Wall Street Journal Wine Club

With newspapers nervous about their impending doom, a lot of cutbacks are being made across the country. More news from the wire, smaller sub-sections (such as travel), and more blogging efforts are all results of the struggling business.

Wall Street Journal has come up with a creative new way to subsidize revenue; they're starting a WSJ wine club. It's one of those wine-of-the-month clubs as found in SkyMall, except WSJ runs it, kind of. They're teaming up with Direct Wines, and other than loaning their name the collaboration isn't clear.

Regardless, if you want to support the WSJ and get something out of it, this seems pretty viable. And hey, maybe it's about time those economic commentators put their money where their mouths are and diversified their portfolios! On the other hand, how many people want to sign up for a wine of the month club during this dire economic downturn?

Read the WSJ-bashing NYT artice here (spoiler: author implies that WSJ readers aren't "effete" enough for wine): (NYT)

Perfect Pitch: How to be a Journalist's Best Friend

Even a "Cadillac pitch" the first time around doesn't work in this new changing age of print media. Yes, we all know print media is slowly deteriorating; calls to travel reporters and those assigned to tech beats confirm this. Perhaps a business reporter will have some decency and open up your e-mail, but you might want to think about using a pitch as a follow-up to an introduction.

Reporters have about five seconds to open an e-mail and decide from the lead if it's worth a read:

• Your subject line is the first thing a reporter will see (unless of course you decided to bcc those 500 people on your pitch list the same one-size-fits-all message that ends up in SPAM), so make it a praise to their most recent article. It's as simple as "Your CNN.com article, from XXX." Why does this work? Reporters love to hear about how great their stories are.
  
• There you have it--- that's your pitch. Next time, they will recognize you as someone who knows them, especially if you end your initial contact with "I'll keep an eye on your byline."

They are putty in your hands...

LA Times Goes Commercial

After making tons of cuts and struggling to survive, the LA Times has given up and brought in a TV exec. With no newspaper experience, Eddy W. Hartstein is going to figure out what it takes to keep this paper in tact. We hope he can get it done without sacrificing content that this pub has had in the past. (NYT)

Print Media: Decay Brings Embitterment

Our erudite friends over at the Times have sort of, kind of congratulated those lowbrow goons at the Enquirer. Mr. Carr suggests that there may be some value in a pluralistic journalist society; perhaps the methods at the Enquirer aren’t entirely without value. A few weeks ago this op-ed would have been a nice gesture. However, with the advent of the Edwards affair and the embarrassing lag between coverage on blogs and coverage in major media, the piece comes off as an obnoxious attempt at turning apology into a chance for condescension.

RIPs

The Austin American Statesman is up for sale, along with Daytona Beach News-Journal. Tribune just sold Newsday. NJ Star Ledger and Trenton Times are under threat to be sold.

What does it mean? More death of print media, call me psychic if you will. For us, headaches may be induced by updating contact lists. And maybe more news from odious wires, which would mean less pitching, and less diversity of news stories.

Goodbye, hard-hitting investigative journalists. Hello, bloggers.