AP - A federal bankruptcy judge in New York on Friday approved the sale of most of the assets of Ohio-based newspaper chain Brown Publishing Co. to the company's lenders for about $21.8 million.

Battellemedia.com
John Battelle acknowledges that Demand Media's content "isn't ever going to win a Pulitzer, nor, frankly, should it be asked to. But it works for me when I want to tie a tie. And that, times millions of uniques a day, is a real business." (Battelle says he finds Demand's IPO "interesting for several reasons," and discloses that he's a friend of the founder.)
> Earlier: The dumbest how-to content from Demand Media

Journalists, especially the ink-stained variety, often get a bad rap for not being terribly good with technology. That perception might change, however, with the revelation that the reporters from the News of the World, one of Rupert Murdoch's trashier publications, have for years been hacking the voice-mail boxes of the bold names they cover. Sure, some folks -- though, hopefully not the office cat -- may be going to jail, but that's a small price to pay for a scoop that Prince William injured his knee.

One phone rings, then another, then four more, now a dozen. The 15th-floor conference room is suddenly abuzz with an eclectic mix of song snippets and audio bits, an intimate peek at their owners before each is picked up or silenced. Having impressed the audience with the telephony technology behind the product, the presenter moves on to the next demo.

The intersection of mobile and geolocation is still an unknown world, waiting to be invented by hackers like the ones at round 2.0 of TimesOpen, The New York Times’ outreach to developers, which launched Thursday night. We wrote about the first TimesOpen event last year: It’s an attempt to open the doors of the The Times to developers, technologists, designers, and entrepreneurs, who can use Times tools to help answer some of the field’s big questions. This iteration of TimesOpen is a five-event series this fall, each focusing on a different topic: mobile/geolocation, open government, the real-time web, “big data,” and finally a hack day in early December.

On the docket Thursday were Matt Kelly of Facebook, John Britton of Twilio, Manu Marks of Google, and John Keefe of WNYC. Kelly presented Facebook Places; Britton gave one of his now New York-famous live demos of the Twilio API; Marks dove deep into the various flavors of the Google Maps API; Keefe — the only non-programmer of the bunch — discussed lessons learned from a community engagement project with The Takeaway.

Building community around an API

An API, or application programming interface, allows applications to easily communicate with one another. For example, any iPhone or Android application that pulls information from a web-based database is most likely it through an API. If you search local restaurants through Yelp, your location and query are passed to Yelp and results given in return. For any company with an API, like the three at TimesOpen, the challenge is to convince developers they should spend their time innovating on top of your platform. Strategically, when there’s an entire ecosystem living on top of your platform, your platform then becomes indispensable and valuable.

What’s most fascinating to me, however, are the approaches each company is taking to build a community around its API. The community is the most important key to the success of an API, a major source of innovation. One of the keys to Twitter’s explosive growth has been its API; rather than depending on its own developers for all new innovation, Twitter inadvertently created an entire ecosystem of value on top of their platform.

Let’s contrast Facebook and Twilio, for example. Facebook hopes Places, launched in mid August, will become the definitive platform for all location data. Interoperability can happen, but it should happen over Facebook’s infrastructure. Facebook envisions a future where, in addition to showing you where your friends are in real time, Places will also offer historical social context to location. Remember the trip through South America your friend was telling you about? Now you don’t have to, all of the relevant information is accessible through Places.

At the moment, though, Facebook’s only public location API is read-only. It can give a developer a single check-in, all check-ins for a given user, or check-in data for a given location. They have a closed beta for the write API with no definitive timeline for opening it publicly. Expanded access to the API is done through partnerships reserved for the select few.

Twilio’s demo power

Twilio, on the other hand, is a cloud-based telephony company which offers voice and SMS functionality as a service, and whose business depends wholly on extensive use of its API. Developer evangelist John Britton made a splash at the NY Tech Meetup when, in front of hundreds, he wrote a program and did a live demo that elegantly communicated the full scope of what their product offers. On Thursday, he impressed again: Using the Twilio API, he procured a phone number, and had everyone in the audience dial into it. When connected, callers were added to one of three conference rooms. Dialing into the party line also meant your phone number was logged, and the application could then follow up by calling you back. All of this was done with close to a dozen lines of code.

