Lee Abrams and friend

Conde Nast Portfolio takes a look at Tribune Co.’s much ballyhooed redesigns and finds that nothing much has changed. New looks-and-feels in Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale have barely budged circulation, which continues to fall. “We can’t find any impact from the redesign,” Norbert Ortiz, the Orlando Sentinel‘s vice president for circulation and consumer marketing, tells Portfolio.

This doesn’t bode well for recent makeovers in Los Angeles and Chicago. Experts debate whether the new designs are radical or just a new coat of paint, with the painters holding the edge: “a distraction,” says Ken Doctor; “seat of the pants” adds Alan Mutter. The story focuses on Tribune chief innovation officer Lee Abrams, who is inexplicably pictured with the cast of Blue Man Group. Abrams invented the album format that revolutionized FM radio back in the 80s, but his innovations in print have been less dramatic. “I wouldn’t call it redesign. I would call it redecoration,” says Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design.

Abrams is quoted asserting that “we really had to work on reclaiming things that newspapers had traditionally owned,” from investigative reporting to election and crime coverage. Oddly, Tribune Co. has slashed editorial staff at most of its papers this year, drastically undercutting their ability to sustain provide such information.

We’ve previously shared our opinion of redesigns (“A Useless Exercise at the Wrong Time”) and see no further need to comment.

New/Old Journalism Clash in Washington Park

Mediashift tell of a new online publication at New York University that’s challenging the school’s 36-year-old campus fixture, Washington Square News (WSN). The venture was launched by three non-journalism majors who were frustrated with what they call WSN’s bland tone and faux objectivity. NYU Local, which is currently configured as a blog, takes a fundamentally different view of impartiality. “Most people who want to be objective tend to disguise their opinions,” says co-editor Lily Quateman says. “Being objective treats readers like idiots and makes them guess.”

WSN Editor-in-Chief, Adam Playford begs to differ, saying his journal will continue to report just the facts and label opinions accordingly. He also says online isn’t a major focus at WSN, which updates its website just once a day. In contract, NYU Local encourages anyone to contribute and makes it possible to do so by any means possible, including cell phone. The staff hopes to move to a social networking platform in order to further encourage community journalism. “The idea of citizen journalism is a massive misnomer,” says 20-year-old co-editor Cody Brown. “Everyone is a citizen and anyone can be a reporter. The term is patronizing.”

The piece, which is written by an NYU junior, highlights the push-pull taking place between old- and new-media models, even within the context of a college-age audience. The fundamental debate is over the question of whether professional reporters are better equipped to tell a story versus thousands of unknown citizens. The fact that the battle is taking place in an institution that’s training the next generation of journalists indicates that this issue will be debated for some time to come.

Layoff Log

• More layoffs are days away at the Baltimore Sun, according to the newspaper’s union. If true, the action would follow by just five months a 100-person downsizing this summer, a cutback that hit the newsroom particularly hard. No word on numbers, but the cuts are expected to be layoffs, not buyouts. The Sun employed 1,400 people before the 100-person cutback last June.
• With five more newsroom layoffs at the New Haven Register, the size of the newsroom staff will have shrunk from 110 to 65 in a decade. The five editors are part of a larger cutback of 20 people announced yesterday. The daily will also shutter Play, an entertainment-oriented weekly. More layoffs are possible in mid-January, when parent Journal Register may fall into default if it can’t make its debt payments. Earlier this week, Journal Register said it would probably close two small Connecticut dailies – the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press – along with 11 weeklies in the state.
• As expected, the ax has fallen in Tribune Co.’s Washington bureaus. LA Observed reports that Chicago Tribune staffers John Crewdson, Bay Fang, Stephen Hedges, and Aamer Madhani were let go. Earlier eight Los Angeles Times staffers were laid off and acting Tribune acting bureau chief Naftali Bendavid left to join The Wall Street Journal.
• Newhouse is cutting deeply in Michigan. Staff at eight newspapers have been told that massive buyouts are planned and some operations will be consolidated in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. There’s no word on numbers, but the Ann Arbor Chronicle account says nearly everyone in the newsroom has been offered a buyout. Production staff has been told that if they don’t take the buyout, they’ll have to work from the Grand Rapids office, which is 130 miles away. Papers in the group include the Grand Rapids Press, Ann Arbor News, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Flint Journal, Bay City Times, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News and the Michigan Business Review. The Ann Arbor paper early announced plans to close its Ypsilanti bureau and to slash pages and sections in an effort to control costs.

Miscellany

Outsell’s Ken Doctor has some encouraging news for newspapers. “It’s a shrinking business that only looks like it is dying,” he tells Media Life. “The U.S. newspaper business will still take in some $40 billion in revenues in 2008.” Doctor believes some papers will close and many may scale back frequency in coming years in order to align expenses with smaller revenues. However, he expects the business to come back, even the devastated classified advertising business. “Forty percent of the newspaper industry is partnering with Yahoo, and we should see a good Yahoo bump in online display ads,” Doctor says. A lot of retraining will be needed, though.

