US political news and blog site Politico has recruited Newsday reporter Glenn Thrush, according to the site’s Ben Smith, who made the announcement of Thrush’s appointment in a blog post.
Thrush joins the site after five years at Newsday, where he began covering New York city hall before joining the title’s Washington bureau in 2005 to cover the US senate.
The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday have signed a four-year deal, which will see the papers printed in New York.
The initial run, starting in September, will be of the papers’ home editions, but New York-specific content will be added in due course.
Analysis of the LA Times’ most-read stories and most-viewed multimedia on its website shows a correlation between platforms and the topic of content.
For example, blogs on the site attract politically interested readers while the news channel is increasingly focused on ‘soft’ and entertainment news.
Having separate newsrooms ‘has reached the end’, James Brady, WaPo’s site editor, has said following the appointment of Marcus Brauchli as executive editor.
A final decision is yet to be made, adds Brady, but a merger has been discussed ‘conceptually’ with Brauchli.
Channel director Cassy will take a six-month secondment to develop the WSJ’s online video strategy.
Spot.us, a project to fund community news stories by donations from that audience, has started to raise money for its first brief – a feature on the supply of biofuels to California.
This is the first project submitted to Spot.us, which was set up by David Cohn in May with the help of a grant of $340,000 from the Knight News Challenge.
The brief is asking for a 1,500-2,000 word feature with photos and has been submitted by Alexis Madrigal, a staff writer at Wired.com.
So far $50 has been pledged out of a required $250 with two contributions (one anonymous and one from Cohn himself) of $25.
The site is not-for-profit so the donations will be used to fund the journalism and get articles wider distribution through local media outlets.
The Chicago Tribune is to follow the LA Times by culling newsroom jobs and reducing the number of pages in its printed editions.
Around 80 of its 578 newsroom posts are expected to be culled with further cuts appearing in non-journalistic positions.
The printed edition of the Tribune is expected to reduce the number of pages it publishes by 13 or 14 per cent each week.
Management began informing staff of the changes late on Tuesady, the Tribune itself reported.
This is the fourth round of staff cuts since 2005, when the paper had nearly 700 newsroom staff on its books. In real terms the paper expects to lose around 55 people as positions made vacant in recent months have remained unfilled.
Last week, The Los Angeles Times, another Tribune Company newspaper, announced that it would reduce the number of pages it published each week by 15 per cent anddo away with 250 staff roles, 150 of them from the newsroom.
Last week LA Times, one of the biggest employers of journalists in the US, announced that it would be dispensing with the services of 150 of them as part of a total 250 job losses at the paper.
Yesterday afternoon it emerged that two more journalists would likely be leaving the LA Times, but not as a direct result of the editorial cuts.
According to LA Observed, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporters Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber will be leaving the paper later in the summer to join the not-for-profit investigative start up ProPublica.
“It’s another big morale blow in the newsroom, which used to be a place where journalists aspired to reach and stay to do their best work. With new deep cutbacks coming and [LA Times owner] Sam Zell’s outbursts making many of the best journalists feel the Times’ commitment to serious news is precarious, it’s no longer surprising to see stars like Ornstein and Weber flee,” wrote Kevin Roderick.
Last week’s editorial staff cuts, which amounts to roughly 17 per cent of the employees, will be spread between the print newsroom and The Times’ web operations.
Those cuts led to this fascinating quote from Times editor Russ Stanton:
“You all know the paradox we find ourselves in,” he wrote said in a memo to the staff. “Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.”
One hundred and fifty losses job losses against two hires doesn’t really make a great case for the internet as a growth medium for the employment of journalists, but nonetheless the growth of ProPublica and its journalistic modus operandi online marks a neat stab at Stanton’s paradox.
The ProPublica site will be fully operational later this year and plans to have almost 30 investigative reporters working on in-depth stories (it helps that self-made billionaire Herb Sandler has set up the site with a donation of $10m a year from his foundation and that it’s under the watchful eye of former WSJ editor Paul Steiger).
ProPublica will conduct investigations, largely online, in areas of significant public interest. It will also use TV documentaries to reveal on that large canvas issues that will be followed up extensively online.
It’s first major project, an investigation into US-backed Arabic language TV network Alhurra, ran on 60 Minutes two weeks ago.
Zell say that newspapers have to slim down and become more economically viable. Newspaper’s are about money, not news, that’s fairly self-evident. Little wonder then that Charles Ornstein and Tracy Weber decided to walk and pursue their investigations elsewhere.
What awaits them at ProPublica?
A philanthropic backer claiming no editorial interference. No desire for profits. No ads on the site. Where almost all resources will be poured into journalism (what no free CD give away?).
The journalistic equivalent to Willy Wonka’s ‘golden ticket’, it seems.
The LA Times announced yesterday that it will cut 250 jobs – 150 editorial positions – across the company in a latest effort to curb spending as reveunes plummet.
In a further cost-cutting step, the newspaper will reduce the number of pages it publishes each week by 15 per cent.
“You all know the paradox we find ourselves in,” Times Editor Russ Stanton said in a memo to the staff.
“Thanks to the internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.”
Silicon Valley Insider talked to Marc Frons, chief technology officer of NYTimes digital, about the projects he’s working on and the development that they’ll be rolling out in the near future. Here’s a brief overview:
Things we have already covered:
The shock of the new: