With General Motors already announcing plans to scale back production by 30% in the wake of a failed government bailout bid, management at Detroit’s two newspapers are mulling potentially drastic changes to their business. Crain’s Detroit Business and The Associated Press both report that more job cuts are likely, but that management of the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News are considering paring back publishing schedules and moving most of their operations online.  The speculation is that one, and possibly both newspapers may shift to a twice-weekly print edition and online publication the rest of the week.  If that’s the case, then it would be the first time that a major metro daily has taken this step.

Official spokesmen are taking pains to say that no decisions have been made, but a memo from Free Press Publisher David Hunky obtained by Crain’s, states that “we plan to share details early next week.”  Managers are quoted as saying that the overriding objective is to maintain a two-newspaper presence in the Motor City.  The Free Press and the News operate under a joint agreement in which the papers maintain separate newsrooms but a single business side.

Esquire‘s 75th anniversary issue in October was a media sensation for its battery-powered cover and fat ad folio. But that’s about all the men’s magazine has to crow about this year. It’s lost 14.56 percent of its ad pages this year, according to Media Industry Newsletter, and that’s on par with performance at other monthlies. Quoting:

The Atlantic is down nearly 17 percent, and Vanity Fair is down almost 15 percent…In October, Condé Nast scaled back Men’s Vogue to two issues a year, leaving the three biggest men’s fashion magazines as GQ, Details (which lost 11.49 and 6.48 percent in ad pages, respectively) and Esquire.

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Times are tough for broad consumer magazines. Newsweek may slash its circulation by as much as 60% in response to the high cost of production and postage, Folio magazine reports. The cuts may be as high as 1.6 million subscribers out of Newswek’s 2.6 million circulation base. Editors reportedly have Economist-envy and want to turn Newsweek into a magazine of thought leadership rather than a big old mass-market play. The Economist has a North American circulation of 714,000

Another factor in the cutbacks is that news magazines have been acquiring a much greater percentage of ‘non-renewable circ’ than they did before in order to satisfy advertiser demand. Non-renewable circ is mainly give-aways and promotions, making it expensive and less valuable that list-based paid subscriptions. Quoting:

“Such a drop in guaranteed circulation is not uncommon, particularly in the newsweekly category. Time cut its rate base by 750,000 copies in January 2007. Newsweek followed suit, dropping 500,000 copies from its circulation in November of that year.”

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Fortunately, there’s Google. MediaPost says Google will create digital archives of the print editions of dozens of consumer magazines going back decades. The news comes not long after Google said it was making the entire photo archive of Life–about 10 million images–available online, including many that have never appeared in print. Google has been on a tear lately and its mission to digitize all the world’s printed content. In September, Google unveiled plans create historical archives of newspapers back to the very first print editions. Publishers are expected to make money by monetizing assets that had been all but out of reach to the public for many years.

2009 Seen Bringing New Wave of Consolidation, But Not the Happy Kind

BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine quotes newspaper executives saying that 2009 will see a fresh round of consolidation, but this one won’t be driven by visions of growth. Instead, mergers and acquisitions will be overseen by “big bankers seeking to ensure that the money they’ve lent, or at least a decent portion of it, is repaid.”

The bad news is spreading to other areas of traditional media. “Robert Coen, a senior vice-president at ad firm Magna who’s known for his ad forecasts, just predicted that local TV ad revenues will be down 9% this year and an additional 7% next year,” Fine writes. “In case you were wondering, Coen expects newspaper ad revenue to post another double-digit decline in ’09.” Ugh.

Cutbacks in Cincinnati

City Beat Cincinnati devotes an unbelievably long story to news that the Cincinnati EInquirer, the area’s only remaining daily newspaper, laid off several employees Dec. 2 and 3. At least 30 jobs were cut. That’s in addition to the voluntary severance packages that 60 staffers took in September.

In addition, the EInquirer‘s newshole will be reduced by six pages on Sundays and a total of 30 pages across the other weekdays beginning in three weeks. Editor Tom Callinan says the layoffs were concentrated among middle managers, not worker bees. “It was a personal statement that it was painful to lay off middle managers I know very well. But we did not touch one hour of reporting, even good reporters that we just hired. Good stories are our last best hope.”

Here Comes The Guardian!

