Monday monday monday

Busy with errands all weekend, yet somehow none of them bore fruit. Neither did I post here at all, but now I'm back at work and trying to avoid that fact. Thus, a post...

In a strange way I really enjoy newspaper coverage of the decline of that industry. It's like they're writing their own obituaries. Sometimes I expect an article to end, "...and I've just been fired."

Today's Business Day section went over and above in this regard. While the big headline was about economic bubbles, 75% of the section spoke to the old/new media split, or transition depending on how you see it. Stephanie Clifford wrote about McGraw-Hill crossing its fingers that someone (anyone!) will take BusinessWeek off its hands despite massive losses. Severe layoffs haven't stemmed the weekly's increasing irrelevancy. It seems their most recent strategy change was to focus on serving their business executive audience, in other words "to help business leaders make more money." Wonder what they'd say about their own industry?

Claire Cain Miller focused on a blog network called Sugar Inc. to discuss organizational tendencies in new media and the redirection of ad dollars to the Internet. With blogs focusing on celeb gossip, trendy consumer goods and the like, they're ripe for advertisers. Ad revenue was up 20% for the first half of the year, and though they haven't turned a profit yet, they should by the end of this year. On the other hand, magazine ad revenue is going down the tubes.

Meanwhile, tomorrow a Philadelphia bankruptcy judge will decide whether ownership of The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily News will go to creditors or the local investors who bought the papers in 2006. The situation, of course, stems from the collapse of ad revenue for papers. Ironically, the downturn in their ad sales was one of the least severe in the industry, falling "only" a bit more than 40% since 2006.

As if giving themselves a pep talk, the Times tried to balance this out with a story by David Carr of a former journalist returning to the paper business. Thomas Moran was a politics columnist at Newark's The Star-Ledger until February 2008, when he left to become policy director of a holding company. Getting out of an industry on the brink (after a couple years of pay freezes), making more money in a stabler position, kids going to college soon; he had plenty of good reasons to do so. Anyway, within a week he hated it and started moping around the house, so he went back the first chance he got. Which is to prove, I guess, that papers are still hiring journalists and that, hey, journalism is cooler than a holding company. Perhaps, but this feels like the exception to prove the rule. I assume the pay freezes are still in place, if they haven't turned into cuts. Interesting description of "most" reporters as "attention-deprived adrenaline junkies who care only for the next story."

Second to that, my favorite part was the description of New Jersey as a "game preserve" of corruption.