Gavin's Blog

From the NY Times today:

The owner of the Xinjiang Kashgar Restaurant near the main Olympic venue said he shut down Tuesday [of last week] after repeated visits from officials who cited health concerns. He said several other Muslim restaurants nearby had received similar visits. The owner, a Uighur, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear that he would be further harassed by the authorities.

Anonymity? It’s the owner of the Xinjiang Kashgar Restaurant. Do you want directions too? It’s near the main Olympic venue.

Via Jim

Jeff points to a rather idiotic ad taken out by the World Association of Newspapers.

We’ve done the search. You only have to turn the pages.

Wha? And quoting the Economist is just as strange for it was they who said: “Newspapers are an endangered species.” Yes they are. And quoting a newspaper that is actually doing particularly well is a little strange too.

And this today from 24/7

Gannett (GCI): USA’s Largest Newspaper Company Takes A Hit

Even though the market expects poor results from newpaper companies, the actual results can come as a shock. Gannett (GCI) is off over 5% to a 52-week low of $15.93 on poor numbers.

GCI preliminary 2008 second quarter earnings per diluted share from continuing operations were $1.02 compared with $1.24 per share in the second quarter of 2007. The preliminary results, however, do not include non-cash charges to be recorded in the quarter, which have not yet been finalized, for the impairment of goodwill, other intangible assets and certain other assets

Total operating revenues for the company were $1.72 billion in the second quarter compared to $1.91 billion in the second quarter of 2007.

At USA TODAY, advertising revenues declined 16.6 percent in the second quarter compared to the year ago quarter. Paid advertising pages totaled 831 compared with 1,034 in the same quarter of 2007.

Internet ad revenue was not front and center in the company’s earnings release, which probably says a mouthful.

Due to the news, shares in Gatehouse (GHS) are off almost 5% to $.99. Shares in McClatchy (MNI) are down 2% to $4.61, and shares in Lee (LEE) are selling down over 1% to $3.17.

Like Bernie, I scan the Sunday papers. Helpfully in work we have a reading room with all Sunday papers available for reading – though I still tend to scan the papers online on Saturday night.

Here are the best news/opinion articles I found today:

Shane Ross: FAS: the €20m-a-week quango

Shane Ross calls for FAS to be the centre of government cutbacks. And with good reason. The quango wastes huge sums of money. God knows what scandals will be uncovered at the agency.

SSHH. FAS is in the wars. And billions of euro are at stake.

Whisper it. The national training and employment agency is the object of murky allegations. Inquiries are uncovering odd antics. People are asking: what does FAS do with its €20m a week?

The answers are disturbing.

Brendan O’Connor: Gang of clueless ministers need to get real and meet those in the know

Mr O’Connor seems to have lost the run of himself. His latest rant borders on the insane. It is worth reading just to see how wrong he is. Richard points to an article by O’Connor from last year that is almost the opposite of what he is saying now.

See the Property Pin discussion on it.

Jody Corcoran: Don’t believe me, John? Believe this: repeating lies is bad news

Jody is suing The Phoenix over a recent article that said he sought a job at the Department of Education. Here he rants away rather badly. Made me chuckle for its sheer vanity.

Cliff Taylor and Niamh Connolly: State agencies to be abolished in reform move

The Post gets sight of what agencies face the axe.

David McWilliams: Central Bank must finally show leadership in the face of crisis

The Central Bank needs to do a helluva lot more.

Vincent Browne: Does Brian Cowen really know what he is doing?

Loses it over Lenihan, Cowen and government incompetence.

Cowen seems to have been unnerved by the Lisbon defeat. He has seemed unsure, vacillating and unsettled since then. His performances over the last few days have been his worst, aided and abetted by Lenihan.

Did you see Lenihan at that Japanese company function last Thursday, going on about how the company, which has been here for 20 years, had not yet ‘‘come of age’’? How Irish people don’t get the vote until they are aged 21? Scary, wasn’t it?

This can’t be shrugged off on the basis of a slip of the tongue – we all misspeak from time to time, but this was not of that order. At the time of making that remark, he believed the voting age was 21.

I must digout that Lenihan reference.

Eamon Quinn: Plan to bail out first-time buyers not a runner – NTMA

Some sense from the NTMA.

Johann Hari: ‘As the world’s oil dries up, the lies will begin to gush to gain control of Venezuela’s supplies‘

Hari makes no sense to me here. He seems to believe that Chavez is some kind of benevolent leader and that elections do a democracy make.

