A rare instance of good news on the newspapers-are-dying front: The parent company of the New Haven Register, the Journal Register Co., has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The Journal Register Co. — a conglomerate of small daily newspapers, of which the Register is the largest, and scores of weekly newspapers — filed for bankruptcy in February. That meant Connecticut’s two most prominent newspapers, the Register and the Tribune-owned Hartford Courant, were both operating under bankruptcy protection.
As newspapers across the country continue to go bankrupt, Yale lecturer Paul Bass ’82 just launched a new media outlet for south-central Connecticut. But don’t look for this paper in print: Like the New Haven Independent, which Bass started in 2005, it is only available online.
The Online Journalism Project, which is led by Bass, launched its second online-only newspaper, the Valley Independent Sentinel, this week. The Sentinel, employing two full-time reporters and freelance contributors, will cover news from Ansonia, Derby, Oxford, Seymour and Shelton. It is being financed by a $500,000 grant from the Knight Foundation.
The phenomenon of five-inch heels, technical support or the latest high-tech gadgets outsourced overseas is nothing new. But a newspaper edition made in India?
Last week, the staff of the New Haven Advocate a joke and made it into a real-life experiment — hiring Indian freelancers to create an entire issue of their newspaper. The move came after a California newspaper, Pasadena Now, famously laid off its editorial staff and outsourced its local coverage to reporters in India, drawing ire from journalists across the country.
Yale parent Ariana Huffington can help. If all else has failed in your internship quest, her Web site, The Huffington Post, now offers a new last resort — it wants to sell you a summer job.
Seriously: HuffPo is currently auctioning off a summer internship to raise money for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. And there appears no shortage of interest in the position.
Ten bids have already been placed for the gig, with the highest bidder having offered $13,000 for the two- to three-month internship. The winner will get to decide whether to work at HuffPo’s headquarters in New York or its political office in Washington. (Alas, Connecticut residents will have to pay sales tax on their internships.)
The latest edition of Rumpus came out late last week, but few were able to read it — at least at first. Recently elected Rumpus co–Editor in Chief Phoebe Hinton ’11 said hundreds of copies of the tabloid were dumped into recycling bins before students could get their hands on them.
Hinton said staffers were able to recover copies of the Rumpus at about half of the residential college dining halls.
“In the end, by stealing copies, I think the perpetrator has ensured that more people overall will read the issue,” she said in an e-mail message. “We would suggest that in the future, anyone who takes issue with something we print should take it up with the editorial staff.”
In 2005, copies of the Rumpus were similarly dumped in recycling bins around dining halls. A year before, in 2004, roughly 2,000 copies of the Yale Free Press were stolen from dining halls, according to then–Dean of Student Affairs Betty Trachtenberg.
The Rumpus editorial board brought a formal complaint to the Dean’s Office following the 2005 incident. Co–Editor in Chief Chloe Gordon ’11 said she is unsure whether the Rumpus board will do the same this time.
Joanne Lipman ’83 is out of a job today as Conde Nast has announced that Portfolio, the fledgling business magazine for which she is editor, has been shuttered, effective immediately.
Portfolio made a splash when it launched in 2007 with Lipman, a former News editor who had been deputy managing editor for The Wall Street Journal, as its top editor. But the magazine ultimately could not overcome the economic downturn, with advertising pages falling more than 50 percent in the first quarter of 2009.
Anne Fadiman, Yale’s Francis writer in residence, loves books.
One of her two published essay collections, “Ex Libris” (Latin: from books), includes advice on the handling of books: Read them in bed, write in their margins, and, yes, feel free to let crumbs wander between their pages. On the back cover of “Ex Libris,” Fadiman declares that she “once found herself poring over a 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in her apartment that she had not read at least twice.”
But, judging by Fadiman’s comments in a New York Times article today, she is not a fan of the Amazon Kindle, which the company calls a “wireless reading device.”
“There’s a little box on Amazon that reads ‘Tell the publisher I’d like to read this book on Kindle,’ ” Fadiman told The Times. “I hope no one tells the publisher.”
