Category Archives: Media

Pretty Soon the Journal Could Be a Home-Based Business

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More bad news for the Camel City's last major tree killer:

A corporate consolidation initiative by Media General Inc. will result in the elimination of two newsroom operations at the Winston-Salem Journal by Oct. 31, company officials said Wednesday.
 
The copy-editing and page-design departments will be shifted to larger Media General publications –the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia and The Tampa Tribune in Florida. The consolidated operation is expected to start up in the third quarter, said Media General, which is based in Richmond.

The consolidation will involve job cuts.

 "It is undetermined how many jobs and where," said Ray Kozakewicz, a spokesman for Media General. The Journal has 18½ positions in those two departments, representing 20 percent of its newsroom staff.

A design coordinator will be based at the Journal, Kozakewicz said.

From what I can tell it sounds like they'll be losing about 16 people from the 92-ish that are currently there.  Sure, some might be able to get jobs in Richmond or Tampa if they want them but that's still a job loss as far as Winston-Salem is concerned. 

At this rate I might be able to rent the Journal space in my house as the kids move out over the next five years.  I can easily accommodate the five of them and their computers.  I might even be able to fit in the high speed copier (with collator/stapler!).  


Nice Article on Labor of Love

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Kim Underwood wrote a nice article for the Winston-Salem Journal about TAA's Labor of Love project at The Children's Home.  As I wrote before, this is one of the most amazing projects I've ever been involved with and I think the article really helps explain why:

The cottage is needed because last Sept. 1, the Children's Home took over the operation of Opportunity House, a nine-bed emergency shelter for young people on Brookstown Avenue. The shelter had been run by the Youth Opportunities organization.

"The intention from Day One was to move that facility on campus," said George Bryan, the president and chief executive of the Children's Home…

When the Children Home agreed to take over the shelter, Bryan estimated that it could take $150,000 to renovate the 10,000-square-foot Stultz Cottage. With no money available, immediate action wasn't possible.

Along came Marc Crouse, a member of the apartment association who volunteers at the home and is in the process of adopting a young person who has been living there. When he approached Bryan about the association doing something at the home for this year's "Labor of Love" project, Bryan thought that fixing up the cottage for the program would be just the thing.

"From the first, we are considering this a miracle," Bryan said.

One Opinion Column You Can Be Pretty Sure Won’t Be Picked Up by the Local Papers

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The Washington Post has a new opinion column called The Spirited Atheist (h/t to Ed Cone for the link).  I'm thinking it won't be picked up by the Journal, News & Record or any other local paper here in the Piedmont Triad, although if they really want to gin up some angry "Letters to the Editor" they should give it a go.

Winston-Salem Journal’s Managing Editor Heading Out

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Ken Otterbourg, the Winston-Salem Journal's managing editor, is leaving the paper at the end of the month.  From his blog post about his departure:

We will be running a story tomorrow announcing my resignation as
managing editor at the Journal. We told the staff yesterday. So
consider this the tease, as it will make you read the article.
But the short version is that a) I wanted to try some other things
besides running a newsroom before I got too old to make the transition
and that b) I had some substantial disagreements with our corporate
staff about some planned changes for our newsroom in the coming year.

Update: I'll keep in place the speculatin' that I wrote below just to show how off one person (me) can be when working with partial info.  According to the article that the Journal ran about Otterbourg's resignation his disagreement with the corporate office has to do with consolidating the copy editing and design functions of the three largest papers.  Of course that could have led to people being let go (speculation number 1), but still it looks like I really was speaking through my nether regions. Update End

That last line has me speculatin' and the three possibilities that pop into my head are:

  1. He's had to be the guy handing out pink slips the last couple of years and he doesn't want to do more of the same.  In classic corporate style the suits in Richmond want him to cut senior reporters since they cost so much and hand the reins to kids out of journalism school (if such people still exist) and hope for the best.  
  2. The suits in Richmond want the newsroom to be better integrated with advertising so that they can offer more "innovative" business solutions to their advertisers.  Hey, if it's good for Murdoch's peeps then why not Media General's?
  3. The suits are considering pulling the plug on the printed product and going entirely digital.

Remember this is pure speculation on my part and I could be totally talking out of my nether regions, but I don't think the speculation is too much of a stretch, especially the first one.  Believe me, I hope I'm wrong.

What Our Reading Might Look Like Not Too Far in the Future

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If you have any interest in the publishing biz or are a fan of magazines then you really need to read Rex Hammock's blog.  Of all the people I follow he seems to have the best grasp of where the industry is going and, more importantly, he's one of the few who seems to know what he doesn't know.  A recent post included a video about how traditional magazine content might be presented on what Rex has dubbed "pad devices." Here's the video, but read Rex's post as it has links to a couple of other interesting and related pieces.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

About the Winston-Salem Journal

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I've been meaning to write about the local newspaper for the last couple of months, but I'm just now getting to it.  Anyone who's read this blog over the last few years knows that in the past I've been somewhat critical of how the newspaper has approached competing the modern information era.  Well I'd like to take a moment to give them kudos for two recent changes:

  1. Unlike some folks I like their redesign to the smaller format. I find it easier to read and I like the new fonts and layout as well. It's purely a personal preference, but the redesign definitely works for me.
  2. I think combining the hard news into one section and focusing on local news in the front is a good move. National news is easily available from other sources (cable news, national news websites, etc.) and the one competitive advantage that the Journal has is in-depth local news and they need to emphasize that.

