Media and technology executives are meeting Wednesday and Thursday in New York City at a conference hosted by private equity firm Quadrangle. Note the word private.

When they meet at the Plaza, they will talk about a ton of different things that their customers, their investors and other readers want to know. I have to apologize for them because they’re not letting in any riff-raff. And that includes reporters who get paid to spend all day figuring out how these people decide what kind of entertainment you want, what kind of technology you pay them for and what deals they pursue with the money that you give them when you buy their stock. This event always excludes press, but that’s no reason not to highlight what you probably are missing because of this. After all, who wants to wait for the 8-K filing?

Some press will be allowed, but it will be an assortment of celebrity journalists who will moderate panels and, according to Peter Kafka, author of “MediaMemo” at News Corp’s AllThingsD blog, will not write about the event (I’m talking about Maria Bartiromo and David Faber of CNBC, The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta, etc).

Peter wrote two posts about this, here and here. He also issued me a challenge to sneak into the conference, but horror of horrors, I’m on a deadline that I can’t shirk any longer. So consider this an invitation from me to you to go to the Plaza and catch these guys on the way in and out of the building. It’s a fun way to spend the day, and maybe you’ll learn something interesting.

Here is the agenda, courtesy of Peter Kafka. Below that is a list of speakers. Outrage breeds corrections: I have to amend the record: The list I had posted here of topics is last year’s agenda. My mistake. The list of speakers appearing THIS year still appears below.

2009 SPEAKERS
EMILIO AZCÁRRAGA President, Board of Directors and CEO, Grupo Televisa
DENNIS CROWLEY Co-Founder, foursquare
BARRY DILLER Chairman and CEO, IAC; Chairman, Expedia, Inc. and Ticketmaster Entertainment, Inc.
BRIAN DUNN CEO, Best Buy
CHARLES FORMAN Founder, OMGPOP
REED HASTINGS Founder, Chairman and CEO, Netflix
REID HOFFMAN Executive Chairman and Founder, LinkedIn Corporation
CHAD HURLEY CEO and Co-Founder, YouTube
JEFF IMMELT Chairman and CEO, GE
PAUL JACOBS Chairman and CEO, Qualcomm Incorporated
OLLI-PEKKA KALLASVUO President and CEO, Nokia
JASON KILAR CEO, Hulu
LESLIE MOONVES President and CEO, CBS Corporation
ANNE MULCAHY Chairman, Xerox Corporation
JAMES MURDOCH Chairman and Chief Executive, Europe & Asia, News Corporation
BRIAN PHILLIPS CEO and Co-Founder, Thread
DAN PORTER CEO, OMGPOP
BRIAN ROBERTS Chairman and CEO, Comcast Corporation
PAUL SAGAN President and CEO, Akamai
ERIC SCHMIDT Chairman and CEO, Google
IVAN SEIDENBERG Chairman and CEO, Verizon Communications
BIZ STONE Co-Founder, Twitter
HOWARD STRINGER Chairman, CEO and President, Sony Corporation
BEN VERWAAYEN CEO, Alcatel-Lucent
DAVID ZASLAV President and CEO, Discovery Communications

MODERATORS
MARC ANDREESSEN General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
KEN AULETTA Author and Writer, “Annals of Communications”, The New Yorker
MARIA BARTIROMO Anchor, Closing Bell; Host & Managing Editor, Wall Street Journal Report, CNBC
JAMES CITRIN Co-Leader, Board & CEO Practice, North America, Spencer Stuart
DAVID FABER Anchor, Reporter, CNBC
MICHAEL HUBER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
BECKY QUICK Co-Anchor, Squawk Box, CNBC
GEOFFREY SANDS Director & Leader, Global Media, Entertainment & Information Practice, McKinsey & Co.
JOSHUA L. STEINER Co-President and Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS Anchor, This Week; Chief Washington Correspondent, ABC News

(Photo of Barry Diller, who will remain away from prying eyes at Quadrangle’s confab: Reuters)

You have to hand it to Sam Zell and his band of outsiders at bankrupt media company Tribune Co. They are going to remake the newspaper business if it kills them.

The gang got broiled for a front-page ad that the Los Angeles Times ran last week that looked like an article. After that outcry, the Tribune-owned paper did it again, this time with another an ad supplement for Paramount’s movie, “The Soloist.” That one includes an interview with Steve Lopez, the Times columnist who wrote the book that became the movie. The ad also ran under the LA Times’s own banner.

As it turns out, nearly everyone who cares enough to talk about these ads in public despises them. You could have said that LA Times employees were just kvetching when they circulated a petition voicing their opposition to the ads — broke down and dispirited by bankruptcy, and repeated waves of layoffs, they stuck to the old line that there needs to be a distinction between ads and editorial copy for various ethical reasons.

