The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America

By 24/7 WALL ST., TIME

Over the past few weeks, the U.S. newspaper industry has entered a new period of decline. The parent of the papers in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy, as did the Journal Register chain. The Rocky Mountain News closed, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, owned by Hearst, will almost certainly close or only publish online. Hearst has said it will also close the San Francisco Chronicle if it cannot make massive cuts. The most recent rumor is that the company will lay off half the editorial staff. Still, that action may not be enough to make the property profitable.

24/7 Wall St. has created a list of the 10 major daily papers that are most likely to fold or shutter their print operations and only publish online. The properties were chosen on the basis of the financial strength of their parent companies, the amount of direct competition they face in their markets and industry information on how much money they are losing. Based on this analysis, it's possible that 8 of the nation's 50 largest daily newspapers could cease publication in the next 18 months. (Read "The Race for a Better Read.")

1. The Philadelphia Daily News. The smaller of the two papers owned by Philadelphia Newspapers LLC, which recently filed for bankruptcy. The company says it will make money this year, but with newspaper advertising still falling sharply, the city cannot support two papers, and the Daily News has a daily circulation of only about 100,000. The tabloid has a small staff, most of whom could probably stay on at Philly.com, the Web operation for both of the city dailies.

2. The Minneapolis Star Tribune has filed for Chapter 11. The paper may not make money this year, even without the costs of debt coverage. The company said it made $26 million last year, about half of what it made in 2007. The odds are that the Star Tribune will lose money this year if its ad revenue drops another 20%. There is no point for creditors to keep the paper open if it cannot generate cash. It could become an all-digital property, as supporting a daily circulation of more than 300,000 is too much of a burden. It could survive if its rival, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, folds. A grim race.

3. The Miami Herald, which has a daily circulation of about 220,000. It is owned by McClatchy, a publicly traded company that could be the next chain to file for Chapter 11. TheHerald has been on the market since December, but no serious bidders have emerged. Newspaper advertising has been especially hard-hit in Florida because of the tremendous loss in real estate advertising. The online version of the paper is already well read in the Miami area, Latin America and the Caribbean. The Herald has strong competition north of it, in Fort Lauderdale. There is a very small chance it could merge with the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, but it is more likely that the Herald will go online-only with two editions, one for English-language readers and one for Spanish.

4. The Detroit News is one of two daily papers in the big U.S. city badly hit by the economic downturn. It is unlikely that it can merge with the larger Detroit Free Press, which is owned by Gannett. It is hard to see what would be in it for Gannett. And with the fortunes of Detroit getting worse each day, cutting back the number of days the paper is delivered would not save enough money to keep the paper open.

5. The Boston Globe is, based on several accounts, losing $1 million a week. One investment bank recently said the paper is worth only $20 million. The paper is the flagship of what theGlobe's parent, the New York Times, calls the New England Media Group. The Times has substantial financial problems of its own. Last year, ad revenue for the New England properties was down 18%. That is likely to continue or get worse this year. Supporting larger losses at the Globe will become nearly impossible. Boston.com, the online site that includes the digital aspects of the Globe, will probably be all that remains of the operation.

6. The San Francisco Chronicle. Parent company Hearst has already set a deadline for shuttering the paper if it cannot make tremendous cost cuts. The Chronicle lost as much as $70 million last year. Even if the company could lower its costs, the Northern California economy is in bad shape. The online version of the paper could be the only version by the middle of 2009.

7. The Chicago Sun-Times is the smaller of two newspapers in the city. Its parent company, Sun-Times Media Group, trades for 3 cents per share. Davidson Kempner, a large shareholder in the firm, has dumped the CEO and most of the board. The paper has no chance of competing with the Chicago Tribune.

8. The New York Daily News is one of several large papers fighting for circulation and advertising in the New York City area. Unlike the New York Times, the New York Post, Newsdayand Newark's Star-Ledger, the Daily News is not owned by a larger organization — real estate billionaire Mort Zuckerman owns the paper. Based on figures from other big dailies, it could easily lose $60 million or $70 million, and has no chance of recovering from that level.

9. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is another big daily that competes with a larger paper in a neighboring market — in this case, Dallas. The parent of the Dallas Morning News, Belo, is probably a stronger company than the Star-Telegram's parent, McClatchy. The Morning News has a circulation of about 350,000, while the Star-Telegram has just over 200,000. TheStar-Telegram will have to shut down or become an edition of its rival. Putting them together would save tens of millions of dollars a year.

10. The Cleveland Plain Dealer is in one of the economically weakest markets in the country. Its parent, Advance Publications, has already threatened to close its paper in Newark. Employees gave up enough in terms of concessions to keep the paper open. Advance, owned by the Newhouse family, is carrying the burden of its paper plus Condé Nast, its magazine group, which is losing advertising revenue. The Plain Dealer will be shut or go digital by the end of next year.

