Birmingham, Mobile and Huntsville to publish three days a week

This might come off as cold, but with the exception of some elderly people with disposal income, people that don't have their own computer(s) aren't the kind of people many businesses, particularly ones that sell advertising, are worried about.

You think there's a bunch of golf and lacrosse on TV because tons of people are watching it? No, it's because the <i>right</i> people are watching it.

 

http://classic.lagniappemobile.com/article.asp?articleID=5483&SID=3

All the while we’re constantly presented with the grind that it’s the Internet that’s killing the P-R and other papers. They decided long ago their newspapers were dead men walking. The second Ricky "Stormcrow” Mathews entered the building, the P-R’s fate was sealed.

Despite his admonitions about "Rising Up” and joining together and Morgan Freeman’s coffee-rich baritone telling us how great the Ricky-run P-R was going to be, Mathews has been nothing but a hatchet man more interested in running groups he has no business being involved with than running the newspaper he was allegedly hired to save.

 

Posted this on the New Orleans thread, but works here too.. Scary part is the original story cited won an Michigan AP award..

Since many people seem to want to compare this to Ann Arbor, a former Ann Arbor Newsie does just that...
Bravo, Mary...

http://annarborchronicle.com/2012/06/02/milestone-integrity-and-a-sense-of-place/
The news from New Orleans coincided with an ultimately successful effort by The Ann Arbor Chronicle to push AnnArbor.com to correct a shockingly flawed analysis related to fire protection that had been originally reported by Ryan Stanton back in May of 2011. Within days of publication last year, Chronicle editor Dave Askins alerted Stanton to the likely source of the factual errors in Stanton’s piece.

Askins correctly analyzed the Ann Arbor fire department’s reports that Stanton had misinterpreted, and soon after that The Chronicle published that analysis. It wasn’t until this week, though, that AnnArbor.com’s “chief content officer,” Tony Dearing, wrote a column acknowledging the fact that the response times reported by Stanton were inaccurate. But Dearing’s accounting of AnnArbor.com’s errors is misleading and incomplete – in part because it fails to take responsibility for obvious reporting mistakes, blaming sources instead.

In that respect, Dearing’s column continues a pattern of disingenuous communication by AnnArbor.com with the community it purports to serve.


And a reader (albeit a PR person for Ann Arbor Schools) writes...
"Currently I am in a conversation with annarbor.com over the use of their sources – most recently 14 year olds who are approached via twitter for an “interview”. Really? Is this journalism? I know social media brings new challenges to reporting but finding your source via tweets with 14 years olds is not good journalism in my book, and frankly crosses the ethical line for me. "

 

I see your point Jake. I just see as another FUBAR experiment.

 

Everyone at all three papers, and in New Orleans, finds out if they have a job Tuesday.

Lot of nervous people. Please keep them all in your thoughts.

 

Best wishes to all.

 

Wow. Talk about some seriously dark clouds hanging over people. Best of luck to all involved.

 

Tuesday will be a very bad day for many good people.

 

The deconstruction of these three fine newspapers begins in 1 hour. Was told last night they're bringing folks in alphabetically beginning at 7 a.m. - absolutely brutal.

 

Wow that is awful. Sounds like what Paxton did in Durham.

 

Thinking of my friends at all of those places.

 

As am I.