Perhaps heartened by the success of the Financial Times in its cross-pond expansion, The Guardian plans to make its presence known on American shores this year. Quoting:

Tim Brooks, the managing director of Guardian News & Media said underscored the company’s commitment to continued growth in North America. “This year has seen the beginnings of serious investment in our North American presence, through the expansion of our editorial resource in Washington and the acquisition of ContentNext Media in New York and LA.”

Pulitzer Warily Embraces Online-Only Media

“Pulitzer Prizes Broadened to Include Online-Only Publications Primarily Devoted to Original News Reporting.” It’s the last part of that headline from Pulitzer press release that illustrates the conundrum the organization faces. The Pulitzer organization has been under increasing pressure to recognize the work of online-only media outlets, but doesn’t want to be swamped with entries from casual bloggers. So the organization this week, finally modified its criteria to include news organizations that don’t produce in print. The Board also decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories.

Writing about the policy change, marketing guru Seth Godin comments:

“Tom Friedman can win a well-deserved prize for writing what is essentially a blog for the NY Times, but if he goes off on his own, he’s out. What a shame. As newspapers melt all around us, faster and faster, the people in the newspaper business persist in believing that the important element of a news-paper is the paper part.

“The opportunity…is to organize and network and identify and reward [responsible journalism] activity when it happens online. Not because the site is owned by a paper or because the founder has connections to the old media. No, because they’re doing work that matters. If I ran the Pulitzers, I’d hand out a dozen more every year to people working exclusively online.”

Miscellany

The Toledo Blade is laying off 23 people, most of them in the newsroom. The cuts are due to declining ad revenue and the newspaper’s ties to the auto industry. Assistant Managing Editor LuAnn Sharp said Wednesday that most of the layoffs will be in the newsroom. Five of the employees work part time. After the layoffs, The Blade will employ 425 companywide.

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New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson says the company is ‘well-positioned to weather the challenges next year is expected to bring” and is not for sale. In preparing for a tough year, the Times Co. is mortgaging its headquarters and slashing its dividend. However, it appears that the company will at least remain viable, which can’t be said about some of its competitors.

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Gannett’s chief financial officer said Wednesday that full-year 2008 revenue declined 8% and he expects headcount to continue to fall, ranging from mid- single-digit percent declines at USA Today to a mid-teen drop at Gannett’s U.K. operations. Fortunately, he also expects newsprint to decline by double-digit rates next year.

And Finally…

Sheldon Cohen sold the landmark Out of Town News kiosk in Harvard Square in 1994 after 39 years, but now he wants it back. He told Cambridge, Mass. city councilors Monday night that he has been overwhelmed by reaction to the news that the current owners decided not to renew their lease. “I’m thinking of coming back,” he said. “This is an opportunity to bring some life back to the square.” to be fair, no one has proposed tearing down the kiosk. The most likely outcome is that it ends up as a Starbucks. Despite Cohen’s misgivings, he may quickly find that there is a reason the current owners want out.  (Photo credit: Cambridge Chronicle)

As the newspaper industry winds down its worst year in history, some observers are finding hope amid the rubble.

Jonathan Zittrain points out that Twitter and Mahalo were powerful tools for documenting the crisis in Mumbai nearly two weeks ago. For many Americans, foreign news services and the BBC were all that was available to track the terrorist attacks. Few US newspapers even have stringers in Mumbai any more. Into that vacuum sprang citizen journalists with their cell phones and self-built news sites. Zittrain says he’s seen the future of news in these services. Check out the Mumbai hash on Twitter, the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks page on Mahalo and the Wikipedia entry on the Mumbai attacks.  Can you read these accounts and not believe that a new kind of journalism is being created before our eyes?

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European editor Frédéric Filloux and former Apple honcho Jean-Louis Gassée meander a bit before getting to the point, but finally zero in on what’s going right in the news world. They point to The New York Times’ introduction of Times Extra as an example of how the link economy is transforming the news business. Times Extra integrates news from outside sources – including competitors – into the Times’ home page. This is a bitter pill for hyper-competitive editors to swallow, but a necessary one in the new model of news.

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They also point to two other recent announcements – the success of The Politico’s new wire service and Huffington Post’s $25 million capital infusion – as evidence that there’s plenty of life in the news business, just not in the old news business. “The Internet economy is moving in the right direction,” Filous writes. These stories, “provide evidence of…progress. Similar news organizations are bound to find sustainable business models.”