Preliminary research by Middleberg & Associates and the Society of New Communications Research shows that 100% of reporters under 30 agree that new media and communication tools are valuable journalism tools. But only 40% of journalists over 50 year agree with that statement. There is no more change-averse animal than an old newsman. You can still take the survey here.

The Daily Triplicate of Crescent City, Calif. celebrates awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association by trashing the slipshod tactics most awards programs use to select winners. Its tone might sound a bit snarky, but our experience is that the point is valid.

In case you didn’t see this comment from last week, journalism professor Robert Hodierne at the University of Richmond has been commissioned by American Journalism Review “to survey folks who left the newspaper business under circumstances other than voluntary — laid off, bought out, etc. I’m spreading the word about this survey in every way I can and if you guys could help me spread the word I’d be grateful. Take the survey here.

Newspaper Death Watch editor Paul Gillin is interviewed on The Radio Ecoshock Show about what’s ailing newspapers and what will fill the gap. You can skip the description and listen to the short interview here.

A selection of stories snipped from the Web. Descriptions are quoted directly from the source.

Virginian-Pilot Considers Layoffs, Other Cost-Cutting Measures

The president and publisher of the Virginian-Pilot said the newspaper and its affiliated companies are considering layoffs before the end of the year because of steep declines in advertising revenue.”We have no sacred cows. Everything is on the table,” Maurice Jones told Virginian-Pilot readers last week. Possible moves include layoffs, raising the price of the newspaper, reducing page count, closing some of the businesses associated iwth the newspaper, and decreasing the circulation area.

McClatchy-owned Star lays off 50

This latest job reduction comes after The Star’s layoff of about 30 employees on Sept. 17 in addition to roughly that many who had accepted the newspaper’s most recent early-buyout offer, publisher Mark Zieman told employees in an internal e-mail on that date.

Zell’s Tribune Co. takes big Q3 hit

The Chicago-based newspaper and TV station owner reported a $124 million loss for its third quarter, compared with a profit of $84 million a year earlier. Operating revenues were down 10% to $1 billion…Fueling the red ink at Tribune were a 13% year-to-year decline in publishing revenues to $654 million. Advertising revenues sank 19%, or $111 million, compared with the year-earlier benchmark. Even its interactive revenues declined 7% to $4 million…The biggest ad declines came in the sectors most immediately hammered by the economic downturn: retail outlets, furniture and hardware stores, and department stores. Automotive advertising was also down, along with telecom services and movies, Tribune said. The largest revenue declines came from the Chicago Tribune, Hartford Courant and Los Angeles Times.

Time Inc. Seeks Volunteers for Job Cuts at Magazines – NYTimes.com

Editors on Monday asked for about 100 volunteers to give up editorial staff jobs at Time, People, Sports Illustrated and a few other Time Inc. magazines, and the company announced the elimination of a similar number of jobs in its business operations. The cuts are the first steps toward what Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, has said will be the elimination of about 600 jobs worldwide, most of them at its 24 magazines in the United States.”

E.W. Scripps Co. joins the growing ranks of newspapers that are cutting broadly across their portfolios. The company will lay off about 400 people as it struggles with profits that plunged from $16.6 million a year ago to a loss of $21 million in the most recent quarter. Editor & Publisher reports that layoffs have already happened at Scripps-owner papers in Knoxville, Tenn. and Evansville, Ind. The National Press Photographers Association has more details on where the cuts are coming, including elimination of 20% of the newsroom in Ventura, Calif. Other newspaper holding companies that have cut broadly in recent months include Gannett and A.H. Belo.

Looks Like a Newspaper, Smells Like a Newspaper

They’re having a good old-fashioned hockey brawl in Toronto over the publication at left. It’s called Our Toronto (no, you won’t find it online anywhere) and it’s a quarterly communication from the mayor’s office that looks an awful lot like a newspaper. Or at least some city council members and watchdog groups think it’s awful. They use terms like “travesty,” “offensive propaganda” and “Pravda” to describe what Mayor David Miller says is simply an honest attempt to inform citizens about what’s going on in their city.

Our Toronto will be mailed to residents’ homes and also published online and translated into languages ranging from Chinese to Urdu. The editor is city communications director Kevin Sack and Mayor Miller will have a column in each issue. The cost to the taxpayers is about $850,000 a year.

Debate centers upon whether this is a propaganda sheet masking as a legitimate news organ or simply a propaganda sheet. Critics complain that all the content is positive about the mayor, but Mayor Miller says he’s simply doing what every other elected official does in providing facts and updates to his constituents. In any case, it’s interesting to see somebody getting into the newspaper business these days.

