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A Newspaper in Las Vegas, at Risk of Closing, Divides a Family

September 5, 2013 by

It was June 2005. Mr. Greenspun, whose family has owned the paper since his parents founded it in 1950, told dozens of reporters and editors that the joint operating agreement between The Sun and its more conservative rival, The Las Vegas Review-Journal, had been amended: The Sun would become the first daily in the country to be delivered inside its competitor, as if it were a separate section.

Despite the skepticism of some staff members that day, the newspaper was able to attract top journalists from across the country, resulting in national awards, including a Pulitzer Prize in 2009. But the financial downturn, particularly harsh in Nevada, pummeled the paper, and dozens of longtime employees were laid off.

And now, the paper itself might disappear. Stephens Media, owner of The Review-Journal, wants to dissolve the joint agreement, intended to preserve newspapers. In exchange, the Greenspun family would receive the domain name lasvegas.com, a Web site the family currently leases from Stephens for up to $2.5 million a year and then subleases to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Mr. Greenspun’s brother, Danny Greenspun, and two sisters, Susan Greenspun Fine and Jane Greenspun Gale, all voted to accept the offer, but Brian wants to fight. Last month, he accused his siblings of “deciding to kill The Las Vegas Sun,” and he is suing Stephens, claiming that the offer gives The Review-Journal a local monopoly over news gathering and opinion.

At stake, he says, is Las Vegas’s future as a two-newspaper town. Doing away with the joint operating agreement “is equivalent to buying The Sun and shutting it down,” he said, adding of his siblings, “It’s a business deal to them.”

The dispute is the latest twist in the outsize history of the Greenspuns and Las Vegas. While there are better-known publishing families in the United States, few are more colorful.

Hank Greenspun started the paper with his wife, Barbara, after working as a publicist for the gangster Bugsy Siegel. In the 1940s, he was convicted of running guns to the paramilitary group that would become the Israeli Defense Forces. (He was fined, never jailed and later pardoned by President John F. Kennedy.) In the ensuing decades, he helped end segregation on the Strip, developed an 8,000-acre master-planned community and brought cable television to Las Vegas. He was also revealed to be a proposed target of the Watergate burglars. The Greenspun name is on schools, clinics and colleges.

The Sun first came to prominence in the 1950s for its opposition to Senator Patrick McCarran’s red-baiting tactics. (Hank Greenspun was also a vociferous opponent of Senator Joseph McCarthy.) It continued to be a liberal voice amid the city’s dizzying growth, but by the time of Hank Greenspun’s death in 1989, the paper was losing millions. Within months, the joint agreement was created, but circulation continued to slide. By 2005, when the deal was revised, The Sun had fewer than 30,000 readers and essentially became a 6- to 10-page insert with no advertising.

On that day in 2005, Mr. Greenspun assured the 75 or so staff members that the deal would let the paper reinvest in journalism. In 2009, the paper won the industry’s highest honor, a Pulitzer Prize, for a series about construction deaths on the Strip.

But as the economy staggered, many of those same journalists were laid off or left. The paper once received as much as $12 million a year in profit-sharing through the joint agreement and now receives $1.3 million. Last month, the Greenspuns voted to dissolve the partnership.

None of the other Greenspun siblings would discuss the case. Brian Greenspun maintains that the deal violates antitrust laws. “In every antitrust violation, there’s always been at least two parties who combine based on it being a good business decision,” he said. His lawyers include Leif Reid, son of the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, another prominent family in Nevada and long supported by The Sun.

But Donald Campbell, outside counsel for Stephens, said: “We believe his beef is with the wrong people. He is a dissident shareholder. The problem he has is with his own family.” Mr. Campbell also said the offer did not include a noncompete clause, so the Greenspuns, or anyone else, would face no legal obstacle in continuing to print The Sun. Mr. Greenspun contends that the costs to do so would be prohibitive.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/business/media/a-newspaper-in-las-vegas-at-risk-of-closing-divides-a-family.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Chicago Sun-Times Lays Off All Its Full-Time Photographers

May 31, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The union representing many of the laid-off photographers plans to file a bad-faith bargaining charge with the National Labor Relations Board, a union leader said.

