By paulgillin | September 5, 2008 - 7:46 am - Posted in Facebook, Hyper-local, Paywalls, Solutions

The New York Sun, which was launched in the shadow of 9/11 with the mission of providing a politically conservative alternative to The New York Times, is on its last legs. An eloquent column by Editor Seth Lipsky says the Sun, which is published on weekdays, will have to shut down at the end of this month if the owners can’t find financial backing. Interestingly, the Sun tried to compete with the worldly Times by being hyper-local, a strategy that is sometimes cited as the salvation of the newspaper industry. “It would put Manhattan and New York state news on its front page (in contrast to the Times’ emphasis on national and international news over local issues),” reads a very good description on Wikipedia. While the paper claims a readership of 150,000, its actual daily sales are less than 15,000. Talks are underway with potential partners and investors to continue publishing the Sun, but time is clearly running short.


Crisis is breeding cooperation in Philadelphia, where Newspaper Guild members from the Inquirer and Daily News voted to forego a scheduled $25-a-week pay hike for at least a year. The owner of those two papers is in serious danger of defaulting on its debt. “We want to see this company thrive, now and in the future,” said the Guild’s administrative officer.


There’s a new group on Facebook called Newspaper Escape Plan. “The newspaper industry is an abusive relationship,” writes Martin Gee, who created the group. “We keep getting beat up but we keep coming back because we love him.” The group has signed up 1,300 members in less than three weeks. Discussion forums are quiet but the wall is busy. (via Robb Montgomery).


The weekly Raytown (KanMo.) Tribune is no more. The paper stopped the presses after 83 years, citing the same pressures everyone else cites. Most of its 11,000 circulation was free, but there were a couple of thousand paid subscribers. If you want to see something depressing, take a look at its home page.


The independent Daily Orange campus newspaper at Syracuse University will stop printing on Fridays. However, its problems appear to be an exception to the rule. The president of the College Newspaper Business and Advertising Managers organization is quoted in this AP story saying that campus newspaper ad revenues actually rose 15% in 2007. Apparently, it’s all about focus.

Layoff Log

The Oklahoma City Oklahoman will cut 150 positions, beginning with an early retirement offer to 102 of its over-55 workforce and making up the difference through layoffs. The paper employs 1,100 people. The publisher noted that newsprint costs are up 40 percent.


The Providence (R.I.) Journal, which is often cited as an example of a paper that has thrived in a competitive market by staying true to its community roots, will lay off an unspecified number of employees. Owner A.H. Belo had hoped to avoid cuts through a buyout offer, but there weren’t enough takers. There’ll also be layoffs at The Dallas Morning News (50 jobs) and the Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise (30 positions).


The Missoulian of Montana will lay off four full-time and three part-time employees. No word on whether that’s a lot for Montana’s third-largest daily.


One of those employees is going to work for the Ravalli Republic in Hamilton. But the Republic is also laying off three full-time and three part-time people. But it’s also planning to make another newsroom hire in the next few weeks. Which is a lot to digest for an organization with only 17 employees.


Clarification on yesterday’s reference to a vaguely worded item in Editor & Publisher about the Raleigh News & Observer: The paper is offering buyouts to 40% of its employees. It doesn’t expect to cut 40% of its staff, although it may get there if business doesn’t improve. “We’re not anywhere near where we thought we were going to be on the revenue side,” says the publisher. The N&O is also consolidating some sections to save on printing.

And Finally…

How will technology innovation support journalism and participatory democracy? Heck, we don’t know. We’re just a blog. But the Media Giraffe project will delve into that issue at a conference in Philadelphia Oct. 23-25. It’s called Rebooting the News, and the focus is on how educators can respond to the alarming flight of young people from traditional news media. Registration is downright cheap at $105.

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By paulgillin | September 4, 2008 - 7:42 am - Posted in Facebook, Fake News

Here’s a cost-saving idea: pay your best employees to leave the company. Sound dumb? More than 20 newspaper companies have done just that during the past year.

Buyouts are a popular alternative to layoffs because they’re voluntary and they avoid a lot of anguish. From a management perspective, though, buyouts are a terrible idea. They reward the employees who are the most ambitious and whose skills are the most marketable. The people who apply for buyouts tend to be the people who are confident they can find work elsewhere. In most cases, these are precisely the people a company should want to keep.

