Saturday Economic Report

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The bad news on the economy just keeps rolling in. The national unemployment rate hit 8.1%, the highest in 26 years, and in California the numbers were even worse, topping 10%. There was plenty of bad news floating around locally:

CUSD LAYOFF NOTICES APPROVED

More bad news from the Claremont Unified School District. The CUSD Board of Education voted Thursday to issue 34 layoff notices to CUSD teachers and nurses. The notices aren't final, but they are the necessary first step if the district has to go through with the layoffs in June.

Wes Woods II reports on the layoff notices in the Daily Bulletin, saying that CUSD is facing a $3-4 million budget deficit through the end of the 2009-10 school year. Woods article said that boardmember Steven Llanusa was the only one to vote against issuing the notices.

Woods also explained some of the actions the CUSD board has already taken:

[CUSD Assistant Superintendent Devon] Freitas said there was already 12 staff position cuts from the district in February.

Among those positions eliminated then were the director of an adult school, director of a child development programs and director of secondary educations, Freitas said.

Lisa Shoemaker, assistant superintendent of business services, said the cuts and reductions were being used to address a $3 million to $4 million deficit for the district in the 2009-10 school year.

JOURNALISTS TAKE THEIR HITS, TOO

Print journalism continues its bleeding. You may have noticed the Los Angeles Times California section disappeared, getting folded into the main, front page section. The Times advertised this as good thing, saying that you can now get all your local and national news in one place, but the fact is it was a cost cutting measure.

LA Observed blogger Kevin Roderick gave the reasons for the Times' decision to ax the local section:

The backdrop, of course, is the economy and the Times' continued free-fall in ad revenue. By getting rid of California, the Times can print the more profitable Calendar section at night and eliminate the expense of a second, earlier daily press run. (Times presses can only handle four sections per run, as this post from last Friday discussed. Note, too, that pressmen are the Times' only unionized workers.)

The move will apparently be spun as an enhancement in local coverage, but Times officials are bracing for howls of protest from print readers who already have been canceling subscriptions over the paper becoming thinner and less well edited. Some LAT officials fear this might be a tipping point. "We can't keep alienating our core readers," a senior person told me. Papers that have tried doing away with just their Business sections have been stunned by the backlash; the Orange County Register reversed its decision to mollify readers.

The added efficiency the Times gained by eliminating the California section allowed the paper's management to show some love for their press workers by eliminating 63 pressroom jobs, reports Ed Padgett.

The Times seems to be giving new meaning to the phrase "Stop the presses!"

And Gary Scott's blog informs us that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wants to top the LA Times and completely eliminate its print edition, along with 75 percent of its staff.

Meanwhile, over at the Daily Bulletin and at other Dean Singleton-owned LA News Group papers, employees who have survived layoffs have been forced into mandatory furloughs. David Allen had a seven-day unpaid break but was back in the media mix this week with new columns and a few posts about what he did on his forced vacation.


CLAREMONT STILL WAITING ON THAT $850,000

In case you were wondering if the state's $42 billion budget fix was going to free up that $850,000 grant for Claremont's Padua Ave. Park, Magic 8-ball's answer would be, "Ask again later."

You may recall that the San Gabriel and Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy (RMC) grant to Claremont was approved but never delivered because California placed a moratorium on issuing new bonds.

October 14, 2008, Claremont City Council
proudly receives $850,000 rubber check from RMC

Although the state has balanced its books (for the moment), Claremont will have to wait a while longer before California can go back to issuing voter-approved bonds for projects like Padua Ave. Park. The RMC's website had a notice:

BUDGET IS SIGNED
BUT THERE IS NO IMMEDIATE CHANGE FOR RMC PROJECTS
Updated March 2

While adoption of a state budget is a critical step in addressing the freeze on sate bond funds, the Department of Finance has advised state agencies that: the cash flow results of the solutions adopted in this budget agreement need to be analyzed. After this process, the State Treasurer’s Office will begin to proceed with bond sales. But it will be some time before we know the amount of cash available to address past and future obligations for these projects, as well as past obligations for the nearly 5,400 projects and grants that have been stopped. It will be some time before the projects and grants that have already shut down will be able to restart. It will also take time to determine when any new projects will be able to start.

As a result of the bond freeze, on December 18, 2008, the RMC notified all grantees to stop work on all bond funded projects and laid off several consultant staff. The remaining staff continue to work with our grantees — in particular to update files and prepare billing for all work performed prior to December 18, 2008. In addition, the Governor has declared that all state employees will be furloughed two days per month; it is expected that our offices will be closed on the 1st and 3rd Fridays of the month beginning February 6, 2009.

At this time we do not know when payments for expenses incurred prior to December 18 will be released, when the freeze will be lifted on existing projects, and when we will be able to authorize new grants. For information on the status of a specific project, please contact us directly.

Needless to say these are challenging times and there are no certainties regarding when the freeze will be lifted. Although updates to this website will be done irregularly, we will update this page with new information as it becomes available.

