Math for journalists

Here's what it takes to pay for a typical news reporter's salary of $40,000 a year plus benefits ($50,000 total, figuring benefits packages including health insurance are 25 percent of salary).

➤417 subscribers each paying $10 a month.*

Or
➤20 full-page newspaper ads @ $2,500.*

Or
➤50 30-second spots on local TV news @ $1,000.*

Or
➤2.5 million views of online ads @ $20 cpm.*

News organizations relying on people to pay for news are going to need bigger boatloads of subscribers.

*Prices vary by market/publication size/other factors but these are typical of small and midsize operations.

For example, a full-page, midweek black-and-white newspaper ad at open rate (at time of this post):

• USA Today: $125,600
• WSJ: $277,200
• Milwaukee J-S: $23,688
• Bozeman Daily Chronicle: $2,587 

The cartoon controversy that got Yahoo banned in Massachusetts

Furious Massachusetts legislators once got a Yahoo banned in the Bay State because they were offended by a religious cartoon it published.

In print.

We're not talking about the Yahoo! we know today that was founded in 1994 to guide computer users through the World Wide Web, which began in 1990.

The printed Yahoo magazine guided readers to jokes, cartoons and humor about what was funny in the lives of college students at the University of Massachusetts, back when you didn't have to designate Amherst.

The magazine and its controversy is being recalled this summer at UMass' W.E.B. Du Bois Library Learning Commons in a display of student publications through the years. (Details below.)

Yahoo was first published in 1954, before, you could argue, the Internet was launched. Students created long articles, short jokes ("I think Jim and Sally were the cutest couple on the floor last night." "Oh, did you go to a dance?" "No, to a fraternity party.") and cartoons lampooning sex, beatniks, later hippies, The Draft, ROTC, Greeks and, of course, campus administrators.

Yahoo editors wrote of the magazine: "The general atmosphere it created was one of nausea occasionally punctuated with a burst of genuine satiric humor."

O tempora! O mores!

By the mid-60s, the times, as singer Bob Dylan attested then, were a-changin' and state leaders were losing traditions and control over society. In Spring 1966, a woman first ran the Boston Marathon, the Supreme Court overturned the Commonwealth's ban on English lit porn "Fanny Hill," and, worst of all horrors, Yahoo printed this unsigned four-panel cartoon:

The cartoon that offended Catholics proved too much for the Puritan state.

Complaints mounted. Six weeks after Yahoo published the cartoon, according to news accounts of the time, fury boiled over. According to news accounts of what happened May 12, 1966:

In Boston:

• Gov. John A. Volpe ordered an investigation.
• Sen. Kevin B. Harrington, D-Salem, showed the magazine to his colleagues, who voted 34-3 after a brief debate to create a five-member committee to investigate Yahoo and all UMass student publications. "I will not stand for an attack on my religion," he said. "Whoever is responsible for this magazine is going to go. There are going to be hard days ahead for the University of Massachusetts, and I predict that heads will roll."
• The 6-foot-7 Harrington drew himself up in front of University President John W. Lederle at a Capitol hearing room where Lederle was testifying before a Senate committee about the school's $34.5 million budget. Harrington threw the offending Yahoo on the table and demanded Lederle explain why state funds were being used to produce a magazine offending state Catholics. Lederle told Harrington he agreed the cartoon was in bad taste and that a review was already underway.

Back in Amherst:

• A university spokesman issued a statement assuring taxpayers no state funds paid for the magazine, just student activity assessments.
• Roger C. Jones, Yahoo editor, issued a statement that the cartoon was being misinterpreted and was intended as "a light social commentary on the lightheartedness, if not bigotry, with which religion is treated by a minority of contemporary society. ... "Unfortunately this cartoon has been construed by individuals as a piece of the same bigotry which in actuality it was intended to satirize."
• Msgr. David J. Power of the campus' Newman Center for Catholic students, called the cartoon "blasphemous" and "offensive to a majority of students, Catholics and non-Catholic alike."

In Springfield, Bishop Weldon, who earlier brought attention to the cartoon, was quoted as saying the maturity of students rather than freedom of the press was at issue: "These students are not quite housebroken."

About 3,500 students signed a petition calling for the student Senate to organize a Free Press Committee.

A planned march on Beacon Hill was called off when Harrington agreed to squelch the probe as UMass officials assured him college administrators were "on top of the situation."

The Yahoo staff answered with a supposedly innocuous Commencement 1966 edition -- except for this cartoon depicting the editors' assessment of the Capitol:

Administrators squelched Yahoo funds.

The Student Senate held hearings the following academic year.

