Newspaper Industry

“What's black and white and read all over?” That is the setup for what used to be the first joke learned by most every American kid. These days, delivering the punch line would leave the kids bewildered. They might just say, “What's a newspaper?” In our new media age, that is not a question with an obvious answer. Ask the people in New Orleans who just found out their venerable Times-Picayune will no longer be available in print every day. Based in a city and state with a perennially high level of corruption and dysfunction, the Times-Picayune has been a powerful and admired community watchdog.

The Great American Twinkie Crisis illuminates what is wrong with the relationship between management and labor in this country. Hostess, the company that since the 1930s has provided our nation with snacks that are nearly indestructible, now threatens to go out of business and leave us bereft of Ding Dongs, Sno Balls, Ho Ho's, CupCakes, Wonder Bread and a variety of other baked goods that are probably not good for us but, at least to a kid's palate, taste...

The newspaper industry is starting to meet its new bosses — the hedge funds and banks that are moving in as rich family owners and starchy executives move out. Although the objectives of these new owners remain unclear, insiders say the transition period promises more upheaval at newspapers just as they begin to emerge from bankruptcy protection. Over the last year, bankrupt newspaper companies including Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times, KTLA-TV Channel 5 and other news organizations, have been overrun by a category of stealthy "distressed debt" hedge funds.

Variety has been a Hollywood must-read and a global show business symbol for more than a century, famous for its snappy lingo and its breathless coverage of entertainment industry news. Its front-page headlines are legendary, with gems such as "Sticks Nix Hick Pix" for a story about people in rural areas rejecting movies about their own lives and "Ovitz no Govitz" for a piece on talent agent and studio executive Michael Ovitz being passed over for a job. An article about Internet piracy had the headline "Cybergeek Leaks Freak Pic Biz. " Reporters write in an invented "slanguage" that makes readers feel like members of an exclusive club, with "hoofers" and "oaters" standing in for Westerns, "boffo" for a strong box-office performance, and "ankled" when a Hollywood executive is pushed out the door.

A revolution is rumbling through Fleet Street, where Britain's national newspapers have traditionally made their headquarters, and the changes that are about to take place will be felt throughout the industry. For decades, the printers have exercised nearly absolute power along Fleet Street. But now the barricades they erected to keep out computer technology, which has been accepted virtually everywhere else in the Western world, have begun to crumble.

Edmund Arnold, an early consultant and educator in graphic arts design who brought cleaner displays of stories and pictures to hundreds of newspapers, died Feb. 2 of pneumonia at a hospital in Salem, Va. He was 93. Publishers of magazines, which have a longer shelf life on coffee tables and in waiting rooms than daily newspapers, have long appreciated the value of beautiful layouts with vivid typefaces and effective arrangement of pictures.

The ever-shrinking world of print journalism shrank a little more Thursday. Editor & Publisher, a magazine that for a century chronicled the rise and now decline of the U.S. newspaper industry, fell victim itself to the wrenching changes on the media landscape. Its owner announced Thursday that it would cease publishing at the end of this year. Founded at the turn of the 20th century when William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were bitter rivals in the competition to build big city newspapers, E&P began a struggle to survive at the turn of the 21st century as print advertising peaked and the Internet disrupted journalism's business model.

You think the economy is sending mixed signals? Just look at the newspaper industry. For every "green shoot" that appears, there's a tumbleweed or two rolling by next door. On the positive side, advertising sales firmed a bit in June at major chains such as Gannett Co. and New York Times Co., enabling those companies to post unexpectedly strong second-quarter profits. Newspaper stocks rallied sharply -- Gannett shares have rocketed 156% since the end of June -- as some investors bet that aggressive cost cutting has positioned the companies for higher profit once the economy rebounds.

As The Times' Dawn C. Chmielewski reported Friday, emissaries of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. recently approached the owners of this newspaper, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Hearst Corp. about joining a consortium that would charge for online news content. Murdoch's Wall Street Journal already does so, but the Australian-born media magnate understands that what's required for serious -- which is to say expensive-to-produce -- journalism to survive is that all the quality English-language papers and news sites agree to charge for Web access and then mercilessly sue anyone who makes more than fair use of their work without paying a fee. For such a scheme to work, the papers' owners need to agree on when to act and what to charge.