Now we can add LA Times Executive Editor John Arthur to the mix. Here’s The Wrap:

Arthur, who was on vacation last week, said he was blindsided by the ad…  The editor said it was initially envisioned to go down the right side of the front page, usually the space reserved for the paper’s lead story. “I’d been told an ad like that was coming, and before my trip I’d complained about it,” he said. “But I was told it was not imminent, that an ad of this shape was weeks or months away — May or June was mentioned to me.”

Arthur was also critical of a four-page advertising supplement about the upcoming Paramount movie “The Soloist,” which was published on Sunday under the signature Los Angeles Times banner. … “I thought the type font that was used in the words ‘The Soloist’ at the top was uncomfortably close to the font we use in section fronts,” Arthur said, adding that he did not know that the supplement was coming either. Lopez could not be reached for comment.

But Lynne Segall, vice president for entertainment advertising at the paper, retorted in an email to TheWrap: “Russ Stanton, his boss, the editor of the paper, approved both advertorial units. The ad department in this company is not in a position nor would we ever be allowed to go out in the market to sell units like this without editorial vetting and giving us permission first.”

The Wrap also noted that Eddy Hartenstein, the paper’s publisher, begged employees to understand that he’s just trying to keep the paper open.

We’ve gotten a bunch of people to talk about this already on another blog entry that we did on this last week. I’d like to bring up another idea, just for argument’s sake:

When we journalists worry that an advertisement in the paper looks deceptively like a news article, aren’t we insulting the intelligence of the readers? In turn, does that make us look like the interior decorators of the elitist ivory tower that so many people say we live in? I’m not saying it’s so; I *am* throwing it out there, however.

(Photo: Reuters)

Rumors of Rupert Murdoch’s interest in buying The New York Times have been swirling for ages, and maybe the media mogul would have snapped up the venerable paper by now were it not for the Sulzbergers.

But there’s always a consolation prize, and this one’s from the West Coast. Variety writes that Murdoch could be interested in buying The Los Angeles Times and has been talking “fervently” about making a play for the paper.

And that would surely be an easier purchase to pull off, given that LA Times’ owner Tribune is in the middle of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Maybe Sam Zell, who owns Tribune, would be more willing to sell the paper to a fellow mogul than the Sulzbergers.

Keep an eye on:

• Washington Post Co’s profit sinks but revenue rises on strength of its education and cable units. (Reuters)
• Hearst Corp may sell or close down San Francisco Chronicle. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• MySpace founders may leave the social networking company. (Financial Times)

We’ll be paying close attention to Goldman Sachs today for reasons other than the wrenching financial crisis. Our interest relates to the investment bank’s Communacopia conference, an annual meeting of some top media players.

Of course, it’s impossible to escape Wall Street’s woes, even at a media conference. After all, there are questions about the ripple effect on the economy — and that includes the advertising business, the bread and butter of media.

We spoke to a number of experts and the consensus was that while financial services make up just 6 percent of advertising spending in the United States, which is no small sum, the bigger issue is the influence that the crisis has on confidence throughout Corporate America. Watching this week’s turmoil, will corporations be as free with spending?

Here’s how Zain Raj, chief executive of Euro RSCG Discovery, a unit of France’s Havas advertising company, put it:

 ”Normally, when Wall Street sneezes, Madison Avenue ignores it. In this case, Wall Street has pneumonia and Madison Avenue better realize it.”

Whether in presentations or on the sidelines of Communacopia, that’s sure to be a topic of conversation. Let’s hear what News Corp, Time Warner and CBS, among others, have to say.

Keep an eye on:

• McClatchy will slash 10 percent of its workforce for the second time this year and is cutting its dividend as the U.S. newspaper publisher struggles with punishing advertising revenue declines (Reuters)
• The Newhouse family doesn’t expect to get the cost-savings it needs to save New Jersey’s Star-Ledger and plans to tell staff that the paper will be sold or closed on Jan. 5 (NY Post)
• Sam Zell faces a lawsuit by current and former members of the Tribune Co Employee Stock Option Plan and other retirement programs (paidContent.org)

(Reuters photo of Goldman Sachs headquarters)

Tribune Co is making good on its promise to use its own reporters to break news about Tribune. It’s not the company’s fault if that news is depressing.

Chief Executive Sam Zell held a conference call with reporters at its papers on Tuesday, prompting a profusion of press coverage in Tribune-owned publications on Wednesday. Some of the most interesting excerpts showed up in The Hartford Courant:

Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell Tuesday defended his decision to order large cuts at newspapers across the chain, including The Courant, saying that no one could have predicted the dramatic drop in advertising revenue that followed his takeover of the company seven months ago.

