Community Newspaper Holdings, Inc., a leading publisher of local newspapers and websites, has announced the opening of a Washington, D.C., bureau to serve its markets in 23 states.
Kery Murakami, an accomplished investigative and politics reporter, was appointed the bureau chief, effective Nov. 30.
Bill Ketter, CNHI's senior vice president of news, said Murakami will provide localized coverage and analysis of federal government issues affecting the cities and towns where the company owns and operates news outlets.
"What happens in Washington affects readers across the CNHI landscape," said Ketter. "The Washington bureau will drill down into issues and policies that matter to our markets, and also diligently scrutinize the activities of the congressmen and senators who represent those markets."
Ketter said the Washington bureau will work closely with CNHI statehouse reporters in covering the interaction between the federal and state governments. "The result will be more original and helpful news for readers on the impact of government on their everyday lives," he said.
Murakami said he's excited about "working for a news organization that's adding Washington coverage at a time when most others are scaling back or eliminating it." More
Longtime Lee Enterprises CEO Mary E. Junck is leaving that job to become executive chairman, the company announced Thursday. She will be succeeded by Kevin Mobray, chief operating officer and a former publisher of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Lee's largest newspaper.
Junck, 68, joined Lee in 1999, and became CEO in 2001. She has served as board chairman of The Associated Press and as a director of the Newspaper Association of America.
The changes will take place in February 2016.
Based in Davenport, Iowa, the publicly-traded Lee has 46 daily papers, most of them mid-sized and concentrated in the West and Midwest. It acquired Pulitzer Inc with the larger Post-Dispatch and Arizona Daily Star in Tucson for roughly $1.5 billion in 2005.
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Click here for a link to Lee Enterprises press release of the leadership transition.
Newspaper Prizes and Awards:
Toner Prize
The Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting recognizes the best national or local political reporting in any medium or on any platform-print, broadcast or online. Awarded annually by Syracuse University's
To enter your 2015 coverage, please go to the entry form.
The Toner Prize recognizes outstanding political reporting in a tribute to alumna Robin Toner '76, the late national political correspondent for The New York Times. Entries will be judged on how well they reflect the high standards and depth of reporting that marked Toner's work. In particular, the judges will look for how well the entries:
Illuminate the electoral process or
reveal the politics of policy and
engage the public in democracy.
Entries must be fact-based reporting, not commentary. Single articles, series or a body of work are eligible. Winners are honored each spring at an award ceremony.
Considering most media companies intend their websites to serve a large audience of readers, it's surprising that we're at the dawn of 2016 and still dealing with issues like bad design, difficult readability and a frustrating lack of usability.
Unfortunate as it is, news organizations have become synonymous with bad Web design. Most TV news stations have templates filled with more wingdings than a Geocities website circa 1996. Newspapers don't do much better, packing their stories with so many callbacks, videos and related links that at times is seems they want readers anywhere except the story they've chosen to read.
It's even worse on mobile, where a smaller screen leads to a diminishing financial return, causing publishers to load their pages with pop-ups, fly-outs and video ads that often inhibit the readers ability to consume a story.
"Even today I think our pages and our experience have such a close lineage to print," said Marc Lavallee, the editor of interactive news at The New York Times. "There's this tendency just to put a bunch of (stuff) on the page."
Lost in the great chase of buzz words like "engagement" is the core mission of all media companies (and the hoards of storytellers they employ): How to get readers to retain the knowledge they've learned from reading their stories. More
Walter Robinson was playing to the crowd. Now famous as the investigative editor played by Michael Keaton in the movie "Spotlight," Mr. Robinson and other real-life Boston Globe journalists were in Lower Manhattan a few weeks ago, telling war stories in ProPublica's newsroom, just before the New York film premiere.
Describing a moment in late 2001 as the Globe's Spotlight team reported the priest-pedophilia scandal, Mr. Robinson, known as Robby, recalled seeing something he found strange on a colleague's computer screen: "Lines going one way and lines going another way." What is that? he demanded.
His story gives a tiny picture of what's changed in 14 years. But writ large, it raises serious concerns. Digital tools are a boon to reporting, and digital distribution can make a story go global, but digital-era economics have devastated newspaper staffs.
Now the question is how that crucial work will continue - especially on the local level. The Times and a few other news organizations will endure, and keep doing worthy investigations, but they can't replace local papers' strengths. Those papers have lost nearly half their reporters in recent years. More
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