Over the last few weeks, the mood in the news industry has shifted from a kind of morbid resignation to one of fiery indignation over the forces that are tearing apart a once-mighty business. The promising development is that media supporters have stopped trying to resurrect a dying print industry and are now focused on saving the essence of quality journalism. They’re getting creative in their approaches. Below are a few recent opinions.

Lean, Mean Media Machine

Writing in the Dallas Morning News, John Chachas says the time has come for the US government to jettison old cross-ownership rules and grant media companies broad license to prosecute people who steal their content.

Chacas, who co-heads the media practice at Lazard, proposes granting news organization “a finite (36-month) anti-trust law exemption to permit deployment of an industry-wide system to track and charge for re-use of their content.” Today’s bloggers thumb their noses at the organizations whose content they steal, and newspapers’ unwillingness to defend their value is their undoing, he says.

Chacas also calls on the government to repeal laws that prohibit media cross-ownership in regional markets. Information no longer knows geographic boundaries, he says, and laws that make it easier for the Los Angeles Daily News to merge with The New York Times than with the Orange County Register are a set of handcuffs on media businesses. Conversely, it’s no longer relevant for the government to try to preserve multiple voices in a market when readers and advertisers no longer believe they’re needed. His four-point proscription is an intelligent call for legal and legislative change.

Reinvent the Model; Save What’s Best

The New York Times rounds up opinions from thought leaders around the industry. The consensus: stop trying to revive the traditional model and focus on finding places to add value.

MinnPost.com CEO Joel Kramer says news organizations will need to derive more revenue from readers in the future, even if that means shrinking circulation: “A newspaper that sold 400,000 copies at 50 cents daily and $1.25 on Sunday might sell only 100,000 at four times the price. But there would be a business incentive to keep quality high, because each extra copy sold should increase profit, not subtract from it.”

Steven Brill mostly agrees. He says the key is to find the crevices where local information needs aren’t being served: “Local newspapers are the best brands, and people will pay a small amount online to get information – whether it be a zoning board meeting or a Little League game – that they can’t get anywhere else.”

Geneva Overholser of the Annenberg School of Journalism is in the same camp. She sees value in a hybrid of community journalists and professional publishers. “These changes will be difficult for newspapers which have considered themselves the primary newsgathers, but they may lead to the next chapter of American journalism,” she writes.

Craig Newmark, whose Craigslist.org is often seen as the Great Satan by the newspaper industry, says media companies need to involve their readers in the process of determining what they do. Quoting David Weinberger, Newmark says, “a paper should be perceived as ‘ours’ (the public) not ‘theirs’ (the owners).” Perhaps the Great Satan is really the newspaper owners.

Author Andrew Keen picks up the thread, suggesting that the future is in a layered model in which community members contribute information that’s then organized by staffs of professional editors. “Rather than slithering into the democratic swamp of crowd-generated content, smart local publishers should focus on their core expertise – the organization and curation of information by professionals,” he writes.

Edward Fouhy of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism tells the story of three small operations that are proud of providing balanced, accurate coverage of local news. “Citizens are inventing a new form of locally based and financed journalism while preserving the values of accuracy, objectivity and independence,” he writes, hopefully.

There are more than 180 comments as of this morning. Thankfully, they are mostly free of the partisan politican ranting that seems to plague this discussion.

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BTW, Jack D. Lai thinks micropayments are stupid and he’s got a long list of links to people who agree. It’s an impressive archive and we really hope to get around to reading it all.

Micropayments with a Twist

Steve Outing opens his Editor & Publisher column by dissing micropayments (“that model will only hasten newspapers’ death spiral”) and then goes on to make a passionate case for…micropayments! Okay, we’re oversimplifying. What Outing doesn’t like is the idea that each publisher would have its own system for charging people a few cents to consume its content, sort of like running a PayPal button in the sidebar. He’s right: That’s a dumb idea. The solution may be in a service like Kachingle, a system that distributes payments to website owners based upon their readership.

Kachingle users only have to set up and fund one account. Whenever they visit a site that’s part of the network, Kachingle allocates a portion of their account to that provider. If Newspaper Death Watch gets 20% of your monthly visits, then the owners get 20% of the payment you set aside. Thanks! Readers decide how much they want to pay and Kachingle takes care of the accounting. In theory, the value of the network grows as membership expands. The New York Times may be helping Newspaper Death Watch by joining the network, but the equation also works in reverse. Somehow, we think we’d get the better of that deal.

Steve Outing is nothing if not thought-provoking. Although this column is a tad more enthusiastic than his usual fare, he’s found an interesting model to promote. Hopefully, the column will still be available at SteveOuting.com after E&P inevitably pulls it off its website. You can also comment at SteveOuting.com, but not at E&P.

Miscellany

Last month we told you about The Printed Blog (“Extra! Extra! Blog All About It!”) a startup that’s proposing to reinvigorate print publishing by harvesting content from local bloggers. Simon Owens called up founder Joshua Karp and found an Internet entrepreneur who’s serious about print.