Miscellany

Too little, too late. The American Press Institute will host a “Crisis Summit” for the newspaper industry this week. Executives will gather behind closed doors to ponder what to do to reverse the industry’s downward spiral. Session leader James Shein says one of the purposes of the head-knock will be to “illuminate for newspaper industry leaders the urgency of their situation.” If any of those leaders still need to be illuminated in this respect, then shareholders should be demanding their heads on a plater.

Barack Obama’s win caused a big one-day surge in newspaper sales as people scrambled to get souvenirs of the historic event. One opportunist was asking $2,000 on eBay for a copy of the Charlotte Observer, of all things. Perhaps attendees at the API Crisis Summit can come up with ways to create more big news events so they can sell out at the newsstand and make a killing on online auctions.

Mark Gunther tells the encouraging story of a nonprofit organization that is funding entrepreneurs to solve pressing social problems, including the decline of traditional media. The group is called Ashoka, and among its investments are several citizen journalism organizations around the world. Gunther has details and links.

And Finally…

Sam Zell could be stuck with the Chicago Cubs for a while. The Wall Street Journal reports that the real estate billionaire-turned-newspaper magnate may be foiled in his effort to sell the storied franchise for $1 billion, the victim of a plunging real estate market and dried-up sources of capital. So Zell, who has said he’s not a baseball fan, could end up with a 50% stake in America’s Most Frustrating Team for some time to come. Perhaps that was on his mind when this photo was snapped during Game One of the National League Division series, where Chicago was swept in three games by a Dodger team that had won 13 fewer games during the regular season.

Always-provocative Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing proposes that publishers need to change their definition of news. Those Twitter and Facebook feeds that stream information about what your friends are having for lunch? That’s news, Outing says. Only most professional editors don’t consider it that. If information doesn’t have a wire-service imprimatur or at least the watermark of a professional writer, it doesn’t quality as news.

But guess what? Customers don’t care. To them, advice from friends is at least as valuable as advice from a news pro. The popularity of social networks and Twitter attests to that. Professional publishers need to tap in to this phenomenon, but they’re too addicted to conventional definitions of news to make that happen, Outing suggests. They’re missing the boat and the market is passing them by.

Outing nails it. For a great perspective on the popularity of social networking read this piece on “ambient intimacy” from the International Herald-Tribune. Clive Thompson explains the value of sustaining relationships through casual awareness of what others are doing.

Twitter and the Facebook News Feed bring new breadth to this concept, enabling people to glimpse others’ lives through occasional insights into their everyday activities. This intimacy becomes addictive. People who initially reject the News Feed as too intrusive or the constant stream of Twitter chatter as too overwhelming often find themselves drawn in to the point that monitoring the stream becomes engrossing. It’s an experience that appeals to basic human instincts.

The 18-year-olds who log on to Facebook 15 times a day are telling us something. Their friends network is their news stream. As we all know by now, they are rejecting packaged media in favor of a jumbled, unpredictable gush of information from all kinds of sources. They choose who to listen to. If publishers aren’t in the news stream, they’re irrelevant. Outing is proposing that publishers could be the source of the news stream, mixing packaged content from professional sources with ambient chatter from individuals. Of course, Facebook is already pretty well entrenched, but it’s not very localized. Publishers could still transform their websites into something more than a print archive with a few blogs wrapped around it.

Miscellany

More layoffs at the Boston Globe. This time, 42 people in the advertising, circulation, marketing and production departments lost their jobs, or a little less than 2% of the 2,450-person workforce. That’s a bloodbath, says the hyperbolic headline in rival Boston Herald, which should know about bloodbaths. No newsroom jobs were cut. The ranks of the idled reportedly include several senior managers, although no one named names. The Boston Phoenix has the memo from Globe publisher Steve Aimsley. The Globe‘s website is now also reporting to the Globe instead of to The New York Times, which kind of makes sense. And in unrelated news, the newspaper’s truck driver’s union rejected an offer of a 5% pay cut and less vacation. The Globe reported the fourth-worst percentage circulation decline among the top 25 US newspapers in the most recent numbers from the Audit Bureau of Control.

The Redding (Calif.) Record Searchlight is laying of 12 people, or about 6% of its workforce. No newsroom jobs were affected and the publisher says the paper’s financial position is strong. Read the delightfully random comments from readers, who attribute the layoffs to everything from the Bush administration to yellow journalism, although not to the 85-lb. salmon carcass that is the paper’s most e-mailed story of the day.

Reuters says the outlook is worsening for Canadian newspapers. Ad revenue at the Toronto Star fell 8.5% in the most recent quarter on top of an 18% jump in newsprint prices. Canwest, which is Canada’s biggest publisher of daily newspapers, can cut back print runs of the National Post daily in western provinces. The Canadian dollar is off more than 20% in the past year, which can’t help.

