I spoke on Wednesday to David Broder, veteran political columnist at The Washington Post and a fixture at the paper for more than 40 years, about deciding to take the buyout that the paper is offering.

As it turned out, “taking the buyout” for Broder, 78, doesn’t mean “leaving” so much as “still writing my column twice a week and coming to work every day.” In other words, he will be a contract employee.

Q: Why leave a place that you joined before a goodly number of us were born:

A: It will allow me to focus entirely on the column while freeing up the Post to use its budget on other newsroom salaries and expenses.

(Tony Kornheiser, the well known Post sports columnist, told me much the same thing: They could probably find someone who would help the paper a lot more than me.)

Q: What do you think about the exit of Posties to The New York Times in the past few years? (Including Sewell Chan, Manny Fernandez and husband-and-wife team Serge Kovaleski and Jo Becker, not to mention Peter Baker who said he left after the paper relieved his wife Susan Glasser of her top editing slot. Oh… and Michael Powell, Ray Rivera, John Schwartz, Mark Leibovich and so on.)

A: I actually worked for 15 minutes at The New York Times, and I was part of the return traffic from the Times to the Post. The notion of moving from The Washington Post to The New York Times is, as far as I’m concerned, not a smart move.

Q: You left the Times in 1966. Why?

A: I fled because of bureaucracy I couldn’t cope with. … I resigned maybe 15 minutes before I would have been fired.

(Photo courtesy of The Washington Post Writers Group)

In William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, Prospero the exiled sorcerer frees the spirit Ariel from a tree. In much the same way, Ariel Investments has freed itself from a tree as well.

The Chicago-based investment firm reported in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it no longer owns any shares in Journal Register Co, the publisher of 20-some newspapers in the United States, including the New Haven Register.

Ariel officials declined to comment on why they sold their shares, but perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Journal Register was recently delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after its stock belly-flopped amid a ridiculously bruising advertising sales climate.

Not only that, Journal Register said in a filing last week that it might violate its debt covenant by July 23, 2008 if it doesn’t amend its credit agreement or see a substantial improvement in its business.

Don’t blame Ariel for losing faith in a newspaper company, however. Journal Register’s stock was around $16 a couple of years ago, but recently it has bottomed at $0.16.

In somewhat more stable situations (Tribune Co, McClatchy Co), Ariel has stuck by its newspapers. But in the case of Journal Register, it’s hard to hang on when a stock price has fallen that far and the company could default.  

(Photo: Reuters)

It looks like Norman Pearlstine couldn’t resist the glamorous life of journalism. After two years in the private equity business at the Blackstone Group Carlyle Group (D’oh!), Pearlstine is joining Bloomberg LP as “chief content officer,” where, as Bloomberg said in a press release, he will work with “Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler to seek growth opportunities for its
television, radio, magazine and online products and to make the most of the
existing Bloomberg News operations.”

Pearlstine used to be the editor-in-chief of Time Inc for 11 years, and before that spent 23 years at The Wall Street Journal. More details on his CV, directly from the release :

He was the paper’s top news executive for nine years, serving as Managing Editor and then Executive Editor. He previously worked as the founding editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal/Europe, the first Managing Editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal, and the Tokyo bureau chief.

Pearlstine was founder of Smart Money magazine and worked as an Executive Editor of Forbes. He is the author of OFF THE RECORD: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources , published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007.

We don’t know what to make of this. Our immediate questions:

- Will he succeed Winkler, with whom he worked at the Journal?

- Will he put Bloomberg into M&A mode?

- Will he work on an effort to take Bloomberg LP public? (This idea has come up at least once before)

Pearlstine wasn’t available for comment, so we’ll just publish our questions here and invite comments, but Bloomberg’s top editorial executive, Matt Winkler, did  call. Here’s a bit of what we talked about:

Q: Why Pearlstine?

A: Nobody brings as much experience in so many different ways as Norm does… Our hope is that Norm can give us a lot more awareness and guidance on ways we can deliver [our news] well beyond the Bloomberg.

Q: When did you first meet him?

A: The meet-and-greet was probably in the halls of Dow Jones & Co when I arrived in 1980, and he was the national news editor at The Wall Street Journal. People would point him out to me as a really important person you ought to know, so maybe on the way to the men’s room I was able to introduce myself. (They started working closely together in 1982 when Pearlstine was planning the European edition of the WSJ and asked Winkler to go to London)

Q: What do you think of him?

A: I would say that everything that I know that’s worth anything in this business, the news business, I can attribute to Norm.

Q: Does his new job at Bloomberg mean that you will retire?

A: I would hope that I’m just getting started, actually.  The first 18 or so years went by really fast. I think the biggest opportunities are ahead of us. I can’t wait to go at them with Norm at my side.

Q: By the way, is there a hiring freeze at Bloomberg?

A: Not exactly. The management committee at Bloomberg… saw what was unfolding with the financial world — they could see what was coming last July — and said, ‘what we want to do for the coming year is effectively freeze the headcount.’ (This does not mean that they are not hiring as people leave, however) We’re determined to find and identify and bring to Bloomberg the most talented, skilled journalists we can.