First they announced Chávez was a dictator. This ignored that he came to power in a free and open election, the Venezuelan press remains uncensor­ed and opposed to him, and he has accepted losing a referendum to extend his term. When that tactic failed, the oil industry and the politicians they lubricate shifted strategy.

Hari glosses over the referendum to extend his term. The details of which would scare any democrat. Democratic institutions make democracies, free and fair elections elect people to those institutions, which have a mix of checks and balances. When those institutions are undermined by leaders, democracy itself is undermined – free elections or not.

Any articles you found interesting? Leave a comment.

Says Kara:

In what will be seen as a new media coup, sources tell BoomTown that Britain’s Guardian Media Group is set to announce this morning that it will buy the company that runs the high-profile digital media news site paidContent for a price “north of $30 million.”

Paidcontent even got scooped. More here.

The New York Times reports that Marcus W Brauchli, a former top editor of The Wall Street Journal, will become the executive editor of The Washington Post on September 8. It was somewhat surprising apparently.

In a statement, Ms. Weymouth (the publisher) said that Mr. Brauchli’s experience at The Journal would “help us navigate the new world of media.”

Her decision to pass over candidates within The Post and hire Mr. Brauchli comes shortly into a tenure that has already made clear that she intends to shake up the venerable but financially troubled paper. She is in the fourth generation of her family to head the paper that her great-grandfather, Eugene I. Meyer, bought in 1933, and is considered the likely successor to her uncle, Donald E. Graham, 63, as chairman and chief executive of the Post Company, which also owns Newsweek magazine and the Kaplan educational business.

But her choice of Mr. Brauchli is a surprising one at a paper best known for its political coverage and inside-the-Beltway savvy. Some editors and reporters at The Post say that changing the leadership in the midst of a hard-fought presidential campaign is an unorthodox and potentially disruptive move.

Mr. Brauchli has little experience in Washington, but at The Journal he helped oversee coverage of presidential campaigns and served as a foreign correspondent. Former colleagues say he has no trouble adapting to new territory.

And the challenges are real:

Since 2000, the paper’s weekday circulation has declined to 673,000, from about 800,000, but is still the seventh-highest among American newspapers. Its Web site draws more than nine million unique visitors monthly, according to Nielsen Online, making it the third-highest for a newspaper Web site.

And…

But those who have discussed the succession with her said that Ms. Weymouth recognized her lack of news experience and wisely sought the advice of a wide range of people.

“It was pretty un-Graham-like to be so public, but it was what she needed to do,” said one of the contenders who lost out to Mr. Brauchli. “She sees that the industry’s in crisis.”

An interesting move by Weymouth.

How bad, as we say in Cork. Rush Limbaugh just agreed to an eight-year, $400-million-plus extension with Clear Channel to stay on the air. Limbaugh’s deal includes an upfront $100-million signing bonus, which means the annualized average salary will be somewhere in the neighbourhood of $37 million through to 2016.

Shame he’s such an idiot.

Roy Greenslade talks about more subs losing their jobs. CITYAM are sacking their entire subbing team. I linked to the Orange County story earlier this week.

Jeff Jarvis talks about it here.

So I’d suggest that publications should put all their articles online before publication in wiki form and enable the public to edit and annotate them (you may choose which edits to take). Why would the public do that? Why do they make Wikipedia? They’re generous if you give them a chance.

I’m not quite sure how that would work. As Jonathan Este comments:

You might say that reporters can do all of that, but I have been around newsrooms for many years in both capacities and let me tell you right now, most of them can’t.

Not that reporters could not be trained to do so. But getting the public to edit material prior to publication sounds almost impossible. Who decides when it’s finished? Who decides when it’s good enough? Who decides what to leave out? If the publication was online only then fair enough, but print publications also have deadlines, and someone needs to make a call.

Roy gives his views on the subject in an article in the Evening Standard. He notes:

Lawson Muncaster, City AM’s managing director, says: “Having looked at how things work on the Continent, and drawing on my experience at Metro International, I believe the sub-editing function is obsolete. I believe writers can take responsibility for filing copy that is readable and correct with a headline. That’s why we’re going through the process [of letting subs go].”

On the other hand, his paper has hired more page designers, and they are sure to play a crucial role in easing the sub-editorial tasks for writers.

All written work, whether it be a novel, a poem or a news story, often benefits from a second, even third, eye. But the removal of subs doesn’t mean that copy will be published unread. Executive editors will still act as quality controllers.

I doubt that this radical step will happen overnight. Indeed, I think there will be a lengthy transition phase which is likely to involve some form of outsourcing.

