Posted by: on January 15
At 5:03 PM Eastern time today my colleague Tom Lowry and I received a particularly incendiary email, which bore the return emailaddress of Radio Advertising Bureau President-CEO Jeff Haley.
It began with the attention-grabbing headline:
“CONFIDENTIAL AND MEANT FOR RAB EMPLOYEES ONLY.
DO NOT SHARE THIS INFORMATION OUTSIDE OF THE ORGANIZATION”
It went on to announce that three top RAB executives, all male, were going to be immediately “relieved of their duties,” listed their salaries, and went on to explain, in decidedly unsparing language, why this was happening. One reason given: organizational sexism resulted in outsized salaries for male executives.
Said email, several RAB-ers say, is a hoax, and was not written by Haley but rather by someone who apparently hacked into his account. The three executives named in the email—Mike Mahone (EVP-services), George Hyde (EVP-training), and Dave Casper (SVP-internet Services)—are, in fact, decidedly still employed by the RAB.
Given that it’s a hoax, I am refraining from going into greater detail about its contents. (The email listed salaries for the executives but I am not repeating that information, as I cannot immediately confirm it.)
The real question, though, is this: who on earth would want to hack into the CEO of the RAB’s email account, in order to lob such arguments?
I am frankly totally baffled, but maybe someone else has any notions. Do you?
I am told the RAB will be issuing a statement shortly, and I will post it here once the organization does.
UPDATE 6:45 PM: According to an email from Haley, said email came from an employee who was laid off, although the RAB statement posted below suggests that may jsut be suspicion at this point.
Full statement from RAB follows after the jump:
Continue reading "In The Inbox Today: Bizarre Hoax Email Sent From Radio Advertising Bureau President-CEO Jeff Haley's Account"
Posted by: on January 13
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's own (excellent) reporting on the news that its parent company Hearst Newspapers is alloting but 60 days to sell it:
Tim Pilgrim, a journalism professor at Western Washington University, suggested that the P-I staff buy the paper and run it at a lesser profit than Hearst requires -- perhaps assisted by a wealthy patron such as Bill Gates or Paul Allen.
"If this kind of profit-driven killing of legitimate news sources keeps happening, the online 'news' outlets that repackage P-I and other newspaper content will be out of news and only have opinion (blogging, etc.) to post," Pilgrim wrote in an e-mail.
Um . . . Tim?
Continue reading "Arguments Why Journalism School Professors Should Not Be Quoted Regarding The Business Of Newspapers"
Posted by: on December 30
I just finished a column (update: it's here), which will be online later this week, which features an individual who’s been involved in selling designer jeans for quite some time.
Because of this-that-and-the-other, I used the column as an excuse to dredge up a bunch of circa-1980 designer denim ads from YouTube. And—surprise!—they’re even weirder than you remember.
Continue reading "Bad Ads, Designer Jeans Department: I Am Putting This Online In Order To Get These Images Out Of My Head"
Posted by: on December 13
I’m away on vacation until the middle of next week, which is why I’m only now getting around to blogging about what looks like will happen to MediaNews Group's Detroit News and Gannett's Detroit Free Press. Per the Wall Street Journal, more or less confirming what Jim Hopkins' sharp Gannett Blog previously surfaced:
But the leading scenario set to be unveiled Tuesday calls for the Free Press, the 20th largest U.S. newspaper by weekday circulation, and the News to end home delivery on all but the most lucrative days -- Thursday, Friday and Sunday. On the other days, the company would sell single copies of abbreviated print editions at newsstands and direct readers to the papers' expanded digital editions.
This squares with what a clutch of top newspaper executives told me some months back were likely near-term possibilities for major American newspapers:
They say big metros also are discussing a wide range of other radical notions. Among them: making home deliveries only on certain days of the week, shrinking additional weekday print editions, and even cutting out paid papers entirely on certain days of the week in favor of a smaller and free product.
What Detroit's dailies may do is huge news--and what's possibly huger news is that there are many close observers of American newspapers who won't find the news surprising, given all that's gone on in 2008.
I’m back in the office next Thursday. Posting will range from “nonexistent” to “light” until then.