I also think the Journal is trying hard with their online efforts.  I'm a fan of some of their blogs, Dan Collins' in particular, and they're even trying some live online chats.  Unfortunately the live chat with Mayor Joines to discuss the Dell situation seemed to have attracted about four people judging by the number of people who submitted questions (I think there were two of us) and I don't sense that many of them get a lot of active engagement. 

What I'm hoping is that the paper will keep plugging away and somehow find gold in the online hills, and do it ASAP, because their print circulation is looking pretty dismal.  Numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulation show the number of M-F subscribers for the six months that ended 9/30/2009 to be 67,169 and the number of Sunday subscribers to be 82,959.  As those print numbers continue to plummet so will the advertising revenue derived from them, and unless it's replaced with revenue from some other function I don't think the paper will be a viable business for many more years. 

Unfortunately I think the Journal gave up its greatest competitive advantage years ago when it started laying off reporters.  I'm not saying that the folks at the Journal did it light heartedly or without a great deal of consideration, but those very same reporters would be the people that could create the locally focused product unique to the Journal whether in print, online, or written in chalk on the road for that matter.  That content could then be packaged and sold, whether to advertisers or directly to consumers, and would hold what I consider to be the best opportunity for the Journal to survive or even thrive.  Unfortunately that horse is long out of the barn and it's a little late to shut the door.

My friends, the demise of the Journal would be bad for all of us because local newspapers have traditionally been the most effective watchdog of local government and without them we'll have a vacuum to fill.  Sure, we could have "citizen journalists" step in and do some of it, and local TV will do whatever it can in two minute chunks, but local newspapers offer a level of expertise that will be very difficult to replace in the short term and as we've seen recently here in Winston-Salem, even the best intentioned and most respected politicians need some looking after.

Everything Old is New Again

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I read this Gartner blog post about the government making its data more easily accessible with a little smile on my face because it caused me to have a little "Back to the Future Moment" moment.  More specifically I enjoyed this part:

A conversation with a federal client on Monday about this last aspect was illuminating. He observed that certain data may allow businesses to create services that they charge for and profit from. If successful, these services, irrespective of whether they are useful to the public, would put a significant demand on the government infrastructure. The question then would be how to strike a fair balance between providing data transparency and access to the public, and ensuring that taxpayer money is not being used to subsidize businesses.

I hate to tell them, but there's been a nice little sector of the publishing industry that's made a killing off of repackaging public data since well before the internet even existed.  They did it by compiling relevant data for readers that was easier to digest than the "off the shelf" data provided by the government and/or the information was delivered in a more timely manner.  To me this worry is a lot of noise about nothing; the government has to provide the public access to its data as part of its mandate and worrying about businesses being subsidized by this activity is, to me, nonsensical.  Companies won't be in business long if they simply regurgitate data, but they can build a nice business if they add a little value for consumers (insight, context, timeliness, etc.) and I think everyone benefits from that in the long run.

Pot, Say Hello to Kettle

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Sometimes the comments provide more entertainment than the stories at the Winston-Salem Journal.  An example from this story was submitted by AverageCitizen in response to a comment left by ThePossum:

The only cliche is in the critisism.I think the Journal deserves a better class of commenter.

Perhaps one that can spell? Maybe that's why he/she is just AverageCitizen and not SuperiorCitizen.

Why Not a National White Theatre Festival?

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This past week Winston-Salem hosted what has become a very prominent arts festival, the National Black Theatre Festival.  It's a big deal and it's a heck of a boost to the city, and as you'd expect the Winston-Salem Journal has given it significant coverage.  Also not surprising is the feedback that the Journal's editor has gotten.  In a couple of words it's that the paper is "too black."  In his blog post about the issue Ken does the best job of explaining why there's not a "National White Theatre Festival":

One of the issues is of course terminology, its the National BLACK Theatre Festival. And so one caller asked when we were going to cover the National WHITE Theatre Festival and wouldn’t people be up in arms if such an event existed. But of course, such events exist. They’re just not labeled as such. And we do cover them. The labeling along racial and ethnic lines is part of minority groups—racial, ethnic, religious—banding together to tell the majority that they exist. Majority groups don’t have to label. They’re implied.

I think he's right, but I'll add my own two cents.  I don't think there's a need for a national "white" anything, but the day is approaching when whites will no longer be the majority in America.  When that happens and when someone decides that there's a need for a National White Theatre Festival I hope that the same acceptance applies.