Published by Steve February 20th, 2008
in 101 @ 280.
Here’s a bitter lesson for Bay Area Media News employees: beware of emails from your boss marked “Important Announcement.” Ahead of what he characterizes as “significant” impending staff cuts, president and publisher of Media News’ Bay Area Newspaper Group John Armstrong extended a buy-out offer company-wide. No, there isn’t an upside, but there is a downside to the downside for employees of the company’s Northern California papers: not all buy-out applications will be accepted, and insiders say big-money employees are more likely to get them, while smaller fish are more likely to get a pink slip down the line.
Armstrong says the company’s financial woes are “of historic proportions.” How exactly this will affect the staffing of the Merc, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the Contra Costa Times and BANG’s other papers won’t be known until after the buyout deadline hits on March 3.
Here’s the internal memo… Continue reading ‘Media News Massacre’
Published by Steve February 6th, 2008
in Front Page and In the News.
Oh, the pressure of being the hip youth candidate. You gotta throw the best party. I mean, you gotta. Luckily for Barak Obama, he was the only individual candidate to throw anything worthy of being called an election-night bash in the South Bay. Supporters partied at the Cabana Palo Alto on El Camino Real, and the contact high from a string of Obama victories early in the night had the crowd buzzing. The party peaked with Obama’s speech from Chicago, around the same time volunteers were getting the word from Hope Central: good job, now get ready for the post-Super-Tuesday-push. Campaign volunteers were upbeat, reminding me that just weeks ago, many thought Hillary was going to wrap up the race tonight. Instead, Obama blazed a comeback trail that won him the most states of any candidates. They were feeling good about their chances, even if there was a palpable disappointment that the momentum of the last couple of weeks didn’t take their candidate even further—as in, right into a knockout punch. In fact, a lot of supporters made a quick exit after the speech, sensing a downer of an outcome in California. Smart move.
Published by Fly February 5th, 2008
in Front Page and In the News.
It was clear what Clinton volunteers in San Jose had in mind on Super Tuesday: minority voters. Her campaigners didn’t waste one minute at the San Jose headquarters; they sat around space heaters and pizza boxes calling South Bay voters all the way up to the minute before the polls closed. But they weren’t just dialing up anyone; volunteers strategically placed more than 3,000 calls Tuesday, targeting Latino and Asian Americans—two major voting groups in Santa Clara County. The group had split from the Palo Alto headquarters a week ago to open shop in San Jose, with the intention of courting minority voters while the Palo Alto station courted women voters. Volunteers were speaking Cantonese and Spanish, offering up their assistance to help voters understand the election process. In some cases, they gave them a ride to their polling place. “Santa Clara County is more diverse than San Francisco; it has more of a minority base, especially Latino,” said Ajay Abraham, Asian outreach coordinator at the San Jose headquarters. As statewide results began to pour in showing Hillary with a big lead, the strategy appeared to be paying off.
Published by Administrator January 27th, 2008
in Downtown Journal.
January 27, 2008 — Winter chill and weekend rains didn’t put a damper on downtown nightlife this week. San Jose Police sealed off a block of downtown San Jose Sunday morning after a patron at the Vivid Night Club at 8 S 1st St. was stabbed around 1am. A lieutenant at the scene told SV411 that a male was knifed in the chest and the arm. He was taken to a nearby hospital where he was reported to be in stable condition. As of 3am, police said two Asian male suspects had escaped and were outstanding. The injuries followed a fight in the club between two groups. Entertainment zone police were standing out front when the assault occurred, according to police, and responded immediately.
Witnesses also report that a patron at the Vault Ultralounge was hospitalized on Friday night from injuries sustained from blows delivered by two San Jose officers. The victim was being helped out of the club by friends after being asked to leave by club security for being intoxicated.
Published by eric January 7th, 2008
in Media Matters, Front Page and 101 @ 280.
The way the top jobs at the Mercury News keep getting shuffled around, it’s beginning to look like a game of musical chairs set to speed-metal. Friday’s edition announced the hire of yet another new editor-in-chief –- the fourth in five years. The new new guy, David J. Butler, arrives from Miami, replacing Carol Leigh Hutton, who was hired last May to replace Susan Goldberg, who replaced David Yarnold in 2003. The newspaper has seen four publishers come and go over that same period.
At this rate, MediaNews, the Denver-based corporation that owns the Merc, ought to consider returning the newspaper to its original name: the San Jose Visitor.
Butler also happens to be the corporate head of editorial operations for the MediaNews empire. Prior to becoming MediaNews’ VP, he served as editor and publisher of the Detroit News, and before that as editor of the Los Angeles Daily News. He has also worked at papers in Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Kentucky and Illinois.