At TimesOpen, Britton stressed API providers need to keep a keen ear to their community. Community members often have ideas for how you can improve your service to solve the intermediate problems they have. For instance, up until a week ago, Twilio didn’t have the functionality to block phone numbers from repeatedly dialing in. For one company using the platform, the absence of this feature became a significant financial liability. Once rolled out, the feature made Twilio much more valuable of a service because the company could more closely tailor it to their needs. To make experimentation even easier, Twilio also has an open source product called OpenVBX and brings together its community with regular meetups.

Facebook already has the scale and the social graph to make any new API it produces a player. But for wooing the hackers — at least when you’re a small and growing platform — open and inclusive seems to win out over closed and exclusive.

American Journalism Review
Investigative reporter Christopher Carey says he "did a lot of soul searching" before teaming up with Mark Cuban (left) and accepting his unconventional short-selling idea. But four years later, "based on what we've done this far and what's happened in journalism, I really have no qualms about this arrangement." || Posted in 2006: Dozens want to write for Sharesleuth.com.

Springfield State Journal-Register
Bruce Rushton had just finished covering a murder trial for the Springfield (Ill.) State Journal-Register when he was pulled over outside the courthouse and charged with driving with a suspended license and disregarding a stop sign. At issue, says the reporter's lawyer, is how the National Crime Information Center database was used to check Rushton's driving record before the traffic stop.

Editor & Publisher
"The urgent need is for publishers to find a way to have the same direct relationship with their online readers as they have had in print, which is one reason there is such interest in the online subscription model," says Journalism Online's Gordon Crovitz. He tells Shawn Moynihan that "publishers need to turn technology into an enabler, not an enemy."

[Every Friday, Mark Coddington sums up the week’s top stories about the future of news and the debates that grew up around them. —Josh]

Cuts and big changes for two papers: In the past week, two American newspapers have announced major reorganizations that, depending on who you read, were either cold corporate downsizing or fresh attempts at journalism innovation. First, late last week, Gannett’s USA Today announced that it would undergo the most sweeping change in its 28-year history, transforming “into a multi-media company” as opposed to a newspaper — and laying off 130 of its 1,500 employees in the process. The Associated Press and paidContent have pretty good explanations of what the changes entail, and thanks to the feisty Gannett Blog, we have the slide presentation Gannett execs made to USA Today’s staff.

Though there are some dots to be connected, those slides are the best illustration of what Gannett is trying to do: Push USA Today further into web content, breaking news and especially mobile content (by far its fastest-growing area) in order to justify a simultaneous move deeper into mobile and online advertising. The paper is hoping to become faster on breaking news, with a web-first mindset, fewer editors, and a strategy that focuses on flooding coverage on breaking stories and then coming back later for deeper features.

Gannett Blog’s Jim Hopkins, a longtime critic of the company, wasn’t thrilled about this move, either, pointing out the lack of newsroom experience in some of its key executives and saying that Gannett touted almost the exact same strategy four years ago, to little effect. He did say a few days later, though, that Gannett’s plans to encourage more collaboration among staffers — by flattening the “silos” of the News, Sports, Money, and Life sections — are long overdue.

News media analyst Ken Doctor was much more charitable, seeing in USA Today’s overhaul echoes of the new “digital first” mentalities at the Journal Register Co. and TBD. The best way to see this, Doctor said, is to “mark another day in which a publisher is acting on the plain truths of the marketplace and of the audiences, and trying to reinvent itself.” Newspaper Death Watch’s Paul Gillin called USA Today’s transformation a bellwether for news organizations and said its harmony between news and advertising is a bitter but necessary pill for traditionalists to swallow. And media consultant Mario Garcia said USA Today’s audience-driven approach is the key to survival in a multimedia environment.

The other newspaper to announce an overhaul was the Deseret News of Salt Lake City, a for-profit paper published by the Mormon Church. The paper is laying off 43 percent of its staff, though you wouldn’t know it from the News’ own article on the changes. In a pair of posts, Ken Doctor looked at the change in philosophy that’s accompanying the cuts — an attempt to become the worldwide Mormon newspaper of sorts, along with pro-am and local news efforts and a news-broadcast collaboration — and liked what he found. News business expert Alan Mutter examined the prospects for a slashed, print-and-broadcast newsroom and came out less optimistic.

