May 20-26 | Your News & Comments: Part 4

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May 20-26 | Your News & Comments: Part 3

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USAT | How to get by with fewer reporters

USA Today recently reduced staffing again, eliminating as much as 10% of its editorial ranks in another bid to cut costs amid slowing digital revenue growth rates.

But even before the latest round of cuts, I noticed the paper was shifting toward more aggregation of other media to make up for its own diminished reporting resources.

Here's an especially vivid example from a story this morning about the slaying of a police officer in London yesterday; as I post this, it's USAT's lead story online. You certainly can't say the paper is falling down on attribution, based on phrasing I ran across:

the Associated Press reported

ITV News reports

The Associated Press, quoting an unidentified British official, said

The BBC, quoting unidentified sources, reported

The BBC said

identified in the British media

told The Independent

In an interview with the the Daily Telegraph

the BBC reported

Contributing: Associated Press

The question: How can USAT prosper it if shifts toward aggregation over original reporting? Please post your replies in the comments section, below. To e-mail confidentially, write jimhopkins[at]gmail[dot-com]; see Tipsters Anonymous Policy in the rail, upper right.

May 20-26 | Your News & Comments: Part 2

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May 20-26 | Your News & Comments: Part 1

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Newsquest | CEO Davidson said preparing to retire

That's according to Manchester radio station Key 103, which today quoted a Gannett spokesman it didn't identify as saying that Newsquest chief Paul Davidson, 58, is in "the early stages of planning his retirement."

Davidson

The station's report didn't give a timetable, however. Gannett has hired The Lygon Partnership to oversee the search for a new boss, and "is understood to be considering external as well as internal candidates for the job," Key said.

Davidson has been CEO since 2001.

Newsquest, which Gannett bought in 1999 for $1.5 billion, publishes 17 paid dailies and hundreds of other free publications in the U.K.

How director Shapiro kowtowed to a Koch brother

[Shapiro and Koch]

In a fascinating inside account of big money's influence on public television, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer today discloses the unprecedented lengths to which WNET CEO Neal Shapiro went to appease David Koch, a high-profile trustee and financial backer of the PBS affiliate -- and the subject of a damning documentary about wealth disparities in the U.S.

After WNET broadcast the documentary last fall, Mayer says, Koch canceled a planned seven-figure donation to the station. In an interview, Shapiro told Mayer the billionaire industrialist's patronage wasn't a motive for his calling Koch to warn him about the documentary before it appeared. Over the years, Koch, 73, has given $23 million to public TV, Mayer says.

The politically conservative Koch family is widely believed to be interested in buying The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and six other Tribune Co. newspapers, an investment that's alarmed many liberals who worry the Kochs might politicize news coverage.

The documentary, Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream, aired in November. Here's the trailer.

GCI's $260K board member
Shapiro, 55, a former president of NBC News, is the only journalist on Gannett's nine-member board of directors. He's held that seat since October 2007.

On Thursday, Mayer says, WNET's board quietly accepted Koch's resignation: "It was the result, an insider said, of his unwillingness to back a media organization that had so unsparingly covered its sponsor."

Curiously, although Mayer's story identifies Koch as an WNET trustee, his name does not appear on this list of members. I've left a message with the station's public relations department to find out whether he's quit.

Last year, GCI paid Shapiro $260,000 in director's fees, according to the annual proxy report to shareholders. As WNET's CEO, Shapiro was paid $703,000 in the year ended June 30, 2012, according to the station's most recent IRS tax return.

May 13-19 | Your News & Comments: Part 5

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