'LOU GRANT' on HULU

Most journalists and writers would admit that they were fans of the '70s TV drama "Lou Grant." It was the one (if not only) TV show that nailed the nuances of working in an inner-city newsroom and the trials and tribulations that go along with the profession. Annoyingly, though, the famed TV series isn't out on DVD -- Amazon has an interest page with several requests. Television rerun rights are held by the AmericanLife TV Network. While it's available for download on Amazon.com's Unbox service and on Apple's iTunes Store, the first season can be watched for free on Hulu.



A quick primer: Lou Grant was the city editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune, a job he took after his firing from the TV station WJM. (Though "Mary Tyler Moore" Show viewers were introduced to the character as a television news producer, the character noted many times that he'd begun his career as a print journalist.) The rest of the main cast were Robert Walden and Linda Kelsey, who played general-assignment reporters Joe Rossi and Billie Newman, respectively (Kelsey joined the show in the fourth episode, replacing Rebecca Balding, who'd played reporter Carla Mardigian during the show's first three episodes); Mason Adams, who played managing editor Charles Hume; Jack Bannon, who played assistant city editor Art Donovan; Daryl Anderson, who played photographer Dennis Price, usually referred to as "Animal"; and Nancy Marchand, who played the patrician publisher Margaret Pynchon.

Recurring actors who played editors of various departments included Gordon Jump, who later starred on WKRP in Cincinnati and Emilio Delgado, who simultaneously played Luis Rodriguez on Sesame Street. Asner won two Emmys for his portrayal of Lou; Marchand won Emmy Awards for "Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series" four of the five years the series ran; Walden, Kelsey, and Adams were all nominated for supporting Emmys multiple times.

The format of the episodes generally consisted of Lou assigning Rossi and Billie to cover news stories, and the episodes revealed the problems of the people covered in the stories as well as the frustrations and challenges the reporters went through to get the stories. The series frequently delved into serious societal issues, such as nuclear proliferation, mental illness, prostitution, and chemical waste, in addition to demonstrating coverage of breaking news stories, such as fires, earthquakes, and accidents of all kind. The series also took serious examination of ethical questions in journalism, including plagiarism, checkbook journalism, entrapment of sources, staging news photos, and conflicts of interest that journalists encounter in their work. There were also glimpses into the personal lives of the Tribune staff.

The series won 13 Emmy Awards, including "Outstanding Drama Series". Asner won the Emmy Award for "Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series" in 1978 and 1980. The series also won two Golden Globe awards, a Peabody award, an Eddie award, three awards from the Directors Guild of America, and two Humanitas prizes.

The cancellation of "Lou Grant" in 1982 was the subject of much controversy. Reportedly the series had significant enough ratings in its last season to be renewed (it was in the ACNielsen top ten throughout its final month on the air), but the network declined to renew it because of controversies created by Asner in using both the series and his presidency of the Screen Actors Guild as political soapboxes. Asner's outspokenness in opposing U.S. intervention in El Salvador created a problem for the series and the network with advertisers. Asner also gave one press conference not long before the show was cancelled in which he was asked whether he would support free elections in El Salvador even if those elected were communists; Asner responded that if that was what the voters chose, he would have to support it.

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MORE WOES FOR NEWSPAPERS

Via Editor and Publisher:

NAA Reveals Biggest Ad Revenue Plunge in More Than 50 Years

NEW YORK - The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years.

According to new data released by the Newspaper Association of America, total print advertising revenue in 2007 plunged 9.4% to $42 billion compared to 2006 -- the most severe percent decline since the association started measuring advertising expenditures in 1950.

The drop-off points to an economic slowdown on top of the secular challenges faced by the industry. The second worst decline in advertising revenue occurred in 2001 when it fell 9.0%.

Total advertising revenue in 2007 -- including online revenue -- decreased 7.9% to $45.3 billion compared to the prior year.

There are signs that online revenue is beginning to slow as well. Internet ad revenue in 2007 grew 18.8% to $3.2 billion compared to 2006. In 2006, online ad revenue had soared 31.4% to $2.6 billion. In 2005, it jumped 31.4% to $2 billion.

To read the rest of the story, click HERE.

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DRUDGE: THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL JOURNALIST

Wonder what Papa H would've thought of this interesting little article which came from The Telegraph in London. Whether you love him or hate him, Matt Drudge is the preeminent force of online news, reporting and posting and quite frankly, a trailblazer.