One can only assume that his arrival will bring some stability to the Merc’s beleaguered newsroom.
There is some dispute about what brought about the most recent sudden change in leadership. Friday’s New York Times ran a piece under the headline “Top Editor Ousted at San Jose Paper,” and described the incident as “a top-level shake-up.” But later in the day, a piece on the Editor & Publisher website quoted outgoing editor Hutton as insisting she is leaving of her own volition.
Contacted by phone Friday, Hutton declined to comment. “I really don’t have anything to say about it,” she said.
Pete Carey, a 40-year Merc newsroom veteran, says he is inclined to believe Hutton is being honest. But he concedes that there’s been a fair amount of tension in the newsroom surrounding a so-called “Rethinking” project that Hutton was heading up.
The Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz wrote about that initiative in a Nov. 17 piece headlined “In San Jose, Downsizing With Dynamite.” Kurtz called the plan the nation’s “most ambitious — or the most desperate” effort to bring a newspaper’s operation online. “The current goal,” Kurtz writes, “is to slash the print edition further and shift two-thirds of the remaining staff to the Merc’s Web site, up from 10 percent.
One Merc reporter is quoted in the piece complaining that Hutton intended to “blow up the newsroom.”
Carey, who was on the team that won the Merc a Pulitzer Prize in 1986, is more generous – or judicious – in his assessment.
“MediaNews is really digging in to try and make a newspaper viable in the digital age,” he said in a telephone interview Friday. “It’s a learning process – and obviously, it’s not always going to be smooth.”
Published by Steve December 14th, 2007
in City Hall and Tech.
No matter how often Pete Constant tries to compare porn to second-hand smoke, the fact remains that the adult industry has been thriving in Silicon Valley—online. This week, the huge adult network that’s been almost invisible to locals went high-profile when the publishers of Penthouse Magazine bought Palo Alto’s Various Inc. for $500 million in cash and securities. Various is known mostly for Adultfriendfinder.com, a social networking site that claims more than 18 million members. Various’ Valley min-empire includes the even racier alt.com, a dating and community site for the kinky set. Penthouse Media Group claims the move makes the company the largest adult entertainment company in the world.
Published by Steve December 11th, 2007
in 101 @ 280.
You know those court dramas on TV where a prosecutor tries to win a case by undercutting the defendant? Well, it happens in real life too, and Supervising Deputy District Attorney JoAnne McCracken has gone on the attack, suggesting that a group of citizens appointed by the City Council isn’t knowledgeable enough to get involved in law enforcement matters. Her recent letter to San Jose’s Sunshine Reform Taskforce (SRTF) about their efforts to make police records more accessible dripped with prosecutorial prowess. She wrote 13 pages to make her case for closed police records and spent four of them attacking the SRTF’s credibility. One particularly snarky paragraph exemplified McCracken’s lowball tactic: “Our criminal justice system is complicated and it is common that people who lack expertise in the area may have misapprehensions about it. Statements made at some public meetings suggest that this may have occurred and influenced task force decisions. For example, one task force member mistakenly thought that most aspects of police investigatory files become public during a trial. Another member suggested that she favored the subcommittee’s proposals because she would have used access to police records in a hiring decision. Yet another task force member remarked that the subcommittee’s recommendations on police investigatory records were ‘much more cautious than other ordinances we’ve read.’ He also found it odd that many ‘resisting arrest’ charges do not involve an arrest on an underlying charge and cited this as a reason for greater access to police records. If there were no underlying charge, he wondered, how then could the suspect have ‘resisted arrest’? These remarks reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the law and criminal justice system.” Gee, if we didn’t know better, we might think she was suing the 13 task force members, not debating public policy. Seriously, are any of McCracken’s concerns about task force chit chat a reason to block better public access to police records? And is she seriously suggesting a task force formed to draft sunshine policy is unqualified to draft sunshine policy? At press time, SRTF members that Fly contacted weren’t ready to comment on McCracken’s letter before they heard the city attorney’s official response. (Full disclosure: Metro CEO Dan Pulcrano is the group’s vice chair and a proponent of a sunshine ordinance since 1998.) Commissioner Trixie Johnson said McCracken’s missive raised “some serious issues” that she’ll be willing to talk about later.
Published by Fly December 2nd, 2007
in City Hall and In the News.
