LA Observed | Fishbowl LA | Los Angeles Times
A memo from Los Angeles Times President Kathy Thomson broke the news in an email to staffers Tuesday: "...the entire magazine industry has been faced with a very challenging environment. We are not immune to the challenges and have made the decision that LA, Los Angeles Times Magazine will publish its final issue on June 3rd." Seven people, including Editor Nancie Clare, will lose their jobs. Clare told Matthew Fleischer she didn't think there'd be jobs for the cashiered employees elsewhere at the paper: "Part of what’s going on is a contraction. They’re contracting in the newsroom too. There’s nowhere to absorb us."

The Times' magazine has had a rough ride since 2008, when Tribune placed the magazine under the control of the paper's advertising department. Russ Stanton, then the paper's editor, insisted the name be changed so readers wouldn't think it was still a newsroom product. In 2009, the magazine was moved back to editorial and Clare was named editor.

New USA Today Publisher Larry Kramer hasn't had a newspaper job since 1991, when he left the San Francisco Examiner to found DataSport, and eventually MarketWatch. But he's thought about newspapers ever since, and in his most recent gig as visiting professor at the Newhouse School of Communications, he taught media case studies. In books and articles, Kramer has written about how newspapers have squeezed out investigative reporting and their need for new business models.

At USA Today, he'll get to apply some of that thinking to the country's second-largest newspaper, one whose average daily circulation has declined only 0.64 percent over the past year but is still facing many of the same problems of smaller papers. It also doesn't have a Sunday print edition, one of the few bright spots for newspapers lately. USA Today cut 130 jobs in 2010 and implemented a "radical restructuring" under former publisher David Hunke, who is retiring. The paper has not had an editor since November of last year, when John Hillkirk left the top role to become senior editor for investigative journalism and national enterprise.

Kramer will lead the search for Hillkirk's replacement. Gannett President and CEO Gracia Martore wrote about Kramer in a memo to staff announcing his appointment, "His appreciation for our print heritage and his deep understanding of transformative power of digital media will make Larry successful in building the USA TODAY brand and helping us implement our growth strategy." That's interesting, because in his 2010 book "C-Scape: Conquer the Forces Changing Business Today," Kramer writes about the inadequacy of traditional newsrooms, praising what he calls the "convergent news-and-culture organizations that have become popular online, such as HuffPost or the Daily Beast." (more...)

New American Media
Elizabeth Ireland is graduating from San Francisco State University with a degree in journalism. She wishes she'd pursued mortuary science instead, a field she says "is expecting an 18 percent growth rate. Although I could have had all this, the career, the job, the growth rate, I followed my heart instead of my head. I chose to go into journalism and screw my credit rating from now until, well, eternity."

After thinking about the chances of landing a job and student loan debt, Ireland writes: "All things considered, if I could look back and do it over again, I would have taken my chance with the stiffs."

Of course, no one would describe any of the journalists who've addressed graduating classes lately as deadly! Savannah Guthrie told flat-cappers at Hobart and William Smith Colleges about making mistakes as a young journalist: "I am glad the first time I was chewed out, it was a local politician and not the White House calling. Making mistakes and being bad at something, this is how you get to be any good at all." Speaking at Barnard College Monday, President Obama offered a media critique: Tell more good-news stories!

"No wonder that faith in our institutions has never been lower, particularly when good news doesn't get the same kind of ratings as bad news anymore," Obama said. "Every day you receive a steady stream of sensationalism and scandal, and stories with a message that suggests change isn't possible, that you can't make a difference, that you won't be able to close that gap between life as it is and life as it should be."

Related: Study: J-school grads’ unemployment rate better than average

The Baltimore Sun


The Baltimore Sun turns 175 on Thursday; to celebrate, Director of Interactive Design Adam Marton has reconfigured its website to present today's news as it might have looked in the 19th century (one big difference: You'd be using Internet Explore to view it) and to show the news from May 17, 1837, Web-style: (more...)