Matt Drudge: world's most powerful journalist

By Toby Harnden in Washington

Ten years ago, he was a reclusive, pasty-faced 31-year-old who, bashing away on his laptop in his grungy Hollywood apartment, shot to prominence when he threatened to bring down Bill Clinton's presidency by breaking news of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

Now, Matt Drudge owns a luxurious Mediterranean-style stucco house on Rivo Alto Island in Florida's Biscayne Bay, a condominium at the Four Seasons in Miami and is said to drive a black Mustang. He remains an elusive, mysterious figure but the internet pioneer is arguably the single most powerful journalist – though his detractors even deny that is his occupation - in the world.

Drudge is still an outsider, contemptuous of the cosy relationships and closed-door deals that keep the ordinary person from being privy to the secrets of the Establishment. He is the reason why people across the globe are now reading about Prince Harry serving in Afghanistan after he shattered a blackout agreed between Fleet Street and Buckingham Palace.

This week, he posted a photograph of Barack Obama dressed in the tribal garb of a Somali elder during a 2006 trip to Africa, claiming it had been emailed by a member of Hillary Clinton's campaign. It appeared to be a brazen attempt to fuel rumours that her rival was a dangerous Muslim.

Within minutes, the photograph was the talk of Washington news rooms and New York television studios. BlackBerry messages flew back and forth between reporters and political operatives. The story spread across the worldwide web as bloggers weighed in on a juicy item that was suddenly topping the news agenda.

To read the rest of the story, click HERE.

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LA TIMES GETS ONLINE ED AS CHIEF

Hmmm ... Is this a sign of things to come?

L.A. Times Editor Post Goes to Web Site Chief

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, February 15, 2008

The Los Angeles Times named its fourth editor in three years yesterday, asking Russ Stanton, who holds the title of innovation editor, to lead a staff rocked by budget cutbacks and management shake-ups.

The appointment of Stanton, who beat out another in-house candidate, comes less than a month after the paper dismissed Jim O'Shea from the post in a battle over budget reductions. O'Shea replaced Dean Baquet, who was fired during a similar fight 16 months ago.

Stanton, 49, will have to make do with less. Sam Zell, the Chicago real estate mogul who recently took control of the parent Tribune Co., announced Wednesday that he would cut 400 to 500 jobs throughout the media company. Times Publisher David Hiller said that would mean eliminating 100 to 150 jobs at his paper -- by layoffs if necessary -- including 40 to 50 in the newsroom.

To read the rest of the story, click HERE.

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DIRE 'TIMES' INDEED ...

Another hit for print journalism ...

The Times to Cut 100 News Jobs
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

After years of resisting the newsroom cuts that have hit most of the industry, The New York Times will bow to growing financial strain and eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs this year, the executive editor said Thursday.

The cuts will be achieved “by not filling jobs that go vacant, by offering buyouts, and if necessary by layoffs,” the executive editor, Bill Keller, said. The more people who accept buyouts, he said, “the smaller the prospect of layoffs, but we should brace ourselves for the likelihood that there will be some layoffs.”

He said, “We intend to move quickly, to get any cuts past us so that we do not spend a year bleeding slowly.”

The Times has 1,332 newsroom employees, the largest number in its history; no other American newspaper has more than about 900. There were scattered buyouts and job eliminations in the newsroom in recent years, but the overall number continued to rise, largely from the growth of its Internet operations.

To read the rest of the story, click HERE

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LA TIMES EDITOR AXED

All too commonplace these days are newsrooms coming under the gun when it comes to finances. What with online news venues, classified ad portals like craigslist and job sites like Monster, it's never been harder for a newspaper to be in business. This is a sad sign of the times ...

L.A Times Fires Editor in Dispute Over Budget Cuts, Month After Newspaper Parent Company Sold
By John Rogers, Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The Los Angeles Times fired its top editor after he rejected a management order to cut $4 million from the newsroom budget, 14 months after his predecessor was also ousted in a budget dispute, the newspaper said Sunday.

James O'Shea was fired following a confrontation with Publisher David D. Hiller, the Times reported on its Web site. The story didn't say when the confrontation took place.

Times spokeswoman Nancy Sullivan said the newspaper would have no comment.

To read the rest of the story, click HERE.

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NEWS BIZ IN TROUBLE

First off, I'd like to apologise for the lack of posts lately. Awful of me ... To repent, I'd like to share this awesome piece I found online via an Australian news outlet called The Age. It delves into the future of newspapers and what the profession means to us all in this day and age. Enjoy ...
Black and white and all over?
Rachel Buchanan
August 25, 2007

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. A wordsmith is "a skilled user and maker of words". Sub-editors are wordsmiths, people who can make a reporter's words into something sharper, better and funnier.