There are rumors that the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger is planning more layoffs in early December, even as it invests in a new lifestyle website that will show pictures of all the bars in town. Jackson Free Press Editor Donna Ladd sums up: “So there’s money for drunk pictures, but not for news coverage.”  Well, what the heck is wrong with that, Donna? Commenters pile on. Ladd says the C-L Scroogishly cancelled the $50 holiday bonus and is asking staffers to pay for coffee while hardwood floors are installed in the publisher’s office.

Did you know US News & World Report is going to go monthly? We didn’t even know it was still around.

News After Newspapers says what we’ve been saying for two years about the outlook for the newspaper industry, but the author sees hope in a new class of product.

And Finally…

This isn’t news, at least as professional editors define it, but the Top 10 Strangest Coincidences on 2Spare.com is worth the waste of time. In fact, the whole site is a time sink. You can get lost for hours. We don’t know how much of the information is true, but this is the Internet and you shouldn’t believe what you read, anyway.

In its second round of layoffs in just seven months, the Seattle Times said it will cut 130 to 150 positions, with the ax falling particularly hard on the newsroom. The cutbacks amount to less than 10% of the Times’ overall employment of, but the 35 to 45 positions lost in the newsroom represent 13% to 17% of the 260-person editorial staff. The publisher also vowed to continue to combine and consolidate sections to cut back on production costs. A buyout will be extended for less than one week, after which layoffs will begin.

Parent company Blethen has been desperately trying to cut costs in any way possible, including outsourcing trucking operations and trying to unload a chain of newspapers in Maine. There were reports late last month that a buyer for the newspapers has been found, but all has been quite for the two weeks since then. The Times cut more than 270 positions in April, and the scope of the new round indicates that the deteriorating economy is taking its toll. Indeed, the publisher said the advertising downturn has quickened with the plunging stock market and that even the one bright spot – online advertising – has flattened.

Rival and duopoly partner Post-Intelligencer says it plans no layoffs, but that company has been in an “ironclad” hiring freeze all year and has reduced headcount significantly through attrition. With this newest round of reductions, the Times will have reduced its total staff from 1,879 at the end of 2007 to no more than 1,469, a reduction of about 22% in a single year.

Layoff Log

• LA Times staffers are girding for yet another round of cuts, this time to the paper’s Washington bureau. An anonymous memo posted on Romenesko late last week claims to detail a meeting with Times D.C. Bureau Chief Doyle McManus in which McManus outlined plans for a consolidated Tribune Co. bureau structure with several papers sharing reporters. The bureau will consist of 24 people, which will require an unspecified number of layoffs, the memo said. This Friday was targeted as the date of the layoff announcement. McManus disputed some of the details of the memo in a posting on Romenesko, but basically affirmed plans for the consolidated bureau structure.
• The Frederick (Md.) News-Post will lay off 16 employees, including four in the newsroom. No word on what percentage of total employment that represents.

Miscellany

The Gannett Company continues to pointedly ignore a website created by a former employee, even as The Gannett Blog has become a major source of news about job cuts at the company. Now The New York Times has selected Gannett as a poster child of corporate cluelessness in this piece about transparency in the blogosphere. According to the Times, Gannett still refuses to return any inquiries from blog editor Jim Hopkins, despite the fact that the his posts consistently spark dozens or even hundreds of comments. In acting as a virtual water cooler for the entire company, Gannett Blog has become the destination of choice for employees who want to learn what’s really going on at Gannett because the company provides so little information about itself. As the Times notes, in an increasingly transparent business world, silence is no longer an option.

The publisher of The New York Times has a provocative opinion to share. Asked at a recent conference if newspapers will even exist in a decade, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. responded, “We can’t care.” Those three words made the headline, but what Sulzberger was really saying was that the transition from print to digital media will proceed whether or not publishers want it. The Times’ recent moves to build a social network and to take down its paid registration wall are simply recognition of a changing media landscape, he said. Sulzberger believes print will have value far into the future and he chooses to look at the current turmoil in the industry as evolution rather than collapse.

And Finally…

Who is this person to the left? If you were a fan of 1960s sitcoms, you’d know him as one of the most recognizable faces on television but he doesn’t look nearly the same today. Click here to find out. AOL’s Memba Them site has photos of 160 celebrities as you once knew them and shots of those same folks today. It’s a tribute to, er, aging gracefully!

Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff says the media mogul was unaware that Dow Jones had an enterprise business when he purchased the company two years ago. “He wanted the newspaper, and the fact that afterward he found himself with businesses that were rather more successful than the newspaper business, was surprising,” Wolff told a conference.

