High School" to this day; but we hear weeping and lamentation over the execrable 1896 building time after time in out-of-town reporting as if the one building were the entire school.
The most odious feature of your reportage, however, is the stark glaring omission that Dillon County has not one single solitary elected school board member. Every member of the Dillon County Board of Education sits on his or her rump by virtue of appointment to office; not one of them has been elected to office, and they each and all continue to this day to refuse to submit to election. The unelected members of the DCBE in their turn have appointed each and every member of the local boards of trustees for Dillon District 1 (Lake View), Dillon District 2 (Dillon proper), and Dillon District 3 (Latta, where I reside). These masters of their microcosmic universe are the personages--THE ONLY PERSONAGES--responsible for the continuing existence of the execrable 1896 building, Mr. Rosen, because, not being subject to the accountability ostensibly offered by the ballot box, they mismanage school policy with impunity.
It is appointed and unelected school boards that have helped Dillon County earn the distinction of having the highest county percentage (15.7%, per the 2000 Census) in the state of citizens lacking even a ninth-grade education. It is appointed and unelected school boards that have helped Dillon County achieve a bare 33.6% of citizens who have completed high school or earned their GED. It is appointed and unelected school boards that have propelled Dillon County to a stunning figure of 39.4% of citizens who have never graduated from high school or earned a GED. It is the same appointed rabble's mismanagement of public school administration that has permitted the 1896 building to continue to stand as a monument to poor-mouthing.
Public schools in Dillon County, South Carolina, I submit, Mr. Rosen, merit no public support whatsoever as long as all school board members and boards of trustees are appointed, as long as none of them is subject to election. The one man in position to effect change is the present head of the Dillon County Board of Education, Richard Schafer, whom I have invited publicly (courtesy of The Dillon Herald, our local semi-weekly nuisance) to resign; but Mr. Schafer has been appointed and re-appointed to office continuously since 1989 and displays no intention of allowing elections of County or local school board members. (That he is also a prominent figure in County and State Democratic Party intrigues I am sure is purely coincidental.)
But thank you again for letting us know that the rank ineptitude of our County's appointed public school overseers is not going to be rewarded--quite yet.
Once President Obama puts signature to paper in Denver, we will begin to discover the depths to which the bill succeeds in rewarding local political patronage systems such as those that have operated for decades here in humble Dillon County, South Carolina. Perhaps possibly maybe Mr. Rosen will care to set President Obama's--and his own--record straight in the days to come; but the McClatchy method of reporting the actual circumstances prevailing in Dillon County to date inspires no confidence.
Lightly Edited? That lost me.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1407948.html
Public editor Ted Vaden to leave Raleigh News & Observer; takes position at DOT.
According to job recruiting site that was posted today, San Louis Obispo www.sanluisobispo.com seeks web editor. I thought this was mass layoff week, not a time for McClatchy papers to be hiring.
The Good News & Bad News in the correct order at least.
“Public editor Ted Vaden to leave Raleigh News & Observer; takes position at DOT.”
Perhaps the newspaper poeple that helped Democrats get elected, now come forth for their payoffs.
hey anom210. if you kept up with the news it was george w. who got all the democrats elected...
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=32995
Chicago Tribune trims newsroom staff
(Crain’s) — The Chicago Tribune fired 20 members of its newsroom Thursday as it continues to cut costs amid declining ad revenue.
The total, disclosed in a memo to employees late Thursday, brings cuts over the last year to more than 200, or nearly third of the paper’s news-gathering and editing staff.
They are adding staff for the new weekly at the FWST. It's just plain dumb. They keep adding products hoping that they get it right. People are so desparate that you have reps stealing accounts from other reps with no real regard for any type of sales ethics.
To Anon 6:22: In McClatchy speak - that is called "sales channel conflict" - ain't it grand? Such a productive way to sell.
Here at the Star we were told we will be going through ethics training by the Publisher in our sales meeting. He also mentioned we will be putting out another publication besides INK and wants us do what we can for it to reach 100 pages.
No mentioned was made about the primary product just stuff about online and the need to be better than other papers inside and outside MNI.
Oh this is the last week for the finance employees who lost their jobs to our vendor in India.
News on job cuts will be either late this week or next week.
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