InkBlots

It’s been a while since he’s been at the mic, but Sid Salter is adding a 2-hour daily radio program to his daily repertoire. The afternoon drive-time program will be available on SuperTalk, a radio network available on a number of stations across the state. The new gig will be in addition to Salter’s longtime job as Perspective editor for The Clarion-Ledger.

Neshoba, a new quarterly glossy magazine supplement, will be published by The Neshoba Democrat beginning in March.

The magazine will be a supplement to The Neshoba Democrat and distributed widely throughout East Mississippi and at Pearl River Resort. The Democrat’s sister newspaper The Madison County Journal launched its own monthly magazine last fall.

Three articles, three different perspectives worth reading on the current state of the newspaper business…

GOOD – From Media Life magazine | The latest forecast for America’s newspapers would suggest that extinction is not too far off. UBS figures newspaper revenues will be down 12.2 percent when the final figures are in for 2008 and tumble another 17.6 percent this year.

Yet media planners and buyers don’t see print newspapers disappearing, certainly not anytime soon, and they’re fairly upbeat about the changes papers could introduce to stem at least some of the declines.

NOT SO GOOD – From Time magazine | The crisis in journalism has reached meltdown proportions. It is now possible to contemplate a time when some major cities will no longer have a newspaper and when magazines and network-news operations will employ no more than a handful of reporters.

There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.

DOWNRIGHT UGLY – From The Washington Post | When Arthur Sulzberger Jr. refused to talk to his own reporter about the financial condition of the New York Times Co., it was the latest sign of an industry in deep trouble.

After all, the Times is not only the nation’s top-selling metropolitan daily but also boasts the top newspaper Web site, averaging 19.5 million unique visitors each month. Its struggles have sparked a passionate debate about how to wring more cash from the online world where the Times, like most newspapers, gives away its wares for free.

Steve Stewart, former publisher of the Clarksdale Press-Register, comes to the defense of a Franklin, Va. man who has recently been branded by some as a bigot for comments made in an interview with the local newspaper Stewart now leads.

A young tennis star from Britain tells the Daily Mail Online he contemplated slitting his wrists over a rape charge that landed him in one of Mississippi’s “notoriously brutal” jails.

Twenty-one year-old Chris Doerr “feared his life was all but over after falling foul of laws in the Bible Belt that mean a girl only has to claim she had sex after a man got her drunk to bring a rape charge.”

Terry R. Cassreino, former communications director for the Mississippi Democratic Party and a former longtime Mississippi journalist, has formed a media and political consulting company…Tammy Broome, former advertising director for the Laurel Leader-Call, recently took a similar position with the Corsicana Daily Sun in Texas.

The Mississippi Supreme Court reprimanded Solomon Osborne, a recently-resigned state judge, for supposedly uttering this line: “White folks don’t praise you unless you’re a damn fool.”

While campaigning for re-election as a county court judge, according to the court’s opinion, Osborne, who is African-American, spoke in 2006 before the Greenwood Voters League, a predominantly African-American political organization. Portions of the speech appeared the next day in the local newspaper.

The MPA Education Foundation Roast of Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant was a smash last week at the Jackson Marriott Downtown. None on the panel, including emcee Sid Salter and “roasters” Andy Taggart, Charlie Ross, Dr. Martha Saunders, Sheriff Malcolm McMillin and Marshall Ramsey, disappointed. And the best performance of the evening, as noted by Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal editor Lloyd Gray, may have come from the lieutenant governor himself.

Taggart also touched on the event in his blog for The Clarion-Ledger.

At least three bills introduced in the 2009 legislative session would have moved public notices — or legal ads — out of newspapers and onto the Internet. Two have died in committee; the third was amended to merely create a study group to determine the feasibility of such a move.

But the bill underscores the challenge to state newspapers, which have for scores of years served as the third party in delivering notices about government business to the public. And, in a state where Internet penetration at home still is only at the 50 percent mark, proponents of keeping the notices in print argue transparency in government would be seriously hampered if the ads are moved wholesale to the Internet.

The Sun Herald filed public information requests with the Mississippi Department of Transportation for travel expense reports for MDOT Executive Director Larry L. “Butch” Brown, Southern District Transportation Commissioner Wayne Brown, Central District Commissioner Dick Hall and Northern District Commissioner Bill Minor since July 1, 2004.

What resulted was some bruised egos and a priceless quote or two from public officials who obviously feel taxpayers don’t deserve too much accountability from them.

Many newspapers picked up on the reaction to the intrepid reporting by SH writer Michael Newsome, including Vicksburg Post executive editor Charlie Mitchell.