[design_tools] Fear And Loathing In the Newspaper Business ... Somewhere. And Adobe InCopy Too!

1707.

Thanks to the magic that is Google Alerts (what would we do without them, good peoples?), one of mine which is set to "InCopy", I get this from a rather mysterious blog called When I Grow Up (spelling and punctuation as per the author):

So my newspaper is getting sold. I don't know what that means for me. Sadly, nothing. I doubt any company will come in and whisk us out of ignominy and truly make us quality. All the reasons I didn't go to work at construction-company owned newspapers are becoming nonreasons.

It'll mean we may give up incopy because we might not have bought the licenses as a newspaper, but as a chain, or the new Sam Zell will make us buy something he wants us to have. It means we'll be in extra limbo because not only will we be in normal limbo, but we won't know if this will be a place worth working at.

The newspaper business, we hear, is in a state of flux. Locally, our signature daily, The Big O, is inveigling people to accept buyouts and the pretender to be The Second Pape In A One Pape Town™, the Portland Tribune, has not only cut back to only one edition per week (when it debuted it published thrice-weekly) but has lost its inimitable editor, Dwight Jaynes (who wrote the most readable, iconoclastic sports column this side of Canzano). The handwriting, as they say, is on the wall.

Anywhoozle, this commentary just struck me as OMC-level bizarre because the correspondent spoke regretfully of losing Adobe InCopy in the midst of concern over the change of ownership of the pape. I (moving again as I do from the editorial we to the personal I) adore InCopy. It's the light that Adobe hides under its considerable bushel.

In Googling Sam Zell, we find that he's apparently, in December 2007, purchased the Tribune Co., which means he's bought the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, amongst other properties, and the deal is going decidedly pear-shaped. We draw no inferences on which paper the blogger works at, and we have no intention of trying, but we offer this link to the Business Week article and merely note the perversity of the universe is, as Murphy had it, at a maximum, when the presence or absence of Adobe InCopy is apparently worthy of mentioning and indeed seems to be something of a deal-maker for working in a news environment.

Tags: Tribune Co, Sam Zell, Adobe InCopy, modren_times, design_tools

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