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If you run a newspaper, you might consider hiring Gordon Borrell for your next team-building event. Check out these quotes and paraphrases attributed to the founder of research firm Borrell Associates in Investor’s Business Daily (lightly edited):

• “We’re confident it’s near a bottom, and there will be a rebound.”
• Newspaper companies have plenty of growth ahead for their Internet businesses — albeit with hard work… Newspapers are planning for exponential growth from the Web — in some
• Local advertising, which newspapers are best positioned to capture, will grow 47% this year to $12.9 billion.

These optimistics comments come on top of recent news that advertising on newspaper websites declined 3% in the third quarter of 2008, indicating that the one business that should be growing is actually shrinking. They are also rather oddly juxtaposed with the chart at right. We hope Borrell is correct, but his comments shouldn’t be cause for complacency.

Miscellany

Disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich allegedly pressured the Chicago Tribune to fire Deputy Editorial Page Editor John McCormick and other unnamed editorial board members in exchange for getting state funding that would grease the wheels for Tribune Co. to sell the Chicago Cubs. We suspect this story might have something to do with it. We also marvel that the great state of Illinois could elect a marvel of leadership like our President elect and a scumbag like Rod Blagojevich to office at the same time.

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The Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch is laying off 18 employees while the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News will collectively cut 35 jobs, reports Editor & Publisher. No word on what percentage of their respective workforces the cuts represent. The Philadelphia layoffs will concentrate in the newsroom, however.

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Self-described troglodyte Ted Venetoulis is still interested in buying the Baltimore Sun. Or maybe the 72-year-old investor is just looking to get his name in the paper. See for yourself. The Baltimore Business Journal reports that Venetoulis and a group of anonymous investors are still looking at possible acquisition of the Sun from its troubled Tribune Co. parent, but a lot has to be worked out first, including assessing the future of the newspaper industry itself. Venetoulis admits that he hasn’t looked at the Sun’s financials, that he wouldn’t want to pay too much and that he’s going to watch Tribune Co.’s bankruptcy closely. It’s too early to tell. Which makes us wonder why the BBJ committed 500 words to this meaningless story.

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The Christian Science Monitor sums up the troubles plaguing the industry. This story doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but we couldn’t resist mentioning it because we’re quoted there.

And Finally…

The Daily Show analyzes the decline of newspapers in its own inimitable style.

And from Rob Tornoe, cartoonist at The Politicker:

Miami Herald For Sale
McClatchy puts the south Florida institution on the auction block, perhaps as a way to raise money to pay off its Knight-Ridder debt. But who’s going to buy the paper? Other titles that have been taken off the market for lack of interest include the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, San Diego Union-Tribune and Austin American-Statesman.

New York Times To Leverage HQ For Ready Cash
Quoting:

The New York Times Co. is borrowing $225 million against a portion of its new headquarters in Manhattan. The company has to raise money to make a $400 million payment on one of its revolving lines of credit this coming May; the other $400 million line of credit, as yet untapped, may very well be canceled by financiers spooked by the credit crunch and economic downturn.”

Viacom, NBC, Others Cull 30,000 in Fight for Their Future – Advertising Age
Quoting:

The media industries have shed more than 30,000 jobs in 2008, according to an Ad Age analysis of Department of Labor employment statistics and news reports. That’s about 3.5% of the total media work force of 858,000. Since the bubble-inflated high-water mark in 2000, media has lost more than 200,000 jobs.

WPP’s media-buying unit Group M is predicting a 3.9% fall in U.S. ad spending in 2009, according to estimates to be released this week. That’s after no ad spending growth from 2007 to 2008.

Fitch Ratings is predicting the weakest year for advertising since 2001. BMO Capital Markets is predicting a 2% drop in U.S. advertising in 2009 but a deeper 5.4% slide in spending on measured media, with radio down 7.6%, broadcast TV down 8.7%, newspapers down 12.1% and magazines down 8.2%.

The good news for media companies is that consumers are spending more time in front of screens than ever before, said Group M Chief Investment Officer Rino Scanzoni. “We are looking at a generation of people that have grown up with multiple media that are now becoming major consumers. Viewing has increased; it’s just fragmented over more pieces.

Would You Pay Money to See Your Favorite Site Ad-Free?
Frank N. Magid Associates asked consumers if they would pay for Web content. The results were resouding. Quoting:

When we asked consumers if they would pay $39.99 a year, which comes out to less than $4 a month, for an ad-free version of one of their favorite sites, only 2.4% said definitely yes, they would be likely to do so…At the lower price of $29.99 a year, or less than $3 a month, only another 1.9% of consumers said they would be very likely to pay for an ad-free version.