Most reporters were trained on the job. I started making my living as a reporter when I was 18, sports stringing (typing copy up on my white Olivetti portable) while I did a diploma of journalism. The next year I got a job on The Southland Times, an old-fashioned paper of record. If it happened in Southland one day, it was in the paper the next. I know. I recorded golf results, shipping movements and the names, ages and places of every competitor in the province's weekly Little Athletics competition.

But the closed universe of the newspaper office, those trade-based temples to type where printers and proofreaders and journos could all sit down in a staff canteen and eat the same awful food together, is vanishing. Did we journalists miss this story because it is our own?

It is strange for me to be not quite 40 and already have memories and language that apply to working worlds that no longer exist (the afternoon newspaper being one example, seeing unsuccessful stories I'd written being thrust onto a metal spike is another.) Older journalists, such as the men and women who share their stories in the book about The Argus or who talk with Michael Young in Death, Sex & Money: Life Inside a Newspaper (Melbourne University Press, 2007), must feel this disjuncture even more acutely.

I could go on about the old days, but I won't. They're over. The question now is: what is the future for newspaper journalists and newspaper journalism?
Two contradictory forces are at work. First, there is the move towards professionalism, most notably the explosion of journalism degrees in universities. I have benefited from this change because I now have a job teaching journalism in one of these degree programs. Educators aside though, the exponential growth in journalism degrees bears little relationship to job opportunity. Between 1987 and 1992, for example, 16 metropolitan newspapers closed in Australia. A weird counter to this, though, is what I see as anti-professionalism, most notably the rise in so-called citizen or participatory journalism made possible by the net.

While printed newspapers continue to close (The Evening Post, Wellington's wonderful afternoon paper, shut in 2002) and print circulations fall or plateau, the online versions of so-called "legacy media" such as this newspaper, are flourishing.
If the nascent but powerful online news industry is any indication, journalism jobs will be scarcer than ever. Printed newspapers required massive investment in staff and presses but online news sites shift many of these costs to the consumer. Readers have to have their own computers and high-speed broadband access to get their news. Many homes and people still do not have this equipment. A $1.40 newspaper is more democratic and affordable.

One version of journalism's future was uploaded in March when Fairfax Digital launched The Brisbane Times, Australia's first metropolitan online-only newspaper. The "meet the staff" section of the website shows 14 mostly very youthful smiling faces. Surely there were more people than that employed. I rang and discovered that the Times is put out by 12 local editorial staff. Half are reporters and half are producers who copy taste, select stories, do layout, write headlines and edit. Granted they are 12 new journalism jobs but still, the News Limited hard-copy competition, The Courier-Mail, has 215 editorial staff, including about 20 dedicated online journos.

The hard-copy newspaper jobs that remain are vulnerable to the same economic forces that mean you may speak to someone in Mumbai about your phone problems in Melbourne. Also in March, Irish newspaper magnate Tony O'Reilly's company APN New Zealand announced a plan to "source some editorial production services from a specialist supplier". Translated, this means that "some sections" of The New Zealand Herald (New Zealand's biggest metropolitan daily), The Listener (a long-running weekly news magazine) and provincial newspapers including The Northern Advocate, Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua's Daily Post will be subbed and laid out by people in Auckland employed not by APN but Pagemasters NZ, a subsidiary of the Australian news agency AAP.

The first "Pagemaster" pages appeared recently in The Herald. "The proposal reflects global trends in newspaper publishing," said APN executive Martin Simons.
A spokesman told me Pagemaster staff would produce world news pages, but I wonder how long it will be before the editing and layout of national and regional news migrates to Auckland too? Or maybe it could all be subedited in APN's Sydney head offices?

One of the most successful publishing ventures of our time is Wikipedia, the online citizen-created and edited encyclopaedia. Many Wikipedia entries are excellent but many others are inaccurate, stupid or vandalised beyond repair. In the wiki world everyone is an expert whether they are trained or not. The unifying factor is that no one is paid a cent. Wikipedia didn't need to outsource subediting because it was never part of the interactive, social-networking web 2.0 universe in the first place. It will be interesting to see if The Citizendium, a new citizen-created encyclopaedia, will overtake Wikipedia. Anonymous entries are forbidden and work will be "gently edited".

COMPUTERS entered antipodean newsrooms from the late 1980s onwards. I remember these gigantic clunky grey boxes with black screens and fuzzy green fonts, as babyish to look at as a Pac-Man console. Within a decade, computers had destroyed many of the trades associated with newspapers, but the impact of electronic pagination is nothing compared with the impact of the internet and associated mobile technologies, most especially camera-enabled mobile phones, on the way news is gathered, written, read, published and understood.