A Twitter stunt gone awry: Twitter devotees are used to seeing untrue rumors and scoops occasionally get reported there (as Jeff Goldblum can attest), but this week may have been the first time a false Twitter report was knowingly started by a member of the traditional media as a stunt. Fed up with the more-breathless-than-usual Twitter rumor-reporting that’s been going on in the sports media this summer, Washington Post sports reporter Mike Wise decided to start a false rumor about the length of an NFL quarterback’s suspension to make a point about the unreliability of reporting on Twitter.

The stunt bombed; Wise admitted the hoax an hour later and was suspended for a month by the Post the next day. Such an ill-advised prank isn’t really news in itself, but it did spur a bit of interesting commentary on Twitter and breaking news. Numerous people argued that Wise’s hoax betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Twitter as a news medium — one that many others probably share. Even after the episode, Wise maintained that it showed that nobody checks facts or sourcing on breaking stories on Twitter.

Quite a few observers disagreed for a variety of reasons. Barry Petchesky of Gawker’s sports blog Deadspin said the whole incident actually disproved Wise’s thesis: The false story didn’t gain much traction, and the media outlets that did report the story credited Wise until it could be confirmed independently, just the way the system is supposed to work.

But the primary objection was that, as Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan, Slate’s Tom Scocca, and several others all argued, to the extent that Wise was trusted, it was because of the credibility that people give to The Washington Post — a traditional news organization — rather than Twitter itself. As TBD’s Steve Buttry pointed out, people would have run with this story if Wise had planted it in the Post itself or on its website; what makes Twitter any different? DCist’s Aaron Morrissey put the point well: Wise falsely “assumed that there weren’t levels of authenticity to Twitter, which, just like any other social construct on Earth, features some people who are reputable concerning whatever and others who aren’t.”

Rupert’s paywall runs into obstacles: Two months after the online paywall went up at Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London, The Independent (a competitor of The Times) reported this week that with a vastly reduced audience to sell to, advertisers are fleeing the site. In the article, various British news industry analysts also said The Times is killing its online brand and not adding any of the sort of value that’s necessary to justify charging for news. Stateside, too, Lost Remote’s Steve Safran saw the news as “mounting evidence that putting up a paywall is bad for business.”

It should be noted, though, that according to those analysts, The Times’ paywall is “more about gathering consumer information than selling content” — News Corp.’s primary intent may be getting detailed, personalized information on Times readers and using it to sell them other products within its media empire, including its BSkyB satellite TV. Francois Nel ran some possible numbers and determined that even with its relatively small audience (15,000 subscribers, plus day-pass users), News Corp. could be making more money with its paywall than without.

On the other hand, a new study reported by paidContent estimated that online subscribers to The Times and Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal are worth only a quarter of their print counterparts. Getting rid of the print product, the study posited, wouldn’t even make up for the loss of income from those subscribers. The Press Gazette’s Dominic Ponsford detailed more of the research firm’s report — a rather depressing one for newspaper execs.

Google and the AP play nice: A quiet news development worth noting: Google and The Associated Press renewed their licensing agreement that allows Google (including, especially, Google News) to host AP content. The deal was announced on Google’s side via a one-paragraph post, and on the AP’s side through a short press release, and then a much more extensive article by its technology writer Michael Liedtke. The extension is significant because the two sides have had a consistently fractious relationship — their first agreement began in 2006 after the AP threatened to sue Google for aggregating its articles, AP executives have criticized news aggregators for misappropriating content, and the AP’s material briefly stopped appearing on Google News late last year.

The Lab’s Megan Garber noted that this new agreement might go beyond another truce and mark a change in the way the companies relate: “Us-versus-them becoming let’s-work-together.” Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan provided plenty of background, surmising that AP has learned its lesson that Google News can live on just fine without them.

Reading roundup: This week was an especially rich one for all sorts of web-journalism punditry. Here’s a sampling:

— The American Journalism Review’s Barb Palser tried to throw some cold water on the hyperlocal news movement, using some Pew stats to argue that people don’t go online for neighborhood news as much as we might think. (That use of statistics led to a frustrated response by Michele McLellan.) And the Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles added his skepticism to the discussion surrounding Patch and large-scale hyperlocal news.