Christie Hefner Exits Playboy
It seems the end of a 20-year rein as CEO should merit more than a one-paragraph news brief. Also, who’s going to replace her?

Well, that was fast.

Over the weekend, reports began to fly that Tribune Co. could soon declare bankruptcy. Company officials were cagey, however, saying that all options were on the table. This afternoon, however, the company declared bankruptcy, putting all of its assets except the Chicago Cubs under court protection. You can see the court documents here, including a painfully long list of creditors. It’s hard to believe that it’s been barely 20 months since Sam Zell told his new employees at the Chicago Tribune that he considered Tribune Co. to be a long-term investment, and that old media still has plenty of profitable life ahead.

What does this mean? In the short-term, not much. Creditors are put on hold while the company reorganizes and tries to pay off some of the $1.5 billion in debt that comes due over the next seven months. Court protection provides Tribune with some leeway to avoid being driving into the ground by its debt service.

However, the company’s future is now effectively out of its hands. Unless the advertising climate improves substantially, the court is likely to authorize asset sales to meet debt obligations. We’d guess that many of the big Tribune titles could end up in local hands or be sold to other media companies. The problem is that there are no healthy media companies left right now and most local investors are going to want to pay pennies on the dollar.

It’s still early, and bankruptcy can be a magic potion for companies in good markets that just need to get themselves aligned. That isn’t the case with Tribune, though. It’s hard to imagine that much good will come out of this latest development.

We’re anticipating that the R.I.P. column to the left could get quite a bit longer in 2009, and it’ll probably start with the Rocky Mountain News. The venerable Denver newspaper (at 149 years, it is said to be the longest-running business in Colorado) was put up for sale last week by E W Scripps. No one, however, thinks Scripps will find a buyer. If so, the Rocky will close around mid-January.

Buyers won’t surface because, as Wayne State University’s Ben Burns says in a colorful quote in the rival Denver Post, it would be like “buying an anchor that’s already been thrown overboard.”

Except it would be more like being chained to that anchor. The Rocky is on track to lose $11 million this year and no one is forecasting a revival of the advertising market until at least the third quarter of 2009. Any buyer would also assume a 50% share in the Denver Newspaper Agency, a joint venture set up in 2001 to operate both the Rocky and the Post in such a way that both papers can survive. The Agency is now losing money and its governance structure makes it difficult for any buyer to make changes without going through approvals and competitive disclosures.

The most likely buyer would be the Post, but quotes by Publisher Dean Singleton last week left little doubt about that possibility: “We wish Scripps well as it leaves the Denver newspaper market,” wrote Singleton in a letter to employees. Why would Singleton want to buy the Rocky, anyway? It’s cheaper and easier to let the paper fail and then pick up whatever assets and people the Post needs to fill in the gaps. There would also be less likelihood of an antitrust challenge under that scenario.

The Rocky employs 220 people in the newsroom, all of whom will lose their jobs if the paper fails. The paper has a rich journalistic tradition, including two Pulitzer Prizes as recently as 2006. People aren’t exactly dancing in the streets at the Post, however. As columnist William Porter notes, “I feel like I did upon hearing an old adversary was terminally ill: bad for him and bad for myself, because in butting heads we somehow made each other better.”

It seems oddy fitting, by the way, that one of the Rocky‘s recent Pulitzers was for a photo essay called “The Final Salute.” As of this morning, there are nearly 300 comments on the story on the Rocky website about the sale.

Politico Reports Strong Response to New Wire Service

Attempting to exploit newspapers’ frustration with the Associated Press, CNN has stepped into the breach with its own international news network. But the cable company may face some unexpected competition: The Politico. The Washington-based boutique news service, which specializes in Capitol Hill coverage, has signed up 67 newspapers for its news service over the last three months. They include the Arizona Republic, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as all 27 dailies owned by Advance Publications. Several of its new clients are in dire financial circumstances and have cut back upon or eliminated their Washington bureaus. That makes Politico’s value proposition compelling. As we’re written before, The Politico continues to be an example of how specialized journalism can fill the gap left by broad-based media titans in an era of micro markets.

