U.S. Weather Channel for sale in Landmark breakup
Landmark Communications, a U.S. media conglomerate has announced that it is breaking up and selling newspaper, Web sites and Cable TV franchises. The most valuable asset is the cable TV channel, which is being put up for sale and may fetch more than $5 billion, according to a New York Times story. Landmark also owns The Virginian-Pilot newspaper and many other smaller community newspapers.
New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin writes:
"The breakup and sale of Landmark Communications would spell the end of a small but storied fixture in the media landscape . . .The Weather channel Web site (weather.com) is also one of the highest-ranked Web-sites in the U.S. — ranking the 18th largest media site by traffic.
It is unclear how big the appetite will be for the company's remaining newspaper assets, though community newspapers have fared much better than large dailies in recent years."
Landmark's newspaper holdings include The Virginian-Pilot, The News & Record and The Roanoke Times, as well as 50 other community newspapers.
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![Digg](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.editorsweblog.org%2Fnewspaper%2F2008%2F01%2Fus_weather_channel_for_sale_in.php&bodytext= <img width="150" border="0" align="right" alt="weather.png" src="http://www.editorsweblog.org/print_newspapers/weather.png" /> <p> Landmark Communications, a U.S. media conglomerate has announced that it is breaking up and selling newspaper, Web sites and Cable TV franchises. The most valuable asset is the cable TV channel, which is being put up for sale and may fetch more than $5 billion, according to a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/business/media/03weather.html?ref=business" target="_self">New York Times story</a>. Landmark also owns The Virginian-Pilot newspaper and many other smaller community newspapers. </p>&title=U.S. Weather Channel for sale in Landmark breakup){kind=link}
In response to the Pandia article...
What about news/media librarians? Where do they fit in?
Many media organizations have librarians on staff, EXPERTS at information retrieval, to work with reporters and editors in using the open web AS WELL as fee-based databases. In some cases, they also work to develop local databases or databases for specific stories.
In some cases while the content might be "on the web" the newspaper library and librarian might now or source(s) that can produce a better, more accurate, timely, authoritative result in a matter of minutes vs hours.
At the same time, the librarian has knowledge of what open web database (general or vertical) to use.
I recently came across a web site with business information. Specifically, a listing of executives. The information had a CEO listed who has been out of that job for nearly 3 months. Librarians now where to turn for the latest info.
Also, many newspaper libraries place the librarians in the newsroom sitting and working directly next to the the reporters.
Since there is so much conversation in the blogosphere about news coverage and opinion articles in newspapers, perhaps there should be an editorial page employee whose job is to go out and participate in those distributed conversations.
Libraries are on the way out in most media institutes. In the UK, where the level of cuts have been more advanced than in the UK, they are practically done away with (except for perhaps one or two members of staff) as most reporters now just hit the online database of cuts for old stories and/or information.
The problem is that if text is optimised for SEO - and that means sacraficing readability -then people won't want to read it and therefore no-one is going to go and search for it.
Of course I moan that newspapers don't set up RSS tags to follow journalists or topics, so hey...