Yahoo cartoon, 1971

In 1968-69 students published an "unmentionable" campus humor magazine under the titles "Magazine" and "NO¢", according to UMass archives. The Yahoo name returned to campus in 1969 with trustees' approval. The last issues of Yahoo were published in 1973, when the Student Senate decided to pull funding for waning interest rather than offensiveness.

About the display 

The W.E.B. Du Bois library exhibit, "Student Voices: UMass Student Publications through the Years," 

showcases student publications from the Special Collections and University Archives department.

"We have one or two issues of Yahoo in there and mention the controversy," Kirstin Kay, archivist, told us in an email. 

The exhibit may be seen in the Learning Commons during regular library hours through the end of August.

Kay supplied further details from the university:

"Since almost the time of first arrival of students at Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1867, the college's students have taken an active role in publishing items for their own consumption. Beginning with the appearance of the first yearbook, put together by the pioneer class during their junior year in 1870 and followed by publication of the first, short-lived newspaper, The College Monthly, in 1887, students have been responsible for dozens of publications from literature to humor to a range of politically and socially oriented periodicals. ... The exhibit has samples of newspapers, yearbooks, cultural, literary, and humor magazines. The display also includes limited production, World War II-era newspapers produced by the 58th College Training Detachment (Air Crew) of the U.S. Army Air Forces stationed at UMass and the temporary campus for returning veterans at Ft. Devens."

One more thing: Library fixed

It is supposedly safe to go into the library now.

Construction on the 296.5-foot tower began in 1969, under the direction of Lederle, a year before he retired as a president who oversaw many construction projects, and then-Provost Oswald Tippo.

The tower promptly started falling apart after it was formally opened as the "University Library" on June 26, 1973. Falling bricks spurred students to nickname the library alternately as "Lederle's Last Erection"  and "Tipp-over Tower."

After closure in 1979 and limited use for a few years, the building was fully restored and operating again in the 1986-87 academic year.

Trustees renamed the tower in 1994 to honor Civil Rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. The Department of Special Collections and University Archives hosts his "superlative collection" on the 25th floor.

Suzanne Vega says she still reads paper newspapers

When Toms Diner came on the radio this morning, we wondered on Twitter if Suzanne Vega's lyrics about "I open up the paper..." would be different if she wrote the song today. Apparently not!

She tweeted this answer:
"yes I still read paper newspapers"

When asked later by media blogger Jim Romenesko which ones, she replied "Nytimes mostly." 

"Tom's Diner," first written in 1981, was a Billboard hot single, with DNA, in 1991.

BTW, Vega has a new album out: "Tales From the Realm of the Queen of Pentacles"
Details here: http://www.suzannevega.com/

Tom's Diner lyrics excerpt:

... I open

Up the paper
There's a story
Of an actor

Who had died

While he was drinking
It was no one
I had heard of

And I'm turning

To the horoscope
And looking
For the funnies ...

SPJ's Town Hall Forum in San Francisco

Passing this along from our San Francisco Friends:

SPJ Presents: “Your Views on Local News – A Town Hall Forum”

Community members will have a chance to discuss their views about the local news with a dozen leading figures in journalism, education, business and politics at a town hall meeting produced by the Society of Professional Journalists on Thursday, March 25.

“Your Views on Local News – A Town Hall Forum” will take place from 5:30-7:30 pm in the Koret Auditorium of the Main San Francisco Public Library in Civic Center. Admission is free.

We’ll discuss how the current crisis in the news industry creates opportunities for the public to help shape new kinds of journalism that contribute to a vibrant democracy. The conversation will explore strategies and business models for ensuring robust and reliable news coverage in a changing economic, technological and social environment.

Participants will include:

* Craig Aaron, senior program director, FreePress

* Mark Adkins, president, the San Francisco Chronicle

* David Callaway, editor in chief, MarketWatch.com

* Sandy Close, executive director, New America Media

* Paul Connolly, senior vice president, the TCC Group, manager of the Challenge Fund for Journalism

* Ron Dellums, Oakland mayor and former congressman

* Glenn Frankel, Pulitzer Prize-winning Stanford professor and former Washington Post London Bureau chief

* Lisa Frazier, publisher, Bay Area News Project

* Dr. Dina Ibrahim, assistant professor for Broadcast and Electronic Communications, San Francisco State

* Pat Kenealy, managing director, IDG Ventures SF

* Barry Parr, media analyst and entrepreneurial publisher, Coastsider.com; and

* Venise Wagner, Journalism Department chair, San Francisco State


Sandip Roy and Hana Baba of public radio station KALW-FM will moderate. The program will be recorded and broadcast by SFGTV, San Francisco’s government channel.

SPJ is the nation’s broadest-based organization devoted to encouraging the free practice of high-quality journalism in accordance with the highest ethical standards.

Cabela's vs. Bass Pro

We hope you appreciate like we did the juxtapositions of these two stories.