Zell, in a conference call with Tribune reporters, said newspapers are confronting “some of the worst advertising numbers in the history of the world,” and said the only alternative to eliminating employees and cutting the size of the papers would be to allow the businesses to fail.

“The reality is, what’s my choice?” Zell asked. “Do I try and create a business that can be viable and preserve two-thirds of the jobs? Or do I let all 100 percent of them go by the wayside because I’m not willing to confront the realities of the environment?”

What about his desire, expressed earlier this year, that he not make the business all about cutting jobs?

“I don’t believe it’s fair to hold me to the sentence that I expressed when I was [in Hartford] six months ago,” Zell said. “I don’t know that anybody has a frame of reference on advertising revenue destruction that, in effect, is as bad as this, going all the way back to the Depression. So I think the circumstances are dramatically worse than anyone could have possibly predicted.”

More coverage here:

The Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania)

Newsday (Long Island, New York)

Chicago Tribune

The Sun (Baltimore, Maryland)

For reporters who cover Tribune, this is all very interesting stuff. Here’s hoping cost cuts don’t force those papers to cut the Tribune beat.

(Photo: Reuters)

If Steve Jobs’ well-being is somehow symbiotic with Apple Inc’s well-being, shouldn’t there be an application for tracking his whereabouts?

Someone must have a lucrative business plan for creating an “EDtv” or “The Truman Show” around the guru of the iPod Mac and iPhone.

Perhaps, this exclusive content could be piped to all Apple TV set-top boxes — for a fee. At the very least, how about a desktop widget that shows where in the world Steve Jobs is.

Its a scenario so fantastic that one wonders why noone has already discussed it. But maybe some have come close. The Wall Street Journal says one hedge fund in 2004 hired private investigators to follow Apple’s CEO to hospital visits, hoping to glean information about how sick, or well, he was. Remember — that was the year that Jobs had surgery to cure pancreatic cancer, a fact the company waited months to disclose.

All of this comes because of concerns about Jobs appearance of late, the company’s cloudy response to questions about his health, and their reluctance to disclose a successor-in-waiting at Apple that can match Jobs’s legendary status — and reassure shareholders.

For what its worth, the New York Times says all this sick talk is nonsense, and that Jobs has reassured people that he is “doing well” and free of cancer.

Silicon Valley long-timer John Markoff quotes “a number of his associates” as saying that Jobs is telling them that he is cancer free.
   
But Markoff introduced new details on Jobs’ health record by revealing that Jobs had a surgical procedure this year “to address a problem that was contributing to a loss of weight.” He cited people close to Jobs who were not authorized to speak about his health.  

Markoff also said Jobs ran a high fever the week ahead of his speech announcing the iPhone 3G and considered canceling his appearance. His gaunt appearance at that June 9 event resurrected rumors he was battling cancer. Sources tell Markoff Jobs has been dealing with nutritional problems in the wake of his cancer surgery. The article did not specify if this was a reference to the recent surgery or that of four years ago.

Still, I can’t help but wonder how many of us would subscribe to “The Steve Jobs Channel.”

Keep an eye on:

• Google is in final talks to buy Digg for $200 million. (Techcrunch )
• Tribune CEO Sam Zell defended his plan for large cuts at newspapers across the chain. (Hartford Courant)
• New York Times quarterly revenue and profit fall (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

Tribune Co is keeping media reporters and headline writers busy these days with news of how the company is trying to turn around its newspaper business and stay afloat under billions of dollars in debt - all while creating a culture that, as Chicago real estate tycoon and newly minted press baron Sam Zell says, does not take itself too seriously.

That is growing more difficult as the company embarks on another round of job cuts at its papers, sparking fear and loathing among employees, and launches an ambitious plan to redo the papers’ sizes and looks. Tribune also set journalism types’ tongues a-wagging with its plan to review reporter productivity as a possible condition for staying on board. That might not sound so controversial, except that many people have interpreted that as saying it’s not about the quality of your stories, it’s about the quantity.

Gerould Kern, Tribune’s vice president of editorial and the successor to departing Chicago Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski, addressed some of these topics in a phone interview with Reuters.

Q: What is your immediate task as the new editor of the Chicago Tribune?

A: As we report almost daily, the newspaper business is in a crisis. And I want to do everything I can in my power to save it. And you know, the Chicago Tribune has played a huge role in the history of the nation and the city, and I know it and I’m proud of it and I want that history to stretch far into the future. So I’m optimistic that we can solve these economic problems, the economic dislocation that faces us and that we’re not only going to survive but thrive in the future.

