David Francis, executive vice-president and publisher of The Times-Picayune/NOLA, and the secretary-treasurer of the LPA Board, resigned his seat on the board last month, now that Georges Media Group has purchased the paper.
Georges Media publishes The Advocate (Baton Rouge), the New Orleans Advocate and other Louisiana newspapers.
Dan Shea is The Advocate publisher. He currently serves on the LPA board.
David was LPA president for 2001-2002 and served on the LPA board for many years. His service to LPA was significant and his participation will be missed.
Christina Pierce, publisher of The Daily Iberian and Acadiana Lifestyles (New Iberia) was elected by the board to take over as secretary-treasurer.
The board selected Clarice Touhey, senior group publisher for GateHouse Media in Houma, Deridder, Donaldsonville, Gonzales, Leesville, Plaquemine and Thibodeaux, to fill Christina’s term on the LPA board.
In sports you often hear coaches talk about “the next man up” when an injury or retirement or trade causes one player to leave, creating opportunities for another teammate to contribute to the team’s success.
We’re sorry to see David go, but are grateful to have people like Christina and Clarice willing to step forward to help the LPA team.
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Do you know there are legal requirements that you document who paid for certain political ads, and hold onto that documentation for a specified amount of time?
Do you know the rules related to “paid for by” lines in political ads?
If you inadvertently fail to insert an ad into the right day’s paper for some reason, can the advertiser sue you for loss of sales because the ad didn’t run? If you think you have a policy that addresses that situation, that limits your liability, are you confident it’ll stand up if tested in court?
If you publish an ad that the client provides “camera-ready” and it turns out it had some artwork in it that was copyrighted, is your newspaper on the hook for copyright infringement?”
“Advertising and The Law” is a webinar being offered LPA members on Friday July 12 starting at 10 a.m. where LPA’s General Counsel Scott Sternberg will take about 45 minutes to present a number of situations where your ad department needs to know and consider various legal issues, to keep your newspaper out of trouble and hopefully out of court.
You’ll also have a chance to ask questions about your own issues.
It’s free to LPA members. Email us at info@lapress.com to sign up to participate. We need the name of the local contact who will participate (if more than one will listen in, we just need one contact), a phone number where you can be reached, your newspaper’s name and your email address. We will provide call-in information a few days ahead of the webinar.
Early in my career, as a somewhat new advertising manager, I learned an expensive lesson about the importance of making sure you had the right wording on your contracts and rate cards to limit your liability when certain issues might happen involving an advertiser.
We got sued for loss of business by a client when his big furniture sale didn’t publish the day it was scheduled. We thought our wording in our contract and on our rate card would protect us. The judge didn’t agree, telling me, “Any ambiguity in a contract goes against the writer of the contract.”
He was saying our contract didn’t say what we thought it said, that it was less than clear – an expensive lesson.
Maybe participating in this webinar can save you from having to learn your own expensive lesson.
Here’s a chance to make sure you’re aware of a number of legal issues that could affect your newspaper through the ad department.
Sign up soon so we can be sure to include you.
Don’t forget you can always check the Law Guide to find answers to issues involving state law on the LPA website at lapress.com, in the members-only section. Each member’s publisher/general manager can get an access code that he or she can share with key staff members to access this section of our website. If you don’t have a code, haven’t checked out the website, do so soon.
Besides the Law Guide there is other good resource material that might benefit your ad department or aspects of your operation.
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More than a dozen newspapers representing more than 100 employees responded to our survey seeking to identify newspapers that might be interested in participating in an LPA Health Insurance Group, if the offering made sense.
We are seeking to see if putting together a group might mean lower premiums, or better plans, or both.
The deadline for the initial survey has passed, but if you missed it, email me today at will@lapress.com and I’ll see if we can get you added to our information gathering effort.
Until we see what the group might look like, we can’t tell you the rates or the plans. No salesperson is going to call you to sell something. We’re just gathering information to see if this looks worth pursuing.
If you didn’t already indicate your interest, do it now so you can get the chance to consider if this might make sense for you and your employees.
I need the name of your newspaper and the number of employees you might expect to have participate in a plan…. IF the details make sense for your operation.
There is no obligation. We’re just looking to see what our options are.
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LPA is working to update its member database, to make sure we have the right names, phone numbers and email addresses for publishers/general managers, editors and ad managers. We want to make sure the right people get the various newsletters we send out, or get invites to participate in webinars or other efforts involving their particular aspect of the business, or if we have some issue, we want to make sure we know who to contact and how to get in touch.
If you’re seeing this, presumably we’ve got your email as a publisher/general manager. But if your ad manager or editor isn’t getting the LPA newsletters targeted to editors or ad managers, will you ask them to shoot us quick email so we can get them added to our database.
Have them notify info@lapress.com.
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Will Chapman is the executive director of LPA. He worked in the newspaper industry, at various times in most every aspect of the business. He’s a past president of LPA following his father and grandfather who also held that office. Email him at will@lapress.com, or call him at 225-344-9309 (ext 108).