One is from The Buffalo News, where writer Donn Esmonde worries about the gamble Buffalo is taking on subsidizing a Bass Pro Shop for a largely taxpayer-funded Waterfront development.

The other is from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where writer Tom Daykin says not only did a taxpayer-subsidized Cabela's not pay off as promised, a Bass Pro Shop that's coming may make the promise of riches from Cabela's even tougher to get.

We know: different places, different cases. Still, is Milwaukee a lesson for Buffalo?

Your comments are welcome on whether these or other types of subsidies are worthy.

What's in your future Beloit Mindset List?

Some news of course is cyclical in nature and reporters and copy editors try to make coverage different, be it Christmas, Fourth of July or the current crop of back-to-school stories.

One of our favorites in that genre is The Beloit College Mindset List, providing 75 "cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college."
This year's list presumes students entering the class of 2013 were born in 1991.
Just a few of our favorites - they have more serious ones:

-- The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.




-- Salsa has always outsold ketchup.
-- Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream has always been a flavor choice.
-- There has always been a Cartoon Network.

The list also addresses some of the same issues creating havoc in the news and media.
"Members of the class of 2013 won't be surprised when they can charge a latté on their cell phone and curl up in the corner to read a textbook on an electronic screen. The migration of once independent media — radio, TV, videos and CDs — to the computer has never amazed them."

So help us help Beloit editors get ready for future lists. Here's a few media-news-related items that may come up in a few years or possibly for the class of 2031. Please add items that you might dread or embrace. (Please use the comments section and we'll pull them back out to our main site.)

Will we see items such as these:

-- News has always been downloaded free to handheld mobile readers and never printed on paper.


-- Pictures have always been digital and Photoshopped in broad daylight and never burned and dodged in a darkroom.


-- Pulitzer-Prize-winning investigative reports have always been written 140 characters at a time by citizen journalists and never by well-paid or even poorly paid reporters working for a news organization.

-- Great literature has always been read for free on 2-inch-wide screens.

-- TV shows were always watched on demand and never at a time scheduled by a so-called TV network.

-- Facebook friends have always shared their private thoughts through HuffPost Social News and never emailed each other, picked up a phone, or met at a Starbucks, which has always only had tables for one.

What's on your future Beloit list?

Corporate bedfellows

We knew something was amiss when we noticed news stories citing Wall Street Journal/NBC News polls.

Not a normal story topic for Jilted Journalists but perhaps something worth pursuing for our readers.

The particular topic here is how polling partnerships come about and what they mean.

For example recent national stories quote Washington Post/ABC News poll or USA Today/Gallup or CNN/USA Today. Some of those pairings have been around for years.
The Wall Street Journal is paired with NBC News in recent polls on President Obama's health-care plan, Sarah Palin's political future and government spending, to name a few.

That seemed odd considering the venom usually spewed between arms of the companies' parents, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and GE. Particularly Fox News' O'Reilly and MSNBC's Olbermann.

Why wouldn't WSJ pair with FNC, we wondered?

Along comes The New York Times' Brian Stelter shedding some light on what's going on.

"Voices From Above Silence a Cable TV Feud"

But are there even more reasons for the two organizations to get cozy?

Insights welcome in comments.

We're all Caesars

Have you ever noticed how the Caesars in Caesars Palace has no apostrophe in it?

(Waxing nostalgic:) It was a detail that escaped us way back in 1979 at Lake Tahoe.

Back then, Harrah's and Caesars were rivals. Back then, there was a Harrah, Bill, and he owned the poshest hotel-casino at Tahoe's south shore. Across the street, Highway 50, was another rival, Harvey's Wagon Wheel, owned by Harvey Gross. The names of Harrah's and Harvey's casinos each had an "apostrophe s" in them, Bill and Harvey owned them back then.

Along comes Halloween night of 1979. At the stroke of midnight, Caesars, without an apostrophe, would take over the Park Tahoe hotel-casino, a couple doors down from Harrah's and across from the fourth major club, Sahara Tahoe. We were there to witness the changeover as a reporter for what was then the Tahoe Daily Tribune. Gaming pretty much never stops and we chronicled how one hand at a blackjack table was the last dealt under the Park Tahoe's auspices, a tray of chips was quickly subbed and the very next hand was dealt under Caesars ownership. (Caesars lost, but the player's streak only lasted three hands.) And so it went table by table, watched by officials from Del Webb, which operated Park Tahoe's casino, Caesars, and Park Cattle Company, owner of the land on which the hotel-casino sat.

The Tribune then was a 5-day, afternoon daily. So the Nov. 1 edition carried our front-page story of the changeover under the headline, "Caesar's comes to Tahoe."

