Mainstream Media

People apparently take radio show ratings seriously. I suppose that should be obvious, but especially on as anonymous a medium as radio waves transmitted indiscriminately over the air, I’ve never understood how anybody can state with confidence the number of listeners to any given show. That said, I’m a little bit surprised that the Arbitron…

As an active local blogger, departing Projo reporter Scott MacKay’s citation of the Projo’s decision to allow anonymous and largely-unmoderated commenting on the Projo’s news blogs as contributing to his decision to take his employer’s buyout offer, quoted by Ian Donnis at the Not for Nothing blog, naturally caught my eye. The two-deep quotes are…

… effective September 12, Turn to Ten reports. [H/T Ian Donnis at Not For Nothing.] The longtime political columnist for The Providence Journal is retiring. M. Charles Bakst is taking a buyout that was recently offered to a number of Journal employees. For the past 40 years, Bakst has written weekly and Sunday columns for…

In Saturday’s Projo, Bill Moyers attempted to take the Projo’s David Mittell to task for not getting his facts correct in a recent set of columns by Mittell about Moyers (I promise, after the block quote, there will be no more references in this post to the timeline of how and when Bill Moyers became…

The news of buyouts at the Projo reminds me of this item, from Glenn Reynolds, on a major reason why he believes newspapers have fallen on hard times… I’ve said for years that hard-news reporting is the killer app for Big Media, but they just don’t want to do it. They want to tell people…

As always, Ian Donnis has his finger on the pulse of what’s going on at the Journal. Working off of his initial story about ProJo parent Belo Corp cutting around 500 jobs throughout the company, Ian also found out that ProJo will cut around 50 jobs or seek buyouts. He’s talked to some veterans over…

Ian Donnis has been keeping tabs on the fall of the newspaper business, particularly the ProJo, for a while, most recently noting that “[t]he bottom line…is that the erosion of newspapers hurts us all.” That’s certainly true. And a couple recent Rasmussen polls point to some of the problems newspapers (as part of the larger…

As Don has noted, Tony Snow has passed away after a battle with cancer. Snow recently served as Press Secretary for the current Bush Administration, but he was perhaps best known as a conservative commentator and newsman (FOX). Undoubtedly partisan, he was also a class act. Snow’s tone and tenor is something sorely lacking in…