Dear California, I've been thinking about this for a very long time, and I've come to the conclusion that we should go our separate ways. I thought I loved you and it would last forever, but I was so very wrong. I know that our relationship has lasted 50 years and that we should fight to stay together, but you've changed so much that, frankly, I don't know who you are anymore! When we first met I was young and rather naive, and I loved you unconditionally. I spent years running with abandon across your sandy beaches in the bright sunshine, playing in your beautiful parks and attending your top-rated schools, which were a national model for the other states.

The Orange County Register officially has a new owner. The Boston investment group 2100 Trust, headed by former greeting card company executive Aaron Kushner, has purchased Freedom Communications Inc., an Irvine company that owns the Register and six smaller daily newspapers. The sale was announced last month and completed Wednesday, according to a statement from Freedom. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. According to the statement, the Freedom name will be retained for the newspaper group.

“What's black and white and read all over?” That is the setup for what used to be the first joke learned by most every American kid. These days, delivering the punch line would leave the kids bewildered. They might just say, “What's a newspaper?” In our new media age, that is not a question with an obvious answer. Ask the people in New Orleans who just found out their venerable Times-Picayune will no longer be available in print every day. Based in a city and state with a perennially high level of corruption and dysfunction, the Times-Picayune has been a powerful and admired community watchdog.

The Times does its best to catch its own typos and grammatical errors before a paper goes to print or a story is posted online; when we come up short, readers tend to let us know. But what happens if a source quoted in a story commits a linguistic faux pas? Gene Axelrod of Huntington Beach was reading Tony Barboza's front-page story Monday about dangers at Yosemite National Park when he reached this quote from Gov. Jerry Brown describing his reaction to a child standing near the edge of a steep drop-off in the park: " 'It made me shake just looking at him. It's dangerous," Brown told the Associated Press.

Google revolutionized the way people access information. Now it wants to transform how people get entertainment. The search giant is touting an ambitious new technology, called Google TV, that would marry the Internet with traditional television, enabling viewers to watch TV shows and movies unshackled from the broadcast networks or cable channels on which they air. Users would need to buy a TV or set-top box with Google software that could connect...

The newspaper industry is starting to meet its new bosses — the hedge funds and banks that are moving in as rich family owners and starchy executives move out. Although the objectives of these new owners remain unclear, insiders say the transition period promises more upheaval at newspapers just as they begin to emerge from bankruptcy protection. Over the last year, bankrupt newspaper companies including Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times, KTLA-TV Channel 5 and other news organizations, have been overrun by a category of stealthy "distressed debt" hedge funds.

The ever-shrinking world of print journalism shrank a little more Thursday. Editor & Publisher, a magazine that for a century chronicled the rise and now decline of the U.S. newspaper industry, fell victim itself to the wrenching changes on the media landscape. Its owner announced Thursday that it would cease publishing at the end of this year. Founded at the turn of the 20th century when William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer were bitter rivals in the competition to build big city newspapers, E&P began a struggle to survive at the turn of the 21st century as print advertising peaked and the Internet disrupted journalism's business model.

The Orange County Register officially has a new owner. The Boston investment group 2100 Trust, headed by former greeting card company executive Aaron Kushner, has purchased Freedom Communications Inc., an Irvine company that owns the Register and six smaller daily newspapers. The sale was announced last month and completed Wednesday, according to a statement from Freedom. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. According to the statement, the Freedom name will be retained for the newspaper group.

You think the economy is sending mixed signals? Just look at the newspaper industry. For every "green shoot" that appears, there's a tumbleweed or two rolling by next door. On the positive side, advertising sales firmed a bit in June at major chains such as Gannett Co. and New York Times Co., enabling those companies to post unexpectedly strong second-quarter profits. Newspaper stocks rallied sharply -- Gannett shares have rocketed 156% since the end of June -- as some investors bet that aggressive cost cutting has positioned the companies for higher profit once the economy rebounds.

As The Times' Dawn C. Chmielewski reported Friday, emissaries of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. recently approached the owners of this newspaper, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Hearst Corp. about joining a consortium that would charge for online news content. Murdoch's Wall Street Journal already does so, but the Australian-born media magnate understands that what's required for serious -- which is to say expensive-to-produce -- journalism to survive is that all the quality English-language papers and news sites agree to charge for Web access and then mercilessly sue anyone who makes more than fair use of their work without paying a fee. For such a scheme to work, the papers' owners need to agree on when to act and what to charge.