All Posts Tagged With: "newspaper"

That would be the ailing, failing newspaper industry. Matt Welch writes:

Here’s a new holiday cocktail for you: Combine one part bailout seasoning with another part perennial journalistic self-pity, pour it out over the Christmas/New Year’s publishing interregnum and presto!—it’s time for patriotic men and women to get behind a government rescue of what was until very recently one of the most profitable sectors in the United States: The newspaper industry.

“We’re more worthy of a bailout than the jokers on Wall Street,” argued Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock on Dec. 20. “You can’t have a democracy without us. If newspapers are dying, so is our system of government.”

Quite. Without < target=”_blank”a href=”http://www.kansascity.com/179/story/275496.html”>Whitlock in the trenches covering the Big 12 North conference, how is the Republic to survive?

Welch quite poignantly gets to the root of the newspaper “crisis” and challenges the lamenting of its journalists:

Blaming the customer is the second-to-last refuge of any crappy industry, business, or organization (the last refuge being asking for a handout on Capitol Hill). As my ex-L.A. Times colleague and current Reason magazine Contributing Editor Tim Cavanaugh has noted in our pages, the paper we both short-timed for was filled with people making jokes about whether we could just “fire our readers.” Over the recent holidays, an entire journalistic Festivus celebration of customer-blaming broke out over New Yorker finance columnist James Surowiecki’s lament that, “The real problem for newspapers…isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free.” To extrapolate, if only us greedy human beings would realize that our very democracy was at stake, that we “are taking an active step in the formation of a country without a civic conscience,” then we’d damned well volunteer to pay an unnecessary premium to keep our finest journalists in permanent six figures. Sounds precisely as convincing as the argument that enlightened voters will surely agree to pay extra taxes so that political campaigns can be financed through “clean” money.

At the risk of alienating what few old newspaper pals of mine still have jobs, the industry they (and I!) so cherish, which has suffered mind-blowing valuation losses and several dozen rounds of downsizing both in personnel and column inches, is still bloated after all these years, with costs that no publisher would dream of incurring if he was starting a newspaper from scratch in 2009.

It’s an excellent column and worth the read.

The firm where I work is featured in today’s Oklahoman Business Section. If you want to know more about the place I work, check it out.

I don’t talk much about my workplace because, frankly, it keeps me from getting into trouble from sharing something — anything — that I shouldn’t be sharing, including matters that attract intense public attention. (Read the article and you’ll know what I’m talking about.)

It’s been an absolute blast working for the firm since I officially came on board at the beginning of this year. I’ve actually been working with the firm for five years now, but prior to January it was in a capacity as a consultant along with my former business partner and current boss. We wouldn’t have considered closing down our own consulting business and joining this firm if we didn’t see an incredible opportunity to join a successful, growing and forward-looking organization. It’s exciting to be a part of some big things happening in Oklahoma, including playing a key role in helping Oklahoma City achieve its dream of becoming a Big League City.

McAfee & Taft is Oklahoma’s largest law firm, serving clients throughout the region and nationally in the areas of aviation, business law, corporate and securities, employee benefits, entertainment, environmental law, healthcare, intellectual property, labor and employment, litigation, oil and gas, real estate, and tax and family wealth. The firm currently employees 275 Oklahomans, including nearly 150 attorneys, with offices in Oklahoma City and Tulsa.

I just wanted to share the article in this morning’s paper because I’m really excited about it for our firm and because it lets my readers know a little bit more about me and my work.

The appropriately named blog Regret the Error publishes the most regretful of errors… a newspaper misspelling its own name…

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The editor expressed regrets the next day…

Being in Oklahoma City, we don’t get to see the Tulsa World until it arrives in the mail several days later at our office. So you’ll understand why we’re only just now getting to look through the Sunday morning edition on a Thursday afternoon.

Something caught our eye as we were perusing the front page of the Sports section — in the interest of full disclosure, my boss actually caught it first, but she’s got a really good eye that spots these things quickly. See if you notice it…

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

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Did you see it? Here’s a hint Continued