Tag: News industry

There's nothing new about news and publishing conglomerates crabbing about Google and other search engines stealing their mojo. But a piece on AdAge.com cataloging the media barons' usual complaints reads in a very different way in this new cynical post-Wall Street monopoly era.

The fallout from the Feb. 28 closing of the Rocky Mountain News continues with a Friday afternoon "memory hole" announcement by the Denver News Agency that it will layoff 200 people over the coming weeks. The job cuts represent more than 17 percent of the DNA workforce payroll, according to an AP story appearing at Forbes.com.

Colorado Media Matters — the sole state-based outlet of a national, liberal nonprofit that takes the media to task for "conservative misinformation" — shut its doors this week so its parent organization could determine how to efficiently expand into other states, The Denver Post first reported Wednesday afternoon. The shake-up will allow Media Matters to determine "if we can find a more efficient way of doing this," editorial director Bill Menezes told The Colorado Independent.

A group of former Rocky Mountain News staffers plan to unveil In Denver Times, a subscription news site, at a press conference at 11 a.m. Monday in Denver.

Following the Jon Stewart-Jim Cramer "Brawl Street" debate broadcast on The Daily Show Thursday night, what's your opinion of the news media's ability to reflect the events of the day? Add your thoughts below the fold.

The parent companies of the Denver Post and 17 Colorado newspapers, television channels and radio stations were named Tuesday to the "U.S. Bottom Rung" list — a rogues' gallery of media corporations most likely to default on their debt.

It looks like MediaNews Group's top secret Project X has been revealed. I'll admit I'm seriously underwhelmed by the "individuated news" or I-News concept, and apparently so are Denver Post readers; one finds only chirping crickets in the online story's barren comment section.

Mike Littwin, the former Rocky Mountain News columnist who's now at the Denver Post -- one of the few lucky transplants -- weighs in this morning on Boulder Rep. Jared Polis' comment about new media's killing the News and stating that was "mostly a good thing." Littwin is justifiably offended. His paper died. Many of his hardworking and talented colleagues and friends are out on the streets, and that is a tragedy. But Littwin is playing at naif -- and that won't work.

In more sad news coinciding with the Rocky's demise, the American Society of Newspaper Editors announced Friday it is pulling its annual April confab off the calendar because "the challenges editors face at their newspapers demand their full attention.”

On the day Denver lost one of its major metro newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News, there are signs that even small-town community newspapers in Colorado — once believed to be relatively bulletproof — are starting to struggle.