The Chicago Tribune company, which also owns the Los Angeles Times,  is on the verge of bankruptcy. In hock to a Lebanese-Mexican billionaire, the New York Times is trying desperately to stay afloat, laying off staff even as it pays its executives exorbitant salaries while mulling the option going behind a pay wall while still employing Frank Rich.

Times, in other words, are tough in the formerly lucrative racket of Joseph Pulitzer, Col. McCormick and William Randolph Hearst:

Now the Philadelphia papers, the Inquirer and the Daily News, are on the brink as well.  They’ve declared bankruptcy and are battling now to stay afloat. Here’s Brian Tierney, CEO of the company that owns them both, discussing their bleak future: (more…)

Should the National Enquirer get the Pulitzer Prize for its multi-year investigation of the John Edwards affair, scandal and cover-up? That’s a question that’s been asked lately: in some cases, at the same Mainstream Media papers which participated in the news blackout of the Enquirer’s Edwards’ coverage.

Edwards, who had been Sen. John Kerry’s running mate in 2004, was one of the front-runners at the time the Enquirer broke the second installment of the story on December 18, 2007.

The Enquirer released an abundance of easily-verifiable information at that time: Rielle Hunter, a former Edwards campaign worker, was pregnant with what the Enquirer reported was Edwards’ love child; she had been moved within five miles of the Edwards campaign headquarters in Chapel Hill, NC; Hunter was living an exclusive gated community, a few houses down the street from Edwards’ former Director of Finance, Andrew Young; and, she was driving around in a BMW registered to Young.  Add all this to the fact that information about Hunter had disappeared from the Internet and other publicly-searchable databases and the MSM was handed a great story. (more…)