“The print newspaper doesn’t need to go away simply because it’s on paper,” Karp told him. The problem is that publishers haven’t revisited the way they produce their printed products to include the work of the community. The Printed Blog is on thin financial footing unless more funding can be found, Karp said. He’s funding the first issues himself and needs to find venture capital “over the next few weeks.”

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They dribble out the news about cuts at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in this story. The paper will lay off 17 people but wait, there will probably be more. The neighbor island bureaus will be shut down. Oh, and there’ll be a redesign from a broadsheet to a tabloid. Praent Oahu Publications is also discontinuing its Friday edition of the MidWeek tabloid. You have to stick with this story to the end in order to learn everything.

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The Charleston Post and Courier has laid off 25 employees after a buyout failed to achieve cost reduction goals. When the company announced its buyout offer in July, the newspaper reported that it had 513 full-time and part-time employees. It will employ 460 people after the latest cuts.

Last month we told you about new Gallup research that showed the Internet is fast closing the gap with local newspapers as the number one news source in the US. Now Pew Research says the lines have crossed. The survey of 1,489 adults found that 40% said they get most of their national and international news online, compared with 35% who rely primarily on newspapers. Television continues to the number one choice, at 70%. Among people under 30, however, the Internet is now just as popular as television for news. In fact, among that age group, the Internet’s role as a primary news source jumped from 34% to 59% in just 15 months, a leap that suggests that these results might be an aberration. We’ll know soon. Pew conducts the survey roughly once a year. There’s also information about the top news stories of 2008, a list dominated by economic issues.

A Public Utility

Should newspapers get a government bailout? One Connecticut lawmaker says yes. Frank Nicastro of Connecticut’s 79^th Assembly district is worried that Journal Register Co. will carry out its threats to shutter the Bristol Press and he’s asking the state for loans, tax breaks or anything else that will save the daily. The Press reportedly has just 11 days to live.

Nicastro’s campaign has fueled an ongoing debate over whether newspapers are entitled to the same government support as airlines, banks and the automobile industry have received. Some people say newspapers are an essential public utility that a democracy can’t afford to lose. Others think the market will find a way to provide this service one way or the other. Almost everyone admits there’s a conflict-of-interest question when a government funds its own watchdog, kind of like letting the banking industry regulate itself. We have an opinion, but we’d like to hear yours, so we made this into a poll question. Cast your vote in the sidebar widget to the right.

A Different Kind of Death Watch

“My beat at The Globe and Mail is the dead,” writes Sandra Martin, in a quote that already goes on our short list for best of 2009. That’s only one of many good lines in her superbly written piece on the craft of obituary writing, one of the least understood and most often satirized disciplines in journalism.

Martin is the Toronto Globe and Mail‘s chief obituary writer and she really, really likes the job. So do a few hundred other people who make up the Society of Professional Obituary Writers (SPOW) (“The first time I Googled the society’s acronym, I came up with ‘sex position of the week,’” Martin comments in another of the 3,700-word essay’s good lines). This fun and fact-filled feature touches on some of the profession’s stickier issues, such as how to balance facts about the deceased’s sexual escapades with the need to avoid angering grieving relatives or how to tell a person you’re interviewing them for their own obituary. She also describes the nightmare all obituarists face: what to do when someone dies suddenly and you’ve got nothing prepared on them.

Martin’s words are relevant to the topic of newspaper survival. She cites Northwestern University research that found that obits were “important” to 45 per cent of readers and “very important” to an additional 12 per cent. That wouldn’t surprise the people at Eons, a social network for baby boomers. They discovered that death notices quickly became the most popular features on their site, which is why they launched Tributes.

Obituary writing isn’t morbid, Martin notes. Rather, it is “about life; death is merely the occasion to set the subject into context.” Read this delightful story and you’ll probably agree that this beat has plenty of, er, life to it.

Miscellany

The Kansas City Kansan will end an 87-year print run on Wednesday when it ceases twice-weekly publication and goes online-only. The Kansan was once the only daily newspaper serving Kansas City, Kan. The revamped website will invite lots of reader contributions through photo-sharing and blogs. Half the staff will be cut. That’s four people. (via Todd Epp).

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“Newspaper stocks fell an average of 83.3% in 2008 – twice the fall of the S&P 500 – wiping out $64.5 billion in market value, according to Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog.” Want more stats like that? Jeff Jarvis has assembled a few and is asking for more contributions.

 

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John Schrag of the Forest Grove (Ore.) News-Times resists the urge to wring his hands and instead gives specifics on how staff cutbacks are affecting city-hall reporting. This column manages to be both opinionated and dispassionate, documenting with examples how citizens are less informed about their government because reporters aren’t there to sit through the boring meetings. Bloggers, Schrag writes, “may show up in Salem, but I doubt they’ll be posting reports about the Banks Budget Committee or the county’s Joint Watershed Commission.” True that.

