David Carr’s elegant New York Times dissection of the editorial agreement between the News Corporation and the Wall Street Journal revealed that Paul A. Gigot, the Journal’s editorial-page editor, helped to write it. This could generate a momentary surge of sympathy for Rupert Murdoch. Historically, Carr pointed out in his piece on Aug. 6th, the [...]

Who is being more humiliated? Rupert Murdoch, who is so reviled that the property he covets has to be protected from him, or the Bancroft family, whose obvious distaste for Murdoch is being overcome by their apparent appetite for his money? If this were a political cartoon, it would show a grinning Murdoch carrying Bancrofts [...]

Like most print-oriented people, my travel ritual includes sampling the local newspapers. Maybe such reading is just habitual, but often enough it also is rewarding or surprising. That certainly was the case during a recent two-week visit to China, reading the China Daily, which is published in English six days a week by the nation’s [...]

You read all about it in Romenesko or the trade press when news organizations cut staff. Sometimes the general public hears about it from the news organization itself. Economize, though, by canceling a supplemental wire service, say the New York Times News Service or Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service, and seldom is attention called [...]

Snip, snip, snip….That’s my scissors clipping more evidence of my daily paper’s service to its non-paying online readers. One of the clips calls attention to ideas for Mother’s Day, another to a Harry Potter blog, another to a column on postage changes, another to new businesses in town, and still another to fallout from higher [...]

Whatever happened to the second paragraph, or the third, the one in which the reporter explains what the story is really about? It’s not necessary, you know, to let a politician’s assertion or anyone’s quote go without comment, without saying what the facts are. In one Washington bureau where I spent my time, the bureau [...]

In the better-late-than-never department, David S. Broder has condemned congressional Republicans for their sustained non-oversight of the Executive branch. “It was a fundamental dereliction of duty by Congress, and it probably did more to encourage bad decisions and harmful actions by executive-branch political appointees than the much-touted lobbying influence,” Broder wrote in the Washington Post [...]

How good a job are newspapers doing with online corrections? Occasional and highly informal surfing among the usual suspects of newspapers suggests newspapers are doing a better job of at least providing access to corrections of mistakes, errors, misstatements, etc. That lengthy wording of corrections is necessary; several months to a year ago, looking for [...]

To put in perspective the sale of the Minneapolis Star Tribune by McClatchy to an investment firm it helps to recall that the Strib was a sister paper of the Des Moines Register when both were owned by members of the Cowles family. The fate of the Register, sold to the highest bidder (Gannett) in [...]

It was no surprise that Illinois Supreme Court chief justice Robert Thomas won a $7 million jury verdict in a libel suit against a small Illinois daily, the Kane County Chronicle. Most libel actions are tossed out of court without going to trial, but once jurors get their hands on a case they usually favor [...]