Among the laid off staff was Claremont's own Tim Worley, a former city Traffic and Transportation commissioner, who was the RMC's water policy director.

News of the News

Newspapers have been taking it on the chin for some time now, not just from the Insider and not just about their proofreading.

The Tribune Company's recent bankruptcy filing is merely the latest example of the extreme set of troubles currently hitting the print journalism industry: online competition for classified ads (think Craigslist); a dead real estate market leading to fewer real estate ads; a global recession; rising labor, energy and material costs; and a steady, general decline in subscribers.

James Surowiecki, who writes the New Yorker's Financial Page column, had an essay in the magazine last week about the paradoxical decline in newspaper readership at a time when more people than ever are getting their information from newspaper websites:

....The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism’s content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of backhanded compliment to their continued relevance. Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that [marketing scholar Theodore] Levitt was talking about, it’s because people are abandoning its products. But people don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.

Does that mean newspapers are doomed? Not necessarily. There are many possible futures one can imagine for them, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to that old standby the deep-pocketed patron. It’s even possible that a few papers will be able to earn enough money online to make the traditional ad-supported strategy work. But it would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper; more important, we’re almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce. For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

As Surowiecki points out, newspapers have been slow to come to the realization that they are not in the newspaper business but are in the information biz. This short-sightedness, along with considerable pride, has prevented newspapers from doing what other online information services do best: link to a wide variety of outside news sources, including sites belonging to rivals. It's what Surowiecki calls the "not invented here" or walled garden mentality.

For news consumers, it's all a good deal. If you're looking for news, you can get it for free from the New York Times' or the Daily Bulletin's websites, or any number of other news and information sites. However, the free news party can't continue forever, and something's gotta give at some point. Some of that reckoning may take the form of more layoffs at places like the Dean Singleton-owned Los Angeles News Group's papers (of which the Daily Bulletin is one) and at the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times. And all those layoffs eventually will eventually result in a decline in the quality and quantity of that free information we are all getting.

Singleton, who runs MediaNews Group, certainly has made no secret of his desire to downsize and to consolidate his operations - What's so important about having writers with local knowledge about the communities we're reporting on? says Singleton. Last October, former Claremont Courier reporter Gary Scott wrote about Singleton's outsourcing ideas:

Dean Singleton, speaking Monday to the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, urged his belt-tightening brethren to consider "consolidating and outsourcing news operations" in these tough economic times. From USA Today:

MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton, who also serves as chairman of the board of The Associated Press, told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that papers should explore outsourcing in nearly every aspect of their operations.

-snip-

Singleton said sending copyediting and design jobs overseas may even be called for.

"One thing we're exploring is having one news desk for all of our newspapers in MediaNews ... maybe even offshore," he said during the speech.

Singleton added after the speech, "In today's world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn't matter."

And, earlier this month Singleton consolidated his Inland Empire copy desks for the Daily Bulletin, the San Bernardino Sun, and the Redlands Daily Facts into one office in West Covina with LA News Group's San Gabriel Valley operations. Gary Scott reported on that as well.

If this talk of outsourcing by local news organizations sounds familiar, you might be recalling James McPherson, the man behind the online Pasadena Now. In May, 2007, McPherson made the national news when he hired some workers in India to cover the local Pasadena scene, including city council meetings, via the Internet. Other less well-known online news sources quickly followed suit.

The McPherson news, even in the Internet Age, apparently didn't get around all that fast. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd jumped right on the story on this past November 29th, 18 months after the story first broke.

The mainstream media's going to have to move a bit faster if they hope to compete with a person typing away in Bangalore, India, for a penny a word, as Dowd noted:

[McPherson] said he got the idea to outsource about a year ago, sitting in his Pasadena home, where he puts out Pasadena Now with his wife, Candice Merrill. Macpherson had worked in the ’90s for designers like Richard Tyler and Alan Flusser, and had outsourced some of his clothing manufacturing to Vietnam.

So, he thought, “Where can I get people who can write the word for less?” In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses.

He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.

“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”

A penny for your thoughts? Now I knew my days were numbered.

State Senate School Journalism Bill

Censorship in Claremont, always a popular subject among the Claremont 400, is in the spotlight once again. The California State Senate is considering a bill to protect public school and public university journalism teachers from reprisals by school administrators who want to quell so-called "negative" stories - that is, stories that cast their institutions in unfavorable light.

The bill, SB 1370, was introduced by State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) and is sponsored by the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA).

Will Bigham has an article in the Daily Bulletin on the subject. Bigham's article notes that in their support of SB 1370, the CNPA has cited an incident at Claremont High School, where former principal Carrie Allen removed a respected teacher from her position as faculty advisor to the school paper, The Wolfpack. Bigham explained:

The reassignment of Becca Feeney, former adviser to Claremont High School's Wolfpacket, is one of the instances cited by the California Newspaper Publishers Association, a sponsor of the bill.