A layoff is a far more effective management tool than a buyout. It’s a way to slim down the organization from the excesses brought on by past prosperity. During good times, organizations tend to grow fat and inefficient. Growth masks a lot of problems and no one wants to cut staff when they don’t have to. As a result, organizations are inclined to hold on to marginal performers and sustain questionable jobs because the alternative is too painful. Nearly every company does this. It’s human nature to tolerate a certain level of inefficiency in order to avoid the emotional turmoil of depriving someone of his livelihood.

Invariably, a slowdown comes and companies have to cut back. This hurts, but it’s also an opportunity to make adjustments to the organizational structure to prepare for new growth. It’s a way to get rid of under-performing employees and unnecessary jobs while also redoubling the commitment to top performers. Good companies reward their best people even during difficult times. Across-the-board cutbacks make no sense because they penalize your best people. Why would you want to do that?

A buyout takes bad management to a new level. In effect, the company is saying, “You’ve taken initiative to develop skills that are in demand in our industry. We’ve paid you to do this. Now please go away. And take this bonus with you.”

Buyouts are very popular with ambitious employees who are seeking new opportunity. Who can blame them? Wouldn’t you rather get paid to look for a new job than do it in your spare time? People actually slept in the lobby of the San Diego Union-Tribune this week in order to take advantage of a limited buyout offer. Those are motivated folks. Could management possibly find a more productive way to harness that ambition?

Sorry if this sounds calculating and insensitive, but businesses aren’t charities. They need to run as efficiently as they can, particularly at a time like this. Buyouts are simply a way of dodging unpleasantness by paying good people to leave the company. They’re bad management.

Miscellany

They’re piling on the ailing San Francisco Chronicle. Clint Reilly digs up some past dirt about the early days of Hearst ownership. Of course, this happened eight years ago, so keep it in perspective. One passage did strike a chord, though: “I repeatedly witnessed bizarre behavior at newspapers that no other business would ever allow. Some reporters and columnists were frequently drunk or on drugs on the job. Such conduct was not simply tolerated, it was condoned. These third-rate Hunter Thompsons screwed up appointments and scrambled facts but were never called to account for their mistakes, incivility or disruptive behavior.” Sound familiar to anyone?


The Wall Street Journal is redoubling its commitment to print with plans to launch WSJ. magazine this weekend. The coming-out party gave new Journal managing editor Robert Thomson the chance to take a shot at the rival New York Times and to use the word “eschatological” in a sentence.


Here’s a little good news for magazine publishers: rich people are actually reading more magazines. Research by Ipsos Mendelsohn shows that folks making more than $100,000 a year said they read 15.3 publications on average compared to 15.1 in 2003. People who make more than $250,000 read an average of 24 print publications. Favorite titles: People, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Time, Newsweek and Southern Living. Four in five rich folks also shop at Wal-Mart.


Is the Raleigh News & Observer really seeking to cut 40% of its staff? That’s what this short item in Editor & Publisher appears to say. If so, this would be the paper’s third round of job cuts in the past year. Oh, and it’s a buyout.

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By paulgillin | - 6:43 am - Posted in Facebook, Hyper-local, Paywalls, Solutions

Journalists are at each other’s throats in the Windy City. It all started last Tuesday, when provocative Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Jay Mariotti quit the paper after 17 years and only a few weeks after signing a lucrative three-year contract. Mariotti’s epiphany apparently was a trip to the Beijing Olympics, where he observed that most of the journalists in attendance were “there writing for Web sites.”

After resigning, Mariotti launched into attacks on his former employer and the newspaper business in general, which he said is dying. The Sun-Times and the Tribune probably won’t survive, he said. “To see what has happened in this business. … I don’t want to go down with it,” he told the Tribune.

Mariotti has clearly made some enemies with his tough-guy style, and critics didn’t hesitate to pile on. Film critic Roger Ebert abandoned his usual soft style to post a blistering open letter, concluding, “On your way out, don’t let the door bang you on the ass.” CBS Chicago caught up with several of Mariotti’s colleagues, who didn’t mince words. “We wish Jay well and will miss him — not personally, of course — but in the sense of noticing he is no longer here, at least for a few days,” said Sun-Times editor Michael Cooke. White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen chipped in “Am I enjoying this? Yes.” There are more good quotes in the CBS account.

