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The job cuts started at Advance newspapers in Alabama and Louisiana yesterday. This is all the beginning of the creation of two new companies in each state with a more digital focus. The future is here, and that future involves some job cuts. Here is the front page of each of the four papers most directly impacted.
Each image is linked to the story, so feel free to click through for the rest of their coverage.
Talked about the Saturday night shooting on the radio this morning. You can hear that here. I’ve gotten out of the habit of listening to myself, so I won’t listen with you. And I’ve talked so much, too much, about the shooting on Twitter that I don’t care to do too muchh of it here.
This is all so unbearably sad. Three kids dead. (One of them a father of two, another a father of one it seems.) All of them with their lives ahead of them. Three more shot. One in critical condition with a head wound. All of them under 21. A suspect at large. And there is no good reason for any of it.
Chief of the Auburn Police Department, Tommy Dawson, holds up a picture of suspect Desmonte Leonard for the media:
The story goes on. The manhunt has shifted to Montgomery, the hometown of the police’s suspect. There are nine agencies involved in the search. Two have been arrested for hindering prosecution. We spent the night watching television, thinking they’ve got the suspect holed up in a house in east Montgomery. (Update: No one was there, after eight hours of waiting, surrounding and inch-by-inch searching in a tear gas-filled attic.)
So several families are in the height of grief. A community wonders how this could happen int heir home. A person is on the run. Some stories you just wish didn’t happen, but this one has only gotten started.
Rode part of something called Savage Revenge today. Oh it was delightfully horrible. Burned my quads, started a good sweat, stretched my lungs. Got up to the highest part of the midpoint and realized I didn’t have time to go through the entire thing, but I rode far enough to realize this might be a little more than I wanted today.
Beth Newell knows about Savage Revenge. She gave herself a do-over. There should be a metaphor for that:
don’t judge me. i wanted to school SAVAGE REVENGE. and five minutes into the new round, i was already 3 minutes behind. i finished a just little bit off the leader board…..in 1 hour 39 minutes, slightly behind the record of 0 hours 55 minutes.
My friend Will Collier writes about an entry for Worst Reporting of the Year:
David G. Savage of the Los Angeles Times’ Washington Bureau took a deep left turn into flyover country last week, churning out an appallingly inaccurate article on former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Siegelman was convicted on felony bribery charges in 2006 (after being voted out of office in 2003). Siegelman, whose prior appeals had been largely denied (two minor counts were thrown out by the Eleventh Circuit while the major bribery convictions remained intact), appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. SCOTUS declined to hear that appeal on Monday. Siegelman, who served nine months of a seven-year prison term before being released on bond in 2008 pending appeals, will now go back to federal court in Alabama for re-sentencing.
Much of Savage’s article should be downright amusing to those familiar with either Siegelman or Alabama. In attempting to explain the strange creatures from this mysterious hinterland to his La-La Land readership, Savage presents this:
Siegelman was the rare Democrat who could win in Alabama. He had also won election as Alabama’s secretary of state, attorney general, and lieutenant governor. But his career ended when Republican-appointed U.S. attorneys charged him with corruption.
That’s one way to put it, if you either don’t know a thing about the political history of Alabama or are anxious to put a pro-Siegelman spin on the whole affair. While all of Alabama’s statewide offices did flip — by significant margins — to the GOP in the 2010 elections, prior to that year “Dirty Don” was far from being a “rare” Democratic officeholder.
How far? The state legislature had been majority Democrat for an astonishing 136 consecutive years prior to 2010.
The reporting actually gets worse throughout the piece. (Update: days later the piece’s many inaccuracies would not be corrected only. This is shoddy or deliberate.)
Want to see Venus go across the sun? The Internet can do that. Wired has links. So does NASA. It was cloudy here. Wikipedia:
Transits of Venus are among the rarest of predictable astronomical phenomena. They occur in a pattern that generally repeats every 243 years, with pairs of transits eight years apart separated by long gaps of 121.5 years and 105.5 years. The periodicity is a reflection of the fact that the orbital periods of Earth and Venus are close to 8:13 and 243:395 commensurabilities.