If it seemed like nothing in the Dome could surpass the sheer surrealism of hundreds of anti-Communist Vietnamese Americans chanting with raised fists in protest over the Little Saigon vote, it was almost outdone yesterday morning by an Internet expert who demanded that Fly google “lesbian sex” and “animal sex” on a laptop in the council chambers. If we’re talking bestiality, you know we’re talking about Pete Constant’s crusade against “second-hand porn” in the San Jose libraries, and indeed, the point of all the naughty googling ended up being that the Internet filtering that Constant is calling for at libraries can be beat by almost any of the roughly 15,000 sites offering the means to do so. However, it was a little early in the morning for links to “real farm girls” and “The Circumventor” (could there possibly be a better porn name for an anti-filtering program?). The main event was a mock council meeting staged by former councilperson Cindy Chavez’s San Jose State political science class featuring her students acting the part of councilmembers, city staff, police chiefs and community members while weighing in on Constant’s crusade in front of an audience. In many cases, the students performed better than their real-life counterparts, which actually makes sense since no one is grading Rob Davis on his preparation for public events. Don’t even ask if Constant showed up to present and defend his proposal, ‘cause you know he did—we said there was an audience! Meanwhile, leading the proceedings was a former mayor who put the “Ham” back in “Susan Hammer.” She was great with the students and seemed to be having the time of her life, telling one speaker “You’re not old enough to remember me” and admitting that while she might have more to say on the issue after seeing further research “I’ll be saying it to myself.” Students assigned to argue against Constant’s proposal (which is not so much a specific filtering proposal as a proposal to draft a filtering proposal) deflated the councilman’s contention that San Jose needs to get in line with the federal Children’s Internet Protection Act (since San Jose libraries do not actually receive federal funds). In the end, Constant got little support from the college crowd, when Hammer couldn’t even get a second to his motion. “C’mon,” she urged for education’s sake, “one of you guys second it.” Constant just shrugged and told her “I’m used to this.”
Published by Fly November 11th, 2007
in South County.
Newcomer Perry Woodward got elected to the Gilroy city council last week without help from developers, thank you very much. The 39-year-old lawyer has never held a public office before and managed to snag a council seat with less than $4,000, most of which he says he lent to himself. Typical Gilroy campaigns pull in two to four times that amount, but Woodward turned the big bucks away when he pledged not to accept anything from contributors with an interest in the south county’s sweet but limited development opportunities. “It’s been my sense for years that money comes with strings,” the councilmember-elect says. “I don’t want anybody feeling like their money gives them special access.” Developers flocking to Gilroy city hall must compete for the right to build residential units that are capped under the city’s growth policy. Woodward says he just didn’t want to be part of a situation ripe for conflict of interest. After reading Metro’s recent news story on the abundance of anonymous campaign contributions in Gilroy (likely from developers and their friends), Woodward said he’d be in favor of tightening the city’s campaign finance rules.
Published by Administrator November 2nd, 2007
in Front Page.
What prompted former Mexican President Vicente Fox to accuse a political rival of ties to the drug trade at, of all places, a San Jose Chamber of Commerce banquet? Noting that press was present during his speech to the annual Legends and Leaders event, he seized the moment to accuse PRI party leader Manlio Fabio Beltrones Rivera of orchestrating a smear campaign linking his wife to the deaths of 18 Pemex oil company workers in an oil rig accident. Beltrones, he added, “has been accused of drug trafficking. … He has a DEA record.” What provoked the unearthing of charges that were reported in the New York Times a decade ago? Fox pointed Fly to the website of Mexico City’s Reforma newspaper, whose lead story that day talked about the failure of life boats at the maritime disaster that were allegedly supplied by a company linked to his wife’s children. Chilling in the Fairmont Hotel lobby with his wife Marta Sahagún, Fox assured Fly that Beltrones “is behind this campaign. I want him to prove his calumny.” Switching to español, he added, “Es un acuso muy seria. Muy estupida y muy mentirosa,” which is a polite way of calling Beltrones a liar. During his speech, Fox took on xenophobia and urged Americans to build bridges, not fences, and move toward a European Union–style region. On the drug problem, he asked “who moves the drugs” from the border to U.S. cities, launders the money and sends it south to bribe Mexican officials? “Are there no cartels here?” Despite his frank comments and current scrutiny at home for driving a Hummer and living large on a ranch with an artificial lake and exotic animals, Fox received a hero’s welcome in Silicon Valley with an articulate case for trade and free markets that played well with the business audience. He also saluted the working class, cheek-kissing and shaking hands with more than 30 uniformed servers and cooks from the Fairmont Hotel’s catering staff, who were lined up stageside by Chamber of Commerce CEO Pat Dando. Fox, who was spotted earlier in the day walking around Santana Row, says he plans to stay active in Mexican politics. “I am not going to be a [former] president who is sitting hard on his — how do you say? — ass. Culo.”