Newspaper sales in Japan are 2.5 times those of the US as a percentage of the population and journalist layoffs are all but unheard of. The reason: the population is declining. The percentage of children 14 and younger is the lowest it’s been in 100 years and the overall population of Japan is expected to decline by a third over the next 50 years. The lack of a new generation of Web-savvy upstarts means papers have less pressure to move online and figure out how to serve a new audience. “We only put 20 percent of our content on the Web,” says on association executive. Of course, there’s a train wreck waiting down the line at some point, but in the meantime, publishers can plan to gracefully manage their properties into oblivion in lock-step with demographic trends.

The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild pried a nice contract settlement out of the Seattle Times: a 6% raise over two years. That money’s gotta come from somewhere, though, and staffers are bracing for an “ugly” layoff announcement in the near future.

We’re late reporting this one (little things like making a living do take their toll), but the New York Times Co. reported that profits fell 51.4% on a 14.4% decline in ad revenue in the third quarter.  Standard & Poor’s responded by lowering the company’s debt to junk bond status. Print advertising was off 18.5% and online advertising was up 10%. Online revenue now makes up over 12% of total sales at the company. The board also said it is considering writing down the value of assets in its New England Media Group, which includes the Boston Globe, $150 million. The Times Co. originally paid $1 billion for the group.

Traffic to newspaper websites was up almost 16% in the third quarter, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Page views were up 25%, making it the best quarter for newspaper website traffic since the organization began tracking those figures in 2004. Interest in the political campaigns and the ongoing turmoil on Wall Street were cited as likely drivers of the traffic surge. It remains to be seen how year-over-year comparisons will fare once the election is over.

Threatened Journalist has an uplifting story on San Diego Union-Tribune ex-pats who are doing quite nicely, thank you. One is a communications manager for the Port of San Diego, another works in media relations for the University of Southern California and a third is a Methodist minister in Mission Valley. All are wistful about their former jobs in the pressure-packed newsroom, but they say they have no regrets. The way the industry was going, there wasn’t much future in the business. The author relates other happy landings: “Former metro reporter Liz Neely just landed a job as an investigator for a law firm. Former business reporter Craig Rose is working for City Attorney Mike Aguirre. Former columnist Gerry Braun is working for Mayor Jerry Sanders. Former reporters Chet Barfield and Mark Sauer are working for Councilwoman Donna Frye. Former North County reporter Lisa Petrillo is working at Children’s Hospital. And the list go on.” So there is life after newspapers!

It’s a dismal day in newsland. Gannett Co. will cut 10% of its workforce, or about 3,000 jobs, by early December. The announcement – Gannett’s second major headcount reduction this year – will bring to over 15,000 the number of newspaper employees who have lost their jobs in the US alone in 2008.

In reporting sharply lower earnings on a stunning 17.7% drop in quarterly revenue, Gannett said it must cut broadly across its portfolio of 84 major daily and hundreds of local newspapers, with the sole exception of USA Today, which appeared to escape the carnage. Rather than cutting arbitrarily, the company will ask each paper to submit its own plan and then trim selectively. These aren’t buyouts but layoffs, and they come on top of the 1,000-person reduction announced in August.

Also today, Time, Inc. said it plans to cut 600 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, and restructure the company in a move to rein in its decentralized structure and improve efficiency. The layoffs will come across the range of Time, Inc. titles, although some publications will be hit more severely than others. The company will also organize its 24 magazines into three groups: news, lifestyle and style/entertainment. A New York Times report says the restructuring is intended to focus more energy on the company’s flagship brands like Sports Illustrated and Fortune, while increasing information-sharing and even bylines across publications. The company will still have 10,200 employees internationally after the cuts.

Gawker has a list of Time, Inc. layoffs and closures stretching back to 2002. The site also notes that the coincident resignation of Time publisher Ed McCarrick, a 35-year veteran, is a symbolic departure from the old-school style of publishing, in which two-martini lunches and golf courses were the principal business venues.

Analyzing the Monitor‘s Exit from Print

The New York Times offers some perspective on yesterday’s announcement that the Christian Science Monitor will broadly scale back its print operations, saying the move makes the Monitor “the first national newspaper to largely give up on print.” The Times also quotes Monitor editor John Yemma describing the move as “a new model” that few news organizations outside of the heavily subsidized Monitor could hope to attempt. Stephanie Clifford’s account also notes that Monitor circulation has dropped from 220,000 in 1970 to 52,000, making the print closure a lot easier to justify. She adds that while going online-only may seem appealing to some executives, print advertising still brings in 92% of newspaper revenue in the US.

Such was evidently not the case at the Monitor, though. Yemma is quoted as saying that advertising revenue brings in a paltry $1 million a year, compared to $9 million from subscription revenue. In fact, the Monitor already makes more money online than in print, he said. Not many newspaper publishers can say that. Another nugget: the CSMonitor.com site gets about 3 million page views a month right now, a number Yemma said he wants to increase to at least 20 million over five years.