The Sun-Times Media company didn’t immediately comment on how many jobs were affected, but the national Newspaper Guild issued a statement saying 28 employees lost their jobs. The layoffs included photographers and editors at The Sun-Times’s sister publications in the suburbs.

“I’m still in shock,” said Steve Buyansky, a laid-off photo editor for three of the group’s suburban newspapers. “I’m not angry right now. Maybe I will be later.”

Mr. Buyansky said about 30 photographers and photo editors were called to a mandatory meeting Thursday morning where the editor of The Sun-Times, Jim Kirk, “talked for about 20 seconds” telling them the layoffs were a tough decision.

Mr. Buyansky said Pulitzer Prize-winning Sun-Times photographer John H. White was in the room and was among those who were laid off. “It’s sad,” said Mr. Buyansky, speaking from the Billy Goat tavern, a longtime watering hole for Chicago journalists, where about 10 laid-off photographers congregated after the meeting. “The Sun-Times had an amazing photo staff.”

Sun-Times Media released a statement Thursday to The Associated Press confirming the move: “Today, The Chicago Sun-Times has had to make the very difficult decision to eliminate the position of full-time photographer, as part of a multimedia staffing restructure.” The statement noted that the “business is changing rapidly” and audiences are “seeking more video content with their news.”

The executive director of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, Craig Rosenbaum, said an unfair labor practice charge would be filed in reaction to the company’s announcement. The union is negotiating a new contract and the company told the union at the bargaining table recently that no layoffs of photographers were planned, Mr. Rosenbaum said.

Like most major newspapers, The Sun-Times, which was bought by the investment company Wrapports in 2011, has been hard hit by the technological shift that has cause more people to rely on their personal computers and mobile devices to stay informed. As more readers have embraced digital alternatives, so have advertisers in a move that has been steadily siphoning away newspaper publishers’ biggest source of revenue.

The Chicago Sun-Times ended September 2012 with a paid circulation of 263,292, according to the most recent statement filed with the Alliance for Audited Media. That contrasted with circulation of about 341,448 at the same time in 2006. Including satellite editions that operate under other names, the Sun-Times” circulation totaled 432,451 in September 2012.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/01/business/media/chicago-sun-times-lays-off-all-its-full-time-photographers.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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InsideClimate News Hopes to Build on Pulitzer

April 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment

When three reporters for InsideClimate News found out they won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting on Monday, none were in the same city — Elizabeth McGowan was in Washington, Lisa Song was in Boston and David Hasemyer was in New York.

“We’re a virtual organization,” said the publisher of the six-year-old Web site, David Sassoon, from his office in New York. So the celebration took place in a telephone conference call; whatever Champagne flowed, flowed in separate locations.

InsideClimate News may be the leanest news start-up ever to be presented with a Pulitzer, journalism’s highest honor, a prize that is typically awarded to regional and national newspapers. It beat out 50 other entrants and two finalists, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post, for the prize.

With a full-time staff of just seven and a nonprofit business model, InsideClimate News exemplifies a new breed of news organization that depends on donations, both from rich charitable foundations and a handful of ordinary readers.

“Because of our name, some people think we’re an advocacy organization,” said Ms. Song, one of the three winners, in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “I hope the award will get people to stop making that mistake.”

Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzers, which are under the auspices of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, said the Web site’s win “indicates the way journalism as we’ve always known it and loved it is being reconfigured.”

Another news operation reliant on donations, the Center for Investigative Reporting’s four-year-old California Watch, was a finalist for a Pulitzer this year (and last year, too). It and InsideClimate News bear some similarities to ProPublica, the pioneering nonprofit newsroom that shared a Pulitzer in 2010 for a collaboration with The New York Times, and won one of its own in 2011, becoming the first such Web winner.