Miscellany

• Newsday will slash 100 jobs, or about 5% of its workforce, in its third headcount reduction of the year. According to a report on Newsday.com, “In the newsroom, the photo operation would be restructured with 20 photographers told to reapply for new positions. Also impacted would be three sports columnists and a reporter-researcher in the Albany bureau.” Most open positions will also be eliminated. Newsday has cut 250 jobs this year, or about 9% of its staff.
• MediaPost’s Media Daily News runs the summary numbers and they’re ugly (right). Gannett has cut headcount from 41,000 in 2000 to about 29,000 today. Tribune Co. is down 30% to 18,000 people. The New York Times Co.’s workforce is about 26% smaller than it was in 2000. McClatchy has reduced its workforce by more than the number of employees it picked up with the acquisition of Knight-Ridder in 2006. In all, the big newspaper publishers have cut more than 25% of their staff in the last eight years, and there are few spots on the horizon that indicate that employment might come back. By the way, Erica Smith’s Paper Cuts layoff tracker puts total 2008 US newspaper layoffs and buyouts at 15,153 and counting.
• A dozen Baltimore Sun employees have left the company and three were laid off in the first announced job reductions since the paper’s 100-employee blood bath in August.

Less than six months ago, Sam Zell said Tribune Co. had enough cash to carry it through the third quarter of 2009. Now The Wall Street Journal and other outlets are reporting that a bankruptcy filing may occur as soon as this week.

Tribune has hired Lazard Ltd. to advise on its options, including a possible Chapter 11, according to several reports. No one in an official capacity is saying much of anything, and sources familiar with the talks are quoted as saying that bankruptcy is only one of several options.

Tribune still has nearly $1 billion in interest payments due this year and another $512 million payment in June. it was thought that asset sales could keep it afloat while those obligations were met, but the recent market free-fall, combined with Tribune’s 83% fall in operating profit in the third quarter, has changed everything. The Chicago Cubs were supposed to be sold this past spring, but the $1 billion price tag has reportedly become too rich with all the turmoil in the stock market. The company has debt terms that limit its borrowings at the end of the year to nine times its adjusted profits. The ratio stood at 8.3 at the end of the second quarter, the Journal says, and that was before the recent collapse in profits.

The Los Angeles Times says Tribune officials are arguing that it’s pointless for creditors to insist on adherence to debt ratio guidelines and that they should focus instead on just getting paid. In fact, the LAT report quotes one ex-Trib exec saying, “”This might all be posturing and positioning. They could be looking for a new [debt] structure . . . without actually having to take the bankruptcy action.”

BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine combines the Tribune Co. news with E W Scripps’ announcement last week that it was looking to unload The Rocky Mountain News and a report that McClatchy is seeking buyers for the Miami Herald. Fine concludes, “That major companies would consider selling in such a terrible environment speaks volumes as to how impaired an asset a big-city newspaper is.”

If you want to read all about it (literally), the news reports are stacking up like cord wood on Google News.

Hot on the heels of the newspaper industry’s record-breaking 18.1% quarterly revenue decline, analysts are weighing in with dire forecasts and advice.

“A newspaper that cannot sell enough advertising or cut enough expenses to sustain profitable operations is not likely to make it to the other side of 2009,” writes Alan Mutter in a depressing outlook on the industry’s immediate future. While the rest of Mutter’s post isn’t as provocative as that closing statement, it provides a detailed analysis of which markets are mostly likely to see mergers or closures (Minneapolis, San Francisco, Southern California, Southern Florida) as well as markets like Chicago and Boston, where two competitors are locked in battles of mutual destruction. The most likely scenario for 2009 is that publishers will have to choose from a palette of equally distasteful cost-cutting options, and that the measures they have to take will be more drastic than the 10%-20% workforce cuts of the past year. Mutter lists voluntary pay cuts, massive outsourcing, frequency reduction and asset sales as being on the table.

Fitch Ratings might agree. Its report says several major daily papers could shut down by 2010. Speaking in that odd third-person-singular that investment companies like to use, the agency sa

ys “Fitch expects newspaper industry revenue growth will be negative for the foreseeable future,” and that credit ratings are likely to decline further. Unlike the 2001 advertising crash, this one is affecting both national and regional advertisers, the credit rating agency says. “And unlike the easy credit and lower interest rates during the 2001 ad recession, this time advertisers and consumers face a credit freeze.” The outlook for 2009? Don’t ask. Fitch expects real US GDP to drop 1.2% while inflation hovers at 2.7%.