 

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Editor & Publisher‘s Mark Fitzgerald lists his choices for the top 10 industry quotes of 2008. Many relate to the stocks of major companies becoming worthless. And Christopher Wink posts some gems in his Twelve months of top journalism blog posts in 2008.

 

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Terrible financial results barely merit a mention any more, other than the fact that each month or quarter seems to be worse than the one just preceding it. Media Post reports ad revenues fell 22.4% at McClatchy in November and publishing revenues were down 17.9% at Media General. The sole bright spot: online revenue was up over 7% at both companies.

 

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Swift Communications has cut staff at its Western Slope newspapers in Colorado and closed some weekly papers. Unspecified cutbacks were made at the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, Aspen Times and Grand Junction Free Press. The company shuttered the weekly Carbondale Valley Journal, Leadville Chronicle and the Spanish-language La Tribuna based in Glenwood Springs.

 

And Finally…

Here are the results of our recent query about the drama in Detroit. Thanks to everyone who voted. We’re trying out a new polling app in the sidebar to the right and will keep plugging away till we find one that we like. Suggestions are welcome:

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Note: An earlier version of this story was erroneously headlined “Survey Says Web is #1 News Source.” A reader pointed out that television still holds the top spot.

Sobering news out of the American Press Institute’s executive confab in Reston, Va. last week. The newspaper industry is in a full-blown crisis and radical surgery is needed to save it, according to an executive summary. CEOs learned about the classic stages of a crisis and ran the numbers on their own businesses. All but one of the public companies in the room was “below the safe stage,” the summary said, meaning that they’re at real risk of bankruptcy.

There were strong words from the podium. Turnaround specialist James Shein of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University said one of the biggest hurdles to progress is “the industry’s senior leadership, including some people in this room…I am not sure you can take a look at your industry with fresh eyes.” Remedies that were discussed ranged from waiting out the economy to hiring experts like scientists or bank regulators to replace some reporters (wait’ll you see the bill on that one). Everyone who’s still around will come back in six months to revisit the situation.

There was undoubtedly some debate about asking the government for a bailout, as the auto industry as done. Ain’t gonna happen, says Alan Mutter. For one thing, government bailouts are intended for industries that have the potential to turn things around and grow again, which is highly iffy proposition for the newspaper business. Paradoxically, a government handout would also compromise one of the most common arguments for supporting the press, which is that it provides a vital watchdog function. “It is difficult to imagine how the vigor and independence of the press would be maintained if the industry depended on the largesse of the very government officials it is supposed to be watching,” Mutter writes. Finally, the industry is just too small to make a difference in the health of the overall economy.

In Praise of Experience

Few news scribes are as eloquent and engaging as The New York Times’ David Carr and you’d do well to read this column about the foolhardiness of firing experienced employees. Pointing to veteran reporters and columnists who have been sacrificed on the altar of cost-efficiency, Carr says newspapers are effectively cutting off their nose to spite their face. Once the short-term profit boost is complete, these organizations, “won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve,” he writes. Read the column for more gems like that.

St. Petersburg Times columnist Eric Deggans was referenced in the Carr column, and he posts a thank-you for the recognition and an elaboration on the practice of laying off experienced people. Deggans notes that his newspaper has few senior journalists writing any more; most of the old-times have made the jump to management or left the paper. He wonders if the loss of veteran old-timers will leave a gap for the next generation: “I wonder if we’ll reach a point where only the best writers can keep doing the job as they age, creating a bit of a generation gap between writers and editors,” he asks. That would be a loss because youngsters need the wisdom of older scribes who aren’t their bosses, Deggans says.

In Condemnation of Euphemisms

It isn’t a layoff, it’s an evolution. At least, that’s how a column by Ventura County Star Editor Joe Howry describes it. “At The Star, our plans were to continue intensifying our focus on local news… Life, in the form of the economic downturn, has forced us to speed up those plans,” he wrote last Sunday.

What really happened is that the Star recently laid off 44 people and consolidated its weekday paper to conserve space. In Howry’s view, though, the cutbacks are simply part of an “evolution” centered around “preserving the quality and quantity of local news.” Not once does his editorial mention layoffs or cost reductions. LA Observed’s TJ Sullivan finds absurdity in the message. Sullivan doesn’t doubt it was painful for Howry to let so many people go, but he thinks they deserved a more honorable send-off that to be referred to as victims of efficiency. Journalists are supposed to tell the truth, he says. Don’t candy-coat downsizing. Admit it sucks and move on.

Newspaper Outsourcing a Growth Industry

Research and Markets has released a report entitled “Offshoring By US Newspaper Publishers” that sees big growth in the newspaper outsourcing industry, particularly in India. About 2,300 people were employed offshore to serve US and UK newspaper companies in July, 2008, the report says. Most of the work is in ad production. Overall revenues of the business are estimated at $35 million this year (quick calculation: about $15,000 per head), growing to $120 million by 2012. “The total offshore opportunity from newspaper publishers is estimated to be approximately $3.5 billion,” the summary says, although it doesn’t specify whether that’s an annual figure or a total of several years. However, vendors still “need to build client confidence in terms of delivering consistently good quality of output and quick turnaround.” You can download your own copy for 437 euros (about $555).

