In response to a press release we issued for a client this week, we received this e-mail message in response:

Please remove me from your email lists since we are no longer publishing travel information. Thanks.

Carol Parker
The Tampa Tribune

This came on the heels of the news last week that the last full-time newspaper travel editor in the state of Florida — Jane Wooldridge of the Miami Herald — had been appointed business editor of the paper. The … Read the rest

The weblog Jossip, a gossipy, crass site that strives to be the vaunted Gawker, ran a post that perpetuates some of the worst clichés about the public relation profession. The writer’s assertion is that since newspapers are laying off reporters or shuttering their doors, promising J-school students are eschewing the lofty calling of journalism for the bright lights and dirty money of the PR profession.

Penned by what could only be a recent — and almost certainly unemployed — J-school … Read the rest

Editor & Publisher published an exclusive story Monday about a number of Northeast newspapers that met in Manhattan to discuss creating a content-sharing consortium where they would freely share photography and stories. This is just another sign of the sorry state of the newspaper business, but it also points to the AP’s declining role as the sole purveyor of news and photos to newspapers.

Late last summer, several large newspapers informed the AP they would be ending their memberships — … Read the rest

When I made the big leap from magazine editor to public relations executive lo, those many years ago, it was with a great sense of relief that I would never again have to produce a daily newspaper. The publication I worked for was a business and management monthly aimed at owners and managers of travel agencies.

One thing I learned early on is that travel agents like to go places and hold meetings. One thing our publisher learned early on … Read the rest

Anybody who does it will tell you, blogging is time consuming. We’re managing a blog for a client (Eurodam News Blog) and cranking up this one on our Web site, and sometimes coming up with compelling, pertinent content is difficult.

But it must be ever so much harder for the bloggers covering the presidential campaign. We’re just less than a year away from the elections, and generating something interesting and different in a race in both parties where, aside from … Read the rest

The American Journalism Review has an interesting article exploring the origin of the “-30-” symbol that journalists used to use to mark the end of a story. I still run across it occasionally when a freelancer of a certain age sends me a manuscript. It appears that no one definitively knows where the symbol came from, but that hasn’t stopped generations of speculation:

So where did the term originate? Some say the mark began during a time when stories were