InkBlots

How many Emmerich employees can you spot in these pictures? Those who hadn’t increased EBITDA this year were voted off the rafts.

Technorati Tags: Emmerich

A mere day or two after The New York Times announced it would reduce its web width, The Wall Street Journal takes the biz by surprise with another slap-to-the-forehead idea: ads on the front page.

Technorati Tags: The New York Times, web width, The Wall Street Journal

Media Life Magazine is conducting a poll using something called surveymonkey.com to determine the contents of an upcoming publication that will focus on the newspaper industry. You can take the poll and find out more here.

Technorati Tags: Media Life Magazine, newspaper industry

The New York Times is suddenly seeming rather 21st century. The stalwart publication announced Monday it will phase in a new design and shrink its Web width by the first quarter of 2008. If the old design’s been good this many decades, another 18 months won’t hurt, right?

Anyway, the Old Gray Lady’s also looking a little more modern for a completely different reason, too: The changes mean the loss of 250 production department positions. For those keeping score, that’s about 10-12 times the average number of TOTAL employees at one of MPA’s member newspapers.

Your editor remembers when computer pagination came to his first newspaper way back in the 80s. The production staff went from eight employees down to two, virtually overnight. It’s been one long web width reduction and frequent hard disk error ever since.

Think Worldcom (Now MCI). Or Kmart Corp. (Now Sears). When times are tough, a name change might be in order. Such is the case with Hollinger International, publisher of The Chicago Sun-Times and once one of the largest publishers of community newspapers in the U.S. The company announced Monday it was changing its name to Sun Times Media Group in an effort to distance itself from its major stockholder, Hollinger Inc., once controlled by mighty Conrad Black. The company was a major international media congolmerate, controlling vast numbers of papers in Canada, as well as major, respected dailies in London and Jerusalem.

Back in the day, Hollinger operated in the U.S. under the American Publishing banner, and owned an assortment of newspapers in Mississippi, including The Meridian Star, Laurel Leader Call, Starkville Daily News and West Point Daily Times Leader, among others. The company eventually sold off most all of its holdings outside the Chicagoland area to buyers like Liberty Group and CNHI. Sales of papers in the late 90s are what eventually led to Black’s legal troubles, which began in earnest a couple of years ago.

What you’ve all been waiting on…results from the Oregon Newspaper Association 2006 Better Newspaper Contest, which we judged this spring.

We ran across this profile of The Sun Herald on the McClatchy Website.

Waco (Texas) Tribune-Herald Opinion Page editor John Young invokes the memory of 19th century Mississippi newspaper editor William McCardle, a vehement opponent of Reconstruction, in his argument against Congress overstepping its bounds and dictating boundaries for the Judicial Branch.

A correspondent for the Daytona News-Journal recently visited Biloxi and offers this grim assessment of the state of our post-Katrina coast.

A FEMA spokesman took his gag off long enough Thursday to deny the agency, bruised and battered by public opinion after a staggering display of ineptitude following Hurricane Katrina, has a zipped-lip policy of not commenting or appearing at public meetings where the media might be present.

A pub called the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report apparently did not get the memo.