Meanwhile, the Cubs have lost four in a row, and the team’s NL Central division lead has shrunk to four games. There is no apparent correlation with Mariotti’s departure.

San Juan Star Gave No Clue of Shutdown Plans

Aug. 29, 2008 was the final issue of the San Juan Star

Aug. 29, 2008 was the final issue of the San Juan Star

Publisher's page three note

Here’s the front page of the last issue of the San Juan Star, which shut down abruptly last Friday after nearly 50 years. This leaves the island of Puerto Rico with no English-language daily. The paper gave no indication that it would cease publishing. On page three of that day’s issue, there was a small announcement that frequency would be scaled back to five days a week (above right). Employees said they were unaware of the change in plans until a general announcement was made.

Miscellany

More proof that adversity makes strange bedfellows: The Miami Herald, Palm Beach County Sun-Sentinel and the Palm Beach Post will share basic news stories with each other while continuing to compete vigorously in the South Florida market they serve. The experiment will last for three months, after which the participants will decide if they want to continue.


2008 Newspaper Job Cuts Total Nearly 4,000; Source: Erica Smith

2008 Newspaper Job Cuts Total Nearly 4,000; Source: Erica Smith


The Des Moines Register has laid off 12 staffers and frozen another 11 open positions. The publisher is being unusually open about who’s losing jobs. They include a 30-year veteran farm reporter and a top feature writer. Daily circulation is down 20% since 1994 and Sunday circulation is off nearly 30%.


After trying to make a go of it as a daily newspaper for five years, the Noblesville (Inc.) Daily Times gave up the ghost last week and shut its doors, idling 24 full-time employees. Owner Schurz Corp. had tried to sell the paper for the last six months but was unable to find a buyer. The Daily Times had increased from weekly to daily frequency in 2003. The company also shut down the twice-monthly Westfield Times.


Apparently, a lot of central California residents think that just because the Modesto Bee will now be printed in Sacramento, the paper is going away. Its editor says that couldn’t be further from the truth.


The Arizona Republic is shedding 27 newsroom employees on top of 35 pressroom workers laid off earlier this month. Gannett Blog claims the paper has 2,700 employees, which makes these reductions a drop in the bucket compared to the typical industry cutbacks of about 10% of the workforce. Blog visitors say the mood at the Republic is horrible. “Morale here is so low people who weren’t offered buyouts congratulated those who took them,” writes one.


Following the lead by several papers recently to reduce “soft” news and features, the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C. will cut its second editorial page and eliminate its dedicated book reviews section. Editorial Page Editor Allen Johnson doesn’t mince words: “We won’t even attempt to pretend that these changes will give you a bigger, better opinion section. They won’t. And you know that.”

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By paulgillin | August 28, 2008 - 11:04 am - Posted in Facebook, Fake News, Hyper-local, Solutions

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has canceled its Associated Press subscription, and it probably won’t be the last paper to do so. The Strib is one of several papers that have complained loudly about the AP’s pricing policies, which they say constitute an onerous tax at a time when member newspapers are already bleeding red ink. Now it’s given the wire service the required two-year notice of its intention to cancel.

More papers are likely to follow. In Ohio, a group of dailies has banded together to share stories, a move driven in part by a desire to cut dependence on the AP. Many papers rely on the wire service to deliver national and international coverage, but with the recent push to go “hyper-local,” the need for such information is declining. Readers already get most of that stuff online anyway, and with its liberal syndication agreements with various online portals, the AP is actually competing with its member companies.

If newspapers begin opting out of their AP subscriptions, it could have interesting ripple effects for the AP and its members. Alan Mutter has noted that the AP gets two-thirds of its stories from member papers. If it loses those sources, then the wire service will have to invest in its own staff to make up for the shortfall. That means the AP has to make a choice between cutting its license fees or losing members and the content that drives its other licensing arrangements. However, as David Brauer notes, “If AP gets less cash and copy from the Strib and cuts its local presence, Minnesota’s news ecosystem could take a big hit. The wire service’s copy fleshes out local papers big and small; a diminished AP weakens a key line of defense for cash-strapped newsrooms.”