— NYU j-prof Jay Rosen can be a polarizing figure, but there are few media observers who are better at pulling thoughtful insights out of the often mystifying world that is journalism-in-transition. We got three particularly thought-provoking tidbits from him this week: A sharp interview with The Economist about the American press; a lecture at a French j-school about the changing dynamic between “the audience” and “the public,” with tips for new students; and a video clip from the Journal Register Co.’s ideaLab on news production and innovation.

— We spent some time this summer talking about the merits (and drawbacks) of links, so consider this a worthy addendum: Scott Rosenberg, who recently chronicled the history of blogging, issued a three-part defense of the link this week. A great examination of one of the fundamental features of the web.

— Finally, two cool reads, one practical and the other theoretical. The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal listed five lessons from the publication of Longshot, the hyperspeed-produced magazine formerly known as 48HRS, and here at the Lab, Cornell scholar Joshua Braun talked about the way TV news organizations maintain the “stage management” of broadcast in their online efforts. “They continue to control what remains backstage and what goes front-stage,” he told Megan Garber in a Q&A, giving comment moderation as one example. “That’s not unique to the news, either. But it’s an interesting preservation of the way the media’s worked for a long time.”

American Journalism Review
Investigative reporting teams are shrinking or, more often, disappearing altogether, notes Mary Walton. "However admirable their efforts, it is hard to see the foundation-funded groups making up for the loss of so many watchdog reporters from mainstream news jobs any time soon." || Earlier: Investigative reporting symposium was "flat-out inspiring."
> Innovative startups are covering state government

Memo from the AP's standards editor

From: Kent, Tom
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2010 5:30 PM
Subject: Standards Center guidance: The situation in Iraq

Colleagues,

Many AP staffers are producing content that refers to the situation in Iraq. It might be a local story about Iraq veterans, an international diplomatic story that mentions the Iraqi conflict or coverage on the ground in Iraq itself.

Whatever the subject, we should be correct and consistent in our description of what the situation in Iraq is. This guidance summarizes the situation and suggests wording to use and avoid.

To begin with, combat in Iraq is not over, and we should not uncritically repeat suggestions that it is, even if they come from senior officials. The situation on the ground in Iraq is no different today than it has been for some months. Iraqi security forces are still fighting Sunni and al-Qaida insurgents. Many Iraqis remain very concerned for their country's future despite a dramatic improvement in security, the economy and living conditions in many areas.

As for U.S. involvement, it also goes too far to say that the U.S. part in the conflict in Iraq is over. President Obama said Monday night that "the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility for the security of their country."

However, 50,000 American troops remain in country. Our own reporting on the ground confirms that some of these troops, especially some 4,500 special operations forces, continue to be directly engaged in military operations. These troops are accompanying Iraqi soldiers into battle with militant groups and may well fire and be fired on.

In addition, although administration spokesmen say we are now at the tail end of American involvement and all troops will be gone by the end of 2011, there is no guarantee that this will be the case.

Our stories about Iraq should make clear that U.S. troops remain involved in combat operations alongside Iraqi forces, although U.S. officials say the American combat mission has formally ended. We can also say the United States has ended its major combat role in Iraq, or that it has transferred military authority to Iraqi forces. We can add that beyond U.S. boots on the ground, Iraq is expected to need U.S. air power and other military support for years to control its own air space and to deter possible attack from abroad.

Unless there is balancing language, our content should not refer to the end of combat in Iraq, or the end of U.S. military involvement. Nor should it say flat-out (since we can't predict the future) that the United States is at the end of its military role.

Tom

Newsweek
Xinhua may be the future of news for one big reason: cost. "The former 'Red China News Agency' doesn't need to worry about the inconvenience of turning a profit," write Isaac Stone Fish and Tony Dokoupil. "As a result, it might do for news what Chinas state-run factories have done for tawdry baubles and cheap clothes: take something that has become a commodity and foist it onto the world far more cheaply than anyone else can."

MinnPost.com | City Pages
City Pages reported this week that the 20-year-old son (at left) of GOP gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer pleaded guilty to underage drinking in July. (The paper also ran Facebook photos of his partying.) AP knew of the citation, but didn't report it. "I don't see the younger Emmer as a public figure at this point," says AP Minnesota news editor Doug Glass. "The arrest was not a DWI arrest; if it had been, we would have been more likely to run it given his father's [DWI] history."