A couple days later comes the letter from the Caesars PR department, thanking us for the story but pointing out the ghastly error of the apostrophe. There is no apostrophe, the PR folks stress, because all their customers are Caesars, to be treated and honored like rulers of their own gaming empire (the fate of the namesake Roman emperor notwithstanding).

(Getting to the point:) Caesars no longer operates at Tahoe, it's part of the same company that also includes Harrah's and Harveys (no longer boasting an apostrophe in its logo) and seven other familiar hotel-casino brands. The Tahoe Daily Tribune is no longer daily. We no longer work for any newspaper, but we publish stories at Jilted Journalists and blog for free here.

In looking at the parallel upheavals in the newspaper and book-publishing industries, we can see more parallels in the way changing technology, industry consolidation, a deep recession and changing customer habits conspire against traditional casino operations just as they do the news and book industries and so many other businesses.

In the news and book publishing worlds, more readers are rising to be Caesars.

They can choose their experiences, they can publish their own stories from Tweets to treatises more inexpensively than ever before, and in doing so they build their own personal brands of themselves.

What can we deal them?

Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.

Bastille Day and The Fourth Estate

(Updated July 14, 2014)

How can we let Bastille Day, July 14, pass without examining the future of "The Fourth Estate?"

As we mark the 225th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, heads still figuratively roll as more media companies place jobs under the blades of corporate guillotines.

Coming to terms
"The Fourth Estate" as we think of it today is a phrase invented in England but likely rooted in French history.

In France, King Philip IV in 1302 convened the Estates-General triad of clergy, nobility and commoners. His deal: They would approve new taxes, he would grant them more freedom. The Estates-General was active at first and then went dormant.

Along came 1789, a financial crisis, the guillotine, King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, a reconvening of the Estates-General, distribution of the U.S. Constitution articles, and a commoner-led revolution.

Later in England the three estates were parallel, The Lords Spiritual, The Lords Temporal (together making up the House of Lords) and the commoners (The House of Commons).

It was also in England where the term The Fourth Estate as applied to journalism stuck.

Author Thomas Carlyle in 1849 credits politician Edmund Burke, who likely was thinking about French history: "Burke said that there were three Estates in Parliament, but in the Reporters Gallery yonder, there sat a fourth Estate more important far than they all."

British politician and historian Thomas Babington Macaulay is quoted this way: "The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm."

Even in a more egalitarian America, the term is often applied to the news media because of its government watchdog role, a de facto regulator.

Coming to termination
Under a generations-old business model, those who rule news media "tax" advertisers to underwrite much of their operations.

It worked in newspapers, later for over-the-air broadcasts. And cable.

The model held for so long that those who ruled the media could not fathom transformative technology and the quickening pace of change. 

Nor were they ready to cope with the loss of control as the Internet first and later the Web and now app after app put "commoners" more in control of what they want to see, when they want to see it, how they want to discover it, what they want to say about it and how they want to create their own flow of "news."

"Taxed" advertisers have gained more and more freedom to say what they want and where they want to say it. Increasing online and mobile advertising dollars flow more to Google, Facebook and Twitter rather than to news sites.

Control over news creation spread to "commoners," too.

In theory, anyone can say anything. Anyone can be a citizen journalist.

Just about anyone can start a blog. We can open Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+ or other accounts. We  tweet, text, sext or toss in our two cents in a Web site's story comments. Despite the fees to access wireless networks and set up home wi-fi, it all comes at a much lower cost for "commoners" who don't need to tax advertisers to get their "jobs" done and their "news" delivered to friends, foes, frenemies and other followers of all sorts -- even if only at 140 characters at a time.

Thousands of traditional "Fourth Estate" jobs are perishing never to return in the forms we once knew them. Pew estimates newspaper and magazine newsrooms chopped 54,200 journalism jobs in the past decade, offset by the creation of only 5,000 internet-based news jobs.

"The vast majority of bodies producing original reporting still comes from the newspaper industry, Pew said.

But don't let anyone get too complacent. There are more revolutions ahead.

Nothing stays.

Even the guillotine fell out of favor.

Your journalistic origins

Anything unusual help spur your drive to become a journalist?

"The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record: prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own, for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is... that these things cannot be confined... to The Twilight Zone."
- Rod Serling,
closing narration.
"The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,"
"The Twilight Zone"
Episode first aired, March 4, 1960, says IMDB.

Holiday Greetings

Wishing everyone a happy Fourth of July holiday.

Jilted Journalists is a site for sore eyes when your newspaper has or is about to declare independence from you.

Hope we can all help each other.

With about 1,400 more Gannett employees about to join the Jilted Journalists ranks, the recent departure of a great top-ranking Los Angeles Times editor, and whatever else is coming down the pike, we're here to help each other.