I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Last week we wrote about the bleak financial picture for New Mexico come January — a possible $1 billion shortfall, and many tough, tough decisions still to come. Well, the Land of Enchantment isn’t the only state to face a world of hurt when state lawmakers convene next year to cobble together a budget for the year that starts July 1. Kentucky confronts a similarly scary scenario, the Louisville Courier Journal reports.
In our part of the world, Arizona’s finances are so bad that it is contemplating putting its prisons into private hands, reports the New York Times. “State officials will soon seek bids from private companies for nine of the state’s 10 prison complexes that house roughly 40,000 inmates, including the 127 here on death row,” the paper reports. “It is the first effort by a state to put its entire prison system under private control.”
A non-budget-related story out of Wisconsin shows how a movement beginning there aims to give the state schools superintendent ‘super duper powers’ to intervene in failing schools, including suggesting curriculum changes. The reason: Wisconsin wants to compete better for federal education grants, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
Rhode Island, meanwhile, may be the first state to try to track swine flu through electronic data, the Associated Press reports.
Newspaper web sites are not holding onto ad dollars, even as Internet advertising is creeping back in a sour economy. More and more advertisers may plan big splashes for the big newspaper sites — Washingtonpost.com, nytimes.com and the Wall Street Journal — but they are more often spreading dollars to Internet-based ad exchanges like Advertising.com from AOL and DoubleClick Ad Exchange from Google, which dominate the buying and selling of extra space, the New York Times reports.
Are more newspapers beginning to move their websites toward the pay model? Advertising Age takes a stab at that issue, and answers with ‘Well, maybe.’
And after the recession, what’s next for newspapers. Editor & Publisher ponders that question in a thoughtful piece quoting people who get paid to think about such things.
