THE NEWS HACK'S CREED:
I know more than you.
I make lots more money than you.
I'm smarter than you.
I'm sexier than you.
I appear on TV all the time.
I work ten minutes a day.
I rule the universe.
I'm going to live forever.
You are an idiot.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 2:
A lie isn't a lie when it tells THE TRUTH.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 3:
I've come to realize that the looseness of the journalistic life, the seeming laxity of the newsroom, is an illusion. Yes, there's informality and there's humor, but beneath the surface lies something deadly serious. It is a code. Sometimes the code is not even written down, but it is deeply believed in. And, when violated, it is enforced with tribal ferocity.
--JOHN "OMERTA" CARROLL.
THE NEWS HACK'S CREED, No. 4:
News isn't news when we don't report it.
PERMALINKS:
THE NEWS HACKS' DICTIONARY
THE EUGENE DAVID GLOSSARY
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If you follow newspaper earnings on any kind of regular basis, you're aware that most of the problems that brought Tribune to this point are issues shared by all of its peers. Among them:
-- Overall print publishing advertising revenue has been essentially flat for several quarters.
-- Newsprint prices are rising.
-- National ad revenue has been down, with marked weakness in such categories as movies and technology. The movie category is critical to Tribune, publisher of the Los Angeles Times.
-- Within classified, automotive advertising has been on the decline for some time, due to an ongoing slump in the auto industry.
-- Help-wanted, which had been one of the strongest classified categories, has recently been slowing down.
-- Retail advertising, hampered by the consolidation of several big retailers, has been flat to down.
-- Circulation is down, as an increasing numbers of readers get their news online. Also, the implementation of the Do Not Call registry three years ago prevents newspapers from making as many telephone solicitations for new subscriptions as they had in the past.
That DO-NOT-CALL blatherskite is a dead giveaway: it is precisely the kind of excuse TRIB and other publishers used during their steady slide. Naturally not ONE item on the laundry list deals with the PRODUCT. It's almost as if these cretins sell widgets. And we're sure even widget customers care for quality. Possibly, just possibly, if newspapers were better written and less biased, if they didn't employ so many GREENHOUSE EFFECTS and FLYING KEYBOARDS, its business quandary wouldn't be so all-consuming. True, some of the rag trade's problems are "structural." But SOME ARE NOT.