I think that’s fair enough. Most of the subs I know, including myself, are also trained in page design. The skills are interchangeable. But as Greenslade says, written work benefits from a second (or third) eye. Greenslade also mentions the Independent’s outsourcing drive. But as far as I can gather, that outsourcing has not been as successful as hoped.

Disclosure: I am a sub-editor and page designer.

Good news for digital natives, bad news for newspapers and TV stations.

According to a study released by Magna Global’s Steve Sternberg, the five broadcast nets’ average live median age (in other words, not including delayed DVR viewing) was 50 last season. That’s the oldest ever since Sternberg started analyzing median age more than a decade ago — and the first time the nets’ median age was outside of the vaunted 18-49 demo.

Fueling the graying of the networks: the rapid aging of ABC, NBC and Fox. The three nets continue to grow older, while CBS — the oldest-skewing network — has remained fairly steady.

“The median ages of the broadcast networks keep rising, as traditional television is no longer necessarily the first screen for the younger set,” Sternberg wrote.

Where are all those young people gone? They are online. Where are the advertisers going? Online. Where are people watching TV? Online.

Where are print newspapers going? To oblivion, eventually.

Murdoch speaks to the staffers at the Wall Street Journal in December last year.

Their audience was of roughly three minds, according to a Journal staffer who dissected the newsroom’s mood for me. There were those who were already making plans to leave, or knew they would jump ship at the first decent opportunity. He called this group “the Extremists”; it included reporters like the Pulitzer-winning Bandler, who recently left for Fortune magazine. Then there were those who knew that the takeover could spell disaster for the kind of journalism they loved, but who were reluctant to believe that Murdoch would really dismantle something so admirable and successful. He called this group “the Hopefuls.”

“And then there was the third portion of the room,” he said. “This is a big group. These are the people who see the tribulations of the industry, who felt sure that if nothing had changed there would be certain cutbacks and layoffs in TheJournal’s future, who were feeling the general dread that all newsrooms in America feel right now. And they thought, Here’s an owner who is going to invest! My job is secure! He’ll beef up the paper, and even if this means we may become more like Fox News, it’s worth it because we will still have the opportunity to do great work. These are the people who believed that Marcus Brauchli would save them. This is the group that I call ‘Naive.’”

At the end of that session, with his typical insouciance, Murdoch again took the mike, to conclude the show.

“Well, I think that’s all we have to say,” he said. “So you better get back to work and make sure you’re not scooped tomorrow.”

As for the industry, Mark Bowden sums it up rather nicely:

Newspapers are in a sad way in America. Readership continues to fall. Advertisers are deserting them for newer forms of media. Revenues are plummeting, as the costs of printing and distribution mount catastrophically. Faced with declining profit margins, investors are fleeing. Knight Ridder, once the largest newpaper chain in America, has gone out of business. Stalwart family owners such as Dow Jones’s Bancrofts are selling out. Reporters and editors are being bought out or laid off in droves, and not just at small regional papers. The once-fat Los Angeles Times has been dismantling itself. The New York Times and The Washington Post are trimming their staffs. In the eyes of many media experts, print journalism, that stubborn 15th-century technology, appears at long last to be on its deathbed.

The new Irish Times website is live. I rather like the layout. Popular stories has been given prominence. The choice to change background colour on a hover is … interesting. The hover on pic with text is similar to the Guardian and The Economist. They don’t seem to have included the option to comment on opinion pieces.

As for blogging it is a little cleaner, but Conor‘s categories are microscopic compared to his body text.

Overall it’s taken design ideas from all the recent newspaper website redesigns. And it’s free. Yay.

Hmm. I understand that Ireland.com would remain in existence as a separate entity, but it simply redirects to IrishTimes.com. As Damien pointed out, it would be a tad ridiculous to split the brand and traffic up between two websites. Maybe they have decided against it.

And don’t ask me why BreakingNews.ie is on a different website to my own paper‘s website. I don’t know.

A salutary tale from the US.

Outsource to India, says the deputy editor of the Orange County Register, California’s fifth-largest newspaper. On a one-month trial basis, Mindworks Global Media, an India-based company, will copy-edit some of the Register’s stories and lay out pages for a community newspaper at the same company that owns the Register.

Similar moved were made at the Irish Independent last year, except they outsourced production to an Irish firm RE&D and to some based in France I think. As best I can tell, that particular outsourcing project may have not been as successful as IN&M painted, or wanted, it to be. I would imagine this is to do with the disconnect between the production teams at a different premises, and the journalists who write the stories. They could bring some production back in-house later this year.

Still though, I guess there’s no harm in testing it out, as in the case of the Orange County Register.