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Tuesday, October 3, 2006
No teen left offline 
| | If you're a student, or a teacher, check out LetsCram.com. It's a new educational support site (a "social way to study") by Santa Barbara High School senior Mike Lewis. It was the subject of a nice report in the Santa Barbara News-Press yesterday (yes, they still do some good work); but, of course, the "content" is behind a pointless paywall. So, no link to it. |
| | Check it out. It's a cool thing. |
Why money isn't the only value
| | Tim Rutten, the outstanding media columnist for the Los Angeles Times, nails exactly why so many of us love, rely on, and will continue subscribing to newspapers. The gist: |
| | Corporate executives like to talk about "unlocking value." Taken as a whole, analyst Edward Atorino of the Benchmark Co. told Reuters this week, Tribune might be worth as much as $14 billion. Analysts, however, are skeptical that a significant fraction of that value can be unlocked by any of the alternatives now under discussion. As Bear Stearns' Alexia Quadrani wrote to investors Wednesday, "With limited interest in private equity, the absence of strategic buyers and generally unappealing breakup scenarios, we believe strategic change may not necessarily create value." |
| | What about simply selling assets and, specifically, The Times, where Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson and Editor Dean Baquet recently put their jobs on the line when they rejected corporate demands for further staff cuts in pursuit of relentlessly increasing profit margins? Johnson and Baquet, supported by hundreds of the paper's journalists, have taken the position that, with The Times already running a balance-sheet-engorging 20% margin, further staff reductions are unwarranted because they will fundamentally undermine the paper's ability to provide readers with an acceptable quality of journalism. |
| | Most estimates put The Times' monetary value at $2.5 billion, and several Southern Californians of more than adequate means already have expressed interest in bidding. But according to Wall Street's smart money, Tribune is unlikely to sell because taxes would eat up more than 40% of the proceeds. |
| | WHAT'S lost in this numerical hall of mirrors with all its dead-end corridors and distorted funhouse refractions is an ethically intelligible notion of what the word "value" must mean in this context. |
| | No one can argue that Tribune or anyone who owns The Times is obliged to lose money. On the other hand, no one should argue that a newspaper's proprietor has no obligation except to make as much money as it can. Somewhere between those two extremes is a fulcrum called responsibility on which a balance must be struck. Doing so requires the recognition that, although stockholders certainly are stakeholders in this process, so ‹ and just as surely — are a paper's readers. |
| | What this moment in the life of the Los Angeles Times requires is recognition that the paper's social, intellectual and political value to readers needs to be unlocked and not just its monetary value to investors. |
| | Unless the real interests of all the stakeholders are respected, everybody will end up with a handful of nothing — maybe not tomorrow, but in the not-too-distant future. That's the substance of the principled position Johnson, Baquet and their staff have taken and of the letter a group of distinguished civic leaders recently sent to Chicago. It's a position that will have to be taken into account whether some version of the Tribune Co. continues to operate The Times or the paper passes back into local hands. |
| | What the LA Times has, still, is what Dave calls a philosophy. Everybody I know from LA says the Times' philosophy comes down from Otis Chandler, who led his family's paper, and its city, to landmark-level greatness. |
| | What Tim calls for is what another Southland landmark, Peter Drucker, counseled for the better part of a century: |
| | There is need for the acceptance of leaders in every single institution and in every single sector that they, as leaders, have two responsibilities. They are responsible and accountable for the performance of their institutions, and that requires them and their institutions to be concentrated, focused, limited. They are responsible also, however, for the community as a whole. This requires commitment. It requires willingness to accept that other institutions have different values, respect for these values, and willingness to learn what these values are. It requires hard work. But above all it requires commitment, conviction, dedication to the common good. Yes, each institution is autonomous and has to do its own work the way each instrument in an orchestra plays only its own part. But there is also the score, the community. And only if each individual instrument contributes to the score is there music. Otherwise there is only noise. |
Soul of a nude machine
| | Another of the News-Press' most well-known writers, Starshine Roshell, has resigned, raising the editorial diaspora tally to twenty-four. Her resignation letter comprises the first post this morning on Craig Smith's blog. Strong stuff: |
| | For 11 years, I have been proud to work for this company. I was honored to have managers who were smarter than me, and had something to teach me. They weren't bullies. They weren't liars. And remarkably, they were able to manage our newsroom by employing scruples rather than lawyers. |
| | But they're all gone now, and the only thing our current leaders have been able to demonstrate is the heartbreaking mess than ensues when ambition far exceeds talent, and hubris trumps wisdom. |
| | At a good newspaper, as ours was, truth is held in higher esteem than power. It makes me sick to see Wendy McCaw topple that hierarchy here, and to watch you both help her do it. |
| | While I will desperately miss the camaraderie of my noble colleagues and the relationships I developed with countless readers, I am grateful for one thing. That when I look in the mirror, I won't see what you do. |
| | When I went to look up Starshine on Google, the right column carried a single ad, for SantaBarbarasBlog. Went there and found a place that looks slick and clean. Like Craig Smith's, its latest post features Starshine's resignation letter. (And the blog was smart to buy Starshine's name as a search term.) Unlike Craig's (and like Edhat and Blogabarbara), it's undisclosing (though not secretive) about the identities of its writers. Unlike Edhat and Blogabarbara (and like Santa Barbara Free Press), the identities of its writers are not pseudonymous. I use the plural in the last sentence because I figger anyone who buys ads for a blog must have ambitions beyond working solo. Also, the blog offered Starshine a gig in the same post. |
| | And this must by Freudian Typo Day. I think I've unintentionally typed "Satan Barbara" three times this morning, so far. |
Gestalt slip
| | If I were a stay at home dad, I would not have a blog. Here is what I would have: |
| | Not necessarily in that order. |
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