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One of your hard-working FBLA editors made the opinion section of the OC Register.

Full story is here.

The above screen grab is from today's front page of latimes.com. We understand Sarah Palin put her name on a book someone else wrote and was on Oprah this week. But does that warrant three out of four featured opinion pieces?

It's not like she's Britney Spears or Paris Hilton or New Moon. Have some dignity.

Psst. Psst. Word is over at college newspaper Neon Tommy, LA Weekly is looking to flesh out its staff. Hire reporters. That's right. Hire. Reporters. That's means journalists to you technically inclined.

Mike Lacey, the self-proclaimed "asshole in charge," said he has authorized Heikes to double the size of its editorial staff in the next six months.

In an interview at the Weekly's offices in Culver City, Heikes said he did not sign on to preside over an organization in decline. At the top of his agenda: reclaiming the Weekly's legacy of pioneering investigative journalism and its street-level awareness of L.A.'s music and art scenes. He's already overseeing heavy investment in the Web as a primary delivery vehicle for the Weekly's goods.

The new editor echoed past voices from the Weekly in describing his editorial approach: "I see it from the ground up, not top down. I don't want us covering [Los Angeles Mayor Antonio] Villaraigosa like a rock star like the Times did for a few years until they got tired of him. What's going on in the streets? Let's work up from that."

The whole piece by Kevin Douglas Grant can be found here.

Pictured Dex Heikes and FBLA editor Tina Dupuy.

Previously on FBLA: LA Weekly Throws Party For Incoming Editor

The LAT has folded real estate blog L.A. Land into the paper's business and finance blog, Money & Company. Kevin Roderick at LA Observed notes that the blog "never seemed to quite recover its mojo from last year's departure of originator Peter Viles. When real estate reporter Peter Hong left the paper last month on a buyout, the blog became less necessary."

The Tribune Company indicated in court papers filed last Friday that it might emerge from bankruptcy by May 31 of next year. The company is filing for a four month extension "to craft a plan to exit Chapter 11 without interference from other parties." Bankruptcy is very confusing. More from the LA Times:

The Chicago-based media company, whose holdings include the Los Angeles Times and KTLA-TV Channel 5, is trying to avoid a lengthy and costly legal battle with some creditors, who are likely to recoup little of their investment in the company given the distressed values of its newspaper and television assets.

A dissident bondholder group has accused Tribune and its senior lenders of hiding "millions of dollars" worth of fees from the court and is conducting an investigation of the $8.2-billion leveraged buyout that gave real estate mogul Sam Zell control of the company.

Romenesko has the Tribune Co. memo.

Bloomberg.com says that the Wall Street Journal may be adding local metro coverage of the Los Angeles area, according to "two people familiar with the company's thinking." The paper is also considering similar coverage of Chicago. From Bloomberg:

Les Hinton, chief executive officer of Dow Jones & Co., told employees in a meeting yesterday that the newspaper was contemplating additional coverage in the California and Illinois cities, according to the people.

The newspaper, bought as part of New York-based News Corp.'s acquisition of Dow Jones in December 2007, debuted a once-weekly San Francisco Bay-area edition last week.

Hinton didn't discuss further details of the possible sections, said the people.

In response to the heated debate over the paywalls and the future of newspapers, our sister blog BayNewser created a poll to crowdsource the answer. Results have been tallied:

Baynewser reflects on the results:

While the poll may seem unscientific, it was relying on the principle articulated in James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. The principle says that "a diverse collection of independently-deciding individuals is likely to make certain types of decisions and predictions better than individuals or even experts." (Cribbed from Wikipedia.)

So what conclusions can we draw? The fact that a self-selected group of people who are interested in the future of newspapers are overwhelmingly pessimistic about paywalls doesn't seem to bode well for the idea.

There you have it. Mob Rule + Newspapers = No Paywalls

Previously on FBLA:
Will Paywalls Rescue Newspapers?

You remember Steven Mikulan? The widely-respected journalist and editor the LA Weekly canned last month after 25 years on staff? Mikulan was known for his versatility, earning accolades as both a theater critic and trial reporter. He counted Dominick Dunne as one of his many fans. Mikulan's most recent role at the paper was as editor of the LAW news blog, LA Daily. Said Kevin Roderick on LA Observed "I liked the aesthetics, if you will, that Mikulan brought to the Weekly's blog. He seemed to rise above the overheated city is falling apart while the Valley suffers meme that's currently in vogue at the Weekly, and his range of posts was a main reason I began checking the blog, well, daily."

Anyhow, the LAW fired him. And now they're looking for his replacement on Craigslist. Comfort with web publishing (including basic HTML) a must!!!

Previously on FBLA:

Cord Jefferson of The Awl takes exception to a recent article in Slate entitled "Paper Hangers: Newspapers aren't doing as badly as you think."

"Chillax, people," wrote Daniel Gross, who also works for Newsweek, a newsmagazine that fired lots of people last year before cutting its page count. "I can't help but think that many newspaper-doomsayers are conflating hope with analysis." Which brings us to our first problem: Based on this article, it would seem Gross believes there are actual Internet monsters-"newspaper-doomsayers," "digerati," etc.-cackling and blogging with glee every time a newsroom loses an editor. Mentioning the latest abysmal newspaper circulation statistics, he says "newspaper haters" must be joyous.

Newspaper haters is a group of people that doesn't really exist, but, even if it did, it wouldn't be composed of people in Internet media. Those people, if they don't occasionally do odd jobs for papers and magazines themselves, have close friends who do. Close friends who, if unemployed, are going to have nowhere to look for work but the Internet. In other words, a blogger who roots for print's demise is actually rooting for his pals to be fired and come steal his job. Nobody does that. Daniel Gross is projecting, arguing that the newspaper die-off is made up by making up some silly animosity on the part of the Web.

Next week, beginning November 8, the Tribune Co. newspapers including the LA Times are going to use as little Associated Press content as possible. It's an experiment designed to gauge whether discontinuing use of all AP content would be a practical option for the future. From Phil Rosenthal at the Chicago Tribune:

The trial is scheduled to be conducted almost 13 months after Tribune Co. gave the AP a required two-year warning that it might drop the news service, effective Oct. 15, 2010. Tribune Co. said at the time that it was keeping its options open while weighing what role, if any, the AP would play in its future.

Some content Tribune Co. papers get from the Associated Press, such as sports statistics, will still be published during the experiment. The company also said that if the AP is the only available source for a report considered vital, it will use that AP coverage. But the company wants to see to what kind of void the absence of AP stories and photos would have.