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gets the technology to do so around the first of the year page and perhaps even section production duties can be shared and we look to extend that as quickly as possible amongst our carolina newspapers these moves will allow the papers to devote more of their resources to unique local coverage while common jobs are done once instead of many times a small staff working with our new advertising vice president at corporate is expected to return many times its cost in new advertising revenue by leveraging our size and multiplatform reach with national customers advertising sales staffs at all papers are being trained and incentivized to sell digital products better mcclatchy interactive is optimizing its operations too handling things like digital ad placements our yahoo partnership and social networking tools that build audience pains from contraction and restructuring are being felt across the company including the corporate offices as you know our corporate staff is much smaller than the knight ridder staff that handled about the same number of papers and we have saved a lot of money by eliminating duplicate services and keeping tight rein on expansion pay freezes and other programs affect corporate employees like all others some of you have questioned whether well paid senior staff are sharing the pain our salaries were frozen a year earlier than other employees and because a larger percentage of senior staff pay comes as bonus stock appreciation rights and the like total pay goes down dramatically when the company performs poorly the average corporate vice president s compensation has been significantly reduced over the past two years and will surely be lower still this year i have faith in our combined efforts to see us through to a profitable stable future there is no question of our ability to survive as a business or to produce public service journalism that serves our communities both require some sacrifice and patience but both are true because we will be smaller we need our smartest most dedicated and most capable employees to move us forward we intend to make sure you are well paid and well treated over the course of your career at mcclatchy and as revenue conditions improve that will be a top priority don t give into pessimism times are tough but they won t be tough forever we have important essential work to do and we need to be about it every day posted by howard at 3 42 pm 60 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest understanding a new architecture of news i hate arguing with my wife yes for all the predictable reasons but also because she so often turns out to be right btw today is my 30th wedding anniversary there may be some connection between that and my admission in the previous sentence from my perspective our discussions typically involve about an hour of her being wildly wrong in multiple different dimensions culminating when she lands on a final point so fundamentally true and correct that i can only agree it s great for getting us to the right conclusion but tough on my editorial board trained argumentative ego i sometimes feel that way about jeff jarvis apologies to both barb and jeff for comparing them the provocative professor and mediablogger at buzzmachine not long ago he landed on a conclusion that strikes me as one of those fundamentally correct concepts where the result trumps whatever process produced it though i continue to disagree with some of jeff s conclusions and more frequently with a process that sometimes seems hair trigger and categorical i ve often credited him here with some of the most thoughtful and useful media analysis around add this to the list his notion of a press sphere illustrates new relationships between producers and consumers of news and much more and offers a good snapshot of the fundamental changes our venerable industry is undergoing importantly it doesn t dismiss the press or professionalism in the process but does show how the once linear relationship of producing and consuming has been irrevocably altered if you want to understand how our role has changed and glimpse where our future lies you ought to be considering this please take a careful look let me and jeff know what you think it deserves our best thinking a taste when we put the public at the center of the universe which is how these charts should be drawn and how the world should be seen as each of us sees it we see the choices we all call upon the press still yes but also our peers media that are not the press e g jon stewart search links original sources companies the government it s all information and we curate it and interact with it with the tools available and again the press stands in a different relationship to the world around it edited to recognize jeff s post was earlier than i thought april 2008 posted by howard at 10 54 am 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest friday september 12 2008 politics journalism and the internet and more some valuable ruminating about the impact of the internet on argument journalism facts politics and persuasion at david weinberger s joho the blog i recommend the whole post which includes this we make the mistake of treating the net as if it were a medium but it s more like a world than a medium everything humans can do and say is done and said there want to find hate based ocd got it want to emphasize the way in which bloggers bring skeptical intelligence to stories promulgated by the worst of the msm can do because the net is an open world no examples are typical posted by howard at 10 34 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest another look at gary pruitt i presume you all found the sacramento news review profile of gary and the company through the link off romenesko yesterday so i didn t highlight it here apparently it sparked another blog comment at reuters that somebody sent to me you can find it here as rolling stones with mcclatchy s pruitt a taste mcclatchy chief executive gary pruitt is one of those newspaper executives a reporter can get along well with because of qualities that are not always common to your typical ceo he leaves the jargon behind at interviews he is honest about bad news making it easier to believe him when he delivers good news he believes in the product good journalism as fervently as he does in his duty to please shareholders which in mcclatchy s case includes the company s namesake family and a bunch of other unhappy people trouble is there isn t much good news to tell about the newspaper business posted by howard at 9 36 am 6 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday september 10 2008 when the truth is just a little fact i m so old i can remember a time when the truth or falsehood of most issues was broadly agreed upon by the electorate and political debate was mainly about what should be done about them a couple of years ago a university of maryland survey found something like 42 of adults in america still believed iraq had weapons of mass destruction long after acknowledgment by the president that we couldn t find any how could we ever have a national debate about the war on that basis a story in today s washington post about how falsehoods quickly become imbedded truths in campaign rhetoric reawakens my fears have a look at this discussion of the truth know here as little