AP - The first week of the final season of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" will include a selection for Oprah's Book Club.

AP - Sara Paretsky's latest installment in her series about feisty, female private detective V.I. Warshawski opens with the heroine outside a Chicago nightclub, the bloody body of a woman who was just shot to death in her arms.

As the fallout over Google’s net neutrality u-turn continues, more GBS watchers are finding common threads between how the online advertising giant approached its business strategy around books and its decision to cut a deal with Verizon, aka Verooglenet.

Earlier this week, we highlighted Prof. James Grimmelman’s brief but pointed “open letter” to Google.  Today, we are reading with interest Andrew Albanese’s aptly titled article This is Why It’s Hard to Trust Google at Publishers Weekly, who’s been covering the ups and downs of the GBS for quite a while now.  His view is summed up as follows:

“In covering the Google Books settlement I’ve always been struck by how many people seem to deeply distrust Google.  This week, the company gave those critics new ammunition.”

As a Google Book settlement “dis-truster,” we see his point and agree that a community of opposition beyond authors, the Department of Justice and the OBA are beginning to take notice.  Albanese closes the piece this way:

“It’s hard to be upset at corporations for acting like corporations, and what ultimately happens with net neutrality is still in the hands of government. But at the same time, wasn’t Google supposed to be different? Hasn’t Google has pretty much traded on the public’s faith? The Google Book Settlement, for example, was sold almost like a public works project. Yet throughout the settlement debate, critics and opponents of the deal have questioned just how deep Google’s commitment to the public runs. This kind of about-face from Google on net neutrality, and make no mistake, despite Schmidt’s support for what he calls a “public” Internet, this is a major shift, will only add fuel to the fire.

I can already hear the questions: Will the Google books database always be carried on the “public Internet?” Will an upgraded version of the GBS database be offered to premium customers, giving libraries in the well-funded suburbs yet another advantage over libraries in inner cities? If you thought the questions were complex enough for one Internet, Google is now talking about creating another.”

These are serious and even new issues to explore.  While looking at the Verooglenet u-turn’s implications on the GBS debate, a recent press release on the subject caught our eye.  The folks over at the New America Foundation – who have steadfastly promoted the proposed book settlement – had this to say about the Google-Verizon deal soon after media reports began leaking out last week:

“During the 19th century a handful of wealthy industrialists dominated steel, oil refining and railroads; striking agreements to receive favorable terms for the carriage of their goods, while subjecting farmers and competitors to unreasonable and excessive charges.

Now, over a century later, history is in danger of repeating itself. After weeks of closed-door meetings sanctioned by the Federal Communication Commission, two of the largest corporations in the communications industry have reportedly negotiated an agreement on network neutrality. Though details of the agreement are not available, its terms are immaterial. It should not be the policy of the FCC to allow the largest companies to write the regulations that will determine the future of the Internet.”

Of course, one of the unnamed corporations is Google – whose CEO Eric Schmidt sits on the Board of the New America Foundation.  We found their allegory to the robber barrons of old reminiscent of the laying out our case against the books settlement:

“In 1871, three powerful railroads secretly approached John D. Rockefeller, proposing an audacious scheme.  The railroads wanted Rockefeller to transport oil over their lines.  More than that, the railroads needed to suppress cutthroat competition among themselves, to raise prices to customers and to protect their markets against new competitive innovations. So the railroads secretly proposed that Rockefeller act as their “evener,” to ensure a stable market division among them.  Through Rockefeller, the three railroads consolidated their market positions and insulated themselves from the rigors of competition.

In aid of their own business interests, the railroads dramatically increased Rockefeller’s market power.  The railroads secretly proposed rate increases to Rockefeller’s competitors and provided hidden rebates to Rockefeller’s own company, making Rockefeller “all but omnipotent in oil refining,” according to one biographer.  Rockefeller seized the opportunity.  At the time he was only one of many competitors in the oil refining market.  But he saw that he could dramatically improve his own competitive position by helping to suppress competition in the rail industry.  …

…The parties before this Court have created in the Google Books Settlement their own modern day version of the South Improvement Company.  Google and the plaintiff publishers secretly negotiated for 29 months to produce a horizontal price fixing combination, effected and reinforced by a digital book distribution monopoly.  Their guile has cleared much of the field in the digital book distribution, shielding Google from meaningful competition.”