Steve Outing has some advice for newspaper executives struggling with the reinvention question. While his E&P column isn’t as edgy as usual, his prescriptions are practical. The most counter-intuitive in our opinion: stop chasing young people. Millennials aren’t going to read newspapers, so your redesigns intended to make your print edition more appealing are going to fail. Reach out to them through their mobile devices and services that aggregate their social networks with news (he isn’t more specific about this; Facebook is a pretty big obstacle to this goal). Focus your print editions on the readers who want to read print. Yeah, they’re older, but they’re still viable. You’re going to be

managing print down for the next 15-20 years, so get used to it. And while you’re at it, start pushing those older print readers online. Make your newspaper a gateway to enhanced services on the Web. And for God’s sake, stop wasting your time on fluffy lifestyle pieces. Print loyalists want serious journalism.

Outing has some investment advice, too: hire someone to maximize online visibility through social media channels, bring in a mobility specialist and give your staff time to come up with novel ideas for reinvention. The problem, of course, is who’s got the time or money for all this? Outing doesn’t address the budget issue but then again, he’s a pundit, not an accountant.

Profiling the Provocateur

The New York Observer has a long profile of local media guru Jeff Jarvis, who perhaps vexes the mainstream media industry more than any other contrarian. That’s because Jarvis, who now teaches journalism at NYU and agitates with his popular Buzz Machine blog, is one of them. He worked at the San Francisco Examiner, New York Daily News, People and TV Guide, among other outlets, and was founding editor of Entertainment Weekly. Jarvis may understand traditional media’s pain, but he doesn’t cut the industry much slack.

He is passionate about citizen journalism and the need for media institutions to remake themselves as hubs of news, commentary and conversation among a community of people with similar interests. He has little tolerance for the go-slow mentality that pervades American newsrooms. As Jarvis sees it, the quicker we blow up the old, the quicker we can get on with the new. And he makes his points in blunt, sometimes profane language.

This has made Jarvis a hot potato for a tribe of senior editorialists who are trying to balance their respect for the man with their distaste for his revolutionary ideas. The piece quotes several of these top editors, including New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who clearly finds some of Jarvis’ ideas persuasive but is uncomfortable with his extremism. Gawker’s Nick Denton sums it up: “Of all the Internet supremacists, he is the one who has betrayed his origins in print. Of all the people who grew up in newspapers and magazines, he is the one who has most clearly abandoned them.”

Jeff Jarvis is required reading at the Death Watch and we commend him to you.

Poignant Tales From the Front Lines

Pam Podger and her husband moved from Virginia to Montana because they loved the natural beauty and the lifestyle. They took at job at the Missoulian. Nine months later, they were both laid off on the same day. More than 50 years of journalism experience was thus thrust out on the street, with two kids to care for. Podger writes in American Journalism Review of her anxiety, her fears about the future of journalism and her determination to stick it out in her new home.

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Cost-cutting is robbing the public of an American institution – the editorial cartoonist. “In the past three years, around three dozen artists have been laid off, forced to take buyouts or to retire, according to the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists,” says an Associated Press piece. The story spotlights Eric Devericks, whose work is pictured above. Devericks has known nothing but success since his work was recognized with a national award while he was still in college. But rewards don’t amount to a hill of beans in an industry that’s cutting bone, so the Seattle Times laid him off effective next Friday. Next month, Devericks, his wife and three kids are “heading to southern California, where two buddies have offered Devericks a job as a business development specialist for their new industrial design company,” says the AP account. The curtain is quickly coming down on a generation of journalists who proved that the brush, as well the pen, can be mightier than the sword.

Back in late October, Gannett Co. announced plans to cut 10% of its workforce.  This week, the hacking began in earnest. A sampling:

