Newsday sold for $650 million

RIP Newsday.

Once this goes thru, they'll never see another dime from me.

 

NY Observer has solid coverage of how this deal is going down. Badly, as it turns out.

http://www.observer.com/2008/season-hellville-dolans-march-please-no-press

 

May 14, 2008
Sports Business
Dolan’s Conflict of Coverage
By RICHARD SANDOMIR

When there is news in his Cablevision empire, shouldn’t Jim Dolan be there? He is America’s newest newspaper mogul — Cablevision agreed to buy Newsday on Monday — but he was absent Tuesday when his Knicks introduced Mike D’Antoni as their coach.

Now that he is buying Newsday’s ink, I was hoping he would pop in, wearing a fedora with a card saying “Press” tucked into the hat band, schmooze with the Newsday sportswriters in the Wamu Theater’s lobby and tell us how much he loves freedom of the press.

You know, that John Peter Zenger sort of stuff.

Dolan is an unlikely newspaper owner. The best you could say is that he could live without the news media, unless he owns an outlet, like the MSG Network. The worst you could say is that he loathes the news media enough to have promulgated a restrictive policy in 2003 (revealed last month by The Daily News) that outlined the ramifications of unfair and objectionable coverage. More than that, it reeked of institutional paranoia.

One of the “accepted beliefs” in the policy stated: “A company can control media access to its representatives and still generally receive fair coverage from the press.”

If that is a tenet of Dolan’s world view as an owner, how will Dolan the Newsday owner react when his sports staff flays his Knicks or Rangers? Will Dolan the sports mogul kill a column or restrict a columnist’s access if he or she is negative or caustic?

Or will Dolan, the neo-Hearst, temper his other self and let the words flow freely?

“If there is any overt attempt by the Dolans to control coverage, it will demonstrate that this deal is a total failure,” said Howard Schneider, dean of the journalism school at Stony Brook University and a former editor of Newsday. (Full disclosure: he was a boss of mine at Newsday.)

Schneider cautioned that a potential problem rested in whether reporters and editors “self-censor themselves.”

“Do you say to yourself, ‘Am I being unfair?’ or ‘Am I overreacting or underreacting?’ ” he said. “It requires a lot of strong editorial leadership from the top down to say, ‘You write the story as you see it, and we’ll support you.’ ”

•

Perhaps all Dolan wants is a vehicle to cross-promote Cablevision products and he will not dictate the direction of the editorial product. But Dolan is not a man of half-measures or indifference. So Newsday staffers must wonder how a company and a chief executive who have shown hostility to journalism will treat journalists on its payroll.

“We can’t expect special access or special treatment when we cover people who own us,” said Ken Berger, Newsday’s N.B.A. columnist. “And they shouldn’t operate under the presumption that they can influence us.” Johnette Howard, a sports columnist, said that she was “looking for some direction” from the newly opened Dolan School of Journalism.

When the sale was announced, she said, “I asked if we have to drop a line into stories that says, ‘The Knicks, who are owned by Cablevision, which also owns Newsday.’ ”

When reporting on Bruce Ratner, the owner of the Nets, The Times often says that he was a development partner in The Times’s new headquarters building. The newspaper also notes that The New York Times Company owns 17 percent of New England Sports Ventures, the parent company of the Boston Red Sox.

Dolan, who is mostly inaccessible to the news media, gave a brief interview on Monday about Newsday to Cablevision’s News 12. He spoke to no other reporters, including those at Newsday, who took his quotations from an audiotape of his chat.

Charlie Schueler, a spokesman for Cablevision, said simply, “Jim did only one interview yesterday and it was on News 12.” (Which is run by his brother, Patrick.)

“For whatever reason, he didn’t want to speak to us,” said John Mancini, the editor of Newsday. Did he think it was odd? “Different companies have different ways of dealing with the press. No law required him to speak to us. I didn’t take any issue with it.”

Mancini said he was not worried that Dolan, or anyone else brought in by Dolan, will dictate how Knicks or Rangers are covered and thus diminish the paper’s reputation. But he said: “I don’t control the situation beyond the reporting of news. Anything is possible.”

Cablevision said in a statement on Monday that Newsday’s probity would not be imperiled. “We are committed to maintaining Newsday’s journalistic integrity and important position in the marketplace,” said Charles F. Dolan, the company’s chairman.

The Dolans might have acquired Newsday at a propitious time. If a 23-59 team can be on a honeymoon, the Knicks are on it, however briefly, with a coach, D’Antoni, who was hired by a new president, Donnie Walsh, to cleanse the Garden of Isiah Thomas’s toxic waste.

But, as Schneider said: “The first time a columnist takes a shot at the Knicks or Rangers, we’ll see what happens. And you know that’s coming.”

Jim Dolan’s newspaper makeover was a subject of gentle humor by one of his scribes, Neil Best, Newsday’s sports media columnist. He greeted me on William Randolph Dolan’s turf with a smile and seven words: “Welcome to the world’s most famous arena.”

E-mail: sportsbiz@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/sports/basketball/14sandomir.html?_r=1&ref=sports&oref=slogin

 

Wally Matthews and Alan Hahn should polish the ol' resume.