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Hitting the Pause Button on Rethinking

February 20, 2008 | Author: cobrien | Filed under: Milestones

Sorry for the extended radio silence on our end. On Tuesday, the Mercury News announced there would be buyouts and layoffs on March 7. The number is undetermined at this point. 

The news tracks with a number of similar recent announcements throughout our industry, including the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the L.A. Times. It’s been a challenging year, once again.
 
Even before the announcement yesterday, we had hit the pause button on our Rethinking process. We had a number of management changes at the Mercury News since the start of the year. Now we’re waiting for things to settle out over the next few weeks before deciding what to do next.

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xygoxen

6 people have left comments

Every time I read the Mercury News, the blatant grammatical and spelling errors beg the question: how much effort went into this story? I don’t understand how some of these “journalists” passed their 7th grade English exams! You can’t possibly hope to increase circulation when the content is utter drivel! Hire some real journalists that know how to sniff out a story and tell it in proper English! There are plenty of stories to be told and this community deserves a NEWSpaper!

Amy in San Jose wrote on February 20, 2008 - 8:29 pm | Visit Link

For Amy:

What is “Begging the Question?”

“Begging the question” is a form of logical fallacy in which an argument is assumed to be true without evidence other than the argument itself. When one begs the question, the initial assumption of a statement is treated as already proven without any logic to show why the statement is true in the first place.

A simple example would be “I think he is unattractive because he is ugly.” The adjective “ugly” does not explain why the subject is “unattractive” — they virtually amount to the same subjective meaning, and the proof is merely a restatement of the premise. The sentence has begged the question.
What is it Not?

To beg the question does not mean “to raise the question.” (e.g. “It begs the question, why is he so dumb?”) This is a common error of usage made by those who mistake the word “question” in the phrase to refer to a literal question. Sadly, the error has grown more and more common with time, such that even journalists, advertisers, and major mass media entities have fallen prey to “BTQ Abuse.”

While descriptivists and other such laissez-faire linguists are content to allow the misconception to fall into the vernacular, it cannot be denied that logic and philosophy stand to lose an important conceptual label should the meaning of BTQ become diluted to the point that we must constantly distinguish between the traditional usage and the erroneous “modern” usage. This is why we fight.

DJ wrote on February 21, 2008 - 5:16 pm | Visit Link

I admire your efforts and I hope the reinvention project doesn’t become a dust-covered suggestion box, but one can only speculate that your shareholders would like to see your operating costs cut in such a way that there is no time for this sort of musing.

dptronz wrote on March 4, 2008 - 10:18 am | Visit Link

I don’t know how newspapers can expect to survive for much longer if the answer to all their woes is deeper and deeper cuts in the newsroom staff. Bigger cuts = fewer reporters = more superficial news coverage = fewer readers. Frankly, there’s just not a whole lot of reading material left in the Merc. Some days I can read the entire paper in less than 10 minutes, not counting Sports (which I skip). The SF Chronicle has gotten shorter too, but at least they still have some unique and funny writers like columnist Jon Carroll and the TV critic Tim Goodman. Yes, newspaper readership is down because of the internet, but it doesn’t help that the newspapers are gutting themselves. It’s like the record company executives who complain that the internet is killing record sales, when the truth is, plenty of people would buy more CD’s if the music wasn’t so crappy.

Susan wrote on March 4, 2008 - 12:53 pm | Visit Link

[…] its credit, the paper briefly tried to imagine a future for itself with its “Rethinking’’ project. But when Singleton realized the project’s modest ideas weren’t going to instantly […]

Media Grunt: Michael Bazeley » RIP Mercury News wrote on March 5, 2008 - 11:14 pm | Visit Link

[…] Rethinking the Mercury News ” Blog Archive ” Hitting the Pause Button … […]

Baby name meaning and origin for Mercury wrote on September 23, 2009 - 7:18 pm | Visit Link

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