PressEthic

The Associated Press is reporting that the Wall Street Journal will reduce the overall size of the paper to meet widely used industry standard and save $18 million annually.

Even the most idyllic ownership models for newspapers can’t stop the wave of change looming ahead. The St. Petersburg Times will layoff 80 – 90 employees—a step it has managed to avoid until now.

Sponsorship and advertising seems to have reached an all-time high. Sporting events are the easiest targets. With the upcoming college bowl season, viewers will see half-time reports sponsored by Tostitos and two-minute warnings by other, large corporations. A recent article in Advertising Age reports that sponsors and advertisers have found a new area to spend their money—national landmarks.

Editors at the many media outlets that provide information decide how the news is framed on any given day. They pick the stories that appear in their newspapers or television reports, determine where and when they appear, and what story gets six inches and which one gets a whole page. On November 3, 2006 Malachi Ritscher set himself on fire in the middle of rush hour in Chicago in protest of the Iraq war. Unfortunately, no media listened and the story didn’t appear until November 26 after a reporter from an alternative, Chicago-based weekly put the pieces together on Ritscher’s suicide.

According to an article that appeared in USA Today, California's State Supreme Court has upheld the 1996 federal Communications Decency Act. The court said that only original authors on blogs and Web sites can be sued for posting libelous or defamatory comments.

An article that appeared on Yahoo! News (via Reuters) states that combined revenue for newspaper and online ads, including classified ads, slid 1.5 percent. This is the first time the revenue has slipped since 2004 when the Newspaper Association of America began tracking it.

We know that print media is struggling with floundering subscriptions, how is radio faring?

Marie Claire is under fire, according to Mediabistro.com and the Drudge Report, for altering a photo of Elizabeth Vargas breastfeeding her newborn at the news desk.

The New York Sun reported today that a Judge Claude Hilton, a Federal judge in Virginia, ordered the New York Times to reveal confidential sources related to a series of articles printed in 2001 about the anthrax scare.

In a recently published article, Fastcompany.com looks at a local journalist that is addressing the popular question, “what will print media do with dwindling subscription numbers?”

The Harvard Crimson, a student-run newspaper at Harvard University, publicly apologized for a columnist plagiarizing material that ran in Slate last year. It seems the desperate need to plagiarize is felt at all levels not just among professional journalists like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, two of the more famous plagiarists in recent times.

NBC and the CW networks became “unwitting stealth marketing partners” with the Weinstein Co., producers of the recently released film, “Shut up and Sing,” according to an article printed Saturday in the Washington Post.

Coming as no surprise to the media world, the New York Times Company and the Tribune Company reported bleak numbers on Friday citing low advertising revenue as the culprit.

Jared Paul Stern is the latest media personality to try to capitalize on his 15 minutes of fame with a book deal.

When studies are released and the authors claim a trend based on the results it is incumbent upon the writer to research and find out if the claims hold water.