Monday squibs

Still ailing; still surfing:

• Strib publisher tries to reassure the troops. The publisher of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, in a memo to employees, says yesterday’s New York Post report that the newspaper is on the verge of bankruptcy isn’t true.
• Charlotte Observer offers buyouts, halts telemarketing. Only telemarketing positions that deal with retention and collection are being saved. Out go those trying to sell new subscriptions, I presume. The Observer is also offering buyouts to “a limited number” of employees “in a number of workgroups” as they streamline and consolidate jobs.
• Creative clones the Flip? It appears there’s a new player on the $100, point-and-shoot video scene.
• Top news sites in Canada for March. Alfred Hermida provides the numbers, which show that the most-visited Canadian-operated site is number six on the list, with traffic almost one-third of the list-leading Google.
• The Wealthiest Colleges Should Acquire ‘The New York Times.’ From Lee Smith: “Higher-education institutions and newspapers have an essential bond — a dedication to the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge — that makes them mutually dependent. ~snip~ Now it’s time for higher education, specifically the nation’s wealthiest institutions, to come to the aid of newspapers.”
• Publisher Tested the Waters Online, Then Dove In. Lots of pointage to this NYT article about a major tech publisher pulls the plug on print for one of its big titles and heads into an online future, where they are making more money. A couple of interesting notes: the staff is now half the size, and the publisher is holding onto the presses for some finely-targetted, heavily-read titles. See also Mathew Ingram and Paul Conley.
• The ‘well hole looking up’ problem. Doug Fisher: “What if all the words written on on the journalism and new-media blogs about how the future is digital and everything needs to be “Web first” and we need to be totally rethinking the way we write, report and present news — well, what if it was wrong?” Great post, well worth reading and a lot of thought.
• Fringe realists seek to remake media. Tom Abate reports from the Journalism That Matters conference with some deep thoughts on independent media and remaking journalism. I’ll be keeping this one in the bookmarks for a while.