Friday Morning Linkage

Unfit to print - Los Angeles Times
The column, published in the San Francisco-based AsianWeek newspaper in the waning days of African American History Month, was so astonishingly hateful that activists of all stripes immediately rushed forward to condemn it. AsianWeek Editor Ted Fang issued a lengthy apology and fired Eng, who is in his early 20s and also writes science fiction novels. The small press that published Eng's books announced last week that it was taking them off the market. There was a hastily arranged community forum about strengthening black/Asian relations and improving coverage across color lines. More are surely on the way.

On Not Knowing What You Are Missing - PBS
Newspaper circulation and advertising revenues continue in a steady decline. Newsroom staffs and foreign bureaus are being cut. Experienced (and usually more expensive) old-timers are being let go in layoffs and buyouts. Pressures from Wall Street on news corporations to maximize profits on a short-term basis are unrelenting, helping to force further cuts in news-gathering, especially the expensive kind overseas and among investigative staffs. Competition from the Web and cable television has increased dramatically, draining revenue and readership from newspapers, in particular. Ownership is changing, consolidating and increasingly falling to those whose main business is not news. A growing legal assault upon, and increasing number of subpoenas issued to, journalists has taken place in the past two or three years.

Big Profits in Small Packages - Washington Post
The average daily circulation of all U.S. newspapers has declined since 1987. The smallest papers, however -- community weeklies and dailies with circulation of less than 50,000 -- have been a bright spot in a darkened industry. As the Internet dramatically transforms the largest papers in the business -- siphoning classified advertising and commoditizing national news -- many small papers are weathering the decline with relative ease, and some are even prospering.

A critical eye for blogs - Boston.com
New media, says Carroll, an assistant professor of mass communications at Boston University, is "happening so fast, it's developing right in front of our eyes." In addition to blogs, he lists "vlogs" (video blogs), "mobisodes" (videos distributed directly to cellphones), and video-sharing sites as examples of the way people are getting their news, entertainment, and political commentary these days.