Newspaper Follies: Where's the Creative Vision?

You can't set off a firecracker in the media echo chamber without it going BOOM BOOM BOOM.

Or is it BANG BANG BANG?

The Bay Area News Group — or can we now call it the Times, Trib & Merc? — set off some big bangers a week ago with of the consolidation of East Bay papers leavened by layoffs and a move out of the office in the Shadelands Business Park in Walnut Creek.

There's the anguish of the halting recession recovery and the agony of the slow reinvention of the newspaper business, and BANG is trying to weave a corporate strategy through it all.

Carl Hall is executive officer of the Pacific Media Workers, Local 39521 of the Communications Workers of America, which represents 190 BANG journalists in the East Bay. 

"The newspaper industry as a whole has not been able to figure out what kind of business plan will work in the environment we're in," said Hall, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter, in an interview with KQED. "You don't see a lot of creative vision out of the newspaper business (and) we the workers are paying the price."