I lost six friends yesterday. A disaster eliminated them. Not a natural disaster, mind you, but the kind caused by an accountant’s keystrokes. Sadder still, someone who didn’t know these people, and maybe didn’t even care to know them, will profit from those keystrokes in the short run. Yesterday, six news staffers at my workplace — five editors and a photographer — were expunged from the payroll of Lee Enterprises’s largest property and St. Louis’s principal news source. Out the door with these six and the few belongings they had also went about 50 years’ worth of institutional memory and irreplaceable expertise, to say nothing of the collegiality and professionalism they brought to work every day. They were expunged about a month after Lee Enterprises ... Continue reading →
It’s official: U.S. craft brewery tally reaches 2,000 Lo and behold; our operating brewery count hit 2,051 as of April 30, 2012. The current count of craft brewers stands exactly at 2,000 and the count of domestic non-craft brewers stands at 51. (These counts are for brick-and-mortar facilities, and does not include contract or alternating proprietorship operations so that there isn’t a double-counting of breweries.) via Brewers Association. Continue reading →
The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which distinguished itself amid great adversity during Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is about to enact large staff cuts and may cut back its print publishing schedule to several days a week, according to two employees with knowledge of the plans.Newhouse Newspapers, which owns the Times-Picayune, will apparently be working off a blueprint the company used in Ann Arbor, Mich., where it reduced the frequency of the Ann Arbor News, emphasized the Web site as a primary distributor of news and in the process instituted wholesale layoffs to cut costs.A request for comment from the newspaper’s editor, Jim Amoss, late Wednesday night was not returned.The plans have been kept under wraps, but the newspaper will likely cease to exist as a ... Continue reading →
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Sounds like Major Brands is heading for Miami. The St. Louis-based spirits and beer distributor has reached a deal with Anheuser-Busch to buy Eagle Brands, A-B's directly-owned distributorship in Miami, trade publication Beer Marketers Insights is reporting. No price was given. A-B told employees in Miami that the deal would close in July, according to BMI. Major Brands didn't return a call Wednesday afternoon and an A-B spokesman had no immediate comment. At roughly 7 million cases, the Miami distributorship sells about the same volume as Western Beverage, a distributorship in Eugene, Ore., that Major Brands sold to A-B late last year. That Oregon deal, along with two other distributor purchases A-B has made in recent months, has heightened concerns among wholesalers that the big ... Continue reading →
