NEWS ABOUT THE NEWS (8#) -

Julio Osegueda from Florida made the New Media Index for the week of Feb 9-13, 2009. Scroll down
to videos. [PEJ]

# The McClatchy-Blethen Seattle Times newspaper is "holding on by our fingertips today," publisher Frank Blethen told state lawmakers last week. The publisher asked them for a temporary break on some business taxes. McClatchy also owns The Miami Herald.

# But the good news is "McClatchy's underlying newspaper portfolio just delivered a 21.5% operating profit margin," according to Nat Ives at Ad Age. It isn't the newspapers themselves that are struggling, Ives asserts, it's their owners who are having financial problems.

# Meanwhile, the Times' main competitor, the Seattle P-I, has been put up for sale by Hearst and is expected to stop publishing a print edition mid-March. There has been some chatter that the P-I may be able to continue online, but who would pay for the necessary computer servers in that event?

# Hearst has hired Neeraj Khemlani, 38, to be their new chief go-to guy for Digital Media. Khemlani is a former manager of Yahoo News & Information.

# The civic-minded Seattle City Club is sponsoring panel discussions about the fate of their city's newspapers: Sunset or a New Dawn?

# Good article by Jacob Weisberg of Slate gives some appropriate background to the current financial struggle of the newspaper industry: The New Hybrids.

# Who are the Media & Newspaper Bigshots of India?

I'm hoping The Miami Herald might become a subsidiary if the deal with Gary "Golden Boy" Pruitt doesn't work out ;-)

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