the newspaper business

McClatchy Newspapers has convinced a banker to help keep the company from failing.

Newspaper publisher McClatchy Co. said Friday it has renegotiated its agreement with lenders to gain flexibility, winning concessions that help the company avoid a potential default as advertising revenue continued falling. McClatchy said the amendment to a $1.175 billion debt agreement will change its terms to account for the company’s reduced cash flow.

Credit crunch?

Depends on who you know.

There are a number of newspaper companies negotiating with their bankers right now,” said Ken Doctor, media analyst for the research firm Outsell Inc.

Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall in those negotiations? “You’re failing.” “No, you’re failing.” “Congress hates you.” “Congress wants to give us money.”

“Well OK, let’s go play golf. “

When a “home-town” favorite is playing a “career-defining” moment in his home state, what a great idea to get his hometown bank to run an ad wishing him luck.

Not sure whether or not “Ryder Cup” is trademarked, our ad department elected to go with “at Valhalla.”

But what is with the generic photo?

Kenny Perry has a golf course just a few miles from where I am sitting. Our photographers have probably dozens, if not hundreds, of photographs of him.

And the ad department goes with this generic shot because they were afraid it would appear that Kenny Perry was endorsing the bank.

I understand being prudent, but this was such a great idea, I was really disappointed that the execution fell flat.  I just can’t see Kenny Perry, his agent, or the PGA objecting.

Kenny Perry of Franklin has a welcome and good luck sign from Western Kentucky University on the side of the old Cardinal Stadium in Louisville.

And J.B. Holmes of Campbellsville now has a sign honoring him on the side of Memorial Coliseum. Holmes is a former University of Kentucky standout.

Galveston city officials have told the newspaper there are only two people that are authorized to speak to the press.

Thomas and City Manager Steve LeBlanc, the paper added, would be the only city officials authorized to speak with reporters.

“City spokeswoman Mary Jo Naschke vehemently denied the city was trying to clamp down on news coverage,” the paper said.

Actions speak louder than words as a press conference lasted less than 30 minutes. Thomas and LeBlanc only answered five questions.

Publisher Dolph Tillotson put it pretty succintly: it’s a dumb move.

“It’s the worst thing the city could do. Those who will suffer most are evacuees,” Publisher Dolph Tillotson said in a statement via text message. “The media will have to turn to other sources that might be less reliable. I can’t imagine a dumber move under these extreme circumstances.”

What an idiot.

But now that he has hit the terrorists hard by making sure YouTube won’t host any terrorist training videos, Lieberman is back in the spotlight.

YouTube updated its “Community Guidelines” yesterday with a notation telling terrorist cells that if any training videos are uploaded to the service, they’re at risk of violating the company’s Terms of Service and could face permanent expulsion from the site. That should put the fear of God into them.

In response, Lieberman circulated a press release saying that his four months of pressuring YouTube has finally paid off and because of his hard work, YouTube and US citizens are safer today.

The Chicago Tribune ran a nine-year old story on their website today about United Airlines (UAL) going bankrupt. The stock plunged from  $12 a share to a penny per share before some genius figured out the Trib got it wrong. On paper, billions of dollars in equity was lost - for a couple hours.
Blue Horseshoe loves Blue Star Airlines.
At least there wasn’t a printed version like the Trib’s other headline gaffe.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: No Tribune Company newspaper website published the story that caused the crash. It apparently was picked up by an investment service.

We’ve been sitting on a very exciting development for quite some time. Google is digitizing newspapers and will put their vast resources behind getting EVERY newspaper digitized. The Daily News is in the pipeline to be digitized.

For more than 200 years, matters of local and national significance have been conveyed in newsprint — from revolutions and politics to fashion to local weather or high school football scores. Around the globe, we estimate that there are billions of news pages containing every story ever written. And it’s our goal to help readers find all of them, from the smallest local weekly paper up to the largest national daily.

Naturally we are thrilled. We have looked into digitizing our archives a number of times, but the cost is just out of our reach. There also wasn’t a revenue stream that we could tap into. With Google behind the project, the digitizing is free - preserving our place in historical archives, and the revenue is their problem.

This effort is just the beginning. As we work with more and more publishers, we’ll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint from around the world searchable, discoverable, and accessible online.

We don’t have a clue when they will start digitizing our archives or when they will be available. Google is pretty tight lipped, so someday, we’ll probably stumble across our archives online and we’ll know it’s done.

Update: Marissa Mayer just demoed the new Google News Archive search onstage at TechCrunch50. The news archives will run contextual ads from Google AdSense, which will be split with the newspaper publishers. Google is launching with millions of articles, to which it will add to as time goes one. The service will also try to drive print subscriptions. She explained:

This is built on scanning technology we built for Google Books, but with some new features.

We’ve already started this with books and maps, now we will do it with newspapers. Viewers will see it in their original context, can pan around and search. We will widen the user base and readership of news archives.

We already have News Archive search. You will see an interface similar to Google Books search. But our engineers have built in new algorithms to figure out [things like] what is a headline. As I mouse over the page, headlines are highlighted in blue, indicatingtheir clickability. When you click on something, it centers the story, and zooms in. You can do a snapback to the original article. In the sidebar, in addition to sponsored links we have related articles you can click on.

In the near future, Plastic Logic will introduce a flexible screen - e ink - that will make it possible to send newspaper content to the screen and maintain the traditional look of newspapers.

Their prototype screen is 2.5 the size of a Kindle, which would be about the size of a tabloid. (Demo video ) The prototype will be available for the International Consumer Electronics Show in January.

That’s not crystal ball gazing. That’s fact.

Esquire has the first mass-produced e-Ink magazine cover for their  75th Anniversary. It’s a pretty lame use - just blinky text, but it is a use. (The cover has a small battery to give the cover blinky power for about 90 days.)

Here’s the crystal ball gazing: Instead of investing in one centralized printing plant, newspapers will invest in decentralized repeater stations. Instead of charging for delivery of the newspaper, newspapers will charge to rent (or lease-to-own) a flexible screen receiver. Overnight, the newspaper business could be transformed from ink on paper to pixels on screen - in a very large scale.

You read it here first.

UPDATE: It’s thin! According to Ubergizmo, the device will measure in at 8.5 x 11 inches, and is capable of browsing docments in PDF format as well as Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. As well as packing a battery that lasts “days not hours,” the device has wireless connectivity, though Plastic Logic is quiet about exactly what type.