From the Las Vegas Review Journal …
How bad have things gotten for Republicans in Nevada? Pretty soon, they won’t have a home in Las Vegas.
Over the weekend, volunteers helped pack up the Nevada Republican Party’s Southern Nevada offices for what was billed as a “move.”
In fact, the GOP’s possessions were headed for storage as its headquarters temporarily relocate to Northern Nevada, according to the party’s executive director, Zac Moyle.
Moyle said he’s planning to live at his parents’ house in Reno and work out of the party’s Carson City office until the legislative session ends in mid-2009.
What do all-white clubs and debutante cotillions have to do with the selection of the next chairman of the Republican National Committee?
Tribune Company files for bankruptcy. The company’s holdings include the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, South Florida’s Sun Sentinel, Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant, 23 television stations, cable station WGN, and the Chicago Cubs.
Given all of the obstacles to bringing a successful prosecution, it’s remarkable that DOJ has indicted those five former Blackwater guards for their roles in the Nisour Square massacre. But one thing in particular is going under-reported in the coverage: In the hours immediately after the shootings, the State Department, who contracted with Blackwater, gave legal immunity to all of the Blackwater guards who were at the scene of the alleged crime in return for their accounts of the incident.
As we’ve reported in the past, DOJ is going to have fun overcoming that hurdle, having to demonstrate that the evidence they gathered for the indictment and prosecution was not fruit of that poison tree.
As if to reinforce the newspaper trends Josh has been documenting below, the Pulitzer Prize committee has announced that it will begin accepting entries from online-only news outlets, reports Editor & Publisher:
Pulitzer Administrator Sig Gissler told E&P that “we are expanding the Pulitzers to include many text-based newspapers and news organizations that publish only on the Internet.” At the same time, they are “stressing” that all entered material should come from news outlets that publish material at least weekly, “are primarily dedicated to original news reporting, are dedicated to coverage of ongoing stories and that adhere to the highest journalistic principles.”
Gissler said the change, to take effect with the upcoming 2009 prizes, is occurring as part of the prizes’ effort to “keep up with the changing media landscape.”
Good for them.
TPM Reader JM — a recent escapee from the industry — comments …
The most depressing thing I’ve heard in a while was Wall Street Journal reporter Shira Ovide on Chicago public radio this morning describing Tribune Co.’s predicament. She pointed out that the Chicago Tribune itself actually has pretty good cash flow (relatively speaking) and some cash reserves. In other words, this is a company that should still be leading the industry – if it weren’t for its massive, crippling debt.
That debt comes from two of the worst decisions in recent corporate history. The first was Tribune’s purchase of Times Mirror in 2000 for the vastly inflated price of $8 billion, which made the company double down on old media without gaining any strategic benefit. The second bad decision piggy-backed on the first. Swooning from the fallout of the Times Mirror deal (including a very foreseeable $1 billion tax penalty), they paid another $8 billion to put a man who actively hates newspapers in charge of one of the nation’s biggest newspaper operations. What could possibly go wrong?
Just a thought experiment: What if the penalties for a CEO’s business failure were as extravagant as the rewards for success are? What if the executives who did this to Tribune Co. had known that the cost of failure would be the loss of all their assets, that they would be forced to start over with a $7/hour job? I have to think they would have been a little more responsible.
There’s at least something loosely parallel with McClatchy’s need to get rid of the Miami Herald. They’re loaded with debt from the purchase of Knight-Ridder.