That’s the Press, Baby! agues that had the Monitor been forced to fend for itself as a profit-making entity rather than enjoying massive subsidies from the Christian Science Church, it would have closed the print business long ago. David Sullivan also harkens back to his youth in Indiana, when two daily newspapers controlled the flow of information and told you only what served their political interests. The Monitor was an oasis of objectivity and journalistic quality in that stew, Sullivan writes, and he hopes it will continue to set a standard for rational discourse when everyone else is going crazy.

Last week, I spent a day speaking to two college classes about the changing media industry. Both groups consisted of juniors and seniors, nearly all of them majoring in public relations. These people should be heavy consumers of information, and they are. When I asked the roughly 45 students how many of them read a newspaper online every day, nearly ever hand went up. But when I asked how many subscribe to a newspaper, only a single student raised a hand.

Oh, they read newspapers. They read Metro, the local entertainment weekly, the college daily and even the major metro dailies on occasion. The difference is that they don’t subscribe. They consume information when it’s convenient to them, and so much information is being pushed at them all the time that they have plenty of choices about what to read. The concept of paying to subscribe to something is foreign to these people in their early 20s. Why pay for what you can get for free?

Some publishers may be adapting to this new reality and paring back their paid subscriptions accordingly. Back in April, the Audit Bureau of Control changed its rules to enable publishers to declare as paid circulation copies that they sold for as little as a penny. At the time, some people predicted the beginning of a new circulation war. But the opposite has apparently happened. The Wall Street Journal reports that the current trend at big papers is to manage circulation intelligently, focusing on hitting the highest-quality readers at the best time of day. The story cites the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Arizona Republic as two papers that have cut circulation to the applause of advertisers, who didn’t see much value in distributing to readers who live so far away that they would never be candidates to come in to their stores. And publishers do see growth potential in circulation of Sunday issues, which arrive when people are most receptive to reading them.

Involuntary declines, continue, though. The two New York tabloids continue to post ongoing readership losses, in part because of price increases announced earlier this year to offset the rising cost of newsprint. Fortunately, newsprint prices are stabilizing now, in large part due to decreases in demand brought about by the slowing global economy.

Pressure to Go Private

Many years ago, for reasons that are unknown to us, major newspaper publishers began reporting monthly, rather than quarterly earnings results. Today, that practice has become a millstone around the industry’s neck, casting a public spotlight on the industry’s woes with painful frequency.

While reporting on the latest round of earnings declines, James Erik Abels of Forbes begins to ponder the once-imponderable: maybe it’s time to think about the end of the newspaper industry. The business model isn’t viable any more, Abels says, and the recession will hit hard at its base of local advertisers. The piece suggests that the pressure of earnings comparisons is only making matters worse by publicizing the industry’s problems. That’s one reason some equity managers are encouraging owners like the Sulzbergers to take their companies private: it enables them to restructure outside of the glare of publicity.

Newspaper brands have considerable value, which is one reason some private investors are lining up to buy them, Abels says. Relaunched with smaller staffs and more nimble businesses, newspapers would have a leg up on online startups because of their reader loyalty. It’s just that the process of getting to that smaller staffing model is to difficult to manage in public view.

Superblogger Robert Scoble has a proscription for the newspaper industry: experiment a lot and do it quickly. Scoble thinks every reporter should have a camera phone that’s capable of taking high-quality video images and should be able to broadcast events in real-time just like television does. He also says people who think quality journalism is dead should look at TalkingPointsMemo, Pro Publica and Topix, which are building profitable businesses based upon good reporting. He also says keep an eye on Spot.us, a startup that will fund journalism based upon the stuff people want to read.

Layoff Log

• Having recently extracted major union concessions by threatening to go out of business, The Newark Star-Ledger rewarded its staff by eliminating 40% of their jobs. Most of the reductions will be achieved through buy-outs, though, and management had told the unions back in August that it needed substantial cuts to keep the paper viable. Huffington Post says the actual newsroom losses will be closer to 45% of the 334 editorial employees. The magnitude of the cutback is impressive eye-popping at a time when most newspapers are still trimming around the edges. However, the publisher said it believes the Star-Ledger can return to profitability when the changes are complete.
• Speaking of trimming around the edges, A.H. Belo is doing everything it can short of layoffs to tighten the belt. The suffering publisher announced it will freeze salaries, reduce employee retirement contributions, suspend its dividend, trim capital spending and lower the fees it pays to its board of directors. The company also renegotiated its deal with creditors. “It’s probably not going to get better until 2010, if then,” says industry analyst John Morton., a newspaper industry analyst in Maryland.
• As LA Observed predicted last week, the Los Angeles Times laid off 75 journalists, or about 10% of newsroom staff. That comes on top of 150 job cuts in the newsroom this past summer. The site has the dour memo from Editor Russ Stanton.
• Randy Turner is the latest blogger to point out the contradiction of newspapers reporting everyone else’s layoffs but burying their own. He cites the Joplin Globe, a Missouri paper that he says laid off 15 staffers last week but has said nothing about it since. And he provides a laundry list of layoffs at other local businesses that the Globe has covered in recent months.

