Submitted by Steve Hanson on Sat, 01/17/2009 – 8:54am
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune has filed for Chapter 11 protection amid some controversy with the Newspaper Guild members, who were not notified of the impending bankruptcy filiing. Reporters have apparently had difficulty cashing payroll checks, and have had their company credit cards stop working.
Submitted by Steve Hanson on Wed, 01/07/2009 – 9:48am
A large part of the U.S. progressive blogging infrastucture was hacked overnight and is currently down or defaced. Many of the blogs in the 50-State Blog Network are hosted on the SoapBlox platform. At least one of the SoapBlox servers was hacked overnight, and the sites hosted on that server have been defaced or are down currently. This includes sites such as
Blue Hampshire
Blue Jersey
Blue Mass Group
MN Progressive Project
My Left Wing (site loads w/o diaries)
Never in our Names
Pam’s House Blend
Swing State Project
West Michigan Rising
Personally I have always thought that having large amounts of the progressive infrastructure hosted with one small company was a mistake, which is why we’ve developed Uppity Wisconsin on it’s own open-source platform, Drupal.
Our condolences go out to the various sites that are down, and we hope they’ll recover soon.
Submitted by Steve Hanson on Sat, 12/27/2008 – 8:55am
The yearly survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reports that for the first time, more people rely on the Internet (40%) as their primary news source than newspapers (35%).
Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and
international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September
2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely
mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television
continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and
international news, at 70%.
Submitted by Steve Hanson on Mon, 12/08/2008 – 1:02pm
The Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy protection
in a federal court in Delaware on Monday, as the owner of The Los
Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Cubs baseball team
struggled to cope with rising debt and falling ad revenue.
Tribune, which was acquired last year by billionaire real estate investor Samuel Zell, had hired bankruptcy advisers like Lazard and the law firmSidley Austin in recent weeks as it negotiated with creditors over debt covenants. (Read the bankruptcy petition here.)
Submitted by Steve Hanson on Mon, 12/01/2008 – 1:16pm
I ran across this interesting article today, which outlines some of the tension that naturally exists between some new media outlets and funding from more traditional-media-related benefactors.
Indymedia refuses to be co-opted by the Knight Foundation
A $200,000 grant proposal, submitted by a group of Indymedia volunteers
to the Knight News Challenge contest, has been blocked by other IMCs
and subsequently dropped due to the abiding ethos that Indymedia is a
counter to corporate, money-fiaxted media entities. The grant
application to the Knight Foundation was to fund technical development
work for Independent Media Centres (IMCs), also known as Indymedia, and
has caused much controversy within the global network. The debate has
also encapsulated, once again, the thorny issue of how to sustain
radical projects without compromising that radicalism by accepting
tainted money.