Miscellany

The New York Times has closed its quarterly sports magazine Play because of slow ad sales. Assistant Managing Editor Gerald Marzorati called the closure the “hardest professional call I’ve ever made in my life,” but with the magazine losing six-figure sums every year, there was no viable alternative. The quarterly was said to be a favorite of New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The Times explored several options to keep the magazine afloat, including cutting editorial staff, publishing it only online and signing a single advertiser for each issue. New York Observer says no staff positions will be cut because the content was mainly freelanced and the only staff employee will be reassigned within the organization.

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The Erie (Pa.) Times-News will use a “generous” buyout to reduce staff by 25 employees, or 9 percent of its 273-person workforce. The buyout, which is available to 51 employees, provides up to five years of company-paid health insurance, or an equivalent flat payment, plus a $10,000 signing bonus for each eligible employee who accepts. The paper has actually been growing weekday circulation in the past year, but “broad economic market conditions” mandate the cuts. The publisher said no layoffs will be necessary in 2009 if enough people accept the offer.

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The Sun-Times Media Group (STMG) is cleaning house in a concession to two big shareholders. Several board members will resign in the first stage of a complete restructuring of the governing body. The company will also lose a special monitor who was assigned to keep an eye on things following an earlier scandal in which two executive were jailed for stealing. STMG is also deregistering its Class A common stock and will now trade on the pink sheets, which require less regulatory overhead.

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The industry’s malaise is spreading overseas. The UK’s Independent is laying off 20% of its staff, or about 90 people. The company’s managing director said the business is “racking up losses that would threaten the very survival of these papers.” Trinity Mirror, which is the country’s largest local newspaper publisher, recently said it had quietly closed 28 titles this year.

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The southern California-based North County Times has cut 25 newsroom jobs, or about 25% of its workforce. Ironically, the paper also has a column this week by John Van Doorn, who was laid off after 58 years as a reporter and editor. The veteran New York newspaperman could be excused for being cynical about the whole thing, but his farewell piece (pre-published in Editor & Publisher) is actually quite uplifting.
Van Doorn thanks an industry that gave him the opportunity to “reside in 11 countries and work in 35, rub shoulders with presidents, prime ministers and a king or two, and with ordinary people far more substantive, such as the North County population.” And he’ll be back. “I cannot not write,” he concludes, inducing paroxysms in Microsoft Word’s grammar checker.

And Finally…

This year may go down as the worst ever for the newspaper industry, but 2008 also ironically included one of the best single-day sales milestones in history: the day after the presidential election. Issues flew off the newsstands in record numbers following Barack Obama’s victory, as readers sought to capture a moment in history.

Now the Chicago Sun-Times is going one step further by offering 44 copies of its Nov. 5 front page as a “museum wrap fine art giclée print on canvas.” If, like us, you’ve managed to live your entire life without knowing what giclée is, Ed Chasen Fine Art describes it as “a French term used to describe a specialized process in which pigmented inks are applied to canvas or paper to reproduce a fine art reproduction.” Regardless, the first 15 copies have so far failed to elicit a single bid starting at $350 each on the auction site, although there are still several days left.

The Sacramento and Fresno Bee newspapers offered buyouts to employees and held out the possibility of layoffs if unspecified cost-reduction goals aren’t met. Sacramento’s buyout offer covers 55 percent of its full-time employees and a smaller number of part-timers, including most editorial employees. The Fresno Bee‘s offer is open to most of its full-time workers. The publisher called the current situation, “some of the worst economic times we’ve faced.” Both papers cut staff just two months ago.

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The Gainesville Sun and Ocala Star-Banner will merge news operations, with the editor of the Sun running the show. News, copy desk, design, layout and pagination for both papers will move to Gainesville. Executives at both papers stressed their intent to remain committed to their local communities. However, they also said jobs will be cut at each newspaper, although specifics haven’t been determined. (via Romenesko).

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Management and union executives are cooperating in Philadelphia as the owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News seeks to cut staff amid a growing financial crisis. Responding to union concerns, the owners are targeting newsroom managers for cuts instead of unionized reporters. No numbers were specified. Standard & Poor’s recently reported, that owner Philadelphia Media Holdings (PMH) was trading at less than 50 cents on the dollar, meaning that the risk of bankruptcy is high. PMH missed a key interest payment in June, forcing it into a forbearance agreement with its creditors that lasts through September 10th.

