Newspaper Guild

The latest report on salaries for journalism and mass communication majors confirms what we have all expected is happening to newsrooms generally: Even many journalists who are still working are losing ground. Worse yet, for an industry chronically incapable of recruiting non-white employees, bachelor’s degree recipients who were members of racial or ethnic minorities had a particularly difficult time in the job market in 2009.

Despite recession, newspaper circulation worldwide fell only slightly last year, and the effect on advertising revenue may be easing, according to the annual "World Press Trends" update of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. Just over 60% of countries reported stable or increased circulations over one year; almost 70% reported the same over five years. Meanwhile, the 12,477 newspaper titles worldwide represented an increase of 1.7% from 2008.

If King’s vision is fully realized, the UAW becomes the auto industry’s key partner in global competitiveness and stellar quality, and not the anchor that pulls a company under because of inflexibility and costs. The UAW becomes the trainer and the broker of the world’s greatest talent for manufacturing the most technologically complex mass-produced product in the world.

Don Rosenberg, a 58-year-old journalist, covered the orchestra for 16 years for The Plain Dealer, a prize-winning newspaper, until he was reassigned in 2008 after a series of negative reviews targeting conductor Franz Welser-Most.

About 50 reporters and editors at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette staged a brief noontime walkout yesterday to protest management’s plan to cut 30 newsroom jobs. "This was a demonstration to the company of what the newspaper and the newsroom would look like if they do indeed cut that many positions from the paper," said R.J. Hufnagel, associate business editor and president of Communications Workers of America — Newspaper Guild Local 38061. The union represents 180 of the approximately 200 newsroom employees.

The former treasurer of the Erie Newspaper Guild has pleaded guilty to embezzling nearly $8,800 from the union. A federal grand jury in May indicted Antonio Jordan, 38, on a charge of using a union-issued credit card to make personal purchases worth $8,767 from March 2005 until February 2009. Jordan faces up to five years in prison when he’s sentenced Nov. 22. His guilty plea bars him from being a union official for 13 years.

The E.W. Scripps Company on Monday said total segment expenses for its newspapers were down 3.8 percent from the prior-year period, to $93.4 million. Second-quarter segment profit in the newspaper division was $14.6 million, down 5.6 percent from $15.4 million in Q2 2009. Year-over-year revenue from Scripps newspapers fell 4.0 percent to $108 million, while advertising revenue was down 7.7 percent to $73.3 million.

You remember what it was like two years ago, amid great wails of crunched despair, as economies tanked, advertising collapsed and only the all-conquering internet marched on? Conventional newspapers weren’t just withering a bit: they were dying in droves. It would only be a mere five or 10 years, some analysts declared, before there’d be no papers left at all. Well, look again.

Magazine publishers might well have expected their first-half newsstand numbers to look good compared to last year when wholesaler system snafus interrupted store deliveries, preventing issues from getting to racks. That wasn’t the case, though, as first-half newsstand sales declined 7.7 percent to just over 451 million units. That’s better than last year’s first-half decline of 12.4 percent, reflecting the delivery problems, but nothing to celebrate about either.

Washington Post stock was hammered in midday trading Friday, and was off 10.5% at noon. Earlier in the day it set a new 52-week low of $363.71 — a little more than four months after hitting a 52-week high of $547.18 a share. Volume at midday was about 178,000, or three times the average turnover for an entire trading session. The high volume and the percentage decliner are highly unusual for the stock, which rarely swing more than 2% either way in a typical trading day.

Frustrated with Senate Republican filibusters that stall nominations and block or kill legislation — notably the Employee Free Choice Act — the AFL-CIO Executive Council has approved an anti-filibuster drive to change the Senate rules. The move was introduced by CWA President Larry Cohen, whose own union adopted even stronger language at its recent convention that demands the filibuster be abolished.

Some analysts who aren’t assigned to the newspaper sector neverthess pay attention to Gannett, which they see as serving as a sort of economic barometer with its mix of newspapers large and small. It’s useful to look at GateHouse Media the same way — but the results aren’t cause for hopefulness. As the Q2 report released Tuesday evening shows GateHouse operated at a loss, even though operating expenses were down 8 percent. And that spells trouble for the industry overall.

Spurred by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, three-dozen billionaires have signed on to a pledge to give away more than half their wealth to good causes — a sum estimated by the New York Times at $600 billion, five or take. So, for the moment, forget NPR-like pledge drives, $49 contributions, micropayment schemes, pay hurdles. How about a program of modest billionaire tithing, a pledging of new philanthropic dollars to assure the free flow of news and information?

WikiLeaks has posted a huge encrypted file named "Insurance" to its website, sparking speculation that those behind the organization may be prepared to release more classified information if authorities interfere with them. Bloggers have noted that the file is 20 times larger than the batch of 77,000 secret U.S. military documents about Afghanistan that WikiLeaks dumped onto the web last month.

Second-quarter earnings at The Washington Post Co. rose nearly eight-fold compared with the same period of 2009, although 67 percent of the company’s earnings were contributed by Kaplan, its education division. At the newspaper division, meanwhile, second-quarter revenue was up 2 percent, even as print ad revenue at The Post declined 6 percent, thanks to a 14 percent increase in online newspaper ad revenue.

An illustrated pamphlet explaining the basics of unionism and why new employees at an organized workplace should get involved in their union has been published by Union Communication Services. "Welcome to the Union" is designed for use by stewards and union officers as an icebreaker. It offers a concise explanation of what unions are, how they function, and the vital role every employee can play in improving the workplace for all.

Demand Media on Thursday debuted a new service for publishers to pad their online offerings. Hearst Corp.’s SFGate.com and Chron.com quickly jumped aboard, making it the second major publisher to do so, following Gannett’s USA Today and its use of Demand Media to power its "TravelTips" section. "Content farms" like Demand Media automatically assign "stories" to nonprofessional freelancers based on user interest and their search engine optimization potential.

For years, members of Congress have tied themselves in knots trying to figure out how to pass a "shield law" that allows journalists to protect the identities of sources without giving anything to journalists whom those same members do not like or appreciate. Now, with a shield law poised for approval, the WikiLeaks disclosures of classified material from Afghanistan have reinforced the timidity that has delayed this legislation for too long.

President Obama’s pledges to sign free trade deals have been strongly opposed by labor unions. But recently, his administration slightly appeased his critics by enforcing workers’ rights agreements in an existing trade pact. Last Friday, the United States filed a complaint against Guatemala for failure to enforce labor agreements outlined in a free trade deal with Central American countries, making it the first time the U.S. has brought a case against a trade partner.

Charles Lechner from the New Organizing Institute emphasized that unions’ social media presence should be written in a human voice, not sound like it’s written by committee. It’s great for unions to be on Twitter but if their tweets read like they are written by a robot, aren’t timely and don’t engage in the twitter community as a conversation you won’t get very far.