• The Louisville Courier-Journal cut 69 positions, or 6.5% of the staff.
• The Reno Gazette-Journal will cut 61 positions, close two weekly publications and idle a commercial printing facility. The weeklies are the Douglas Times and Fallon Star Press.
• A total of 206 jobs will be eliminated at Gannett’s New Jersey papers, including the Asbury Park Press, Cherry Hill Courier-Post, East Brunswick Home News Tribune, Bridgewater Courier News, Parsippany Daily Record and Vineland Daily Journal.
• The Arizona Republic was also caught up in the Gannett downsizing.  The Phoenix Business Journal reports that 68 employees were laid off on Wednesday, including 25 from the newsroom.  The nearby East Valley Tribune recently announced plans to reduce its number of publishing days.
• Also maimed in the Gannett buzz saw is the Nashville Tennessean, which will lose 90 jobs out of 1,140 total employees.  One-quarter of the cuts are in the newsroom.
• The Town Talk of Alexandria, Louisiana will cut 14 jobs.
• Ninety-two jobs were lost in Gannett’s Wisconsin properties.  Two weekly newspapers -  the Wrightstown Post Gazette and the Denmark Press – will also close.
• The Battle Creek Enquirer will lose nearly half its staff, a total of 50 employees out of 105 positions.  The paper also shut down its printing press and move all printing operations to Lansing.
• Florida Today will lay off 30 employees and buy out six others.
• The Des Moines Register will eliminate 41 jobs and leave another 15 open positions unfilled. Among the casualties is the newsroom’s editorial cartoonist, who has been with the paper for 25 years. The cutbacks amount to 6.9% of the workforce.
• The Green Bay Press-Gazette cut 22 jobs at its daily and weekly publications.  However, no reporting or advertising sales jobs were eliminated.
• The Hattiesburg American will move its production operations to a nearby newspaper and eliminate 38 jobs.  The publisher assured readers that they will see no difference in the newspaper as a result.
• The Honolulu Advertiser accepted 41 buyouts and laid off another 10 employees.
• The Mississippi Clarion-Ledger cut 33 jobs through layoffs, buyouts and elimination of open positions.  The publisher also promised that quality will be unaffected.
• The Indiana Journal & Courier is cutting 13 jobs, about 6.5% of its workforce.
• The Poughkeepsie Journal eliminated 14 staff positions, including three open jobs and seven buyouts.

All this and more is being documented in gruesome detail on the Gannett Blog, Jim Hopkins’ remarkable watchdog website.  Gannett may not be revealing the extent of its job cuts, but Hopkins has assembled field reports from employees at 71 newspapers, as of today.  In addition, more than 100 comments have been posted. Peter Kafka of All Things Digital pays homage to the blog here, as does Editor & Publisher, which quotes extensively from it.

Unrelated to the Gannett moves:

• The Minneapolis Star Tribune has asked its unions for $20 million in cost cuts, saying “the survival of the company is at stake.” The Strib is riddled with debt. It cut $10 million earlier this year, but its $400 million in debt demands more drastic action. The paper has already cut $50 million since 2007 through attrition, layoffs, buyouts and other means.
• The Bakersfield Californian will lay off 25 staffers.  The move was prompted by “the steepest and sharpest drop off” in advertising revenue in the newspaper’s history.
• The Chicago Tribune will idle an unspecified number of newsroom employees by the end of the week. Update: A total of 11 newsroom employees will lose their jobs, including both of the Tribune‘s New York correspondents.

And to all a good night…

Bad news has spread across traditional media at a breathtaking rate. Fortune’s Richard Siklos ticks off some of the sorry numbers. It’s not just the newspaper industry that’s suffering.

Quoting Michael Nathanson, media analyst at Sanford Bernstein, Siklos notes that this is the first time in memory that a coincident election and Olympic year has been accompanied by a decline in ad spending. “Excluding Internet spending, ad spending across all traditional media in this year’s third quarter was down 8.5 per cent, the sixth consecutive quarter of declining spending,” he writes.

Siklos quotes Craig Huber of Barclays Capital forecasting that “classified advertising as a percentage of newspapers’ revenue will decline to 26 per cent in 2009 from 36 per cent in 2006. Meanwhile, newspapers’ share of total U.S. ad expenditures…will have declined to 10 per cent next year from 20 per cent in 1999.”

But it’s not just newspapers. Yahoo just reported a 64% drop in quarterly earnings. Google stock is off more than 45% and analysts are cutting their forecasts of online spending growth. The only winners at this point appear to be subscription services that derive a significant portion of their revenue from non-advertising sources. While the story stops short of pointing to a generalized decline in advertising, the numbers leave you wondering. Could it be that businesses are beginning to question the value of advertising and that those doubts are creeping into the numbers? Could be. On the other hand, it could also just be a crummy economy.

“Get Me Bangalore!”

