J-Topics

The Sun-Times Media Group was put up for sale yesterday by directors who blamed the management of former media baron Conrad Black for the company's current difficulties.  Financial statements for the company, which owns the Chicago Sun-Times and several other Chicago-area newspapers, are awash in red ink. The company took in $419 million last year, but lost $57 million after all expenses were counted.

The Guardian has printed the full text of the 2007 Hugo Young Memorial Lecture that New York Times executive editor Bill Keller gave at Chatham House. In it, Keller attributes the beleaguered state of the industry to the Internet, the Bush administration and -- above all -- a loss of faith among newspapers themselves.

The Press Gazette has printed an abridged version if you're only interested in the highlights.

Hat tip to SPJ Press Notes.

"A lot of journalists and former journalists and bloggers seem to hate their newspapers because of some vague psychic or moral sensibility, as if some great social contract has been breached. The newspaper was supposed to represent some Rockwellian expression of American idealism and democratic life along with a devotion to craft.  Instead, it became a place where the sounds of cash registers were louder than the roar of the presses; where any spark of creativity was watered with a fire hose; where literary rebels were chained by the next corporate formula to come down the pike," writes Roy Peter Clark on Poynter Online, in an eloquent summary of the common complaints.

Clark has been on a campaign lately to get people to read "newspapers." I agree with Clark about reading news. Largely, I agree with his critique of the critics of mainstream media. But I think his notion that quality news has to be printed on dead trees is, at best, antiquated. I think "newspapers" read online are even better than the link-less, search-less, video-less, voice-less, ink-smudge-less, boringly two-tone "newspaper" that still thuds loudly onto my porch at 3 a.m. each day, after we've been awakened by the radio and door alarm blaring from the newspaper delivery guy's car, left idling on the street to spew exhaust and noise into the night air.

Karen Zhou, a member of the Toronto Star’s community editorial board, argues that reading the paper version of the newspaper, compared to online versions or free commuter papers, is still the best option.