Newspapers

This morning, employees at the Denver Post met their new incoming president and CEO. Per a dispatch on the 120-year-old daily’s website, former San Diego Union-Tribune publisher Ed Moss will assume those duties on February 20.

There’s some interesting background in the Post piece by Aldo Svaldi that involves the paper’s parent company, Digital First Media. Moss, who was also named executive vice-president of that parent, has been on Digital First chairman William Dean Singleton‘s radar since the mid-1990s:

Singleton said he first got to know Moss in 1996, and eventually hired him in 2007 to oversee the Los Angeles Newspaper Group. “I was distraught when he came to me and said he was going to San Diego,” Singleton said. As a potential bidder for that newspaper, Singleton watched its performance closely.

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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

It sure didn’t take long for Phil Bronstein to make some major additional impact on California Watch. Just weeks after leaving the San Francisco media world for the vanguard non-profit’s Berkeley boardroom, the Bay Citizen is reporting that its own two-year-old operations may soon be folded into CW.

It makes sense, mainly because the founder and benefactor of the Citizen, San Francisco investor and philanthropist Warren Hellman, passed away in December at age 77. Per the report:

In the weeks before Hellman’s death, sources say, he began discussions with Bronstein, then a vice president at Hearst Corporation, to take over as chief executive of The Bay Citizen when Liz Frazier stepped down. Her last day on the job is Monday. She declined to comment for this article…

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The Sacramento Bee has apologized to readers for running a photograph in their Sunday newspaper that had been digitally altered. The photo was a composite of two pictures of birds taken at the Galt Winter Bird Festival. The photographer, staffer Bryan Patrick, has been suspended pending an investigation.

From the newspaper’s apology:

The Bee’s ethics policy strictly forbids such manipulation of documentary photographs. It is considered a violation of our core values, as it misrepresents the accuracy of the event. When we alter a photograph for illustrative purposes, we disclose that at the time of publication.

The altered image was caught after a reader called the paper to complain that it looked suspicious. Click on the photos at right to enlarge, and check out the plants. You’ll see what that reader was talking about.

Via Poynter.

Frying Pan News’ Steven Mikulan just posted quite the exit interview with recently fired LA Times blogging pressman Ed Padgett. The Times cited Padgett for “suspicion of sabotage” among other reasons for letting him go. Which sounds absolutely insane. Mikulan delves a little deeper.

Shortly after Padgett’s firing there was a “Christmas purge” of workers, followed by a “New Years Purge.”

“Those folks each got $20,000 in severance,” Padgett claims. “Two of the fellows were let go two weeks early because they were worried about sabotage. They’re so paranoid, because it’s not just my department — it includes editorial.”

Padgett believes it’s possible there’s some reality behind the company’s fears. A Teamster email he posted on his blog in December warned members against engaging in sabotage — while denying such behavior. But what does that ultimately say about a company that its employees would harm the source of their livelihoods?

Padgett also says that two recently fired Times employees have committed suicide in the past few months–an operations plant worker and a company truck driver. Terrible, terrible news. Especially in the context of Tribune Company’s plans to give management big, fat, out-of-the-blue bonuses.

The LA Times published an internal memo by managing editor/online Jimmy Orr over the weekend, showing the full extent of the paper’s online success in 2011. Overall page views were up by 28% in 2011–reaching more than 2.1 billion. Monthly unique visitors also grew by 34.2% by year’s end.

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The canine nominees for the first ever Golden Collar Awards were announced last week, and Martin Scorsese was outraged to learn that Hugo star Blackie the Doberman had been overlooked. In an Op-Ed for Sunday’s LA Times, the director made his case for the four-legged actor as a write-in candidate for the “Best Dog in a Theatrical Film” category:

I’m proud of Blackie, who laid it on the line and dared to risk the sympathy of her audience. Let’s just say that on the set, she had a fitting nickname: Citizen Canine. The bath scene alone is a masterpiece of underplaying, with Blackie’s wonderfully aquiline face accentuated by the 3-D.

The editors of Dog News Daily, the publication behind the Golden Collar Awards, have agreed to make Blackie a nominee if and only if they receive 500 “NOMINATE HUGO’S BLACKIE” posts on their Facebook page by Monday, February 6. You know what you have to do, people.

After 23 years as the New York bureau chief for The Los Angeles Times, Geraldine Baum is stepping down. Tomorrow will be her last day.

In her farewell email to colleagues, she has high praise for both the paper and her colleages:

Journalism for me, at its best, is a team sport, and what distinguished the LA Times from other papers was not only that it was a writers’ paper but also the basic decency of just about everyone with whom I worked here.

Baum gives her reasons for leaving the LA Times simply as, “it’s time for Geraldine 2.0.”

Full memo after the jump.

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Nicholas Kristof is something of an expert on sex trafficking. The Pulitzer Prize journalist has covered the issue extensively in both his reporting and his book Half the Sky: From Oppression to Opportunity for Women Worldwide. So his criticism of Village Voice Media for aiding human traffickers through their Backpage.com sex ads has a special resonance.

In his latest column for the New York Times, Kristof writes of the Backpage.com sex ads:

It is a godsend to pimps, allowing customers to order a girl online as if she were a pizza.

Lauren Hersh, the ace prosecutor in Brooklyn who leads the sex-trafficking unit there, says that of the 32 people she and her team have prosecuted in the last year and a half — typically involving victims aged 12 to 25 — a vast majority of the cases included girls marketed through Backpage ads.

“Pimps are turning to the Internet,” said Hersh. “They’re not putting the girls on the street so much. Backpage is a great vehicle for pimps trying to sell girls.”

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Contrary to what is being widely reported, London’s Daily Mail is not the world’s most read English-language newspaper site. It’s apparently beating NYTimes.com only because the UK publication’s December 2011 comScore stats also factor in traffic from a sister site (pictured).

Per a report in The Guardian by Dan Greenslade:

A [New York Times co.] spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy, disputed the way the comScore figures are compiled. She says the Mail only passed the Times by including in its total a personal finance site published by the paper.

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At the NATPE conference in Miami Beach, FishbowlLA spoke with Barry Levine, the executive editor of the National Enquirer, the gossip rag that always gets flak, even when it breaks major scoops, such as the John Edwards lovechild scandal, or Tiger Woods‘ mistresses.

The Enquirer is here to pitch a TV show concept, not a TMZ-like program, but a behind-the-scenes look at how the sausage gets made at the paper. Yes, that includes the nasty bits, like checkbook journalism, and sneaking into hotel rooms to grab some DNA samples.

“If it wasn’t for us there wouldn’t be TMZ, there wouldn’t be Entertainment Tonight, and I think after the last couple of years, the new credibility we have established after John Edwards, and the Tiger Woods scandal after that, we have had so much media interest and interest from readers and the question is always ‘how does the Enquirer get those stories?’”

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