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Miscellany

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GateHouse Media Inc. and American Community Newspapers (ACN) could become the third and fourth newspaper companies to be delisted from a major stock exchange this year.  ACN disclosed on Friday that it has been warned that it may be delisted from the American Stock Exchange for failing to file a 10-Q report. ACN publishes more than 100 community papers and shoppers. The company has until Sept. 4 to file a report telling how it will come into compliance. GateHouse has been notified by the New York Stock Exchange that it could be delisted if it doesn’t get its stock price over $1 a share (it’s at 60 cents now) and maintain a market capitalization above $75 million.

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Yahoo Japan is experimenting with user-generated editorial content. The Japanese Yahoo News page now features large amounts of material suggested and edited by readers. It’s a variation on Wikipedia and Google’s Knol, which are two experiments in community journalism. Unlike those two examples, though, Yahoo requires user editors to apply and take a test before they can contribute. (via Editors Weblog)

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The Editor of the McDowell (N.C.) News remembers fondly the days when a good monkey story merited a trip to Tokyo and a phalanx of support staff. Now all people want to read about is presidential candidates and their love children. Sheesh.

And Finally…

Editors at the annoyingly elitist Wine Spectator must be red-faced after their magazine bestowed a coveted Award of Excellence on a non-existent restaurant named Osteria L’Intrepido. The prank was dreamed up by Robin Goldstein, author of The Wine Trials, as part of a research project. Goldstein concocted a website featuring a menu assembled from recipes found in an Italian cookbook and submitted it as an entry in the magazine’s contest, along with a $250 entry fee. To twist the knife a little, he put together a reserve wine list “largely chosen from among some of the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past few decades.” His blog entry lists some of the reviews Wine Spectator published of his choices:

“Sweet and cloying. Smells like bug spray.”

“Smells barnyardy and tastes decayed.”

“Turpentine. Medium-bodied, with hard, acidic character.”

These reviews apparently missed the fact-checkers at the magazine, which awarded it a top honor anyway. We suppose $250 will buy you a lot these days.

Media General expanded its cost-cutting initiative, announcing plans to lay off 500 employees by July on top of the 250 laid off last year. The reduction amounts to 11% of the company’s 6,900-person workforce, an unusually deep cut even in these troubled times. Media General has been hammered by its exposure to weak Florida and California markets, where real estate advertising has shriveled and the recession is being felt more deeply than in other parts of the country. Most of the job cuts will come in the publishing division. Media General also owns 22 broadcast stations. The company will add 60 jobs in interactive media.

StopBigMedia.com smells a rat. The advocacy blog notes that Media General was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the FCC’s decision to lift its 30-year-old ban on media cross-ownership. The layoffs are thus hitting geographies where readers already have little choice in media, meaning that Media General will simply hack away at quality in the name of profitability, the blogger alleges. It appears, though, that the FCC’s decision will be reversed by Congress.

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The Beaver County Times of Pennsylvania is shutting down its printing operation and consolidating production with the New Castle News. The move was necessitated by th deteriorating condition of the Times’ 44-year-old press, the publisher said. The paper will cut 16 full-time and 80 part-time positions. The News plans to hire six full-timers to handle the additional work.

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Editor & Publisher reports that editorial cartoonists have been especially hard-hit by the newspaper downturn. Two decades ago, the industry employed about 200 cartoonists. Only about 85 are left. Latest casualties: Jake Fuller of the Gainesville Sun and Dave Granlund of the Metro West Daily News.

Miscellany

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz pens an unusually frank column on the state of the newspaper industry. Kurtz lists the names of talented colleagues who are leaving the paper and speculates about political maneuvering, but then closes with an honest account of the management mistakes and demographic trends that have led to this predicament. Quoting: “If newspapers wither and die, it will be in part because the next generation blew us off in favor of Xbox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods. Network news faces the same erosion. Maybe, in the end, we get the media we deserve.”

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Mother Jones has published photos of the empty San Jose Mercury News offices taken by staff designer Michael Martin Gee in April. The whole set is available on Flickr.

LAmag.com rounds up a group of former LA Times editors for one-on-ones about the past and future of the newspaper. The conversation is pleasant until you hit the jump page, when former EICs Dean Baquet and James O’Shea unload on owner Sam Zell.

Quoting from Baquet:

“Tribune was not a good steward, but Zell seems to be worse. Tribune didn’t like the L.A. Times, but Zell seems to be flailing and making it up as he goes along. At least with Tribune, you could have a rational fight—they never shouted obscenities at me. I wish somebody could tell this guy that he’s presiding over important newspapers and that sounding like a knucklehead won’t work in the newspaper business. Doesn’t he understand that the best people at the Times are floating résumés across the country because of his bullying?”

And from O’Shea:

“I think Mr. Zell looks at newspapers as he looks at any business, but a newspaper isn’t any other business. It’s a public service. If you do a good job serving the public, then business will be good. Public service is not a dividend you decrease or increase when profits fall or grow. What the L.A. Times becomes will depend on Mr. Zell’s understanding of that.”

