The Tribune Company is hiring brass from radio with no newspaper experience, so they preemptively have set out to make fun of their latest hire, former Clear Channel programming exec Marc Chase.

The NY Times reports:

Since Mr. Chase is another career radio man, Tribune decided to mock itself before any critics could.

Tribune.com posted his mock resume:

Vocabulary Advisorist for George W. Bush
President of the United States of America
Washington DC, 2004-present

eBay
President of Buying Crap
San Jose, California 2003-2004

Google
Executive Vice President of Finding Crap Anywhere
Mountain View, California 2001-2002

We're still flummoxed by Zell's April Fools 'joke'.

We don't know if we can handle too much more.

Under the title - "Are Newspapers Doomed? (Do We Care?): Newspapers & the Net Forum". Britannica Blog invited a bunch of smart, educated and in-the-know people to write about whether newspapers are truly on the brink of extinction.

Some deny it like Jon Talton's essay titled,"When I Hear the Term "Citizen Journalist," I Reach for My Pistol." He writes:

The trouble the newspaper industry faces is largely the failure of a business plan involving monopolies, exorbitant advertising rates, an unwillingness to invest in research and development, and, finally, a jettisoning of journalism to chase assorted fads.

The results have been predictably dismal.

We'd like to point out that the whole discussion and forum is not happening...well...in print. Cough.

Tribune's mad dash for cash might have some more repercussions here in Los Angeles. If things don't perk up, FBLA has heard that the LAT Orange county production facility will be closed in January, 2009, with 41 workers losing their jobs. But imagine the savings.

Sam Zell has a payment due in December of $650 million, and over a billion in 2009, so what happens if the payments aren't made?

Earlier:
Zell Conference Call April 17th

KRod has the list of LA Timesfolk taking the buyout and shaking the dust of Spring Street from their heels. FBLA's big cool foodie pal, Charles Perry is on the list, as is the delightful Gina Piccalo, Kevin Crust, and too many others. We wish them all the best, and wonder why Los Angeles must remain a one-paper town.

Not mentioned, but also moving on is our favorite correspondent, Stephan Pechdimaldji, Senior Manager, Media Relations. He's moving to a Silicon Valley outfit, and thus will clutter our inbox with happier news, no doubt.

AJR ran a piece titled "Maybe it is Time to Panic". A fluffy little article:

Today's newspeople know they have forfeited the edge on breaking news and lost the buzz in the online marketplace. They have been outflanked and out-thought by portal sites, aggregators, social networkers, indexers, video hosts, auction and classified sites and many others. They see advertisers retreating, and readers fleeing and Web viewers waffling.

Robert Niles at OJR, asks about how J-schools can help their students:

My question: What do journalism schools need to be doing to prepare their students for a more entrepreneurial industry?

One response changed the way that I approached this issue. It promoted me to trash what I had planned to write and instead simplify my advice to other journalism educators.

Blame Nick Denton. (And, I know, many of you probably have blamed the Gawker Media publisher for a great many things....) In a public response to my query on his Gawker blog, Denton replied: "I can think of no answer except this: close."

And the NYT reports on how the industry as a whole has cut back on reporters following the candidates:

Among the newspapers that have chosen not to dispatch reporters to cover the two leading Democratic candidates on a regular basis are USA Today, the nation’s largest paper, as well as The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Houston Chronicle, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer (at least until the Pennsylvania primary, on April 22, began to loom large).

But remember, AP is going to hire 21 new reporters to be on Britney Watch, so put that in your free market pipe and smoke it!

Time.com's Swampland ran a piece by Michael Scherer about the changes in the providing and consuming of news.

Here is a basic shift that has occurred in the news business: Because of the Internet, you, the reader, no longer have to buy information in pre-fabricated packages like "newspapers." You can just go online and individually select the articles you want to read. And there are lots of websites and blogs to help you out.

Put down your google and stop looking. There's really nothing out there better than FBLA.

Cough.

Anyway, in a story about the evolution of the news business, what is really notable about this piece is that author, Michael Scherer actually engages readers and critics in the comment section. He writes:

benfranklin. I agree. another sad effect of the internets. nitwits like me get to publish without an editor. but thanks for pointing out my typo. i have since added the missing word.

That's the future for journalists - sitting in your jammies at 2am reading what some geek in Spokane thinks of your placement of a semicolon.

That'll get some emails.

As if Windows Contacts killed the Rolodex. It's just so much more complicated than that.

Eric Alterman's piece in the New Yorker details the demise of the American newspaper:

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies' solution to their problem was to make "our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting." That may help explain why the dwindling number of Americans who buy and read a daily paper are spending less time with it; the average is down to less than fifteen hours a month. Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

And how many of those readers still defend their purchases of Betamax?

Anyway, the article goes on to detail the success of Huffington Post, which just surpassed Drudge Report in traffic:

Surrounding the news articles are the highly opinionated posts of an apparently endless army of both celebrity (Nora Ephron, Larry David) and non-celebrity bloggers - more than eighteen hundred so far. The bloggers are not paid.

According to the article, Huffington Post generates $11 million each year and has 46 full-time employees. And its self-proclaimed to be the model of the news business of the future.

Sam Zell, take note: the reason your business loses money is because - duh - you pay too many people.

We'd also like to note that sharecropping was cruel and exploitive but at least they were given homes to live in. Party like its 1899!

This originally aired earlier this year in January, where the joke was whimsical.

Now after all the lay offs and 'chief innovation officers' its rerun last night was biting.