Richard Richtmyer is a news writer for a Philadelphia-based newspaper.  On the Facebook social network, Richtmyer simply stated an opinion about how he thought Associated Press executives should be punished for negatively affecting the McClatchy Company stock.

“It seems like the ones who orchestrated the whole mess should be losing their jobs or getting pushed into smaller quarters,” stated Richtmyer on Facebook in late May. “But they aren’t.”  One of his 51 Facebook friends ratted him out to a higher ranked employee and eventually Richtmyer was reprimanded.

Today McClatchy is a penny stock.  Two years ago the company spent $4.5 billion to buy another publication company called Knight Ridder.  After buying Knight Ridder, McClatchy started looking to sell off several Philadelphia papers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News.

The Associated Press union was not happy with Richtmyer being reprimanded and warned all other employees to be careful who they choose to add as friends on the social network.

“We have seen about six Facebook problems over the last two months, with employees — maybe managers you have as friends — reporting potential issues to management,” stated union guild chief Kevin Keane in a memo to other members. “You must be careful who you allow on as friends.”

The News Media Guild believes that the AP needs to fine tune their policy in how they handle these types of situations and they are also pushing for Richtmyer’s reprimand to be removed.

[via Wired]

Gannett Co., Inc. (NYSE:GCI) has bought 10% of CareerBuilder.com from Tribune Company for $135 million. After this acquisition, Gannett now owns 50.8% of CareerBuilder. Based on the equity acquisition, CareerBuilder is worth about $1.35 billion. CareerBuilder’s rival, Monster Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ:MNST) is worth about $2.37 billion based on it’s market capitalization.

“CareerBuilder is a terrific company, with great growth potential that just keeps delivering more for Gannett and our partners,” stated Craig Dubow, Chairman, President, and CEO of Gannett Co., Inc. “We were delighted when the opportunity arose to acquire more of the company while maintaining a good, solid relationship with our partners.”

Tribune Company has been struggling to pay off $13 billion in debt. A lot of the debt was accumulated by taking their company private and from a decrease in advertising revenue. Some of Tribune Company potential strategies for paying off their debt includes selling the Chciago Cubs and Wrigley Field. Tribune is even debating whether to sell off the Chicago Tribune Tower and the L.A. Times.

Tribune Company now owns 30.8% of Careerbuilder.com. Other owners in Careerbuilder includes The McClatchy Company (NYSE:MNI) at 14.4% and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) at 4%.

For additional details, check out the press release.

Topix.net, a news aggregator will be announcing today that they have received another $15 million from already existing stakeholders in the $72 million-valued Palo Alto, CA based company. By upping the ante of investment into Topix, Gannett Company Inc. and the Tribune Company will now hold a 33.7% share of the company each. The McClathy Company owns another 11.9% of the company, thus making 79.3% of the Topix.net company being held by investors.

What makes Topix.net unique from other news aggregators such as CNN, Google News, Live Search News, etc? Topix aims to provide customized news aggegration based on user needs. Topix.net’s patent pending NewsRankâ„¢ technology allows its users to select from over 360,000 categories or from over 32,500 U.S. cities and towns to bring them the news they want to hear. Not only that, but users can backtrack news articles produced since the last year using the Topix.net search engine.

In August of 2006, Topix.net added a couple of impressive features which include a case-sensitive enabled search and a click-o-gram histogram chart in which users can select at what point in the timeline that they would like to read archived news about certain companies, celebrities, sports, etc. Check out the screenshot that I have of the histogram below when I searched for Detroit Tigers, one of the worst teams in the MLB until this year when they moved all the way to the World Series in one of the biggest turnarounds in MLB history. Notice how the news aggregators picked up on the Detroit Tigers in October during The World Series?

Currently there are 25 people working for Topix.net and with the new funding, Chris Tolles, VP of Sales and Marketing of Topix.net plans on hiring and marketing aggressively as well as finding other ways to monetize from Topix services.

As I was writing this article and referring to CNET, I also noticed that a similar post went up on GigaOM about an hour or two ago and had several comments added right away which I thought I would mention since they suggest improvement for Topix. Louis Gray stated: “Topix is a great site, and does a strong job of searching archived news releases. Despite this, for some reason, they just aren’t on my list of ‘go to’ sites. Topix is NOT a destination site in the way that Digg and Slashdot and Google News are.” Om Malik, founder of GigaOM stated: “I use it to track telecom and its various subsectors.they could do a better job of the user interface.”

Given what it sounds like from these Topix testimonials, the site is finding a hard time being “sticky.” However, since the site is now backed by another $15 million, I’m sure that they will find ways to take away marketshare from Google News, Digg, and Slashdot.