All three distribute their work free on the Web and team up with for-profit news organizations that republish some of it with credit. All three say they try to tackle topics that bigger, better-known news organizations are not equipped or inclined to do.

“We are a climate and energy news organization, out to cover the issues that aren’t being covered by the mainstream,” said Mr. Sassoon. “The gap keeps getting bigger, so there’s more and more for us to do.”

Dan Fagin, a science journalism professor at New York University, said, “There are a lot of these experiments under way.”

A member of the InsideClimate News advisory board, Professor Fagin praised the site. “They’re relentless,” he said, when it comes to following up articles about pipelines and spills.

Mr. Sassoon said he was perplexed by the relative dearth of environmental coverage by other outlets.

InsideClimate News was the first to report on The Times’s decision last winter to close its small environment desk and assign its reporters and editors to other departments. While The Times said it was not shirking from coverage of climate change and other issues, and has continued to publish articles about those issues, the move made some people in journalism and environmental circles uneasy.

“The dismantling of the environment desk was, in some ways, a good argument to take to our funders, to say we need more money, but it didn’t make us feel good,” Mr. Sassoon said.

InsideClimate News has an annual budget of roughly $550,000, four-fifths of which goes to staff. The rest pays for travel, Internet services and other expenses.

The organization is an outgrowth of Mr. Sassoon’s consulting work for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic group that emphasizes climate policy. Initially, it was a blog called Solve Climate News, which collected news links from elsewhere and added a bit of commentary — a tried and true formula for many new blogs. For a while “we were chasing traffic,” Mr. Sassoon said, sheepishly, but the site soon got serious.

“We started to do our own original journalism rather than derivative stuff,” he said, and eventually renamed it InsideClimate News.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/business/media/insideclimate-news-hopes-to-build-on-pulitzer.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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New York Times Wins 4 Pulitzer Prizes

April 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

In a sign of the changing news business, an independent nonprofit organization based in Brooklyn, InsideClimate News, won the prize for national reporting for its coverage of dangers posed by oil pipelines.

The fiction prize, which was not awarded last year, went to Adam Johnson for “The Orphan Master’s Son.” The prize for general nonfiction was awarded to “Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys and the Dawn of a New America,” by Gilbert King.

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis won two Pulitzers, one for local reporting on the rise in infant deaths at badly regulated day care centers and another for editorial cartooning by Steve Sack. The Wall Street Journal won one Pulitzer Prize for Bret Stephens’s commentary on politics and American foreign policy.

The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize for Philip Kennicott’s criticism of art and the social forces that underlie it, including an examination of the allure of violence and misfortune in an essay after the Newtown school shootings called “Why Do We Stare?”

The fourth award for The Times went to John Branch for his feature “Snow Fall,” on a fatal avalanche in the Cascade Mountains in Washington State, which, the Pulitzer committee noted, was “enhanced by its deft integration of multimedia elements” including extensive video, animation and graphics. This is the third highest number of Pulitzer Prizes that The Times has won in a single year. (It won five in 2009 and seven in 2002.)

The Denver Post won in the breaking news category for its coverage of the theater shootings last summer in Aurora, Colo. The Pulitzer committee recognized how The Post’s reporting staff used social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and video to “capture a breaking story and provide context.” A finalist in the same category was the staff of The Hartford Courant for its coverage of the Newtown school massacre.

The Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., received its first Pulitzer, winning in the public service category for its reporting on how off-duty police officers were often speeders who endangered the lives of residents.

The prizes were especially valued in 2012 because so many news organizations were battling their own financial troubles. The Washington Post won one award and was a finalist for four others, even as the company endured a change in executive editors and found its financial situation under scrutiny. In an interview, Mr. Kennicott said that The Post had made sure that he felt that these financial and management changes would not affect his ability to focus on his work.

