It seems impossible, but Gannett’s stock fell more than 30 percent last week, dropping below $2 per share on Friday before closing at $2.20, and it has started today down a bit further. Those heady days when shares topped $80 and stories went around about Gannett millionaires working in newsrooms don’t seem all that long ago, do they?
What impact that will eventually have on the Honolulu Advertiser remains to be seen.
Meanwhile San Francisco Weekly is reporting that the Newspaper Guild has proposed a series of initiatives for the San Francisco Chronicle, including the “intention to form a public-labor partnership to explore the possibility of acquiring the Chronicle should the paper be offered for sale.”
One Chronicle employee took matters into his own hands and placed a long ad in the San Francisco Examiner highly critical of the Chronicle’s management for considering the closing of the newspaper.
And there’s more of the same up in Seattle, where the Post Intelligencer is on temporary life support and the Times struggles for survival. According to Crosscut.com:
Meanwhile, the Times Co.’s pension problems were underscored by its minority partner, McClatchy, which announced in a federal securities filing late Monday that it had written down the value of its 49.5 percent share of the Times Co. to zero. Two and a half years ago, when it acquired Knight Ridder and its stake in the Times Co., McClatchy valued the holding at about $102 million. In its filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission Monday, McClatchy blamed the writedown on the Times Co.’s “retirement plan liabilities.”
Let’s see. Maui News reporter Ilima Loomis devoted an entry in her blog last week to her assessment of the direction of journalism, made in response to questions from a student.
Hawaii Congressman and now gubernatorial candidate Neil Abercrombie made his official announcement on Saturday via networking sites Twitter and Utterli. It’s going to be interesting to see how effective these can be as campaign tools in a statewide election.
And a reporter in Wichita has been using Twitter to cover trials in state courts, and recently extended his Tweets into a federal court trial. He reports via his cell phone, according to an AP story last week.
The last time I was in Honolulu’s federal court, however, court rules prohibited cell phones, which have to be checked and left at a security station downstairs. Perhaps its time for a serious talk with Judge Ezra about how to bring these new options to reporting from Honolulu courts.
And so it goes.
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In Saturday’s blog, you reported a Maui reporter’s unhappiness that statistics were not readily available to the media when they would have been provided to a member of the public, and you wondered what the City’s policy is.
Our department’s policy is that any information that has been released or normally would be released to the public (statistics, reports, handouts, presentations) should be made available to reporters by civil service staff, but that questions about how policies are going to be interpreted or what projects will be supported are to be answered by the Director or Deputy (who are political appointees).
I don’t know if this policy is followed by other City departments, but it is the policy that has been in place for our Department for the last 15 years.