A former professor on the radio

Steve Prince, who was a really tough film teacher I had at Virginia Tech, was featured on this week’s On The Media, talking about how 9/11 has been handled in movies.

Then he gave host Bob Garfield a C+.

I have an IMDb page

So, it turns out that two of my friends from high school are writers for one of my favorite shows, completely unknown to me. (This is completely awesome, don’t get me wrong.) I participated in theater in middle school and high school, but no longer do creative work. With two other exceptions (both of whom work for non-profit groups trying to influence policy, interestingly), everyone else seems to have kept their hand in creatively, working as photographers, working in theater professionally or doing community theater. Or, you know, actually writing for a successful dramedy. The closest I get to that is listening to Martini Shot on my iPhone.

But there is good news! While it’s not as extensive as Jessica’s or Amy’s, I do have a page at IMDb. The bad news is that it’s for a misspelled version of my name, based on the completely unexpected thank-you credit I got for the original version of World of Warcraft after I left Blizzard. My correctly spelled credits for Warcraft III and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction aren’t in the system.

But just like with discovering that I had a Moby Games profile, I suppose that beggars can’t be choosers.

Now if I could just get a page on Wikipedia …

The return of That Sound

Although it’s occurring under bad circumstances, the best new music (or alternative/modern rock, whatever you want to call it) podcast is back. Dave Cusick’s That Sound Radio podcast is now in catch-up mode, after six months “off” while he worked as a disc jockey.

That means there’s three hours of the best music released over the past six months and change, all ready for the listening:

* Catching Up with That Sound, hour 1
* Catching Up with That Sound, hour 2
* Catching Up with That Sound, hour 3

For those of you — and you know who you are — who haven’t listened to a new artist (or, worse yet, a new song or album) since you graduated college, listen to these three hours of music and be dazzled by how much awesome new stuff has come out in 2009 alone. Some of the songs are even free MP3s at the links above.

Great stuff. Cusick’s too good at what he does to not be snatched back up by the radio industry again soon, so enjoy it while it lasts.

Information wants to get paid

At least one Rhode Island paper seems to be making online content almost exclusively available to subscribers work for it. From Newsweek:

Spooky things began to happen this summer in the yachting mecca of Newport, R.I., shortly after the Newport Daily News hurled caution to the wind and began charging a $345 subscription fee for its online news—$200 more than for the print edition.

First, the phones stopped ringing in the paper’s circulation department. Fewer subscribers were canceling home delivery of the paper, something they had been doing in droves when they knew they could get the same product for free at NewportDailyNews.com. “Those calls have stopped,” William F. Lucey III, assistant publisher and general manager, told NEWSWEEK.

But something even stranger happened: after the Web site put up a pay wall for nearly all its content, readers would brave driving rainstorms to go out and buy the newspaper. Since then, newsstand sales of the Newport Daily News have jumped by 200 copies a day. For a paper with a daily circulation of 13,000, that’s a significant gain, especially since, in an era in which most papers are seeing steep declines in readership, even holding steady is a success; an increase is a triumph.

The paper has what local papers pretty much everywhere have: A monopoly on professionally generated local news. According to the always-reliable Wikipedia, Newport has a median household income of $35,669, so a $345 annual subscription fee — more than what it costs to subscribe to the Economist — certainly would drive folks to the newsstand, and in large numbers, assuming any interest in the local news. (That end of the equation is a different department’s issue, obviously.)

Former Daily Press Hesperia reporter Hillary Borrud now works at a paper in Oregon that does something similar (and is also family-owned, so decisions to throw up a “pay wall” don’t have to be run past a board or stockholders).

I don’t know that pay walls are the solution for what ails the newspaper industry, but they may not be as crazy as many people (including me) once thought they were. It’d be hard to erect one if your coverage area was served by multiple entities — it’s not hard to get lots of Capitol Hill coverage, for instance — but in a community like Newport, that’s not the case.

Freedom Communications to declare bankruptcy

Yes, I’ve heard.

Freedom Communications is expected to file for bankruptcy this week under a plan that will hand the owner of the Orange County Register and 30 other newspapers around the country to its lenders, people briefed on the matter told DealBook.

A filing by Freedom, which could be made as soon as Tuesday, would be the latest by a newspaper publisher as the industry struggles to cope with declining advertising revenue and heavy debt loads. Several big publishers have already declared bankruptcy over the last 12 months, including the Tribune Company and the owner of Philadelphia’s two major papers.

Freedom’s bankruptcy will probably wipe out the 45 percent equity stake held by two big private equity firms, the Blackstone Group and Providence Equity Partners .

That outcome could mirror what is expected in Tribune, whose expected reorganization plan will probably wipe out the equity stake of the billionaire investor Samuel Zell, who took the company private in 2007.

The majority of Freedom is still owned by the Hoiles family, whose patriarch, R. C. Hoiles, founded the company seven decades ago as an outlet for his libertarian philosophy. Freedom took on the investments by Blackstone and Providence nearly six years ago to allow some Hoiles family members to sell their stakes in the company, ending strife within the clan.

No, I don’t know what it’s going to mean. After all, when the Chicago Tribune bought the LA Times, my division at the LA Times Syndicate had a counterpart in Chicago, but we were fewer in number, had more products, more customers, more revenue — and got the axe anyway.

In that same vein, in a newspaper industry that I’ve described before as the dinosaurs arguing about what that meteor that just hit the planet is going to mean for them, the Hesperia Star is a healthy little mammal. Not only are we not losing our collective shirt, we’re growing in revenue. Small newspapers, like the small mammals, are thriving around the country. Unlike, say, coverage of Capitol Hill, there’s just not that many competing sources of news of Main Street.

That said, I felt pretty confident about the prospects of the new media group at the LA Times Syndicate, too, and I ended up being the guy training the folks in Chicago who ultimately closed out our contracts and put bullets in the brains of the products we’d worked so hard to create. So we’ll see.