We watched it on a Netbook, which was something that at least made sense to people in the 2004 transit. What will they watch it on during the next passage, in the year 2117?
If you like reading comments, which is something for all of you masochists in the crowd, you might appreciate the ones added to John Archibald’s column today. He writes:
I’ve heard the questions all day.
Why are people protesting the new printing schedule at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, but not at the Birmingham News and other affected cities?
I hear that it is because we are too far right, or that we are too far left. I’ve heard that we are only interested in black people, and that we hate black people. I have heard we have outlived our usefulness, and that we don’t dig hard enough.
[…]
But if you want to look at why New Orleans protests and why all these other cities don’t, look at the nature of the cities.
New Orleans has identity and pride. Birmingham has division and hostility.
We can’t get together to “save” anything, because we can’t agree that anything is worth saving.
The comments are perhaps some of the more cogent — from almost every perspective– on the subject of Alabama’s shifting media landscape.
I keep my personal inbox as something of an electronic do list. There’s always a lot to do, of course, but I try to keep the size of that one low. You write me, I write you back. Here are some interesting things to read, or some research to consider, I’ll email myself the links until I can work through it. Important errands and tasks, that’s an email.
I had 11 in my inbox tonight when I somehow managed to delete them all. Every last one gone down into the memory hole of trash folders and cross-tabbed folders.
I spent the better part of an hour trying to remember the subject of all of those emails. Some of them came to mind more easily than others. Finally I dug through the cobwebs of both my brain and the trash folder to find them all.
When I finished my lovely bride said “There’s an undo button at the top of the page.”
I’m sure there’s a metaphor in there for some.
I love this road. Good quality asphalt, a bike lane basically the entire way from beginning to end. It is quiet because the business of this road is down near the other end. Up here, for the time being at least, it is still undeveloped. It is the victory lap of some of my routes. A fair amount of it is downhill.
I did an easy 20-miler this evening. I’m looking forward to longer rides, which will start back next week.
And if you need a bit of inspiration for, well, just about anything, here’s a video destined to go big. Only 250,000 views so far, but that will change. Tune out the music, and wade through the first two-and-a-half minutes. The reward comes soon after that:
Things to read: Local boy is a good speller. Samford and UAB baseball both make the NCAA regionals. Auburn and Alabama did not.
New York tries to cut down on soft drinks:
New York City plans to enact a far-reaching ban on the sale of large sodas and other sugary drinks at restaurants, movie theaters and street carts, in the most ambitious effort yet by the Bloomberg administration to combat rising obesity.
The proposed ban would affect virtually the entire menu of popular sugary drinks found in delis, fast-food franchises and even sports arenas, from energy drinks to pre-sweetened iced teas. The sale of any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle — would be prohibited under the first-in-the-nation plan, which could take effect as soon as next March.
That’s a sticky slope, friends.
Two years after the oil spill, the fishing is bad down on the Gulf:
The long-term prognosis for the Gulf’s health remains uncertain.
Recent studies have found higher numbers of sick fish close to where BP’s well blew out and genome studies of bait fish in Barataria have identified abnormalities. Meanwhile, vast areas of the cold and dark Gulf seafloor are oiled, scientists say.
And many fishermen are convinced something’s amiss.
[…]
“We was there to work, but couldn’t,” said Lawrence Salvato, 49, as he stopped for lunch on a dock where he moors a shrimp skiff he runs his wife, Lisa. “Usually people are excited and they can’t wait to get out there. This year, there’s no real incentive.”
He said he made about $10,000 in seafood sales last year compared to $75,000 in 2009. He said his family made do with a $40,000 interim payment they got from BP. Fishermen who haven’t settled legally yet with BP over damages continue to survive on periodic payments from a $20 billion trust fund set up by BP.
“We’re afraid,” Salvato said. “A lot of people are getting out of fishing. They’re afraid.”
Meanwhile, up in Chicago:
“We are no longer a newspaper company,” Sun-Times Media Holdings LLC Editor-in-chief Jim Kirk said in a memo to staff. “We are a technology company that happens to publish a newspaper. We deliver content. And we will deliver content on many platforms and in ways that we haven’t yet fully considered.”
The times, they have already changed.
