The Newspaper Guild of New York sends this message:

About 65 to 70 Reporters and Editors from the Newsroom at The New York Times formed a silent gauntlet at this morning’s Times Company annual stockholders meeting. They lined up in the lobby of The Times building in Manhattan and handed out leaflets that contained a highly critical analysis of the company’s position during 13 months of bargaining with the Guild. That analysis was written by Times Labor Reporter Steven Greenhouse.

They also leafletted outside the meeting with a banner and large sign that said: “Without Us, it’s just White Space.”

Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. and other Sulzberger family members as well as other Times executives were also forced to walk past the lined up staffers, who are getting angrier by the day about the lack of progress on a fair contract…and the company’s continuing demands for a ten to fifteen percent cut in compensation.

More info and Photos of the protest can be found on the New York Guild’s Facebook page.

(Credit: Mark Allen Miller)

* Can an algorithm write a better news story than a human reporter? (Wired.com)
* Nashville Scene blames auto-correct for identifying Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson as a “communist.” (Nashville Scene)
* David Simon: “Anything that says content should be free makes it hard for all writers, everywhere.” (DavidSimon.com)
* ESPNer was so devastated by “Chink in the armor” headline fallout that he vomited several times. (The Blaze)
* Daily Dot founding editor Owen Thomas resigns and “has some awesome opportunities in front of him.” (Daily Dot)
* How two photojournalists are taking on Philadelphia’s gun crisis. (Philadelphia Weekly)
* Dan Savage: Village Voice wouldn’t run my column 21 years ago because it was too dirty. (MediaBistro)
* Gawker shows the search warrant that was delivered to the Fox Mole’s apartment. (Gawker)

“The New York Times appears to have done away with its ‘Single Page View’ on its web site,” Gawker’s John Cook tweeted last Friday.

I was still getting the one-page option, so I figured it was a glitch.

Then today I got this email from a reader:

on some articles the NYT no longer gives single-page options. I think it’s crap to do this with a paywall in place and without announcing it. they’ll say it’s just a test no doubt.

It’s no test; Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy explains what happened:

We unintentionally removed the single-page button when we launched a new version of our share tools last Thursday. By late Friday afternoon, it had been replaced. Users may need to refresh cache for it to take.

(I put Murphy’s last line in bold.)

I will continue to cover the city of Detroit without the @freep so the public can get objective news. More details to come.

— Steve Neavling (@Freepreporter) April 20, 2012

The Detroit Free Press fired City Hall reporter Steve Neavling last week. Detroit Metro Times has the back-story, and Neavling has some tweets about the dismissal.

Letter to Romenesko

From DAVID LARTER: Not sure how the Washington Post, New York Times, Oregonian and a bunch of other newspapers would feel about having their A1s doctored for a political video sponsored by some agenda group in DC called Free Market America.

From "If I Wanted America to Fail" video

Anyway, the funny thing about this video is it talks about bullying in DC and “regulations only lobbyists can understand” but a quick Google search reveals that “Free Market America” is really Americans for Limited Government, a think-tank of sorts out of Fairfax that spent nearly $100K to retain D.C. lobbying firm Aduston Consulting. Ironic.

This only comes up because the group’s video is posted on Drudge Report as if it were a link to a news story. It kind of makes me mad that they faked the A1s of so many newspapers. It’s misleading.

Rex Huppke’s Chicago Tribune essay (“Facts, 360 B.C. – A.D. 2012″) was Tweeted over 3,500 times and recommended on Facebook more than 24,000 times. “Its overall shares, via Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, Google+, Digg, Reddit and Tumblr, totaled more than 88,990,” reports Caitlin Johnston. She writes:

Sure, news sites can attract a large audience with pictures of two-headed cats and Kim Kardashian, but this was different. This resonated.

“It wasn’t one of those cheap kinds of clicks,” [deputy metro editor Mark] Jacob says. “Those are empty calories. With this, they’ll read all the way to the end, and they’ll talk about it and remember it.”

* The man behind the Obit for Facts
* The story behind the best op-ed ever

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) reports newspaper website traffic was up 4.4% in the first quarter, and that “newspapers achieved a more than 7% increase in unique visitors ages 21 to 34, with average daily visits by this age group up 17 percent and total visits rising by 15 percent.”

NAA president Caroline Little says in a release that “these numbers provide strong evidence that newspapers are making solid progress with their innovative efforts in the digital space.” The release is after the jump. Read More