(Reuters photo shows Pearlstine on the left in his role as president of the American Academy in Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel in the middle and former U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Holbrooke on the right.)

(Disclaimer that you’ve probably read before: Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters are competitors in providing financial news and data.)

I did a phone interview last week with Kara Walsh, chief executive of Metromix, and learned a little bit about what the online entertainment guide is up to these days. Metromix is owned by Gannett and Tribune, the newspaper publishers and broadcasters that own, among other things, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and Newsday.

Metromix is set up so that people who live in various cities where it is active can look up restaurants for reviews and locations, and perform similar searches for other entertainment information. The sites rely on users for contributions, as well as from hired help in the markets where it’s active.

Metromix is one of the “vertical” sites co-owned by the two companies, and just like quadrantONE, the national advertising network site for their local and national papers and TV stations, it is designed to help them reel in advertising as their print products see it decline.

Metromix has been active in Chicago for a while, but last year began its expansion into more cities. Walsh said the expansion — with the goal of being in 25 of the nation’s top 30 markets — is going according to schedule. Here’s what else I learned:

Number of monthly unique visitors according to:

- comScore: 951,164

- Nielsen: 1,149,000

Number of monthly pageviews according to:

- comScore - 8,052,000

- Nielsen -  6,655,000

Walsh said page views are up 37 percent, and unique visitors are up 25 percent.  Metromix won’t share its revenue, but it’s up 88 percent in the first four months of 2008, compared with last year.

Sites like these have to be kept full of fresh information in order to remain relevant. Does Metromix work for you? Let us know.

When Rupert Murdoch said the other day that he wasn’t investing in newspapers anymore, we assumed that he was being ironic, especially as it came in the same telephone conference call with News Corp analysts and reporters in which he said that he thought his agreement to buy Newsday from Tribune Co was all but sewn up .

That goes to show you what they say about assuming things.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday , and we subsequently confirmed , that News Corp isn’t going to chase Newsday after all. Instead, it’s pulling its $580 million bid, paving the way for Cablevision to likely take over its fellow Long Island media outlet. New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman is in the race still as far as we know, but it’s hard to see how Tribune will take his $580 million bid when Cablevision has a $70 million sweetener on top of that.

Why? Apparently the economics were unjustifiable. What could that mean? The short list: Tribune’s quarterly financial results, which came out late Friday, show the company continuing to lose advertising revenue at its newspapers; media ownership laws might make it tough for Murdoch to take the paper yet keep his New York-area television broadcast licenses; and finally, a bid higher than $650 million is already a higher valuation for a newspaper than most sensible financial folks see as feasible.

That didn’t seem to bother Murdoch before. Here’s what he said on the News Corp earnings call (reproduced from our earlier blog entry ):

No, I don’t think Cablevision will prevail. Just be patient for a couple of days (inaudible). We’re certainly not in the business of getting into an auction here …

We’re hoping to wrap it up within the next week. And I don’t mean the end of next week, I mean within the next seven days … It takes two to agree. But we’re at a pretty advanced stage. I’ll just leave it at that at the moment.

Here’s what he subsequently said at the Time 100 dinner later that week, according to the New York Observer (whose owner Jared Kushner also was interested in bidding, though a source close to Kushner Properties told us recently that he has no idea what he wants to do about a bid right now — we’re guessing nothing):

“Yeah, I might have gone a little too far saying it was a certainty,” he told The Observer. “I was telling the truth, but you don’t know until …”

Until Saturday.

At last, we have found a culprit who is slowly killing newspapers across the United States. Her real name is unknown, but her online identity is daphne3620 and she left the following comment on the Web site of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Now I feel like garbage I read the Star Trib online and don’t subscribe to the actual physical paper. Sorry .. guys! I would gladly pay to use the site here .. give it a thought. I am serious .. I will pay.

This comment was attached to an article posted to the Strib’s Web site on May 6 that revealed that the paper’s owner had to write down 75 percent of the $100 million it paid for its stake. Private equity firm Avista Capital Partners engineered a purchase of the paper from McClatchy Co, which was announced in 2006. Since then, the paper has hemorrhaged revenue, just like many other big-city dailies.

The write-down, taken at the end of 2007, reflects the estimated loss of value and is consistent with the falling stock prices of publicly held newspaper companies such as McClatchy and the New York Times. Avista’s public accountants required the private equity firm to write down or “mark to market” the estimated value of the Star Tribune.

The memo denied a recent report in the New York Post that the Star Tribune may file for bankruptcy.

“The Star Tribune currently has sufficient liquidity and is up to date on all its debt payment obligations,” said the memo, distributed by Avista.

And if this turns out to be wrong, daphne3620 and all her freeloading friends will have to pay a very big price indeed. (Me included.)

(Photo: Reuters)

Digital media and entertainment: it may not help your kids, and it may even make them cry.

A new poll released by Common Sense Media and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center on Thursday showed that U.S. parents agree that digital media skills are important to children’s success in the 21st century, but they were skeptical about whether it contributes to the development of skills like communicating, teamwork and establishing civic responsibility.