In short, the AP is engaged in a stare-down with its member newspapers. Will more defections like that of the Star Tribune force it to blink?

The industry’s dire financial situation has got newspapers thinking creatively about how to avoid cutting into bone. Editor & Publisher continues its recent reporting on this issue, focusing on creative content-sharing and partnership agreements that many papers are hatching to deliver quality information to readers while abandoning traditional rivalries. Adversity is the mother of invention, and some editors are reporting that by abandoning their “not invented here” bias, they’re minimizing the impact of layoffs and cost cuts.

Miscellany

Almost two-thirds of the top 30 newspaper websites had double-digit percentage increases in year-over-year unique traffic in July, according Nielsen Online. Ottaway Newspapers led the good news parade with a gain of 167%. The Los Angeles Times was up 66% and The Wall Street Journal Online advanced 94%. Editor & Publisher didn’t try to explain the dramatic improvements, but the combination of high gas prices driving more at-home “staycations” along with interest in the presidential campaign and Summer Olympics probably all played a role.


University of South Carolina journalism professor Ernest Wiggins was curious about how newspaper websites handle comments from readers, so he looked at 10 of the largest titles to see if there was any consensus. His findings: not really. All of the newspapers he reviewed post some language intended to keep discussions civil, and a minority actually screen contributions. Beyond that, practices range from the New York Daily News‘ genteel “Be nice” plea to the Los Angeles Times‘ draconian warning that “A VIOLATION OF THESE POSTING RULES MAY BE REFERRED TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES.” He cites advice from two Poynter faculty as a rule of thumb: encourage comments, state the purpose of the forum but don’t threaten people.


Alan Mutter says the distressed financial condition of American newspapers could make them appealing buyout targets to foreign interests with a political agenda. He focuses, in particular, on Arab and Asian governments that are flush with cash in overseas investment funds and that could benefit from having bully pulpits in the US market. The Unification Church-owned Washington Times set the precedent by using a newspaper to champion its conservative political causes and there are no rules that would prevent other overseas buyers from doing the same thing. At current valuations, newspaper companies would be a rounding error for some of these funds, which boast assets of as much as $400 billion. If overseas interests bought big into the US market, it could lead us back to the early days of newspapering, when publications typically took strong positions on the issues and made no effort to deliver “just the facts” journalism, he says.


The Honolulu Advertiser is again moving to cut headcount, even as it pursues rocky negotiations with the Newspaper Guild. The company will eliminate 27 positions at its Pacific Media Publications community newspaper group and consolidate seven community newspapers into three. The company had earlier cut 54 jobs at the Advertiser. A Guild spokesman said the move “certainly does not reflect a move toward trying to get a contract.”


The Chicago Sun-Times is seeking more staff cuts on top of the 40 positions eliminated earlier this year as part of a $50 million expense reduction campaign. The editor didn’t specify a reduction target, but said the cuts are driven by the “awful” advertising climate. Two weeks ago, parent Sun-Times Media Group announced that it was outsourcing its inbound classified advertising operations after reporting a dismal $38 million loss in the second quarter.


Sam Zell says Tribune Co. will be able to cover its debts for at least the next seven years. Buried in a Bloomberg story about Zell’s forecasts for the real estate market is the tycoon’s comment that “We don’t have any real maturities that aren’t covered until 2015.” Zell also said he expects to sell the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley field later this year for “a lot” of money.


At Tribune Co.’s namesake newspaper, social media has come of age. Huffington Post’s Todd Andrlik writes that a four-person social media team has come up with strategies to monitor news reports on Twitter, establish communities on Facebook and generally improve its reader interaction. A recent page three story about a bomb threat at Daley Center bomb originated as a Twitter message to Colonel Tribune, the paper’s online avatar that’s a throwback to colorful onetime owner Col. Robert R. McCormick. Sharing content through social networks has also resulted in an immediate 8% uptick in site traffic.


CNN has joined with the free Metro papers in New York, Boston and Philadelphia to deliver columns by CNN correspondents in select Metro editions every Friday for 12 weeks. Their stories began appearing last Friday. The deal expands an existing agreement that provides 70 Metro editions with content produced by CNN exclusively for Metro.