Maureen Dowd writes about a newspaper that’s offshoring editorial content and learning to make it work. James McPherson is the editor and publisher of Pasadena Now, a small weekly. A year ago, he fired his entire editorial staff and farmed out coverage to a staff of Indian writers he recruited on Craigslist. He pays them about $7.50 per 1,000 words, compared to the $30,000 to $40,000 he was paying each reporter annually. The Indian writers “report” via telephones, web harvesting and webcams, with support and guidance from McPherson and his wife.

Reaction to the idea was brutal at first, but the concept of editorial offshoring is gaining traction. Dowd counts MediaNews Group chairman Dean Singleton among the ranks of executives who have recently talked about massive offshoring to save costs. Singleton says most preproduction work for MediaNews’s California papers is already outsourced to India, which has cut costs by 65 percent.

If the idea sounds preposterous, think about it. How many people in a standard newsroom never leave the building? Any job that primarily involves computer and phone work is a candidate for offshoring. Between cell phones, webcams, virtual meetings and instant messaging, the need for face-to-face contact is diminishing to the point of irrelevance in many cases. On-site reporters will always have value, but in the future they could become a small corps of feet on the street feeding copy to a virtualized production force that is largely invisible. The compelling cost efficiencies give publishers a lot of incentive to be creative.

Ex-LA Times Editor Takes on Zell

Former Los Angeles Times editor James O’Shea comments at some length on recent statements by Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell about the failure of newspapers to listen to their customers. O’Shea has a problem with that philosophy. “If all we had to do was ask readers what they wanted in a newspaper and then give it to them, wouldn’t someone have done that years ago?” he asks? In fact, they did. “I’ve seen dozens of papers march down that road to no success.”

O’Shea agrees that journalists have done a poor job of demonstrating their value as stewards of the public trust, but he thinks that failure is actually due to their efforts to listen too closely to their customers. The conventional marketing wisdom is that readers want soft, lifestyle stories and the more we give them that pabulum, the more we undermine our value as serious journalists. “To the extent we blur the differences between these once-distinct voices with pandering coverage that resembles advertorial and not editorial we play right into this trap,” he writes.

After nearly 2,500 words of analysis, O’Shea fails to deliver a prescription for change. “Newspapers have to figure out how to deliver journalism that makes the public believe we once again are a public trust, something of value and something they won’t hesitate to pay for,” he writes. Hear, hear! How are we going to do it? O’Shea doesn’t offer any ideas. That makes this piece ultimately rather disappointing.

Miscellany

If the newspaper industry is dying, apparently no one told Saharra White. The California State University, Northridge journalism major pooled her savings and donations from friends last year to launch Say It Loud!, a newspaper for African-Americans of the San Fernando Valley. “I wanted to start the newspaper because there are black people in the Valley doing some positive things,” she says. Say It Loud! is one of about 200 black community newspapers across the US, according to the Black Newspaper Publishers Association. White says she felt the stunning election of an African-American as President demanded new media to cover the impact of the Obama administration on America’s future. She distributed the paper in print for a year, but now has gone online-only as a matter of economic necessity.

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The Cleveland Plain Dealer is laying off 27 staffers by phone this morning because not enough people took the paper up on its buyout offer. In a memo yesterday, Editor Susan Goldberg told Guild local 1 employees that those selected for layoff will be notified by 9:30 a.m. Anyone who doesn’t get a call should come in to work.

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The publisher of the San Jose Mercrury News has told employees to brace for more layoffs early in the new year. The company has already cut newsroom employment by 50%.

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The Charleston (W. Va.) Daily Mail will switch from afternoon to morning publication, giving the city two morning papers. The Daily Mail and the Charleston Gazette will continue to compete with each other, despite the fact that they share production staffs and distribution networks. They also share about 6,000 readers who subscribe to both publications. Afternoon newspapers have all but disappeared in the US.

And Finally…

While executives and journalists fret about the implications of life without newspapers, Donna Freedman writes on MSN Money Blog about more practical matters: what’s she going to use to clean her windows?  The alarming shrinkage of daily newspapers is going to leave people with a shortage of packing material, impromptu gift-wrap and puppy-training supplies, she worries. “Without newspapers, what will I put at the front door to soak up moisture from wet shoes? To say nothing of the fact that I would no longer be able to say, ‘These are the Times that dry men’s soles,’” she groans. Several visitors pick up on the fun, offering eulogies for Sudoku puzzles lost and fish ‘n chips that lost their appeal on polystyrene platters.