Excerpt from the release is here:

“When it comes to digital media in kids’ lives, it’s a confusing time to be a parent,” said Jim Steyer, CEO and founder of Common Sense Media. “Clearly, parents seem to understand that the world has fundamentally changed and that kids need digital media to be successful in the 21st century. But the results also suggest that parents have reservations about how their kids engage with each other using digital media. That’s why it’s important that we help parents understand both the potential and the risks of digital media, so we can make sure kids get the best of this new world.”

The poll included a nationally representative sample of 695 parents, as well as an illustrative sample of 245 teachers, according to the press release.

Among the recommendations:

A national public engagement effort should be mounted to help parents understand that the range of 21st-century skills goes far beyond the “3 Rs” they learned. Parents should be provided with tools and information to help facilitate their comfort, acceptance, and usage of digital media to promote skills that will be essential for their children’s success today.

A somewhat more entertaining study out earlier this week from Consumer Reports WebWatch and the Mediatech Foundation found that many children’s Web site publishers manipulate kids — and even bring them to tears.

Some of the findings:

Web sites frequently tantalize children, presenting enticing options and even threats that their online creations will become inaccessible unless a purchase is made. Some sites show attractive options that invite a click, but lead to a registration form instead. Some sell a child’s prior experience — a room they’ve built for a virtual pet, for instance — back to them, using statements such as, “If you cancel your membership, then your belongings will go into storage and will be automatically retrieved when you re-subscribe.”

The games we observed vary widely in quality, in educational value, and in their developmental match with children’s abilities. Such mismatches often result in frequent cries for help.

“There’s nothing more painful than watching a young child cry,” [study author] Warren Buckleitner said in a press release. “But unfortunately, that’s the end result for too many children who are spending time with ’state-of the-art’ children’s online content.”

One of the ways that Thomson Reuters hopes to save money after the merger closed is through real estate sales. In that spirit, it looks like change begins at home, in the city where Thomson Reuters’s world headquarters is located.

Here’s the top of a press release from real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield:

NEW YORK, May 6, 2008 - In one of the largest and most complex transactions completed in Manhattan this year, Cushman & Wakefield announced today that Newsweek has signed a long-term lease for approximately 163,000 square feet at 395 Hudson Street, owned by the New York City District of Carpenters Pension Fund.

The lease involved three separate parties and the swap of two floors by tenant Thomson Reuters, allowing Newsweek to lease the contiguous third and partial fourth floors of the 10-story office building in Hudson Square.

And

“This transaction allowed Thomson Reuters to consolidate and reduce office space redundancies created by the recent merger of the two companies,” said [Cushman & Wakefield Executive Vice President] Joseph Cabrera.

This is the kind of news that employees at the new company probably don’t mind hearing, even though Thomson Reuters does plan to cut an undetermined number of staff. After all, office space doesn’t mind being told they’re redundant.

(Photo: Reuters)

Latest change at The Wall Street Journal in Year One of the Murdoch Era: Venerable editorial page cartoon “Pepper… and Salt” is moving to the leisure and arts page.

We’re almost surprised that a Frankenstein-style mob hasn’t already taken pitchforks and torches to the Dow Jones building. After all, it’s one of the paper’s longer-running traditions. Heck, even the editor-in-charge of the cartoon has been at it for 58 years, The New York Times reports.

The Journal would not comment on why the 58-year-old cartoon was moved last week, or what the future holds for “Pepper … and Salt” in the new Murdoch era.

But Pepper’s move could make way for a more Murdochian brand of editorial cartoon, cartoonists said. (The Times reported.)

It turns out that the editors announced the change on April 22. Why didn’t we notice before? Because we take our Pepper… and Salt on the Internet.

(Photo: Reuters file)

We asked last week what happened to Tribune Co.’s sense of humor after a press release about some of its lawyers was conspicuously short on slap-happiness. We’re happy to report that humor has returned in this latest release about a real estate purchase. Could Tribune be responding to our previous question, “Where’s the funny?”

CHICAGO, April 28 /PRNewswire/ — Tribune Company today announced that it has completed the purchase of real estate formerly leased from TMCT, LLC, including properties used by the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun and Hartford Courant. The transaction enables the company to eliminate $24 million in annual lease payments.

The company received an option to purchase the property for $175 million as a result of the 2006 restructuring of TMCT, LLC. The purchase is structured as a like-kind exchange, with Tribune using the proceeds from its sale of the Tribune Studios real estate in Los Angeles, announced in January, and from the sale of additional property in Stamford and Greenwich, Connecticut.

“This tax-efficient transaction gives us complete control over some very
strategic real estate assets in major markets around the country, particularly
in downtown Los Angeles,” said Stephanie Pater, Tribune’s director of real
estate. “At the same time, we eliminate our annual lease payments and save a
substantial amount of money.”

In explaining the apparent lack of humor in today’s announcement, Pater
added, “We never joke about real estate — it’s made our Chairman and CEO one
really rich dude.”

There’s the funny.

(Photo: Reuters)