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By paulgillin | August 22, 2008 - 8:41 am - Posted in Facebook, Fake News, Paywalls, Solutions

Editor & Publisher has a 3,000-word special report on the newspaper industry’s prospects that doesn’t turn up much new ground but documents the panic that has set in across the business. Everything is on the table, industry execs now say. In the coming year, expect a lot of papers to eliminate money-losing Monday, Tuesday and Saturday editions, dump their classified advertising sections and combine forces with rivals or outsource overseas. Recent redesigns like those at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel are intended to be produced by smaller staffs. Some papers consider giving up on courting the youth audience and decide to just focus on giving their older readers something they’ll want to consume for the next 25 years.

The problem is that newspaper are tinkerers, not re-inventers, the piece concludes. Their core skills are mis-matched to the enormity of the task that faces them, and the unrelenting declines in business have left them with no option to think through bigger changes. Noting the waning interest in the the “Newspaper Next” program, the American Press Institute’s Drew Davis quotes one board member as saying, “We are like drowning people, who are treading water as fast as we can. And you people are throwing life preservers and we can’t even get our hands out of the water to reach them.”

In its first year, Newspaper Next reached some 6,000 people, but since API rolled out its 2.0 version last February, the response has not been anywhere near that, says Davis. The biggest newspaper companies, he adds, are most conspicuous in their absence.
Not everyone is as dour as the people quoted by E&P. Kevin Slimp reports on a recent meeting by a group of consultants, speakers and trainers who call themselves the Media Specialists Group. They discussed the future of newspapers and, while they agree that big dailies are mostly toast, they’re generally optimistic about circulation trends among regional and focused titles. Expect to see a lot more free distribution and segmentation, they say. Newspaper publishers will also do more contract printing and use their delivery channels to distribute advertising.

Decline is Worse Than Numbers Indicate

Vin Crosbie submits the most lucid, dispassionate and coherent explanation for the decline of the US newspaper business that we’ve seen since Eric Alterman’s groundbreaking piece in The New Yorker this spring. The industry’s problem isn’t the Internet, he argues, it’s the steady loss of respect for and contact with its readers, a trend that began more than 30 years ago. While absolute circulation has declined only 14.5% since 1970, the real decline is more like 45% when adjusted for population growth. Only a third of Americans say they read a newspaper yesterday and only 46% read one regularly, down from 71% in 1992.

Crosbie skillfully skewers the online readership data that newspaper execs use to obscure their problems, pointing out that readers who visit four or five times a month can’t be compared to subscribers. He also dismisses the so-called “passalong rate,” which dying publications like to use to inflate circulation numbers

In the end, he predicts that half of all American dailies will be gone – both online and in print – by the end of the next decade. He promises more analysis of what went wrong in essays today and next week.


In his analysis, Crosbie also ticks off the precipitous decline in newspaper share values over the least few years, ranging from 65% at Gannett to 99% at Journal Register, yet Morningstar believes the companies are still overvalued. In a report subtitled “The newspaper business is in terminal decline,” Matthew Coffina analyzes the outlook for Gannett, The New York Times Co., Lee Enterprises, McClatchy and GateHouse Media and sees, at best, relatively fast ongoing deterioration of their businesses. “[We] consider the newspaper industry unattractive as a whole,” he writes.

Is Yahoo Friend or Foe?

First, Yahoo created an ad consortium and invited newspapers in so they could sip from the cup of online spending. Now it’s competing with its partners. In an Agence France Presse story (carried, ironically, on Yahoo News), Glenn Chapman reports that Yahoo is here to stay as a primary news source. It’s got feet on the street in Beijing for the Olympics (following the herd there) and has scored coups with recent interviews with South Korean president Lee Myung-bak and George W. Bush, who gave his first Internet-only interview to Yahoo. One of its tactics is apparently to ask readers to submit questions during interviews with dignitaries, which is kind of cool, when you think about it. (via Josh Catone).

For some reason, the industry’s troubles are hitting particularly hard in New Jersey. Newsday gathers up the bad news: Gannett just 120 jobs in six Jersey papers. The owner of the Newark Star-Ledger says the paper is on track to lose $30 million to $40 million this year. And the Hackensack Record just sold its building and will turn most of its staff reporters into “mobile journalists,” which is a new euphemism for “stringer.”