The Online Journalism Blog has been running the results of a survey of journalists about the impact of new media on their profession. In its fifth installment, the site asks how “blogging has affected what happens after news is ‘published/broadcast.” To their credit, journalists are going with the flow. “After the story goes up, instead of moving onto the next idea I’ll spend time answering reader questions and comments,” says a 26-year-old Australian journalist, reflecting the words of several colleagues. As we’ve noted in past entries, the Web has flipped the model of publishing. In the old days, publishing was the end of a process; today, it’s the beginning. Once a story is published, it’s subject to enhancement, analysis, commentary and updates. Journalists need to be ready for the likelihood that they may be called upon to revise and develop a story long after it’s been published. It’s the Wikipedia model gone mainstream. Stories never die as long as there’s some who’s still interested in them.

Columnist Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee laments the loss of veteran reporters from Capitol Hill bureaus. While he’s impressed that some smaller papers have kept their Washington corps intact, he says the survivors miss the expertise of people like recently retired San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Ed Mendel, who had more than 30 years of experience covering the budget. The Capitol press corps is a group of friendly competitors, Walters notes. The most experienced members are the first to have their heads on the chopping block because of their high salaries. But those veterans are also the ones who raise the level of performance for everyone else on the Hill. Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope in cases like that of the UCLA daily newspaper reporter who “blew the lid off insider dealing at the School of Dentistry, which was giving coveted orthodontics residencies to major donors and their relatives.”

The Baltimore Sun’s John McIntyre sounds off on the increasingly popular option of outsourcing editing tasks to offshore body shops. “Imagine…that General Motors and Ford, fighting desperately to reverse their plummeting sales and stock values, concluded that it would be smart to save money by eliminating the quality control function. Think they’d wind up selling more cars?” he asks. There is truth in his argument. Recall the last time your call to customer service was answered by someone with an Indian accent. Was that a more positive experience than speaking to someone who shared your culture and values? Maybe it was. We’re just saying… We’re reminded of an item we posted last week about an experiment at the UK’s Sunday Express, which has started letting some reporters post their stories directly to print, leading to some horrific gaffes. Newspaper credibility is at an all-time low in the US. Tolerating typos, inconsistencies and stupid mistakes won’t make them any more credible.

The anonymous blogger at Newspaper Biz says the trend toward big newspapers cancelling their AP subscriptions is the road to mutual suicide. Now’s the time for newspapers to leverage the AP’s status as a cooperative to fight mutual foes like Google, which make money by stealing content, he argues. We’re not so sure a lot of newspaper publishers would agree.

Huffington Post’s Jack Myers reports on recent comments by TiVo president Tom Rogers to a group of TV executives in which he predicted that the coming implosion of TV advertising will make the newspaper industry crisis look like child’s play. “Probably two-thirds of homes or more that advertisers care about reaching will be fast forwarding the majority of television ads,” he said. With 3.5 million DVRs in the market today, Rogers should know. He says there are plenty of ways advertisers can reach DVR users, such as presenting messages when a viewer is about to delete a program or – horror of horrors – actually producing messages that viewers want to consume. Not surprisingly, he believes TiVo can be their ally because the service, which has been one of the worst things ever to happen to the television industry, knows so much about viewer behavior. He also quoted The New York Times as saying that actual TV viewership is 40% to 60% higher for some programs when DVR viewership is factored in.

The accountants taketh away, but they also giveth back. This quarter, the giving was to McClatchy, which swung to a profit of $4.2 million because of an accounting change. A year ago, the company lost $1.3 billion in the same quarter, also because of bookkeeping gymnastics. The most telling number is in the revenues: down 16%.

The Waterloo Courier will move printing operations to a bigger press in Cedar Rapids, causing the layoff of 52 employees at its current printer. The news was reported in the fifth paragraph of a story titled “Courier moves printing operations” next to an enormous photo of an unidentified balding man. Please post a comment naming this person if you can, because his forehead overwhelms the lead. Also note the many comments that have already been posted on the story, most of them savaging the Courier for moving jobs out of town. It appears that deliver is already a problem in Waterloo, and most commenters can’t believe the 50-mile truck ride will improve things, particularly in snow.

The Dayton Daily News will lay off less than 10% of its 120-person workforce. Specific numbers weren’t released pending union negotiations.

