News Media Guild

Demand Media will produce content about real estate and small business for Hearst Newspapers’ San Francisco Chronicle and Houston Chronicle.

Members of Castlewood Country Club in Pleasanton pay $25,000 to sign up — more than the kitchen and laundry workers bring home in a year. But the union, Hotel Workers Local 2850, enjoyed a good relationship for decades, and the management showed respect for a loyal, experienced staff. Then a new management came in, tried to jack up health costs, and eventually locked out its workers when no agreement was reached. The dispute has gone more than two months, attracting widespread labor and community support, as was demonstrated recently by a spirited solidarity rally (photo).

CHICAGO Orange County Local News Network, a partnership between the Los Angeles Times and San Diego-based U.S. Local News Network has been shut down, four months after its launch.

Tribune Co. has unveiled plans for a third round of top executive bonuses, nearly $15 million, bringing to more than $72 million the amount of pay enhancements the media company handed out while operating under bankruptcy protection.

The number of unique visitors to the Websites of the biggest newspapers is up 15% so far this year, according to a Newspaper National Network analysis of data from comScore Media Metrix.

Readership of The Wall Street Journal has jumped 20% since News Corp. acquired the paper in 2007, according to a new study by The Media Audit. During the same period, readership of The New York Times remained higher but flat, and fell at the third national daily, USA Today.

A study of merger options has been endorsed by the Media Workers and other member locals of the Communications Workers of America. The Hawaii Newspaper Guild and CWA locals in the Bay Area have joined with the San Francisco-based Guild to take a broad look at realignments. Further discussions are planned in advance of the July TNG-CWA Sector Conference and CWA Convention in Washington, DC.

Negotiators for The Bee and The Guild reached a tentative agreement on a new three-year contract Friday — culminating months of talks over the labor agreement. A draft of the agreement will be available in a matter of days for the upcoming ratification vote. The date of the ratification vote by dues-paying members is yet to be scheduled. The agreement, while far from perfect, does include some union-sought protections for current employees.

The tipping point is not yet at hand, but the economics of local broadcasting may begin to unravel as dramatically — and irretrievably — in the next five years as they did for newspapers in the last five years.

The Tribune Co. must provide more information to creditors in the disclosure statement outlining its proposed reorganization plan, a Delaware bankruptcy judge said Thursday.

The Bay Citizen, a new non-profit news organization, has announced its staff reporter and online editor line-ups as it prepares for its May 26 launch. The Bay Citizen’s reporting team will focus on regional enterprise news coverage on six core civic beats.

An improving ad revenue picture and growing digital revenue make it clear that "we’re much closer to the en of this historic recession than the beginning," Chairman and CEO Gary Pruitt told shareholders at The McClatchy Co.’s annual meeting Wednesday.

So what indeed is Yahoo? CEO Carol Bartz has been trying to paint the new picture of it not being in Google’s space, but being different. Not a search company, to be sure, a media company of some sort, and one that’s put many of its eggs into the basket of better and better targeted advertising, down to serving each of us the right ad within 50 milliseconds of the time we hit a web page.

Henry Blodget says the Huffington Post could also be within spitting distance of the NYT in terms of online revenue by 2012. "And a few years after that? It seems reasonable to think that Huffington Post could eventually just be bigger than the New York Times, online and offline."

The New York Times will announce the "pricing and specifics" of its online metered paywall model "toward the latter part of the year," the company’s senior vice president of digital operations, Martin Nisenholtz, said during a presentation at the J.P. Morgan Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference in Boston today.

Even as newspapers and broadcasters gird for a fight over media cross-ownership as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) begins its mandatory quadrennial review of media ownership laws, a coalition of public interest organizations returned to a U.S. appellate court Monday seeking to overturn a 2008 FCC rule that loosened the ban on same-market common ownership of a newspaper and broadcast station.

Oahu Publications Inc., which is consolidating the state’s two largest daily newspapers into the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, expects to employ between 450 and 500 workers once the papers are combined next month.

The New York Times will begin charging for access to articles on its website in January, Bill Keller, executive editor of the newspaper, said at a dinner for the Foreign Press Association Thursday evening.

Objections to Tribune Co.’s Chapter 11 disclosure statement flooded into U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware on Thursday, complicating the company’s efforts to win a judge’s approval of the document at a key hearing next week.

E.W. Scripps Co. CEO Rich Boehne told shareholders at Thursday’s annual meeting that the company is open to making a one-time distribution to stockholders of some of the proceeds from the sale of its business that licenses the "Peanuts" characters.