A Fine Export: Used to be the Courier-Journal was a fertile training ground for journalists who went on to become national newsmen. There’s no better example than Howard Fineman, who had the political and environmental beat here in the late 1970s, when the paper truly covered the entire state. Now, he’s best known as Newseek’s […]

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Idolatry in Louisville: It’s bad enough that Kentucky is one of the few states holding out on crowning Barack Obama as the Democratic presidential nominee, but now we know that Kentuckians are silly enough to give “American Idol” a ratings boost, going against the national trend. According to Tom Dorsey, when Idol airs in Louisville, […]

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The C-J Loves Bruce: Who would have thought the state’s major newspaper would embrace Bruce Lunsford? Editorial writers at the paper seem to have gotten over all their past problems with Lunsford the politician in a convincing endorsement delivered Sunday. It’s time for those Dems still holding a grudge against Bruce to get on the […]

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We’re Next: Last night’s Presidential Primary results in North Carolina and Indiana didn’t settle anything, so Kentucky gets a turn as a battleground state in the national race. Clinton’s margin in Indiana was razor-thin, while Obama blew her away in North Carolina. And despite the recent endorsement of Ben Chandler and enthusiastic crowds at office […]

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On Sunday, Pam Platt’s C-J column indicated the kind of muscle the newspaper is putting forward for the Kentucky Derby. Imagine, a field of 36 emerging from Sixth and Broadway, armed with notepads, still cameras and video cameras, unleashed on the city. Seven bloggers, including one actually focused on the horse race.
Am I being picky […]

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The Courier-Journal’s parent company continued its downhill slide with today’s announcement that profits are off by 9 percent in the first quarter, with the company’s revenue down sharply toward the end of the quarter. One analyst wrote that classified revenue is off 16 percent, (which you could confirm by taking a look at Sunday’s C-J) […]

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Dear C-J, I’m just not going to call your screwed-up automated system any more when you fail to deliver my newspaper. Please get your circulation department on the stick and make sure my newspaper gets to my porch every day. Your strategy to get readers online shouldn’t include purposefully skipping delivery on certain days for […]

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Looks like Louisville can get pretty fired up for the Presidential Race. I was tied up with baseball practice and the Mayor’s Cup quick recall competition, but Jake was all over the Obama event on Market Street. Really. Dozens of photos, and a complete recounting of who was there. Go see.
Later in the afternoon, when […]

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In the ongoing race to see who can most exploit the weather for dollars as often as possible, it looks like the Courier-Journal has gotten the one-up on WHAS11 news.
How? Well, by exploiting the reporter being exploited by the television station that is exploiting the weather. The Great, Giant, Scary, Awful Flood of […]

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Rick wrote about it last week in LEO.
Now the Courier-Journal’s new look is live and I think it sucks. Drab colors, doesn’t at all feel like a newspaper, difficult to find breaking news as it’s all subdued under a pastel “LATEST HEADLINES” section - and speaking of headlines, only the headlines of stories (the […]

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Lots of folks celebrating St. Patty’s on Bardstown Road last night, like us.
Jazz Club Has The Blues — Count me among those sorry to hear that the Jazz Factory is being silenced after five years. Not that I spent much time there. The place was cursed by its location — in the Glassworks building — […]

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It’s When, Not if, Dammit: That’s right, there’s no danger that the Museum Plaza won’t be built. That’s the message developers and the city keep hammering home. Still, when the words “indefinitly postponed” make it into the lede of the story, people will get worked up.
To clarify a story from yesterday, the city’s […]

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Today’s big news stories, and the C-J’s front page:
Shot Dead, Good Timing: All day yesterday, news stations covered the police shooting in the South End, which occurred conveniently before the Noon news. WHAS-TV sent three different reporters (Melanie Snow, Chuck Olmstead, Adam Walser) to Third Street throughout the day. It leads the C-J. But reporters […]

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A man who robbed the Beechmont location of Stock Yards Bank in Louisville was shot to death today just after 12:00 Noon.
It’s 2008. Why do people even attempt to rob banks these days?
This is what happens when you do crazy crap. You get shot - 14 or 15 times - until you’re dead […]

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One more interesting note involving the Courier-Journal, courtesy of Gannett Blog (run by Jim Hopkins, who made a career stop here).
The company recently released its 83-page annual report, in which you can find all kinds of clues as to what additional changes are heading our way.
For one, you can expect more specialty websites like the […]

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The Courier-Journal is home to a regional call center for Gannett, so that if you live in, say, Binghamton, N.Y. and you don’t get a paper, your call is likely to come to Sixth and Broadway.
The storm caused delivery problems all around the region. Gannett’s solution: Give up.
Those calls that didn’t get answered weren’t limited […]

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On Saturday, the writers on the C-J editorial board decided to take a shot at the leaders in Lexington who want to build a massive downtown building as a way to spur development. Thinking big, they said, was foolish for the small-timers in the state’s second-largest city. Lexington, they say, has an inferiority complex and […]

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Chances are, you didn’t get a Courier-Journal this morning. I’ve got a bunch of white stuff outside my front door.
Other than news about the snow, today’s paper’s front page has a story about the reaction to Gov. Beshear’s surprise proposal for a 70-cent cigarette tax increase. After meeting with House Democrats, they were smoking-hot pissed […]

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Over at Social Media Explorer, Jason Falls has taken a long, hard look at the C-J’s new website.  He’s impressed with all the social media tools, but wait a minute. There’s no strategy to build a social media community there. Or so Jason says.
He’s got a problem with the strategy, not the nifty tools. If […]

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March 5, 2008 — A new record for Web traffic on The ‘Ville Voice. Thanks.
So for about a year now, my son Josh has been bugging me to get the new digital cable box from Insight. He was tired of my complaints that I couldn’t record two programs at a time. Said all I had […]

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