Novel Concept

Jason Mandell writes about a writer’s novel approach to sustaining investigative journalism using a community support model. David Cohn, a former tech and science reporter for Wired, has created Spot.Us, a place where journalists can float ideas for investigative reporting pieces and get funded by visitors, who vote with their wallets for the stories they like. The results are then syndicated to partner outlets. “If you get 100 people to give just $15, that’s enough to pay a journalist to do a story on something that will benefit the community,” Cohn told Mandell. Spot.US is partially funded, ironically, by Knight Foundation. Knight-Ridder was forced to sell out to McClatchy two years ago and has suffered along with its acquirer. Maybe Spot.Us is a way to begin to build at least a shell of a new vision for investigative journalism.

Layoff Log

How bad is morale at USA Today? The Gannett Blog floats the possibility that the national daily, which has so far escaped outright layoffs, may finally be on the chopping block. What’s most interesting, though, is the 50+ comments, most of them from people purporting to be USA Today employees, describing the dour mood in the halls and speculating about a big meeting next week with the publisher. There’s also an interesting account of a recent internal meeting at which tensions flared between print and online staff. Apparently, online is now the favored child at McPaper and some of the print veterans resent it.

Also,

And Finally…

Slate’s Jack Shafer Ron Rosenbaum hates pencil puzzles, and his rant against a practice that he sees growing in popularity is worth reading just for gems like his characterization of Sudoku as the “mind-numbing hillbilly heroin of the white-collar class.” Shafer Rosenbaum picks up copies of Will Shortz’s Funniest Crossword Puzzles and let’s the first “down” clues speak for themselves:

4. Highly ornamented style

5. Tell ___ glance

Whoa, dude, you’re killin’ me!

Puzzle addicts could cure cancer if they’d apply their brains more appropriately, like by reading a book, he says. “For you puzzle people: Reading is a seven-letter word for what you’re depriving yourself of every sad minute you’re spending on your empty boxes.” In the end, “there are two kinds of brains. Those hardwired to obtain deep pleasure from arranging letters in boxes and those hardwired to get the creeps from the process.”

It’s very funny. Now, back to our puzzle…

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By paulgillin | August 20, 2008 - 8:27 am - Posted in Facebook, Fake News

When the Web became a consumer phenomenon a decade ago, newspaper executives first shivered and then rushed in to what they believed would be a gusher of growth. Online channels appeared to deliver incremental new readership, and advertisers were eager to reach more eyeballs.

Most publishers took the path of least resistance to exploiting the online opportunity. They simply layered the job on the existing ad sales force. Reps were given packages and incentives to upsell print advertisers with incremental business. And it all worked great. Until recently.

Ad Age sums up the alarming news that online ad sales by newspaper businesses is beginning to decline. Among the publishers reporting drops in the most recent quarter are Tribune, Scripps and Lee. For now, sales are dropping in the single-digit percentage range, but the falloffs are a sharp contrast to the 20%+ annual growth of the online ad market in general.

Why is this happening? Simply stated: greed. When most newspapers went online, they slapped the same stuff they were producing in print into an HTML template and uploaded it to a server. Today, few of them offer any reader interaction outside of a basic commenting capability and some shortcuts for bookmarking stories to Digg. The stuff they post online is still cut and pasted from print. There’s been no investment, no innovation and no effort to keep up with Web 2.0 evolution.

More problematic is that newspapers have failed to establish and train dedicated online sales forces. Their reps did okay when online ads were a simple add-on to free value-add to an ROP advertiser, but now that the online business is becoming the engine of growth, those simple upsells don’s work very well.

If you talk to most veteran print sales reps, you’ll quickly learn that they have no idea how to sell online advertising. The language and metrics are foreign to them. That’s not surprising, given that their incentives have historically been heavily loaded toward print sales. Print generated a disproportionate amount of their revenue and commissions, so they sold what brought in the money. Their motivations aren’t difficult to figure out. Sales people are coin-operated. They prefer the path of least resistance and sell what’s easiest to sell.

The problem is that upselling print advertisers is a losing business when those advertisers are fleeing print. This forces sales reps to prospect for new business, and all that new business is coming in online. What’s more, the revenues and commissions from that business are much lower than what the reps have been accustomed to. And they have to learn a whole new language and process to bring the business in the door.

