Gov. Patrick targets legal notices

Gov. Deval Patrick is repeating a threat he’s made in the past: to take legal notices out of newspapers and run them online instead, thus saving taxpayers some money.

Hillary Chabot reports in today’s Boston Herald that Patrick has included a provision in his transportation bill that “would allow public transportation projects to advertise on the Internet instead of newspapers.”

From the earliest days of American newspapers, legal notices have been an important source of revenue. During Colonial times, it wasn’t uncommon for newspapers to curry favor with the royal governor in order to get lucrative official advertising.

Has the moment come to rethink legal ads? Probably. But given the horrendous state of the newspaper business, the timing couldn’t be any worse.

What Patrick proposes isn’t unique to Massachusetts. Le Templar of the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz., recently spoke with NPR’s “On the Media” about this very subject. Among other things, he said:

[A] variety of research shows that despite the current plight of the newspaper industry, people are still reading newspapers and their companion websites far more than they’re reading individual government websites. We’re talking at magnitudes of 10 to 100 times more.

Also, newspapers serve as sort of a central repository. If you’re a person who likes to know what different governments are up to around you, you can go to your local newspaper and read them all at once instead to having to go sit in a library all day and look through different minutes or, in the modern electronic era, hit individual websites.

Templar also argued that it’s far easier for the government to prove that it published a legal notice, as required by law, with a newspaper clip than with an online notice on a government site. (Thanks to O-Fish-L for calling my attention to the Herald story.)

Herald to shed 20 jobs

While everyone is focused on the looming 50-person cut in the Boston Globe’s newsroom, the Boston Herald yesterday quietly announced that it would soon shed 20 jobs.

Lisa van der Pool reports in the Boston Business Journal that the cuts won’t come exclusively from the Herald’s newsroom: publisher Pat Purcell says the reductions will involve “editorial and commercial” employees at both the paper and its Web site.

As at the Globe, the Herald will look for volunteers first.

Weld misquotes Carter

There’s a howler near the top of former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld’s op-ed in today’s Boston Globe that any sharp-eyed editor should have caught. Weld and John Stimpson write:

In 1981, the United States was in the midst of what President Jimmy Carter had labeled a “national malaise” and a “crisis in confidence.”

Trouble is, as this PBS article explains, “Though he never used the word — [political adviser Pat] Caddell had in his memo — it became known as Carter’s ‘malaise’ speech.”

Howard Owens takes over the Batavian

Big news out of little Batavia, N.Y. As I was expecting he would, Howard Owens has announced that he’s taking over the Batavian, the online-only “paper” he launched last fall when he was still working for GateHouse Media. He’s going all-in, selling his house and getting ready to start covering the news and selling ads next week. He writes:

My wife and I are listing our house in Pittsford for sale and as soon as it sells, we will rent a place in Batavia (or maybe elsewhere in Genesee County). I expect we’ll see my wife’s byline in The Batavian before too long.

Best of luck to Howard. If he can make this work, it will be a model for a business desperately in need of some good news.

A push to save City Weekly

Local media and political activist Ron Newman has written an open letter to the Boston Globe asking that it save the City Weekly section, currently targeted for elimination on March 22. Newman writes:

Dear Boston Globe folks,

As a resident of Somerville, I am distressed to read that you plan to discontinue the only section of the Globe that consistently covers news about our city (and our neighbor, Cambridge).

Your internal memo, published at Dan Kennedy’s Media Nation blog, says that “the suburban zones … are too important to readers to dramatically reduce.” Does this mean that the Globe no longer cares about readers who live in Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline? How do you expect to keep readers and advertisers if you keep slashing away at the content that makes the Globe unique?

For over 50 years, I’ve lived in houses that received home delivery of at least one daily newspaper. But I’m seeing less and less reason to keep my Globe subscription.

To see the reaction that this decision is getting, I recommend you read the comments on these blog entries:

http://community.livejournal.com/davis_square/1665644.html
http://community.livejournal.com/b0st0n/6482970.html
http://www.universalhub.com/node/23506
http://www.universalhub.com/node/23389

You still have several weeks to reconsider this bad decision. Please do so.

My own take? Probably unrealistic. But I’d certainly like to see the Globe take some steps to pump up its city coverage online.

Joe Biden’s so-called lie

I’m posting some incomplete findings in the hopes that someone else might be able to fill in the blanks.

The right-wing blogosphere is on fire right now with claims that Joe Biden “lied” when he said that Louisiana is losing 400 jobs a day. Biden made his remarks in the course of criticizing Gov. Bobby Jindal’s refusal of more than $90 million in additional unemployment funds. A local newscast in Louisiana, citing the state employment agency, claims that the state actually added jobs in December, the last month for which numbers are available.

Well, now. If you take a visit to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, you will see that Louisiana’s unemployment rate rose from 3.8 percent in June to 5.9 percent in December. During that time, 45,065 people in Louisiana lost their jobs. That adds up to approximately 250 per day — not 400, I’ll grant you, but a damned high number, and certainly one that contradicts the notion that the state was actually adding jobs. [Actually, yes. Biden was right. See update, below.]

Now it’s nearly March. We know that the recession and unemployment have accelerated over the past two months. I don’t have January and February numbers of Louisiana, but I may just be looking in the wrong places. But I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if an average of 400 people a day have been losing their jobs in Louisiana since the first of the year.

Yes, I realize that the local report I’m linking to claims that Louisiana’s unemployment filings actually declined through mid-January. But remember, that same report says Louisiana gained jobs in December, which is directly contradicted by the federal numbers.

Anybody know where I can get credible preliminary unemployment estimates for January and February?

Update: The answer was staring me right in the face. Steve points out that Louisiana lost an average of 430 jobs a day in December.