Survey says Newspaper Websites Attract Smart, Rich People

A Nielsen survey commissioned by the Newspaper Association of America reports that newspaper websites attracted more than 66.4 million unique visitors in the first quarter, up 12.3% from last year. Page views were up a more modest five percent. In addition, the survey found that regular online newspaper readers are richer, better educated, more likely to travel and more likely to use iTunes. They have all kinds of other desirable characteristics, which you can read about in the press release.

Murdoch Still Favored to Win Newsday

Newsday continues to provide the best coverage of its own impending sale. You’d think that with Cablevision outbidding two other suitors by $70 million, the deal would be a no-brainer.  Not so, says this report. For one thing, Sam Zell may be reluctant to snub his new buddy, Rupert Murdoch. Cablevision may also face the same kind of cross-ownership regulatory hurdles as News Corp. And the whole deal needs to be rubber-stamped by a watchdog group of Tribune Co. employees, who may or may not agree with their boss. The whole thing could drag on for months. (via Romenesko)

Envisioning the Future of News

Susan Edgerley, assistant managing editor of The New York Times, is answering questions from readers. She’s focused on reinventing the newsroom. Some notable quotes:

“Two years ago, we might have been hesitant to break a scoop on the Web — we would have worried about the competition catching up to us before our print deadline. No more. Now we put the story out there and figure out how to advance it for the next day’s paper.”

 ”The Web staff used to be in a different building a couple of blocks from our old Times Square office. When we moved into our new building about a year ago, we had the space to sit together for the first time.”

 ”I don’t think you’re wasting your time getting a print journalism degree. Telling stories fairly and compellingly will always be at the center of what we do.”

 ”We’re hiring people, some of them straight out of school, for their Web skills.”

 ”Finally, NYTimes.com is more than the stories, pictures and graphics you see everyday in The New York Times. It is more than a newspaper on the Web. We want to use its blogs and reader comments and Topics pages and interactivity to talk more directly to our readers and find ways for them to share information with us.”

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ReinventingClassifieds.com has a prescription for resuscitating the dying business. Newspapers should put all their classifieds into one distributed, constantly updated database and then distribute them freely to bloggers, who can sell display ads against them. Bloggers can offer free classifieds to their readers, which become part of the master database. It’s an interesting idea, although we question how much interest bloggers – or display advertisers – will have in running ads next to ads. (via Romenesko)

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For the true TV news junkie, check out LiveNewsCameras.com. The site aggregates video feeds from more than 100 stations around the U.S. The project is the brainchild of a former Bay Area TV producer, says the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.

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Editors Weblog reports on Sunlight Foundation’s new tools for online journalists. They include a Google Maps mash-up of earmarks from last year’s Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill.

There’s also an item on the innovative uses of Twitter by the Evening Leader in the UK. The group text-messaging service recently enabled the paper to cover local election results, scooping its competition and setting up the print edition for more thoughtful next-day coverage. Will Twitter become an essential tool for journalists in the future? Let’s hear your comments.

Layoff Log

• The Lexington Herald-Leader is offering a voluntary buyout program, looking to reduce its staff of 385 employees by about four percent. Layoffs are possible if the offer doesn’t generate enough interest.
• The Camera of Boulder, Colo. laid off nine employees — 6 percent of its staff — in response to declining advertising revenues. The president of the company described the newspaper’s business as “healthy.” You figure it out.

The owner of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is disputing a report in the New York Post that the paper is on the brink of bankruptcy. In a statement issued late Friday, Publisher and Chairman Chris Harte said the Star Tribune “currently has sufficient liquidity and is current on all its debt payment obligations.” However, he acknowledged that the company has hired a private equity firm to advise it on business options.

There’s no question things are grim at the “Strib.” The paper has cut 10% of its workforce over the last two years and was one of the leading losers in the ABC audit report published last week. In February, Harte told his people “Total revenue is down almost $75 million in the last two years… classified revenue was down over 50 percent from what it was at the start of the decade.”

A Star Tribune bankruptcy raises the likelihood that the paper’s creditors could end up owning it, and you know how committed banks are to quality journalism. The most likely scenario is massive expense cuts and a fire sale. The Star Tribune’s near-monopoly position does buy it some breathing room, but it’s hard to imagine there would be much hope of attracting new readers from such a crippled state. Ironically, as we noted two weeks ago, readers of the Star Tribune’s website spend almost as much time there as readers of The Wall Street Journal’s wsj.com.

Do J-Schools Hinder Progress?

Vin Crosbie writes a searing commentary on ClickZ about why journalism schools are part of the problem in the newspaper industry, rather than part of the solution. Having spent most of the last year on a sabbatical from consulting to teach journalism, Crosbie says he’s been astounded by the refusal of faculty at various academic institutions to change the ways in which they teach their craft in the face of seismic industry disruption (he’s careful not to point the finger at his own). “What I found were faculties resistant to change and students whose insights and mastery of new media were being eroded by the authoritative resistance to change of so many professors,” he writes.