So now you’ve got ad sales reps who have been taught how to close $10,000 deals that carry a 1% commission suddenly selling having to sell $500 deals that take just as much time to close. Even if you hike the commissions to 5%, it’s still a pretty unappetizing prospect for most of them. The fact that the products are uninspiring and expensive makes things worse. That means reps are basically selling brand and reputation, and newspaper brands are now becoming a liability.

Some nimble publishers have experimented with setting up online-only sales staffs and training new recruits in the intricacies of selling a highly targeted and measurable medium. They’re on the right track. Those that have deputized their print sales people to peddle banner ads as a companion to their ROP contracts are headed off a cliff. Sadly, that’s probably most of them.

Gannett Loses Control

What do you do when a blogger becomes the chief source of information about what’s going on inside your company for employees of that company? That’s the conundrum that’s facing Gannett these days, as Jim Hopkins’ independent Gannett Blog has apparently gone viral. Hopkins reveals some recent traffic statistics: 91,000 visits and 189,000 page views in the last 30 days. That’s serious blog traffic, folks. What’s more, the site is being swarmed by Gannett employees. It’s become the virtual watercooler for a company of 46,000 people

The conundrum for Gannett is what to do about Hopkins. So far, it’s chosen a strategy of benign neglect, which is a huge mistake. Hopkins remarks that Tara Connell, Gannett’s chief spokesman (and interestingly, a former managing editor at USA Today) has gone almost silent recently as rumors have swirled about layoffs and cutbacks. Meanwhile, check out the volume of comments on each post on the blog. Gannett’s strategy (and we suspect this isn’t Connell’s decision) is about as wrong-headed as it could be. It is allowing a brush fire to grow out of control. What’s worse is that it’s failing to address an important channel to its own employees, who are the most valuable spokespeople it has.

One of the great ironies of watching the newspaper industry collapse has been to see the same media icons that have long scolded institutions for their insularity become reclusive and inwardly focused when the spotlight is turned on them. Gannet Blog is exhibit A in how not to handle a new influencer.

Stiff Upper Lip at the Sunday Times

The UK’s The Guardian sits down with John Witherow, who’s edited the Sunday Times for 14 years, for his first interview in nine years. Jane Martinson finds the 56-year-old Witherow to be charming, disarmingly unpretentious and energetic. He’s full of passion for newspapers and optimistic about the future. Speaking of uber-boss Rupert Murdoch, with whom Witherow speaks every week, he says, “He intuitively believes in newspapers and thinks they can be successful. He believes that all titles should aim to expand their circulation.”

The Sunday Times has had limited recent success in that area. Witherow admits that a price hike to £2 two years ago was a tactical mistake that cost the paper 100,000 readers. Still, at 1.15 million weekly copies, it’s a profit engine that earns £50 million a year.Witherow is excited about a new design that has added full color. He doesn’t see his 14-year tenure in one of the country’s most visible journalism jobs as a liability. He loves the experience of reading newspapers and views it as his challenge to pass along that enthusiasm to others.

DirectTV Pioneer Takes Over at the LA Times

Broadcast veteran Eddy Hartenstein takes over as publisher at the beleaguered Los Angeles Times. The paper runs a terrific profile of the guy. Hartenstein is “regarded by many as the father of the satellite TV industry,” having germinated and nurtured the idea of delivering by satellite what had previously been available only over wires. He’s an analytical thinker who also has the people skills to lead an organization. He prefers to stay out of the spotlight and let his accomplishments speak for him. People respect and like him. He had lunch with Times editor Russ Stanton for 3½ hours before agreeing to take the job. Sam Zell assured him that Tribune Co. won’t micro-manage the operation. And mark this quote from Zell about the Times: “This [the Times] is a keeper.” Let’s see if that promise holds up when the next debt payments come due.