It has all happened so fast. In the 20th century, media evolved through a series of technological landmarks that seem stately in comparison: first radio waves across the Atlantic in 1901; television invented, 1926; television transmission begins in Australia, 1956; CNN begins, 1980. From there, change is compressed. In 1992 the Mosaic browser made the internet easier to use. By 1998, Matt Drudge's online news and gossip website, the Drudge Report, had broken the story of Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, an event that is widely cited by journalism academics as the birth of online news. Google, MySpace, YouTube, wikis and blogs all belong to this century.

Stuart Allan, author of Online News (2006), begins his history of the form with the Drudge Report. Other key events are the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York, in which "amateur news reporters" used weblogs to create their own "decentralised media" and the war in Iraq, which resulted in the rise of first-person, raw accounts of life inside Iraq in the warblogs of Salam Pax and Riverbend. Participatory or citizen journalism began, in this account, with the launch of Indymedia (motto "be the media") in 2000 in Seattle during anti-globalisation protests. South Korea's OhmyNews, in which citizens write the stories (and readers tip writers they like best) and citizen "reporting" on the London bombings, Hurricane Katrina and the Asian tsunami are other examples of what Allan says are "the ways in which the very users of online news are rewriting the rules which have traditionally governed journalism as a profession".

Ordinary people, Allan argues, are now pursuing their own news agendas, sidestepping "corresponding notions of 'authority', 'credibility' and 'prestige'."
News is becoming more and more personalised. The "I" rules. Even though there are unlimited column centimetres in cyberspace, online news stories are shorter and pacier than their print counterparts. Many are in point form, like a PowerPoint presentation. Online news is shaped by the conventions of the blog, a form of writing "dominated by the use of the first person", according to Mark Tremayne, editor of the excellent collection of essays Blogging, Citizenship and the Future of Media (2007).

Tremayne points out that while researchers have been reluctant to define blogs as journalism, readers thought otherwise. Blogs were journalism and their seemingly personal, raw, unedited and informal tone meant readers trusted these "stories" more than reports in the traditional media.

Like many other journalists, I would define news as all the important, surprising, tragic or weird events that have happened here and overseas on a particular day. News is not just things that matter to me. News is information gathered, written, photographed and edited by professional journalists who strive for what I see as the impossible, but still honorable, goal of objectivity and who are motivated by the old-fashioned concept of "public interest".

In Imagined Communities (1983) theorist Benedict Anderson described newspapers as one-day bestsellers. The ritual of reading a newspaper, Anderson argued, was a private event that was also "an extraordinary mass ceremony" that helped an individual imagine themselves as part of a national community.

This analysis no longer works. A community now can be a world made for one. In the 2005 Alfred Deakin innovation lectures in Melbourne, former World Economic Forum program director Lance Knobel talked about an American media project called Daily Me. "The Daily Me is a personalised newspaper that contains just what you want," he said in a speech reprinted in Barons to Bloggers: confronting media power (Miegunyah Press, 2006).

Many people already create their own "daily me" through technologies such as bloglines or RSS (really simple syndication) that feed stories from selected sites into a subscriber's computer. The ABC is now promoting a customised news service called News You Choose. Social-networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook allow users, such as my journalism students, to both consume and create highly personalised news — coming parties, gigs, album releases, art shows, entertainment gossip — whenever they want. YouTube, the video-sharing website whose motto is "broadcast yourself" lets users post and view videos, thereby broadcasting their own unedited version of the news.

In May, when a student was stabbed at work here at La Trobe University's Bundoora campus, footage was posted on YouTube. A far more distressing emerging trend is for members of the public to use their phones to make news by filming themselves or their friends committing violent crimes, as demonstrated by recent stories on bullying.

The public is shaping news agendas as never before. Online editors can quickly see which stories "click" with readers. News risks becoming a "hit" parade, a top 10 list of most clicked items. How long before Australia gets its own version of Las Ultimas Noticias, Chile's most widely read newspaper? The paper, according to Knobel, has "a system where all clicks onto its website are recorded and displayed in the newsroom. The clicks — and the popular vote they represent — determine the print content of the newspaper. If a story gets many clicks, it will be followed up and similar stories will be written. If a story doesn't get enough clicks, it and its follow-ups are spiked".

Stories about climate change are a "hit" with readers now, but they weren't 10 years ago. News is not just what matters to me or you in this instant. As Tremayne writes: "Unless bloggers begin covering school board and city council meetings, major and not so major crimes, serious and not so serious accidents and fires, weather, issues of importance to the few and to the many and issues of little interest to themselves — all this on a daily basis — they will not provide the services now covered by the mainstream press."