- Douglas A. McIntyre

Barack Obama's stem cell and climate change science is superstition

By Gerald Warner, Telegraph

Barack Obama is earning plaudits from the "science" lobby, militant secularists and other usual suspects for his decision to lift the Bush administration's ban on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research today. This is being hailed as a new Enlightenment and it is every bit as bogus as the first.

Embryonic stem cell research is a dead end. Embryonic stem cells have not been used successfully to treat any illness, despite inflated claims that one day they will supply revolutionary new treatments for illnesses ranging from diabetes to paralysis. Dr James L Sherley, a Senior Scientist at Boston Biomedical Research Institute in America, has said: "The promises of cures from cloned human embryonic stem cell research are indeed misguided. Whether extracted from IVF embryos or cloned embryos, embryonic stem cells are unable to mend tissues and organs. Only adult stem cells have this ability, and they possess it naturally."

In contrast to the failure of embryo experimentation, stem cells from umbilical cords and placental blood have already been employed successfully to treat leukaemia and anaemia, while adult stem cells have also worked in trials to treat severe heart failure. Most recently, teams of researchers in Britain and Canada have found a safe way of manufacturing stem cells from a patient's skin. The new technology obviates the need to use viruses, which created a risk of cancer, as well as allowing the transformational genes to be removed after performing their function, preventing them from causing any future damage.

By giving a fiscal boost to research that is both ethically controversial and scientifically futile, Barack Obama is directing science onto a negative course. His allocation of federal funds to embryo experimentation makes American taxpayers complicit in the destruction of days-old human beings. In tandem, his embrace of the "man-made" climate change lobby shows that his supposedly enlightened policy is just a new superstition. Presumably, like the Prince of Wales, he believes we have just 100 months to go before climatic Armageddon.

Obama claims that science, not political ideology, will guide his administration. That is transparently not so. This policy is, to the point of caricature, driven by the ideology of junk science, liberal hysteria, and the aggressive lobbying of interest groups hungry for taxpayers' money. Obama is a sucker, impressed by the white-coat pretensions of lobbyists who are the 21st-century equivalents of those seekers for the Philosopher's Stone who plucked importunately at the sleeves of medieval monarchs ("Sire, I have a project...").

This presidency is now firmly set on the road to political, fiscal, cultural and moral disaster. Change we need... Hope... Oh, yeah.

Source: Telegraph

Better Search Doesn’t Mean Beating Google

By SAUL HANSELL, The New York Times

A headline that kicked around the blogosphere this weekend made no sense to me: “Wolfram Alpha Is Coming — and It Could Be as Important as Google.”

The post — written by Nova Spivack, the chief executive of Radar Networks — took a look at a new sort of search engine being cooked up in secret by Stephen Wolfram, a British mathematician.

Wolfram’s search engine, called Wolfram Alpha, is meant to be able to answer specific factual questions in a far more precise way than any search engine before it. For example, it will parse questions like “What is the location of Timbuktu?” or “How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?” to answer the questions rather than simply pull up sites that have the answer on them.

If it achieves its very ambitious goal, it could be quite useful and influential. (We won’t begin to know until the site opens to the public in May.)

But Mr. Spivack’s post has a critical logical flaw, one that too many people make: Google is a company, while Wolfram Alpha is a technology. They are very different. And it is Google’s success with users and advertisers that made it “important.”

First of all, companies constantly change their technologies. What would it mean if your operating system had a better file system or interface than Windows? Not much. Over 20 years, Microsoft has constantly evolved the technologies it uses to build its operating system products. If you are going to build a new one, you need to compete with what your rival will do in the future, not what it does now.

Similarly, it is a mistake to assume that the search engine used on Google today mainly uses PageRank, the algorithm that was the center of Google’s first product. Google doesn’t boast about it, but it already uses the latest trendy idea in search — “semantic” formulas that try to understand what the words in a query mean. For example, it not only takes into account that “Britney Spears” is a name, not two random words, but the name of a famous person. It will search for Britney pages differently than it will for a name of someone who is not so well known.

Mr. Spivack appears to assume that Google is sticking to its initial methodology and interface of simply presenting links to existing Web pages. He writes that “Google’s index is also incomplete, and always will be. Therefore Google does and always will contain gaps.”

For years, Google has blended hundreds of different algorithms and search methodologies to make a product it hopes will attract users. It already provides direct answers to some simple questions, like currency conversions. And it invites users to contribute information that is not already in its index, as in Knol and YouTube. Google may fail, but not as Mr. Spivack seems to imply, because it mindlessly sticks to one approach.

