Newspaper
pay rises 2%, Inland Press Association says
Pay
for those working in the newspaper industry rose an average of 2.1
percent from 2008 to 2009, according to the Des Plaines, Ill.-based
Inland Press Association’s Newspaper Industry Compensation Study.
Salaries increased for
most newsroom employees, except for beginning reporters and editorial
page editors. Experienced reporters’ pay increased by more than
2 percent.
Interactive producers,
with roles including online positions and graphic artists, had the
largest pay increases, about 13 to 14 percent.
Employees involved
in alternative business development, such as new distribution techniques,
saw gains of about 5 percent.
“The study is the
industry standard for planning and explaining compensation decisions,”
Inland’s executive director, Ray Carlsen, said.
The Newspaper
Industry Compensation Study comes from an annual study on salaries
and other data from 400 U.S. and Canadian newspapers and more than
90 newspapers and online positions at those papers, divided according
to circulation categories. Specific results are only available to
those involved in the study, who pay to participate.
Ottaway
Newspapers renamed Dow Jones Local Media Group
Middleport,
N.Y.-based Ottaway Newspapers, which owns 17 daily and weekly newspapers
in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, will become Dow Jones Local Media
Group July 1.
“The new name reflects
the closer working relationship between our successful local news
franchises and the rest of Dow Jones and News Corp.,” Dow Jones’
chief executive officer, Les Hinton, said, according to Editor &
Publisher.
James H. Ottaway founded
Ottaway Newspapers in 1936, and Dow Jones acquired the group in 1970.
After Dow Jones became part of News Corp. in 2007, an attempt was
made to sell Ottaway.
Ottaway’s chief executive
officer, Patrick Purcell, will keep that title for the Dow Jones Local
Media Group. He said the name change would not affect the group’s
“core values,” and that the publications will still “operate
independently to cover the communities they serve,” according
to Editor & Publisher.
Ottaway owns eight
dailies, 15 weeklies and several magazines in Massachusetts, New Hampshire,
New York, Pennsylvania and Oregon. They include The Standard-Times
of New Bedford and the Cape Cod Times of Hyannis, both in Massachusetts,
and the Portsmouth (N.H.) Herald.
Investigative
journalism boosted by AP, Knight Foundation
Two major announcements
of support for investigative reporting were made at the Investigative
Reporters and Editors Conference in Baltimore June 13.
The Associated Press announced
that it will begin to distribute the work of four groups dedicated
to investigative journalism to AP members beginning July 1, and the
Miami-based Knight Foundation announced that it has created a $15-million
initiative to help develop new economic models for investigative reporting
on digital platforms.
Boston University has already
been awarded one of the grants from the Knight Foundation.
AP will deliver work by
the Center for Public Integrity of Washington, D.C, the Investigative
Reporting Workshop at American University in Washington, the Center
for Investigative Reporting of Berkeley, Calif., and ProPublica of
New York City. The four groups combined have more than 50 professional
journalists.
The investigative reporting
work can be published at no charge by the 1,500 American newspapers
that are AP members, The New York Times reported.
According to the Times, AP called the arrangement a six-month experiment
that could be expanded in the future to include other investigative
nonprofits and to serve nonmember clients, including broadcast and
Internet outlets.
“It’s something
we’ve talked about for a long time, since part of our mission
is to enable our members to share material with each other,”
Sue Cross, a senior vice president of AP, told the Times.
According to the Times,
the announcement comes at a time when newspapers have cut back on
investigative projects because of staff reductions, but independent
investigative reporting groups have grown in size as a result of donations
from foundations and wealthy patrons.
“Our goal here is
getting more eyeballs on what we do, and the nonprofit sector is really
picking up steam,” Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the
Center for Investigative Reporting, told the Times.
Rosenthal also told the
Times that in some cases the nonprofit groups might still make exclusive
arrangements with a partner in traditional media, which would not
be shared with AP members.
The Knight Foundation grants,
some of which have not yet been announced, will promote both local
and national investigative reporting, according to a press release
from the foundation.
“Communities are
harmed by what they do not know,” Eric Newton, vice president
for journalism for the Knight Foundation, said in the press release.
“We’re awash in information, yet it seems to be getting
harder to find good investigative reporting.”
Among the major
grants already active under this initiative, Boston University received
$250,000 from the foundation. The grant at BU is being used for a
regional, university-based investigative reporting team involved with
the print, broadcast and digital press.
N.Y.
journalism graduate students finding jobs in field
More than 60 percent of
graduates from journalism graduate programs at Columbia University
in Manhattan and the City University of New York have found jobs in
journalism, according to DailyFinance.
Of the 306 May graduates
at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, 64 percent said
they had plans for after school, such as fellowships, internships
or continuing education, or already had jobs, according to Columbia’s
associate dean for communications, Elizabeth Weinreb Fishman, and
even more have found work since May 28, when students first responded
about their plans.
Stephen B. Shepard of City
University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism said
67 percent of the school’s December graduates had found full-time
journalism work, and 15 percent were working part-time or freelancing.
Shepard attributed the success to the university’s multimedia-focused
curriculum.
Columbia graduates
are working at CNN, NPR and The New York Times, which have all had
layoffs recently, according to DailyFinance.
New
print, online AP Stylebook has extra features, same price
The 2009 Associated Press
Stylebook brings several changes to its print and online versions.
The biggest changes come
in the online edition, which offers an enhanced search function, audio
pronunciation guides, and listings of information for 125 U.S. and
65 international companies.
The online Stylebook can
be customized by users according to their organizations’ preferences,
and AP will update it regularly. Dave Minthorn, AP’s manager
for news administration, is going to be available to answer subscriber-submitted
questions. There also will be an archive with answers to more than
5,000 frequently asked questions.
Online subscribers will
also get the new, online-only directory of companies for no extra
charge. Each company entry will have regularly updated information,
such as company size, business description, revenue, market capitalization
and net income figures.
In the print version, a
new Quick Reference Guide offers answers to common questions, such
as differentiating between the use of similar terms and guides to
using abbreviations or acronyms correctly.
Several word entries have
been added to the new Stylebook, including “Twitter,”
“texting” as a verb, and separate terms for different
types of diabetes, to name a few. “CEO” and “mpg”
are now allowed on first reference.
Business terms have been
updated to include “recession-proof,” “collateralized
debt obligations” and “solvency,” to name a few.
The new Stylebook requires
the use of first and last names for sitting U.S. presidents.
In sports, “knuckleball,”
“tipoff” and “timeout” have been added.
Prices for the print edition
remain at $18.95 retail and $11.75 for member news organizations,
the same as 2008, because of the economy, according to an AP spokesman,
Jack Stokes.
Online prices will also
stay the same as 2008. Members will pay $15, and individual subscribers
$25. The price for online site licenses will decline according to
the number of users.
The items
above were written, at least in part, from published reports by Jen
Slothower and Jennifer Skala, graduate students at the Northeastern
University School of Journalism and news staff coordinators for the
Bulletin.
