The Evening Paper - Media, Culture and the Modern Condition Modern Fire Studios

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James Brown on the Netflix show Inventing Anna as allegory for voting.
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Maury Povich's daytime talk show will end after three decades.
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Another dark day for one of the largest newspaper publishers in the country.
 
Alden Global Capital is buying Tribune …… a publishing company whose papers include The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel, The New York Daily News, among others. 
 
The deal is valued at six hundred thirty million dollars
 
Why all the gloom? It’s because of who the buyer is. The hedge fund’s nickname is the destroyer of newspapers. And last year Vanity Fair called Alden the “hedge fund vampire that bleeds newspapers dry.” CNN recently called it a “corporate strip miner”
 
Alden owns about 200 newspapers and often slashes newsroom budgets typically by cutting crucial reporters and editors.
 
And they’ve been aggressively expanding. In the last two years, the hedge fund attempted —— and failed to buy America’s largest newspaper chain, Gannett, and the McClatchy chain
 
A post on News Guild dot org… the largest newspaper labor group…. calls the sale —- “a short-sighted view of the value of the company, and an utter disregard for the value of quality news coverage.”
 
CNN quotes Alden’s president Heath Freeman who says that's not so...
 
"The purchase of Tribune reaffirms our commitment to the newspaper industry, and our focus on getting publications to a place where they can operate sustainably over the long term."
 
And if Alden’s playbook for what it calls long teen success is the same... waves of layoffs are to come. Employees and former employees of alden newspapers say those layoffs happen at twice the rate of other newspapers. And the company gains twice the profit … of course. 
 
All this speeds up the slow death of local papers in communities across the country.
 
A blow that tough to calculate until it’s gone and rarely replaced.
 
I’m James Brown and I good you bid night

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Baseball Fans don’t have a strong opinion on expanding its postseason.
 
26 percent of fans told the morning consult that they want to keep this year's 16 team format. the league expanded their format because the regular season was shortened by labor strife abd the covid-19 pandemic
 
28 percent of fans that they wanna return to its typical ten team structure. They’ve had it since 2012.
 
More than a third of fans say they have no opinion on it. 
 
Commissioner Rob Manfred and media partner ESPN have expressed interest in keeping a larger playoff field.  But Manfred says he doesn’t expect to keep 16 teams.

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Nintendo Switch has surged during the pandemic.  
 
The company said it expects to sell 24 million of them by March 2021, up from a forecast of 19 million. Nintendo also hiked its operating profit forecast by 50% to $4.3 billion.
 
A CNBC report says a new version of Animal Crossing brought new consumers to the Switch in its fourth year. 
 
Sony and Microsoft will release next-generation consoles next week, adding to competition for the Switch.

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