Valuing News By The Pound

The struggling company has looked at the column inches of news produced by each reporter, and by each paper’s news staff. Finding wide variation, they said, they have concluded that it could do without a large number of news employees and not lose much content.

As hard as economic times are for TV, they’re worse for newspapers and other print outlets.

So, what do you do to get the bottom line up? I don’t know, but I suspect it isn’t this. Here’s a story from The International Herald Tribune. Michaels is Randy Michaels, CEO of the Tribune Corporation, now owned by Sam Zell, and heavily in debt.

…the struggling company has looked at the column inches of news produced by each reporter, and by each paper’s news staff. Finding wide variation, they said, they have concluded that it could do without a large number of news employees and not lose much content.

Michaels said that, after measuring journalists’ output, “when you get into the individuals, you find out that you can eliminate a fair number of people while eliminating not very much content.” He added that he understood that some reporting jobs naturally produce less output than others.

He said that The Los Angeles Times produced 51 pages of news for each journalist there, while the figure for two other Tribune papers, The Baltimore Sun and The Hartford Courant, is more than 300 pages.

Michaels had been CEO of Clear Channel Communications. When he left there, Radio Ink reported:

…industry message boards were swollen with vitriolic postings vilifying both him and Clear Channel. Various diatribes claimed that Michaels was everything from “the antichrist of Radio” to “a blight on professionalism” to “representative of the heinous crimes perpetrated by Clear Channel.”

Today, it seems Michaels is valuing content the way a butcher values meat – by the pound. But in the real world content is not equal word-for-word. You would hope some of the LA Times lower word count has to do with the depth its stories contain.

It will be sad to see newspapers disappear. I’m afraid that’s going to happen… and sooner, rather than later.

Right now, TV is incapable of providing the depth and story count papers do (though TV kills print in immediacy, emotion and a number of other categories). Few of the Internet news sites really produce their own content, and those that do seldom produce local news.

My daughter and her generation don’t read many newspapers nor do they watch much TV news. No one has yet figured out how to make traditional news more attractive to them.

It’s all very sad.

Charles Lane – Trust Me, You’ll Know Him By Sight

As character actors go, he had quite a career. He was always the stiff, stern company man or governmental hack – the guy who had a ready “no” for anything you needed.

Charles Lane’s resume on IMDB is as long as your arm. There are 300+ entries, many of them for multiple appearances on the same TV series. On Bewitched alone he was Mr. Roland, Mr. Cushman, Mr. Jameson, Mr. Harmon and Mr. Mr. Meikeljohn.

Like most character actors, he wasn’t well known by name. If you’re too well known, your value as a ‘character’ diminishes. The ratio of those who knew him to those who knew his name had to be 100:1, maybe more.

From the LA Times: “His roles were so numerous that he told TV Guide in 1965 that he would occasionally see himself in movies on TV and have no memory of having played that role.”

I most remember Charles Lane as Homer Bedloe, president of the railroad (the CF&RW) that employed Floyd and Charlie and ran the Cannonball between Hooterville and Pixley with that stop at Petticoat Junction’s “Shady Rest Hotel.”

Mr. Bedloe was out to get Kate Bradley, while Kate’s Uncle Joe tried to get Bedloe. Kate was always victorious. By definition, everyone on Petticoat Junction prevailed against Uncle Joe! Homer Bedloe never got more than a Pyrrhic victory.

It wasn’t until I read about him in Wikipedia and saw his ‘original’ name (Charles Gerstle Levison) that I realized he was Jewish. They had Jews in San Fransisco in 1905? Who knew?

Charles Lane was 102 when he died on Monday in Southern California. He was one of my all-time favorite mean people.

A documentary on his life is in production. I’d like to see “You Know the Face” when it’s released. Meanwhile, the clip below is from Nickelodeon on the occasion of his 100th birthday.

Is It Soup Yet?

For the past few weeks I have been following (here and here), with great interest, stories about White House staffers using non-governmental email accounts while discussing government business on ‘company’ time. Obviously, that makes them somewhat more difficult to find (especially if people searching didn’t know there was any off site email to begin with).

It seemed like such an explosive story… but there’s hardly any buzz.

The LA Times seems to be carrying the water on this. Wednesday evening they added:

The White House said today that it may have lost what could amount to thousands of messages sent through a private e-mail system used by political guru Karl Rove and at least 50 other top officials, an admission that stirred anger and dismay among congressional investigators.

I hate it when email gets lost. It’s so convenient tragic.

This story has been bubbling for a while – weeks now. Will it graduate to the big leagues? Who knows. It’s funny how some stories ooze out as opposed to break out.

It still looks like a big story to me.

The White House Email Story

On March 28, I wrote about White House staffers using ‘off the books’ email addresses from work. I thought the story would gain traction. It has not… until now.

The LA Times has picked up the story with a fairly long piece in this morning’s paper.

It’s funny how some news explodes while other stories slowly gain steam until they reach critical mass. It’s as if the editors are looking for cover by making sure others approve of their story choices.

No, it’s not as if. It just is! Everyone needs some assurance their choices are correct. Editors are no exception.

My MTV Prediction

This is going to be very brief, because this site is not about political commentary. In fact, I avoid it on purpose.

However, after the Super Bowl, I did make a prediction that the whole Janet Jackson debacle would impact MTV and they would be forced to make some programming changes. I didn’t realize it would happen so quickly.

From the LA Times

By Jeff Leeds

Times Staff Writer

February 9, 2004

Under intense scrutiny following Janet Jackson’s breast-baring performance during last week’s Super Bowl, MTV has quietly plucked a number of its edgiest music videos out of its daytime rotation.

The Viacom Inc.-owned cable network, which produced the Super Bowl halftime extravaganza, notified several major record companies last week that at least eight of their videos would now be played only during overnight programming, generally between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., sources said.

MTV shifted most of the videos