The Los Angeles Times hasn’t formally announced a new round of layoffs, but LA Observed says the axe has already fallen selectively. The website posts a memo from the head of circulation reading, “Yesterday was a tough day . . . 31 of our co-workers are no longer part of the circulation team.” There are rumors of much bigger cuts coming. The site also reports that Sam Zell is sniffing around the Orange County Register and the San Diego Union-Tribune, apparently believing that his employees’ retirement funds aren’t yet leveraged enough.

Cincy Navigator

Mark Glaser has an extended interview with Jennifer Carroll, Gannett’s vice president for digital content. She gives a progress report on Gannett’s Information Center initiative, a 2006 campaign to remake its 85 daily newspaper newsrooms into 24-hour digital publishing platforms. Carroll says that the programming and video skills the company has taught its journalist has led to some truly innovative coverage, like the Des Moines Register’s video/database/map mashup coverage of the Parkersburg tornadoes. Another innovation is CinciNavigator, a mass mashup created by the Cincinnati Enquirer that embeds information about local events ranging from arrests to nightclub listings on a map.

Carroll says database reporting can create a groundswell of interest that leads to improved print sales. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle found that by publishing a database on police overtime the Thursday before a Sunday print date, it created anticipation that drove the highest Sunday single-copy sales of the year.

Carroll says Gannett is hiring and expanding its commitment to digital journalism, even against the backdrop of a terrible business climate.  A few people comment on the interview skeptically, suggesting that newspapers will never be a destination for multimedia content.

Future for Journalism Bright, Just Not So Much for Newspapers

John Kirch writes about a recent panel on the future of journalism at the University of Maryland-College Park. He offers the optimistic view that that future is bright.  The comments by panelists reflect our own opinion that the best time to get into journalism is when everyone else is getting out.  The future of big branded news institutions is dim, panelists said, but journalists will still be able to survive and thrive by promoting their own brands instead of the brains of their employers.

Paraphrasing the panelists, Birch writes, “Reporters will not only have to know how to interview sources and write stories for different media platforms,…they will have to know basic business principles so that they can create individual brand names for themselves that can be used to build followings and create job opportunities.”

Knowledge of business principles goes against the grain of conventional journalism teaching, of course.  However, that doesn’t mean journalist have to sell their souls, only that they need to be able to promote themselves because they are the product.  The risk is that journalists fall back to providing only content that delivers a large audience, such as celebrity gossip. We hope to see nonprofit and public interest organizations emerge that promote content that the public needs to know about.  The difference is that the content mix will be pulled by the readers more than pushed by editors.  What that will look like is anybody’s guess.

Miscellany

Jeff Jarvis is as provocative as ever in this withering attack on a recent AJR piece by Washington Post reporter  Paul Farhi. Farhi makes the case that journalists aren’t responsible for the plunging fortunes of newspapers; a variety of competitive and demographic trends are the real culprit. Balderdash, says Jarvis. “Victimhood is an irresponsible abdication of responsibility, a surrender.” We suspect that Jarvis was trying to stir up controversy and boost attendance to his forthcoming conference more than he was trying to savage a colleague. In that respect, he was successful. There are more than 150 comments on the piece, many of them thought-provoking, and Jarvis returns to engage with his audience frequently during the debate.

While free daily newspapers have struggled in US, they’re evidently hitting a chord with the commuter set in the UK.  Brand Republic reports that free dailies given away to commuters are gaining a foothold with the younger readers, who have largely forsaken paid daily newspapers. “City AM‘s daily reach has increased from 23% in 2007 to 32% this year, while the FT’s has dipped from 22% to 20%,” writes Mike Fletcher. Metro’s circulation now tops 3 milllion across the UK and has brand extensions that offer eight different platforms for advertisers. Perhaps more importantly, the freebies have solid demographics among the up-and-coming audience of young adults. London Lite, which is published by the same company that also produces the Daily Mail and Evening Standard, counts almost 80% of its readers in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic group.

The Providence Journal will lay off 25 part-time in six full-time employees, all from its news operation.  The move leaves a news staff of 200 people and a total staff of 705 at the ProJo, down from 763 in early September.

If online competition is hitting the broadcast industry as hard as the print business, why haven’t there been more layoffs in TV newsrooms?  Here’s one explanation.

The collapse of so Wall Street firms will hit the media business hard, with newspapers taking a disproportionate share of the body blows, according to a Bernstein Research report.  The report says finance and insurance/real estate advertising makes up 21% of newspapers’ ad revenue, about double that of broadcast media and slightly more than that of online media. “History suggests that another industry will eventually fill the growth void left by the insurance/real estate and finance sectors, but the operative word is clearly ‘eventually,” wrote the report’s author, analyst Michael Nathanson.