News is not black and white and "read all over" any more, but I still believe in newspapers and in newspaper journalism. These pages you are holding contain more than news and features. They are an inky artefact, a monument to the efforts of a trade, a profession, a type, whose time, I fear, is passing.
Rachel Buchanan lectures in media studies at La Trobe University.

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HOPE PAPA H. AIN'T ROLLING OVER ...

Being that Papa H. spent some time as a reporter (for The Toronto Star and Kansas City Star), we feel he'd think this to be priceless. And it is. Read on ...

The online community magazine PasadenaNow.com, recently made headlines when they decided to do something a tad different in the modern news game.

In these days of stringent belt tightening, the bottom-liners are starting to rear their ugly heads in newsrooms throughout the nation. That said, the editor and publisher of Pasadena Now, recently announced that he hired two reporters to cover Pasadena city government — from Mumbai and Bangalore, India.

You read correctly. India.

Starting Tuesday, the dynamic duo will begin sloshing out about 30 Pasadena-centric pieces a week between them. Halfway across the globe.

In exchange, one reporter will make $12,000 a year, the other $7,200, for covering budget battles and zoning meetings in a city of 146,000 best known for the Rose Bowl and Caltech.

Hiring foreign correspondents in reverse makes good sense to head honcho, editor and publisher James Macpherson, 51, a longtime Pasadena resident.

The fledgling two-year old site garners roughly 45,000 visitors a month, but has yet to return turn a profit. Until now, any news coverage consisted mainly of rewritten press releases. He wants to change that.

To his credit, there's a wealth of material available online - city council meetings are webcast and most municipal documents are posted. Truthfully, anyone can write those stories, given they have enough skill and computer expertise.

But is it journalistically ethical? Or bottom-line saavy?

Just how did Macpherson snag his offshoring Clark Kents? They responded to his ad on Indian versions of craigslist.org.

As a result, a male staffer in Mumbai gets to cover city politics over the Internet, while a woman in Bangalore will write features about business and government based on interviews done by staffers in Pasadena, which will be transcribed (in India) and e-mailed to the reporter.

The visionary newsman told MSNBC and Newsweek that the news has already netted him angry e-mails, mostly from journalists. No shock there.

Outsourcing news gathering to a foreighn land. Kinda gives new meaning to the term telecommute, huh?

What's the country coming to? We think most members of the Greatest Generation may be shaking their heads right about now.

I know Papa Hemingway is.
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Take a look at an excellent special report on Indian outsourcing done by ABC News.

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FOURTH ESTATE SUFFERS YET AGAIN

Since Papa H spent much of his time dabbling in The Fourth Estate, the lounge figures we'd drop the goods on the current state of circulation for the nation's top daily newspapers.

The prognosis isn't good. People have to realize that once a newspaper folds, the news gathering folds along with it.

Granted, while most of the country may get their news online, via phone, TV or whatever, way more than half of the actual gathering of news is garnered by newspapers themselves.

Help them out. Buy a paper. Read the paper. Subscribe to a paper.

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Average Weekday Circulation at the Top 20 U.S. Newspapers, for the six-month period ending in March, as reported Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The percentage changes are from the comparable year-ago period.

Circulation at the Top 20 Newspapers

1. USA Today, 2,278,022, up 0.2 percent
2. The Wall Street Journal, 2,062,312, up 0.6 percent
3. The New York Times, 1,120,420, down 1.9 percent
4. Los Angeles Times, 815,723, down 4.2 percent
5. New York Post, 724,748, up 7.6 percent
6. New York Daily News, 718,174, up 1.4 percent
7. The Washington Post, 699,130, down 3.5 percent
8. Chicago Tribune, 566,827, down 2.1 percent
9. Houston Chronicle, 503,114, down 2 percent
10. The Arizona Republic, 433,731, down 1.1 percent
11. Dallas Morning News, 411,919, down 14.3 percent
12. Newsday, Long Island, 398,231, down 6.9 percent
13. San Francisco Chronicle, 386,564, down 2.9 percent
14. The Boston Globe, 382,503, down 3.7 percent
15. The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., 372,629, down 6.1 percent
16. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 357,399, down 2.1 percent
17. The Philadelphia Inquirer, 352,593, up 0.6 percent
18. Star Tribune of Minneapolis-St. Paul, 345,252, down 4.9 percent
19. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, 344,704, up 0.5 percent
20. Detroit Free Press, 329,989, down 4.7 percent

The Dallas Morning News is reporting for the first time since being censured in 2004 for misstating circulation figures. The Chicago Sun-Times has not yet resumed reporting.

Source: Audit Bureau of Circulations

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