While the board that administers the Pulitzers started including online-only news sites in its awards in 2009, InsideClimate News.com is by far the smallest of such winners. InsideClimate News described itself as a five-year nonprofit organization financed by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Marisla Foundation and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. Its newsroom currently includes only seven full-time journalists.

David Sassoon, founder and publisher of the news site, said his staff celebrated on a telephone conference call because they work from their homes.

“We’re just thrilled with this recognition,” Mr. Sassoon said in a telephone interview. “It really helps a small outlet like us.” How? “Hopefully we’ll be able to raise more funds, to expand, which is what we want to do.” He joked that now that they have a Pulitzer, “more sources will call us back.”

The publishing industry was watching the fiction award closely after the Pulitzer board declined to award the prize in 2012. In addition to the winner, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” there were two finalists: “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” by Nathan Englander, and “The Snow Child,” by Eowyn Ivey. Tom Reiss won the biography prize for “The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal and the Real Count of Monte Cristo.”

Ayad Akhtar won the drama award for “Disgraced,” a play about a corporate lawyer who long disguises his Pakistani Muslim heritage, and Sharon Olds won the poetry award for “Stag’s Leap.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 15, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. He is Steve Sack, not Steve Sacks.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/business/media/the-times-wins-four-pulitzer-prizes.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder: Frank Bruni Named Times Op-Ed Columnist

May 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Frank Bruni, whose writing career at The New York Times has spanned two presidential campaigns, part of a papacy and more than five years as chief restaurant critic, has been named an Op-Ed columnist.

Andrew Rosenthal, editor of the opinion pages, said in an e-mail to the staff on Monday that Mr. Bruni would write a new column in The Times’s redesigned Sunday Op-Ed pages.

“This column, which will be a new anchor feature of the section, will be a sharp, opinionated look at a big event of the last week, from a different or unexpected angle, or a small event that was really important but everyone seems to have missed, or something entirely different,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “It will fast become a destination for our readers with Frank at the keyboard.”

He said Mr. Bruni would also write a column one other day of the week, most likely Thursday.

Mr. Bruni, 46, is the first openly gay Op-Ed columnist in The Times’s 160-year history.

He said he would take on a wide variety of subjects.

“I’m excited and really grateful. At The Times and beforehand, I’ve been lucky to be able to write about many different topics, and I’m eager to take on a job that will allow me to range across most or all of them in a reflective, analytical and sometimes — I hope — spirited way.”

His new job— he was a writer at large for The New York Times Magazine — is a piece of the broader reshuffling of the Sunday Week in Review. The section, which will be renamed and run by the editorial department rather than the newsroom, will focus on opinion pieces.

Mr. Bruni joined The Times from The Detroit Free Press in 1995. While in Detroit, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing for his portrait of a convicted child molester. He is the author of two New York Times best sellers, “Ambling into History,” an account of George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign, and “Born Round,” a memoir about his struggles with weight. He spent three and a half years in The Times’s Washington bureau, covering Congress and the White House and writing for the magazine. He was named Rome bureau chief in 2002, a job he held until 2004, when he was named chief restaurant critic.

Mr. Rosenthal’s full memo is below.

To all:

I am very excited to announced today that Frank Bruni has agreed to join the ranks of Times Op-Ed columnists. Frank will be, first off, writing the Page 2 column in the remake of the Week in Review.

This column, which will be a new anchor feature of the section, will be a sharp, opinionated look at a big event of the last week, from a different or unexpected angle, or a small event that was really important but everyone seems to have missed, or something entirely different. It will fast become a destination for our readers with Frank at the keyboard.

Frank also will be writing a regular Op-Ed column in our print pages and online, most likely on Thursdays. He is a net addition to our lineup, not a replacement for anyone or anything.

Frank needs no introduction. His work as a political writer, a foreign correspondent, food critic and magazine writer for the Times have been popular with our readers for almost 16 years.

His first column will appear in the first edition of the new section, unless, of course, he decides to write sooner.

Andy Rosenthal

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2b2531c1da48e964a4de49255b7da8a9

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