Feeney, an English teacher, was stripped of her Wolfpacket duties in July 2007 following a clash with Carrie Allen, then the principal of Claremont High.

In May 2007, the newspaper published a series of articles critical of long-term substitute instructors teaching advanced-placement classes.

Shortly after the stories were published, Allen lashed out at Feeney and the newspaper in a letter placed in Feeney's personnel file, according to a written description of the events that Feeney submitted to the California Newspaper Publishers Association.

As we noted back in August, 2007, the Wolfpack, under Feeney, won an award from the Los Angeles Times for a series of articles they published in 2005 about the Claremont Unified School District secretly allowing author Jeremy Iverson to enroll at CHS posing as a student in order to write a book about life as a high schooler.

Both the Iverson incident and the use of substitute teachers for AP classes are things that parents and kids would be concerned about, and the only way they discovered these things was from the Wolfpack. Yet, the CUSD administration would have students and parents denied that important information.

None of this oddball behavior regarding censorship is new to Claremont. Just consider the recent Jonathan Petropoulos-Nazi-looted art story that Claremont McKenna College may or may not have tried to squelch (depending on whom you talk to) before it the story was published in the Claremont Independent.

Claremont, you see, is populated by a good number of faux civil libertarians, a good number of whom are on the CUSD board or on the City Council, yet who have remained silent on this and many other similar issues. That silence you hear is the uproar over at the local Democratic Club over the goings on at their local high school. And, as we wrote in a follow-up to our August post about the removal of Becca Feeney from the Wolfpack:

ORIGINALLY POSTED 8/10/07:

In more absurd CUSD action, Will Bigham in today's Bulletin writes that the school board apparently violated the Brown Act during Monday night's meeting.

Of course, this comes as no surprise to long-time school board observers. The Claremont 400 has had little respect for the Brown Act and has fairly consistently sought to conduct its business behind closed doors. In its heyday controlling the city council, the 400's actions earned Claremont a Black Hole Award in October 2000 from the California First Amendment Coalition.

That philosophy no doubt informed the decision to remove the faculty advisor from Claremont High School's student paper, the Wolfpack, as we noted yesterday. One good thing about these small-town Savonarolas' actions - through their attempts at hiding their business from the public eye and at controlling what news gets out, they're helping shape the resolve of a few future journalists and artists who are now students under this absurdist regime.

So, Claremont's gift to the world isn't its consistently bad record on First Amendment issues; it's the Journalism Teacher Protection Act, which is what SB 1370 would be called should it become law. Like Claremont's Cookie Grinch, Mayor Ellen Taylor, this is simply more evidence illuminating the real characters of the group running the town. It's comforting to know that some good comes out of these continuing bad acts.

Falling Axes

We wrote last year about some of the problems facing the news industry, particularly print media. Since then, the Los Angeles Times has been purchased by Sam Zell. Despite initial promises to shore up the Times staff, Zell has moved forward with buyouts and layoffs to downsize staff. So not much has changed in that regard from the previous Tribune Co. regime at the Times.

Kevin Roderick at LAObserved had a list of the latest casualties of what he called "Zellutation." Just how much fat is there left to trim? Roderick reported the Times is also doing away with guided tours of the Times Building.

Roderick hosted KCRW 89.9FM's "The Politics of Culture" last Tuesday, and he discussed the intersection of journalism and blogging with blogger (and journalist) Joshua Micah Marshall from TalkingPointsMemo.com. Thanks to Gary Scott for pointing out that audio link (more on Scott below).

And Ed Padgett's Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20-Year Club blog has been covering the cutbacks on the Times' production end. Padgett's post on Friday noted that 31 people were cut from from the Times' Orange County and downtown Los Angeles production facilities.

Things aren't much better over at the Daily Bulletin, whose parent company, Media News Group, has forced layoffs at many of the papers they own: The Daily Bulletin, The Daily Breeze, The Long Beach Press-Telegram, The Los Angeles Daily News, The Pasadena Star-News, The San Bernardino Sun, The San Gabriel Valley Tribune, The Whittier Daily News, and The San Jose Mercury News, to name a few.

Gary Scott's Reporter-G blog has a list of the latest cuts at the Bulletin and at the three papers comprising the San Gabriel Valley News Group (The Star-News, The SGV Tribune, and the Whittier Daily News).

Surveying the wreckage, one cannot help but be struck by the fact that the combination of the media consolidation and streamlining/restructuring in the form of downsizing has to have an effect on the end product. That paper you get each morning is bound to get thinner and less substantive.

* * *

Meanwhile, The Claremont Courier continues to chug along, having undergone an online and print edition makeover. Yes, we've had our criticisms about the Courier, but they do seem to know their market, and they've even managed to provide some decent coverage of a few important community issues (affordable housing and the Village Expansion, to name two).

Perhaps there's a micro-niche for the community-specific newspaper that the Courier can fill.