facts versus campaign claims and public images the more the new york times and the washington post go after sarah palin the better off she is because there s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she s new she s popular in alaska and she is an insurgent the gop strategist said as long as those are out there these little facts don t really matter posted by howard at 11 50 am 10 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest ap free zone this from jeff jarvis at buzzmachine new jersey s star ledger today put out an entire edition without anything from the associated press within the sharp eyed reader will notice lots of local news by staff plus articles from other papers washington post la times mcclatchy the glouceseter county times and content from online services such as sportsticker posted by howard at 11 32 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday september 06 2008 calibration these data from the newspaper assocation of america show that newspaper revenues have dropped 13 4 billion since 2003 allen mutter says they dropped 3 billion in the first six months of this year the aggregate data don t reflect mcclatchy s performance precisely for example our online revenues are growing robustly which apparently isn t true everywhere but it s obvious that the whole industry is in recession and we re hurting too i mention this to suggest that you consider the scale of the problem before blaming it all on gary or worse yet me we ve made some mistakes and haven t done everything right but the serious financial situation that mandates layoffs and expense reductions is way bigger than us right now the issue is ad revenue decline we know we re never going back to the days i ve referred to as fat dumb happy but we don t need to our company is already considerably more efficient than it was then and becoming more so so our operating costs are falling if revenue can stabilize we ll be able to operate healthy news organizations without the continued threat of further cutbacks and when will they stabilize nobody knows and signals are still mixed but they will and our job is to get from here to there and then start building posted by howard at 11 27 am 18 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest friday september 05 2008 moderate well that was fun i wanted to allow unmoderated anonymous comments on this blog to model the benefits of open unfettered conversation for nearly three years now it s been wide open and generally worked well now it s not i have turned on the moderate comments feature which means i ll need to see and approve comments before they appear anonymity is still okay and i intend to approve liberally i guess you ll be the judge of how well i do i m not looking for more email or to make this clumsier but i honestly think the degenerating flood of repetitive often misinformed comments is a barrier to broader communication this is my blog and i d like to elevate the debate a little there are plenty of hate mcclatchy blogs out there and starting a blog is easy so there s room all your name calling ad hominem criticism and more but not here i apologize for the inconvenience which i will work to ensure is minor please continue to comment to criticize and to contribute posted by howard at 9 50 am 17 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest thursday september 04 2008 palin coverage must we chose broccoli or curly fries i got a good question in the comments to my wag the dog post below that gives me a chance to clarify and expand on the original i m going to take advantage of the fact that this is my blog to elevate that question and answer it here for wider visibility the anonymous comment question was as one of your mni reporters i appreciate you clarifying way up above that you wouldn t actually fire reporters for asking questions as you said you would in your lead a gentle writing reminder here exaggeration in the pursuit of making a point sometimes comes across better in person than in print i m just saying in the welter of crap posts some previous anon made mention that if adn had covered the palin daughter s pregnancy months ago vetted it for the world in effect then maybe it wouldn t be an issue now and as one poster pointed out the prurient and sleazy my words not his are what seems to drive readers interest these days certainly not nato treaties with the soviets as responsible journalists we re no longer the gatekeepers of information but god knows we still need to attract readers and let s say it together drive internet traffic so what are your thoughts on balancing all those things in a responsible way it s a very good question i had a discussion like this in tacoma once when i mentioned that it s hard to make a living urging people to eat their broccoli when the guy in the next booth is selling curly fries editor karen peterson raised her hand to remind me howard they giving away the curly fries over there and so they are but if all you eat is curly fries you die young and fat clutching your heart we need to be sure we are selling not just broccoli but balance nutrition longer life many people want that we can sustain our mass audiences by finding ways to serve that impulse with time for dessert along the way i wish i had been clearer in my original post about that distinction of course i don t propose firing people for asking questions pertinent or impertinent i have never done so one time in 40 years of journalism so it s a fair bet i won t start now i didn t realize my attempt at emphasis would be interpreted as a genuine threat or a directive i promise to try to be more precise if you promise to cut me a little rhetorical slack i don t apologize at all for my sentiments which are genuine important and i think right i had a helpful productive email exchange last night with mark seibel and other editors at the bureau who were explaining whey their staffers took issue with my post in thinking further about it i decided this was what i intended to say we are not likely to get many substantive chances to question this woman and i don t want them squandered sex education policy opens the door to questions about her daughter i guess but much of the rest of the frenzy thus far as centered on far less meaningful questions i don t want us to play into that there are plethora of infinitely more more important questions to ask and things to learn about sarah palin matters of genuine national interest and security do you or anybody you know complaining about this question that prioritization i m sorry i kicked up some dust with this i m not sorry about what i said posted by howard at 8 44 am 18 comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest wednesday september 03 2008 sarah palin wagging the dog in dodge city i believe i d fire any reporter who wasted a chance to question gov sarah palin by asking a single question about pregnancies duis or thuggish boyfriends an extraordinary two month drama is now unfolding about her nomination as a vice presidential candidate and its resolution will demonstrate a great deal about the ability and capacity of press to perform genuine public service journalism in an era of dodge city bloggers and wag the dog manipulations much hangs in the balance jay rosen spins out an ominous and all too plausible scenario over at huffington post examining how and why republican stra...