The New York Times is creating a new department called Food to be edited by former national editor and restaurant critic Sam Sifton.

 

The department will include the dining section and the new NYT Cooking site and app that Sifton has been working on, which is scheduled to debut in the fall. Dining editor Susan Edgerley will be Sifton's deputy. 

 

"The new department will produce the weekly print and digital report, as well as the content that will appear on the Cooking app," executive editor Dean Baquet wrote in a staff memo announcing the news.

 

Click here to read the text of the full memo. 

Brian Corcoran has been appointed as interim publisher at The Post-Star, replacing Rick Emanuel, who has left to become a group publisher at GateHouse Media.

Corcoran, 44, has been employed at The Post-Star as controller since 2007 and took on the additional role as operations director in 2011.

 

Prior to joining the paper, Corcoran was controller at Champlain Stone Ltd. in Warrensburg and a financial analyst at the General Electric Research Center in Niskayuna.

 

He holds a bachelor's degree in business administration from Le Moyne College and a MBA in accounting from Union College.

 

Corcoran is also currently president of the board of directors at the Franklin Community Center in Saratoga Springs and is board treasurer for the Rotary Club of Glens Falls. He also serves on the finance and budget committees for the Family YMCA of Glens Falls and the Tri-County United Way. 

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism has named Dr. Carrie Brown to head the school's proposed new M.A. in Social Journalism, Dean Sarah Bartlett announced yesterday.

 

The program, which will prepare graduates to become leaders in community journalism in the age of social media, plans to begin in January, pending New York State approval. Development of the new Social Journalism program is being underwritten by investor, philanthropist, and author Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn and a partner at the leading venture-capital firm Greylock Partners, with matching funds from the Knight Foundation. More 

Like the sale of the Washington Post this time last year, the merger of E.W. Scripps and Journal Communications, announced last night, and their reorganization into separate print and broadcast companies came as a jaw-dropping surprise.

But the morning after, the complicated transaction makes perfect sense.

• Local broadcasting is seeing a wave of consolidations. The business is healthy, and getting bigger provides station groups more leverage negotiating retransmission fees with cable providers. That has become a significant new source of revenue growth as political and automotive advertising remain strong.
• Financially squeezed newspapers drag down the share price of companies with prospering TV, cable and digital divisions. The spinoff of Tribune Publishing scheduled next week and the division of News Corp a year ago give the remaining parent television and entertainment companies investment wind at their back.
• At the same time, newspaper groups theoretically do better with management whose exclusive focus is on the particular challenges of that industry. Otherwise, they can end up a neglected problem child, getting less capital allocation and management attention, in a company with several financially stronger divisions.

My colleague Al Tompkins has separately rounded up a list of broadcast mergers and print spinoffs, and he also documents the stock price kick broadcast/digital companies have experienced.  More 

 

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