More important, successful companies succeed for many reasons in addition to the quality of their products. When a technology start-up begins to do well, it is like a snowball rolling downhill, as technology, packaging, marketing, sales, customers, developers, brand reputation and a lot of luck bind together to create momentum that then feeds on itself.

Back to Microsoft: There are lots of people who believe that there are better operating systems available today than Windows. The question is, how very much better do they have to be, and what else needs to happen, to unwind the self-reinforcing ecosystem that lets Microsoft dominate the PC business? Windows now is just one of Microsoft’s products.

Mr. Spivack wrote about Google, not simply Google’s search product. But even if that’s what he meant, you can’t really separate the product from the business. The company’s importance stems from the breadth and depth of its offerings, such as e-mail, maps, cloud computing and most important, advertising. The search engine itself draws money, technology, employees, attention and support from the Webmaster community in part because of Google’s momentum in all its other activities.

In addition, the factual queries that Wolfram Alpha is geared to answer aren’t the queries that make billions of dollars for Google. Google’s money comes from commercial questions like “Mother’s Day roses” and “Thai restaurants Philadelphia” that bring in the advertising dollars, some of which are used to improve results on all sorts of queries.

Wolfram Alpha may well have an idea about how to make money. It may not matter even if it doesn’t. Sergey Brin and Larry Page didn’t know how their nice little pellet of technology would roll downhill picking up one of the best business models and most powerful brands the world has ever seen.

I don’t want to be too hard on Mr. Spivack, who has done a great job breaking the news of what could well be a very interesting technology. But I think he, and so many others who write about technology, would be better off being clear that technologies are simply some of the raw material from which important companies are made.

Source: The New York Times

One Lucky Head

Do not stare at their faces. Do not look at their dresses. Do not laugh. Do NOT try to talk to them. Just walk straight. Look far away. Do NOT laugh.

My mom repeated endless instructions as we planned to visit a local street market for the first time since my dad's transfer to Tizit, a remote village in Mon, the “backward” region in northeast India. His promotion as inspector in the state police earned him the transfer in a new duty station. The 6th Nagaland Armed Police Battalion in Tizit was a fairly new unit and the most unfavorable destination of all the six police units in Nagaland, and the most dangerous. The area was infested with separatist National Socialist Council of Nagaland rebels, popularly known as “the underground.” But this was also the land of the fierce dao-carrying tribes, the head-hunting Konyaks.

All of us carried some impressions about this tribe as we prepared to leave for the market. I was 11 years old. Boys in my neighborhood had filled my ears with bits of bizarre images about them.

They just wear a strip of cloth to cover their genitals. (Even women wore scantily on their top and covered their chest with heavy traditional ornaments.)
They have black teeth. (Because they chew katha-paan, a mix of wild red bark, beetle leave and raw beetle nut that perpetually made their teeth black)
They cut off your head if you laugh at them. (It was believed they hung human skulls around their houses to show off their valor and compete to become the village lord, gaonbura).
They drink opium flavored tea. (Tea mixed with opium, known as kani.)

As we were reaching the market I could see blur images of some nearly cloth-less men walking on the sides of the road. At that age I was already aware that walking naked was immensely obscene. My sense of decency mattered to me immensely. After all I was taught in school that a proper dress is the mark of civilization. Therefore, these scenes of half-clothed men resembled pictures in my history book that talked of Iron Age.

Dad’s driver pulled the Jeep near a huge mound of red soil through which passed a 2-lane state highway. As I got out from the back of the vehicle, I saw several pairs of walking buttocks of brown men who hung their flickering dao, a machete with a very short handle, on their backs. All walked barefoot. Their neatly trimmed head resembled a mushroom sprout. Some men wore necklace that had replicas of human skulls. Later, dad told me that the numbers of the head in this skull-necklace increased as they added human heads in their houses. Most adults had the tribal blue marks on their face with some dots in their chin. Their cheek bone rose prominently in sunken cheeks. One could count the neat shape of the muscle in their arms, thighs and back. I thought if they spread their arms sideways, they would become a perfect scarecrow. I whispered my thoughts to my mom. But she walked stone-faced. Perhaps any manifested humor would mean another head in the house of the tribe.

The market smelled raw vegetables near the street and smell of dried fish came at the other end. One tribal man wearing half-pants and vest had spread out large chunks of pork meat on the table. His hands were smeared with blood. Other men and women squatted on the floor with their produce. Some smoked bidi, unrefined tobacco wrapped in tendu leaf. They sold yams, wild shoots, michinga leaves, peppers, cucumbers, mustard leaves and many more roots and weeds whose names remain a mystery even today. In the interior portion of the market some makeshift shops were set up by the Biharis, Assamese, Marwaris. These were the plainmanus, people from the plains, or people from different states of the Indian union other than the hilly Nagaland.