He estimates that a quarter of J-school professors are actively blocking curriculum change and that they’re intimidating the 50% of the teachers who do want to move forward. Surprisingly, it’s the academics in their 30s and 40s who seem to be most in denial.

Union Agitation in the East Bay

It didn’t take long for union organizers to return to the East Bay. More than half the employees of a chain of newspapers in the region have signed cards demanding that they get union representation. They’ve filed their petition with the National Labor Relations Board, which will probably clear them for a vote.

The unit of MediaNews Group that runs the papers in the area probably thought it had scored an end run around the union nine months ago when it combined enough operations to dilute union membership below the 50% level required for recognition. Now employees of the combined operations have struck back. It’s hard to imagine what either side stands to gain. As a commenter on Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20-Year Club notes, “Gee, now they get to be laid off in order of seniority instead on who can do the job best.”

Your Daily Murdoch

As expected, Cablevision bid $650 for Newsday, which means Murdoch will have to match the ante. Speculation is that he’ll do just that and will eventually walk away with the prize, in part because his offer cuts Tribune Co. in for a tax-efficient minority stake and in part because he and Sam Zell are now good buddies.

Alan Mutter thinks Zell has a secret agenda in cozying up to Murdoch: he sees News Corp. as his exit strategy. Mutter sketches a scenario in which Tribune Co., on the brink of default, sells to News Corp., giving News Corp. cross-ownership of multiple print and TV properties in key cities. Murdoch and Zell then argue before the Federal Trade Commission that such consolidation is necessary for survival in the face of Internet competition. If the FTC modifies the rules, then News Corp. goes on a shopping spree. Intriguing idea.

And Finally

Editor & Publisher has a nice analysis of recent shakeups in D.C. newsrooms, including the ousters of the Associated Press bureau chief and a top national editor at The Washington Post. The common thread appears to be that these people were the victims of political struggles touched off by industry change.

The Economist summarizes the trials of the U.S. newspaper industry. It’s nothing you haven’t read here already, but it’s done in that crisp, efficient Economist style.

Blogging for Time, Justin Fox says newspapers will milk their current business until they die because they just can’t bring themselves to change their print-centric mentality. This statement is followed, curiously, by a discussion of his lunch.

The oddmakers are still placing their bets on Rupert Murdoch to emerge from the Big Apple newspaper scrum clutching Newsday, but he apparently won’t get it without a fight. Newsday itself reports that Cablevision is ready to hike its bid above $600 million, meaning that Messrs. Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman will probably have to raise their bids as well. Cablevision’s controlling Dolan family apparently feel that Long Island is home turf, and may even join in a joint offer with New York Observer owner Jared Kushner to keep Murdoch’s hands off the paper. Meanwhile, Murdoch has hired former U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato to grease the skids with local elected officials, who still have the power to nix the deal.

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Fortune’s Devin Leonard has an insightful analysis of the financial machinations behind the Muroch-Zuckerman dogfight. He says Murdoch’s proposal to Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell isn’t an outright buy but a joint venture between Tribune and News Corp. Such a deal would save the famously tax-averse Zell a lot of money in capital gains taxes while shoring up the money-losing New York Post. Of course, Murdoch would still have to get the deal past the FCC, but his track record there has been pretty good. Meanwhile, Zuckerman probably sees a Newsday-Post combination as a death knell for his Daily News, a fact that may force him to raise his offer.

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Over at The Wall Street Journal, the special committee to oversee editorial independence issued a protest against the way former WJS managing editor Marcus Brauchli’s resignation was handled last week. The committee says it was informed after the fact in a manner that was inconsistent with the letter and spirit of its agreement with Murdoch. It plans to play an active and vigorous role in hiring a successor, said a statement by the five-member committee, whose formal authority is unclear. Chairman Thomas Bray hastened to note that he has no intention of stepping down from the committee, which isn’t surprising, considering that members are paid $100,000 a year for their work.

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Retired LA Times veteran Ken Reich shares his plain-talk view of the difference between Tribune and News Corp., casting his vote for Murdoch. “He invests in his newspapers. He builds them up, rather than tears them down,” Reich writes. He then goes on a tirade against the situation at the LA Times, particularly the “squalid duet [sic]” of publisher David Hiller and editor Russ Stanton. The editor “likes to write memos, and each one is dumber than the one before. He is a lackey to Hiller,” says Reich, who is probably not seeking freelance work from his former employer. Thanks to the LA Times Pressmens Club blog for the link. But guys, you’ve got some serious spyware issues.

Pearlstein Cautions Against Too Much Hyper-locality

Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post advises putting the brakes on the rush to hyper-local journalism. In a speech to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual conference, he said that readers value business coverage and that news of markets and investments shouldn’t be overshadowed by what’s happening down the street.

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Pearstein’s message was a little too late for the St. Petersburg Times, which is continuing an industry trend by merging its stand-alone business section into the rest of the paper. There’ll be a full page of business news, but stocks are going away, to be replaced by summary market data.

