This memo was sent to Baton Rouge Advocate staffers on Monday afternoon:

From: Ballance, John
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2012 4:01 PM
To: News – All Departments
Subject: It’s on

FYI
I got a call from the AP today telling me that the Times Picayune is outing The Advocate. This means we cannot use any Times Picayune photos in our print or online editions.

We will now add to our outs The Times Picayune preventing them from using our photos in their 3 day a week print publication or any other of their publications.

John Ballance
Photo Dept. Manager

UPDATE: I was sent this second Advocate memo:

At this point we have decided not to out the Times Picayune but, we will have a mandatory credit.

So for now Please add to the after the outs in the caption field

MAGS OUT / INTERNET OUT/ONLINE OUT/NO SALES/TV OUT/FOREIGN OUT/LOUISIANA BUSINESS INC. OUT/GREATER BATON ROUGE BUSINESS REPORT OUT/225 OUT/10/12 OUT/IN REGISTER OUT/LBI CUSTOM PUBLICATIONS OUT/MANDATORY CREDIT THE ADVOCATE/ FIRST LAST NAME.

ex. MANDATORY CREDIT THE ADVOCATE / BILL FEIG

* Earlier: Advocate expands circulation into New Orleans (nola.com)

— New York Times staff (Washington bureau in smaller photo)

* Brief labor action at the New York Times (nytimes.com)

From a previously posted New York Times union memo:

“The company’s new CEO, Mark Thompson, is expected to begin work Monday. [He actually starts in November.] Let’s get together in the lobby at 3:40 for a group picture. We want to welcome him — and acquaint him with the grave situation he has walked into.” (The Times reports Thompson doesn’t start with the company until mid-November, but is visiting the paper this week for meetings.)

New York Times media reporter David Carr started working on the death-of-Newsweek-print-edition story on Wednesday, but got beat by Newsweek, which announced the news early Thursday. Carr told a Washington and Lee Journalism Ethics Institute audience on Friday how that happened.

The Newsweek part of the speech starts at 14:48 in the video:

The night before last [Wednesday] I heard from a source that Newsweek was going to cease publishing in print, and that’s kind of a big story in Manhattan media. And so I did the thing where I didn’t want to put out the phone calls too wide, right? I did the thing where — you know, sometimes when you really want to make a story happen, you make as much noise as you can, you want them to hear you coming through the brush — I’m coming for you! But this I was just like creepy crawling around, a little email there, a little phone call there.

David Carr at Washington and Lee University

Somewhere in there I hit a fricking tripwire, and even though we stood at 10 o’clock at night and said, we know this is going to happen, but we have not spoken to anybody that has direct knowledge, which is sort of our standard. We’d just been through this with the Times-Picayune and a big story a couple months before, and we decided rather than gamble and try and make phone calls, or go to the people [involved] we’d sit still.

Our targets in this case — Barry Diller, Tina Brown, Newsweek, Daily Beast — heard me or somebody like me creepy crawling around and in the dead of night they pushed the button on the press release. And that made me unhappy. I just want to say that. I just was profoundly unhappy about that. …

When I woke up at 6:30 [Thursday morning], and you know, you open up your email and — whoosh! — you just get your nose broken right away. It’s like, wow!

What did I do? I opened up a WordPress file, and immediately began typing. I had some string from the night before, hammered in what I had. It wasn’t as spun as what they had, and everybody on the web — because I had a little bit of early [unintelligible] — all pointed at me. So even though we didn’t get the story [first] we were able to catch up.

* David Carr addresses Washington and Lee Journalism Ethics Institute (wlu.edu)

“What happens next? Who knows?” writes Richard Deitsch. “There is no blueprint for a high-profile sports television reporter dating a professional athlete in today’s social media world, and [ESPN sideline reporter Samantha] Steele’s personal life now becomes part of the Twitterverse.”

For its part, ESPN does not consider the relationship a journalistic conflict given that Steele covers college football and Ponder plays in the NFL.

“We do not comment on, or confirm, personal aspects of employees’ lives,” an ESPN spokesperson said. “Regarding any policies, we expect any commentator to raise any relationship that could be a conflict with the sport they cover. This does not fit that scenario as she covers college football.”

* Samantha Steele heads into the unknown (sportsillustrated.cnn.com)

Clark Kent quits the Daily Planet in Superman #13 — and he doesn’t go quietly. He resigns in front of the whole staff, reports Brian Truitt, “and rails on how journalism has given way to entertainment.” (The Daily Planet is now part of the multimedia corporation Galaxy Broadcasting.)

New “Superman” writer Scott Lobdell explains that “this is really what happens when a 27-year-old guy is behind a desk and he has to take instruction from a larger conglomerate with concerns that aren’t really his own.” Kent will find a new platform to speak the “unvarnished truth,” says Lobdell.

I don’t think he’s going to be filling put an application anywhere. He is more likely to start the next Huffington Post or the next Drudge Report than he is to go find someone else to get assignments or draw a paycheck from.

Oliver Willis tweets that this development shows DC Comics doesn’t know what to do with Superman. “Flailing, sad,” he writes.

“Lobdell has been watching too much of ‘The Newsroom” … and that show sucked,” writes a commenter at Comic Book Resources.

(Graphic courtesy of Newsarama.com)

* Clark Kent makes a major life change in new “Superman” (usatoday.com)

The Tampa Tribune — recently sold by Media General to a California private equity investment firm for $9.5 million — is cutting employees’ wages and offering buyouts.

“I haven’t yet heard what percentage the cuts are averaging,” my tipster writes. “At a newsroom meeting, they told staff that the company has to offer severance to everyone, however, buyouts will be denied to those in critical newsroom positions.

Date: Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 11:15

Memo to All Employees:

Re: Pay adjustment and voluntary severance program

As Tampa Media Group establishes itself as a private, locally-managed company, we are taking immediate steps to align costs with revenue. The first of these steps will be to offer a voluntary severance program.

This voluntary program will be offered for a limited time only. Those interested in a severance package should notify Human Resources by 5PM on 10-26-12. It is important to note that while this program is voluntary and designed to help us reduce costs while compensating those who participate, acceptance of those applying for severance will be determined by management based on current business needs. Senior management will review the applications and will inform you whether you have been approved by no later than 5PM on 11-2-12.

In addition to the severance program to help us re-align costs to revenue, we will also be adjusting individual pay rates, effective immediately. Your managers will be meeting with you about your individual circumstance and I will meet with your departments this week to answer additional questions and explain in detail why this is important and necessary. As you know, our goal is to achieve sustained profitability in the short term and strengthen our market position in the long term. Moving forward with these cost-alignment measures will hasten our ability to operate more cost-effectively and be more competitive.

* What the fate of the Tampa Tribune means to Minnesota newspaper readers (minnpost.com)

A Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) study finds that the Poynter/St. Petersburg Times-run PolitiFact.com rates Republican claims as false twice as often as Democratic claims, while the Washington Post’s Fact Checker faults the two parties about equally.

CMPA President Dr Robert Lichter says that shows “media fact-checking involves subjective judgments, just like any other form of journalism. Voters must still decide for themselves which ‘facts’ they trust.”

* Fact-checkers disagree on who lies the most (cmpa.com)

A meteor story in last week’s San Francisco Chronicle was co-written by the paper’s oldest and youngest staffers. (David Perlman is 93; Ellen Huet is 22).

“I would bet that at 71 years, this was the largest age difference in a staff double byline in newspaper history,” writes Peter Hartlaub.

* Double byline of the ages in Friday’s Chronicle (sfgate.com)