Tag: The Los Angeles Times

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.

China Makes Artificial Rain for Beijing

Chinese weather specialists used chemicals to engineer Beijing’s heaviest rainfall of the year, helping to relieve drought and rinse dust from China’s capital, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Friday. The Los Angeles Times relayed this story from China yesterday.

I’m not an expert in weather modification, but I know a little about it. Cloud seeding has been tried in the past and the results are usually less than desired.

Let me start at the essence – to see a cloud, you need a cloud. So, if you’re thinking of going to the Gobi and planting flowers, forget it.

You also need the proper temperature structure. Cloud seeding promotes the formation of ice crystals which, being too heavy to remain suspended in the cloud, fall to earth, melting on the way down. Voila – it’s rain.

I am worried that someone in China is selling a bill of goods to the government – making this seem more reliable than it really is. The fact that a single episode is squarely credited with record rainfall seems foolhardy at best and certainly non-scientific.

In science, when something happens without proper controls and protocols being in place, it’s called anecdotal evidence. It is interesting to look at, and probably spurs more study, but you can’t draw conclusions from anecdotes.

From the article, it looks like that’s just what they’ve done!

More important than the lack of rain is the terrible condition of Chinese air quality – the reason they needed this rain in the first place.

Judging by video I’ve seen, and first hand reports from friends and relatives who’ve visited, China’s air is not fit for breathing! City vistas are yellow with haze.

I just did a quick check on the weather in Beijing (not their most industrial city) and found a few hours yesterday when the reported weather condition was “smoke!”

We’re not perfect here, but many of the pollutants China is putting into the atmosphere have been brought under control in the states (many – not all, by any means). That means, probably for the cost savings, China has chosen not to use currently available technology.

I’m not a big worrier when it comes to human induced climate modification (aka – global warming), but if you are, what’s being done in Beijing should scare the daylights out of you. Whatever moisture falls from seeding is moisture unavailable for cloudiness (and rain) downstream.

There was once a commercial where the tag line was, “It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature.” Correct.