It’s quite something when the Google-backed New America Foundation is equating Google with Standard Oil in the same way we did in our brief.  As Albanese writes, “…the company gave those critics new ammunition.”  But the real ammunition, as GBS objectors have known all along, is the truth.

In this age of undead Bennets and robo-Karenina, a different kind of mash-up is on the literary horizon: cross-vertical social media. Startups like GetGlue, LivingSocial, and Blippr are all-in-one social media hubs for a user’s complete entertainment discussion needs: books, films, TV shows, music, even beer and wine. Cross-vertical referrals match books with films or music.

One possible effect of the growing popularity of these sites is an opportunity for book marketers to more easily reach potential readers who aren’t frequent bookstore browsers, an often elusive and expensive crowd to access.

“One of the challenges of buying a table at Barnes & Noble is that you are able to tap into people who are interested in books, but not tap into people who are interested in cinema,” says Ami Greko, GetGlue’s Director of Business Management (and previously Digital Marketing Manager at Macmillan).

GetGlue, which has 500,000 users, allows marketers to cherry-pick the taste profiles of the people they want to reach, said Greko. She cited a recent campaign by Scribner for Chuck Klosterman’s rock chronicle Eating the Dinosaur that targeted people who favorited songs from the band Guns N’ Roses.

“We got these great responses from people who said, ‘I’ve never heard of this writer before, but if he’s writing about Guns N’ Roses, I want to read more,’” she said.

GetGlue currently has partnerships with Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and Hachette.

GetGlue is also riffing on FourSquare’s “badges,” offering profile “stickers,” small, branded graphics that users can earn for their devotion to a particular show or author. “There’s an inherent human element in wanting to gain recognition or earn an achievement,” VP of Business Development Fraser Kelton said. “It taps into ego, it taps into pride, and frankly it’s also fun.”

Amazon’s “Customers Also Bought” referral feature doesn’t offer much help to readers looking for their next literary fix, said Greko. “The challenge with Amazon is that you don’t know what this computer knows about you,” Greko said. In contrast, GetGlue’s recommendation engine pulls from what Greko describes as “the full taste profile”—encompassing a user’s favorite movies, books, shows, and music—and provides suggestions that include justifications for why the item was referred to the user. Perhaps in response to this challenge, Amazon recently announced apartnership with Facebook, and can now offer recommendations to users based on information from their Facebook profiles.

But not everyone believes that breaking down verticals is a savvy move. For example, a new entry in vertical social media, Pocket Tales aims to get kids (and parents) involved in sharing reading experiences by making reading into a game, complete with points and quizzes. And Goodreads.com, which has over 3.5 million registered users, isn’t interested in becoming “all things to all people,” according to its Community Manager, Patrick Brown. Brown says Goodreads users enjoy the very specific purpose that the site serves. “They like that it’s a site where they don’t have to deal with anything else,” he said. “They don’t want to have a discussion about what the latest movie is.”

Brown added that all-encompassing social media sites don’t offer the depth of reviews or interactivity that specialized sites do. “Rather than really going deep and having some kind of actual substantial conversation, it’s kind of a surface glossing,” Brown said. In contrast, he said, Goodreads allows for users to find reviews of even obscure books and contact those reviewers for more information and in-depth discussions.

Brown added that previous ideas for expansion that were floated to Goodreads users, like sections on movie adaptations, were not received well. “A lot of people are readers only; those people feel like they have a home with us,” he said. “If we became all things to all people, those people would feel that we were losing them.”

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Searchlight, a St. Vincent and the Grenadines weekly, installed the SCOOP publishing system in mid April and used it in production after seven days of set-up and training while installer Chris Stival was still on site, according to Software Consulting Services, which cited the staff's cooperation and weekend training sessions.

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Mary Junck, chairman and CEO of Lee Enterprises was appoined to the board of directors of the Newspaper Association of America by NAA Chairman Mark G. Contreras, senior vice president/newspapers of The E.W. Scripps Company.