Q: How do you make the business thrive with fewer people?

A: I think it becomes a lot harder and that’s going to force us to be a lot more innovative and entrepreneurial and resourceful than we’ve ever been before. There’s been a lot of misinformation and confusion about productivity as a topic. I think the idea’s fairly simple. Let’s turn over every stone, let’s do every smart thing we can to stretch the resources, to use them to serve people and build our audiences and bring in revenue to support journalism.

It means our full-time professional staff is going to get smaller. And that’s been happening to newspapers all over the country. And yet we’re having to support more local media channels than ever before. … At the end of the day we still will have the largest newsgathering organization in this city by far. And if we are really smart and resourceful about using them we will be able to a fabulous job for consumers in whatever channel they choose.

Q: What do you say to the reporters who say they’re scandalized by the idea of being judged on how many stories they produce, rather than the quality of individual stories?

A: I think it is unfortunate that this has been focused on in this way. I understand it based on some comments that [Tribune Chief Operating Officer] Randy [Michaels] made on the middle of that call. Let me just say this: I talked in a broader sense about productivity, which frankly is the way I’m looking at it. What can the whole organization do that’s smart, that‘s strategic, that’s resourceful.

But on bylines: All of our newspapers are looking at all kinds of information to see what is valuable in making some of these tough choices… Some of our newspapers in some departments have been doing byline counts over the years. It’s not the first time that anybody’s ever done that. From the beginning, we made it clear that this should be viewed as just one data point and, frankly, probably not the most valuable and that it had to be combined with other information. … Everybody knows for instance that you have to evaluate investigative reporters differently than other kinds of reporters. Because reporting takes a long time… And everyone was aware of that.

In the end, the information and the judgment calls [were] left strictly up to editors in the newsroom and that’s where it will remain. So, I think much more is being made of it than really is there.

When we saw a memo hit the blogs this week saying that more Tribune layoffs could be coming, we put the reporting machinery into motion — only to find out that apparently it’s not true.

While future layoffs are perhaps inevitable, the latest memo authored by Chief Executive Sam Zell turned out to not be “latest” at all.

The subject line, which you can see at the Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20 Year Club, says “Reducing staff,” always a promising sign of news. Then there was this:

It is within this context that I am announcing we must reduce the number of staff positions within the publishing group and corporate office through a combination of voluntary separation programs, involuntary layoffs, attrition and closing of open positions. Each of our newspapers is making its own decision about which programs best suit its needs.

But here’s the thing. When we checked with Tribune spokesman Gary Weitman, he noted the similarity between this memo and one Zell had written in February. In fact, it’s the same memo, Weitman said, but with a June 2 date now. A source at one of Tribune’s papers who is not necessarily a friend of management confirmed that the memo is from February.

We’re asking our other Trib sources elsewhere in the empire to see if they got anything more recently, especially as Zell gets ready to update lenders on Tribune’s financial status this afternoon. We’re also waiting to hear back from Padgett and from Fading to Black, a death-of-newspapers site that picked up Padgett’s post.

(Photo: Reuters)

It was a case of baseketball at the Sports Lawyers Association annual conference in San Francisco this week when the Chicago Cubs came up in conversation.

The Cubs, as most Media File readers know, is the pro baseball team being sold by Tribune Co as it looks for a way to dig away at its mountain of debt after it was taken private by Chicago real estate mogul and noted raconteur Sam Zell (careful with that link. It’s NSFW). One potential bidder is Dallas Mavericks owner and blogger Mark Cuban, who got quite a plug during the conference.

Thomas Ostertag, senior vice president and general counsel for Major League Baseball, was giving a state-of-the-sport speech to an audience of several hundred sports industry officials and attorneys. Here’s what he said about the Cubs:

“We do expect this sale to get more public attention than really almost any sale I can think of in the history of our game, putting aside perhaps the sale of a guy named Babe Ruth to the Yankees way, way back.”

That’s when Joel Litvin, president of league and basketball operations for the National Basketball Association said, “I’m sorry Tom, can I make a plug for Mark Cuban as the next owner of the Cubs?”

Cue laugh from the crowd.

Litvin pressed on: “He’s smart, innovative and entrepreneurial.”

Ostertag smirked and replied, ”Moving on.”

More hilarity ensued, especially because few people believe Cuban has a shot at getting the team. But even if he doesn’t, he has plenty on his plate already.

(Reporting by Ben Klayman in San Francisco. Writing and links by Robert MacMillan in New York)

(Photo: Reuters)

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.