A Peek at the Future

Editors Weblog has two interesting short items today:

• The Norwegian press is integrating computer programmers into its news staff because editors believe that databases and online mashups are becoming a critical part of the reporting process. Norway’s public broadcasting flagship’s latest project is Politikerdatabasen, “a database that currently contains information on all members of parliament in Norway and will expand to include information on the country’s 11,000 local politicians in May.” The editor in charge says that all reporters should learn programming skills, to go along with the photography and video skills they’re now having to adopt.
• The site also tells how the U.K.’s Evening Leader is using Twitter to cover soccer matches. “The tweets, texted every few minutes by deputy editor Martin Wright, appeared both on a widget on the Leader website and on the paper’s Wrexham Twitter account.”

Will New York City soon have two New York Times? That hasn’t happened yet, but the trend appears to be in that direction. The Project for Excellence in Journalism analyzed The Wall Street Journal’s editorial profile in the four months before and the three months after Rupert Murdoch’s takeover. It found that business coverage is down sharply in favor of political and international stories. While the Journal still runs far more business news than the Times, the papers appear to be headed toward a similar content model.

The tricky part for the Journal will be figuring out how to sustain its strength (and brand equity) in business coverage and not look too much like the Times. Meanwhile, you have to believe that the Financial Times is salivating at the prospect of moving in on the Journal’s traditional market.

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Newsosaur Alan Mutter believes that Murdoch’s strategy in New York is focused on the Daily News, not the Times. He runs some numbers on what would happen if Murdoch controlled both Newsday and the New York Post and concludes that Mortimer Zuckerman’s Daily News would be painted into a corner. One Newsday asset that many reports have overlooked is AM New York, a free daily with 314,000 circulation. The Newsday-Post combo would dominate the profitable Sunday market while AM New York would squeeze the Daily News’ weekday business. When you add up all the Murdoch strategies, you can see New York eventually becoming a two-publisher town, with one publisher holding three of the four titles. 

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This may answer some recent questions raised on Wall Street about just what Murdoch is trying to accomplish. Put all the pieces together and the answer appears quite clear.

Perhaps this prospect is injecting some jackrabbit juice into the U.S. Senate, which looks set to strengthen the ban on cross-media ownership in large markets.

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On a completely unrelated note, Slate’s Jack Shafer calls out Murdoch for what Shafer says is habitual lying about his 1993 decision to dump the BBC from his Star satellite TV system. The short piece is of mainly historical interest, although it does manage to use the term “genocidal tyrant” as anchor text. If you query Google on that term, you get a page full of Murdoch references.

Other News

• The Boston Globe avoided layoffs as 23 employees accepted buyout offers. We just don’t know who they are, and the Globe intends to keep it that way. Romenesko has the memo.
• A day after Wall Street pushed stocks of three newspapers to historic lows, the issues bounced back big on Thursday. Some bloggers are calling the stocks a bargain at current levels and fears appear to be easing about the credit crunch, which should lift spirits at debt-laden newspaper companies.
• Nielsen posted comparisons of view time spent on various newspaper sites in March, 2008 versus a year earlier. Editor & Publisher noted that only 11 of the top 30 sites reported increases. What struck us was that the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Houston Chronicle websites get almost as much reader time as NYTimes.com and significantly more than WSJ.com. What are they doing right?

There are signs that the industry is trying to reinvent itself, or at least complain more vociferously about the forces that are marginalizing it.

What’s Black & White And Spread All Over? – MediaPost, Dec. 10, 2007
[A study commissioned by the newspaper industry finds that newspaper readers are more likely to be influencers than non-readers. The results really aren't surprising. In percentage terms, twice as many people over the age of 60 read daily newspapers as under the age of 30. Given that newspaper readership increases with age, it's not too much of a stretch to believe that older people would be more influential in purchasing decisions than kids. You can also assume that people who can afford a subscription to a newspaper are somewhat more affluent than those who rely solely on the Web. It's hard to tell; the rather skimpy 10-slide presentation on the NNN's site gives no demographic breakdown. - Ed.]

Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky, ajc.com, Dec. 13, 2007
[The author calls for "citizen journalism" to be regulated and/or certified. The scenarios he outlines to support his case are valid. Unfortunately, professional journalists aren't licensed or certified, so the idea that ordinary citizens should be subjected to some kind of review process rings pretty hollow. -Ed.]

Local Papers’ Web Scramble – WSJ.com, Dec. 18, 2007
[Newspapers are rapidly losing market share in the one market in which they should have a significant edge: local advertising. In 2007, for the first time, pure-play Web companies had a larger share of local advertising than newspapers. In just three years, newspapers' overall share of that market is down from 44% to 33.4%. This is largely newspapers’ own fault. Instead of investing in local sales staff over the last decade, they have mainly focused on trying to sell more high-margin national display advertising. Meanwhile, pure-play Web companies swooped in and took their market share. -Ed.]