A friend of mine and reader sent this to me based on his own experience with News Corp. Reprinted with permission.

I am a former News Corp empplyee, working in IT in Australia between 2000 and 2003 in digital and print content management; news print and web publishing, advertising systems, archives, ecommerce, multimedia etc. I worked heavily with the production systems I am referring too below. Especially the global news paper production system, which is used at Wapping (News International) but is also the shared platform for most of the 140+ news papers in News Corp.

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The UK newspapers are one small set of a single, global newspaper production system which has included the New York Post for many years and now the WSJ.
140 newspapers share a single production system where all news is shared. So a crime in one newspaper is a crime for all.  read more »

I really hate Joel Klein and his puppetmaster, Bloomberg. While they spend gobs and gobs of money contracting out testing of our kids to their buddies, they are gutting our schools. Teachers are being laid off and class sizes increasing...again. But what is even worse, their default is always to blame the teachers union for anything they think parents won't like. As the year ends and teachers are being laid off, the Joel and Mike team of scam artists are blaming teachers yet again for something that is not their fault.

There was a movement (a bit silly in my opinion) among parents in NYC to shift the start date of school to a more reasonable day. Both teachers and parents would prefer that the first day of school followed the Jewish holidays rather than having a one day first week of school. Seems to me that this would be a pretty obvious thing that any competent Dept. of Ed. would have figured out years ago. Having a one day first week is difficult for young children who generally have adjustment issues at the beginning of each school year. Still, my wife and I figured that the board of ed would NEVER listen to the teachers and parents, and so would refuse, so why bother. Bloomberg doesn't give a crap about teachers or parents...only the private contractors he can shunt money to.

And, of course, they DID refuse to change the day. Just as well for us because we already planned around the stupid one-day first week they had planned.

But Joel Klein sent a letter home with kids on the last day of school blaming the teacher's union for the Department of Education's refusal to change the day.

Teachers on Park Slope Parents list as well as teachers at my son's school say that this is a gross distortion of the facts. In fact, it seems to be an outright lie. And a lie that is typical of the Bloomberg/Klein method of blaming others for their own bad decisions.

Here is the statement from the UFT that seems in complete agreement with what teachers themselves are saying. Personally I believe the teachers, not Bloomberg and his lying cronies. From the UFT website:  read more »

Not too long ago I took City Council candidate Doug Biviano to task for lying about the record of one of his rivals, suggesting that his inaccurate depiction of her record perhaps stems from the fact that he wasn't even around during the fights he was talking about. Biviano is a brand, spanking newcomer to the fights for reform in Brooklyn and against Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards proposal. Yet he comes out accusing Jo Anne Simon, who has been part of these fights for years and who is endorsed by the strongest reformers and anti-Ratner organizations around, of not standing up on these issues. Biviano basically lied, plain and simple. But, rather than say he was a liar, I suggested his not even being a part of these fights until he suddenly got it in his head to run (I met him when that idea was incubating) was the reason for his inaccuracies.  read more »