Truly speaking, anyone from outside Nagaland was a plainmanu – an outsider. It was the obvious anthropological distinction. The Nagas, comprising Angami, Ao, Sema, Konyaks, Lotha, Rengma, and more than a dozen other tribes, were indigenous to the state who spoke their own tribal dialects of the Tibeto-Burman family. All others were plainmanus who spoke other Indian languages. The neighboring Assamese people influenced in the development of Nagamese, a pidgin with Assamese and Hindi vocabulary that became the lingua franca of the Nagas. We all spoke Nagamese. It is this language that binds the locals and the plainmanus. Underneath this bond, however, exists a tension that no plainmanu wants to ignite.

Plainmanus were denounced because they held jobs that locals would have held. They ran the administration, business, hospitals and schools since the 1950s when the Indian government brought in “outsiders” to run the state machinery. Some people came from nearby Nepal. Dad got enlisted in the early 1960s after working as an elephant-chaser in Bhutan as a boy, and later, working for a judge in Assam. Now after nearly 25 years in service, he spoke most of the Naga languages, but not Konyak, and knew how to deal with the locals and the undergrounds who were becoming more militant in demand of their rights. He would always keep several 750 ml. of XXX Rum for unexpected strangers. I was beginning to realize that when the rebels needed some revelry they would come to our house. When dad asked his orderly to carry couple XXX bottles, I knew there was someone in the market who had to be acknowledged. That was necessary for a plainmanu’s survival.

Of course, as a boy, I had heard it all and seen it all. In this market when my mom selectively chose to stop at shops run either by a plainmanu or less ornamental local women, the amorphous relationship shared by the locals and the outsiders made a tell-tale sign of the undefined antagonism that existed between them. Women like my mother only ventured into those comfort zones. But that’s not why I came to the market. Her routine did not seem romantic to me. When she stooped to ask for a price of an item, I would try to get a quick glimpse of the facial marks on the women’s faces. Some women had thrust the 6-inch hollow silver torch light in their ear lobe as an ornament. Even the women’s teeth were black. But by following my mom this way in the market, it was almost becoming certain that I would not get a chance to peek at a house that hung several human heads. Well, some boys had told me there was one such house near the market.

At a Marwari’s shop when mom paused to buy some lentils, I quietly crawled out of her attention to stroll in the market and to look for the skull-house. At that age nobody wants to become a mamma’s pet. What stories would I take to my boys? That I held my mamma’s pinkie throughout? That escape meant so much to save me from the disgrace to let the boys know of my great adventure to the house of skulls.

The escapade and the courage came with a sudden confusion. The snaking market corridors that I walked just a while ago now seemed a little strange, more frightful. It was only the walking buttocks that kept me amused. A little further toward the ridge of a nearby river, a group of men flocked at a Bihari’s tea stall. I wanted to know whether they bought kani-tea.

“Bhaiyya, kya ka chai hai?” I asked in Hindi. (What tea is this, brother?)

“Phika chai,” he said. (Raw tea.)

It was common for the locals to drink raw tea unlike plainmanu’s style of adding milk. But this cleared my doubt that the man did not prepare kani-tea, and so, he was uninteresting. I only enquired whether he knew of a skull-house nearby. He said he has never heard of it. Perhaps one didn’t exist today. But how could my boys go wrong? And why would all men carry a dao on their back? What purpose did it serve other than head-hunting?

Then, very boldly, I turned to the locals and asked them whether all had human heads in their house. One of the younger men suddenly stood up and grabbed my hands. He spoke fast in an unintelligible language as he dragged me a few steps and shook my innards. None other men spoke. His eyes bulged red, his breath smelled bidi. I looked at the Bihari whose eyes seemed unsympathetic. Other men spoke in Konyak and tried to pacify the young guy who was now reaching behind to grab his shining 20-inch dao. Every year during Dasain, the 10-day Hindu festival, we marveled at a similar weapon used for animal sacrifice in a temple. Now I felt like an animal whose head will gloriously hand among several unfortunate others. Customers who were buying something now looked the boy shrieking and shouting. The guy’s friends struggled to snatch the dao from his hand. I hadn’t even practiced screaming in the past, but now I shrieked loud.

In a flash, my dad appeared and grabbed the young guy’s hand. His police uniform and imposing built body froze the guy. I thought, brave dad. The guy blurted out something in Konyak, which I am sure was his best expletive. An angered Naga isn’t pacified by an apology. Dad just waved his hand to the men gesturing, ‘Go away.” Then, turning toward me, he gave a piercing look, and twisted my left ear so hard that I heard some cracking sound. I knew a sound beating waited for me at home.

Nobody spoke in the Jeep when returning home. But, I had enough stories for my boys.