Mike Daisey | The Washington Post
"This American Life" is considering fact-checking David Sedaris' work for the program, Paul Farhi reports:

In an interview, [host Ira] Glass said no one at his program was concerned about Sedaris before the [Mike] Daisey episode. “We just assumed the audience was sophisticated enough to tell that this guy is making jokes and that there was a different level of journalistic scrutiny that we and they should apply,” he said.

But the Daisey debacle has brought about a reassessment. Glass said three responses are under discussion: fact-checking each of Sedaris’s stories to ensure their accuracy, labeling them to alert the audience that the stories contain “exaggerations” or doing nothing.

At the moment, Glass said, he thinks the best course is to check Sedaris’s facts to the extent that stories involving memories and long-ago conversations can be checked. The New Yorker magazine subjects Sedaris’s work to its rigorous fact-checking regime before it publishes his stories.

(more...)

Federal Bureau of Investigation | Security Management
The FBI has posted a list of traits of corporate spies, and Security Management's Carlton Purvis says they'd have helped identify Joe Muto as the Fox Mole: "What Muto did wasn’t exactly espionage," Purvis writes, "but Fox News would no doubt categorize him as an insider threat."

The trouble with this theory is that the FBI's tip list sounds a lot like your average Mediabistro job listing, or lines from a pretty good annual review. Possible moles:

• "work odd hours without authorization." • "take proprietary or other information home in hard copy form and/or on thumb drives, computer disks, or e-mail." • "unnecessarily copy material, especially if it’s proprietary or classified." • "disregard company policies about installing personal software or hardware, accessing restricted websites, conducting unauthorized searches, or downloading confidential material." • "engage in suspicious personal contacts with competitors, business partners, or other unauthorized individuals." • "buy things they can’t afford." • "are overwhelmed by life crises or career disappointments."

So far, spring speeches at academic institutions have told students to consider a major other than journalism (newspapers are "dreary"), and that "Most people’s voices are not worth being heard."

Now it's graduation time, and media types are back at the nation's podia, though not at Barnard College today, where President Obama speaks after bumping New York Times editor Jill Abramson.

Time Managing Editor Rick Stengel told Butler University's graduating class Saturday:

Information doesn’t want to be free; people want free information. And we’ve trained people to expect free information – but you know, you get what you pay for. A comment on a blog is free. But you will have to pay for the insight of a Joe Klein or a Fareed Zakaria, for there is a deep investment that has been made in their experience, their talent, their contacts, their perspective. That’s worth a lot. Information feels like it’s free because it comes to you in a frictionless way with a click on your keyboard. But the information – the knowledge you get from a TIME story about the Middle East -- comes at the cost of keeping correspondents in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Jerusalem.

Zakaria, meanwhile, was at Duke University, where he told chair-fillers "this is an extraordinary world [and] country you're coming into," mentioning mobile devices as evidence, "which some of you are looking at right now, and don't think I don't see you." (more...)

The New York Times | The Daily Beast
A lovely bit of New York condescension leads Alexandra Robbins' Sunday New York Times article on the fallout from Jeff Himmelman's book about Ben Bradlee: Washington is "perhaps the only city where journalists can be at the peak of the social establishment," news that might come as a surprise to several members of The New York Times' management and to most Washington journalists, but the reporting underneath that silly assertion is a solid look at a journalistic relationship gone bad. Himmelman was Bob Woodward's mentee, and he was close to former Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his wife, Sally Quinn, who in better times asked Himmelman to co-author a book with their son Quinn Bradlee.

Richard Cohen told Robbins that Bradlee and Quinn are "repulsed" by the book. Woodward called it "bad journalism to the core." Robbins sketches Himmelman's past as a student at Sidwell Friends, a Yalie a capella type, and a D.C. musician with a day job heaving facts for Woodward and taking dinners with Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. The beef of these former pals? Himmelman quotes Bradlee as having doubts about Woodward's reporting during Watergate and "reveals intimate details of his family life, including piecing together a letter Mr. Bradlee once wrote to Sally Quinn (then his girlfriend and now his wife), ripped up and filed away without sending."

In The Daily Beast, Himmelman says his subjects' claims he was some sort of double agent are absurd: (more...)