The Seattle Times editorial page today bashed the New Times-Village Voice merger as the next step in "the dangerous march toward monolithic media."

This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, since the Times is a holdout from the days of family-owned, single-property newspaper companies -- companies that, with few exceptions, have been snapped up by conglomerates in the past 25 years (or become conglomerates themselves).

What I found interesting is the peg the Times used for condemning the merger: the wording of the announcement news release, which touted the combined companies' " portfolio of newspapers and online assets."

Sniffed the Times: "Readers are ill-served when newspapers cease to be viewed as newspapers but as assets in a portfolio."

As I've advised before, in today's transparent, Web-enabled world, news releases now have to be written with the assumption that everyone will read them -- not just the financial and business media.

Slowly but surely, companies are learning this. Before the late '90s, CEOs routinely communicated to their Wall Street investors (through news releases as well as conference calls) in a very different way than they spoke to employees and customers. A layoff, for example, is often a positive for a company's stock price, while it's obviously anything but positive for employees. And investors love to hear that a company's products are earning higher margins than those of the competition; but a customer might see or hear the same message and think, "I'm getting ripped off!"

Corporate communicators have worked to close this gap. But mistakes still happen.

In this case, given concerns that the New Times-Village Voice merger ran counter to the anti-establishment legacy of alternative journalism, less corporatespeak would have been a plus.