Miscellany

  • The Chicago Tribune has cut 70 of newsroom positions – or about 13% of its total editorial headcount of 550 – in recent weeks. That’s more than most people expected, according to rival Chicago Sun-Times. The mood in the newsroom is described as “tense,” which is probably an understatement.
  • More signs that the Modesto (Calif.) Bee is being absorbed into the Sacramento borg. The paper is offering a buyout to all of its 200+ employees, its second such offer this year. Last month, the paper said it will stop printing in Modesto and move those operations to Sacramento. That cost 33 full-time and 127 part-time employees their jobs. In April, the Bee extended a buyout plan to about 100 employees, 11 of whom took it. The McClatchy Co, which owns the franchise, is trying to cut overall expenses by 10%.
  • The Indianapolis Star will lose 23 employees as part of the bigger cuts at Gannett. The story didn’t specify the size of the paper’s total workforce.
  • Tucson Newspapers, which publishes The Tucson Citizen, will eliminate some 30 jobs, also as part of the Gannett cutbacks.
  • The anonymous “Retch” at TellZell is exhorting readers to fill out an online petition. “It calls for Sam Zell to add two seats to the Tribune board of directors: one to represent the workers and another to represent readers.” Seeing as the workers own the means of production at Tribune Co., it doesn’t seem a half-bad idea. However, they’ve got to get more than the 128 signatures so far.

We Miss Copy Editors Already

We miss copy editors already

From CIOInsight.com

And Finally…

If you’ve ever taken a “money shot,” you’ll appreciate this gallery of pictures that were taken just at the right time. A good 90% of them were no doubt accidental, but let’s pat the photographers on the back anyway. Everyone needs a good pat on the back once in a while.

By paulgillin | August 15, 2008 - 8:19 am - Posted in Facebook, Google

Gannett joins the long line of media companies taking layoff medicine. It will reduce headcount by about 1,000 people, or 3%, with about 600 of those cuts coming from layoffs. Nothing new to report here. Gannett is feeling the same pain as everybody else, although the 3% reduction is small compared to the 10% many of its competitors have recently taken. BTW, this story broke in the Gannett Blog, where Jim Hopkins had the first news on Wednesday. Hopkins continues to tap in to the observations and experiences of Gannett employees to create a principal information source about the company, which scrupulously ignores him. (See “The Futility of Corporate Secrecy“).


The free weekly newspapers run by Philip Anschutz will now pay you to blog.  Well, not really to blog, so much but to examine. The newspaper chain is seeking people to become  “examiners,” writing about everything from Airedales to zoology, from what we can tell. Really successful examiners will be rewarded with a penny per page view. At that rate, the Death Watch editor can afford lunch at Friendly’s.


Television network ABC has declared the week of Sept. 21 National Stay at Home Week. It so happens that’s the same week that all the new fall shows are launching. We suspect this promotion won’t go over very well in the airline industry and that those free first-class upgrades for ABC execs are going to be pretty hard to come by for a while.


“Journal Register Reports Assets of $77 Million — And Liabilities of $719 Million”

Editor & Publisher, 8/12/08

“News-Journal Corp. officially for sale”

News Journal Online, 8/13/08


The Chicago Sun-Times has got an interesting idea to attract readers: It’s bringing back dead columnists.  “Vintage” columns written by Chicago institution Mike Royko began appearing this week, which must be deja vu for some local residents because Royko died 11 years ago. “Whatever happened to the people, places and issues that columnist Mike Royko went after –  or championed – during his legendary run?” the Sun-Times asks in its debut column. It turns out they’re dead, too. The subject of the 1979 piece is a Polish immigrant who died in 2000.


Still can’t figure out why Twitter is important? Play this video. (via Steve Outing)
What is Twitter good for?Appeal for help: I’d use more video embeds but they corrupt the WordPress template. If anyone has any great ideas how to prevent that, I’d love to hear them. Can’t find any useful advice online.

Comments Off on TGIF 8/14/08
By paulgillin | August 12, 2008 - 7:59 am - Posted in Fake News, Google, Layoffs

Eric Schmidt, CEO, GoogleGoogle CEO Eric Schmidt, whose company has played a critical role in the destruction of the US newspaper industry, bemoaned the decline of investigative journalism, a discipline he called “fundamental to how our democracy works,” in remarks at the the recent Ad Age Madison & Vine conference in New York. The executive said a fundamental challenge to the industry is that readers are spending less time on content and thus less time being monetized. The idea that new advertising models will emerge to support quality journalism after the newspaper industry collapses is misguided. “The evidence does not support that view,” he said.Schmidt observed that newspapers are being challenged by the triple whammy of advertising competition, high newsprint prices and a decline of non-targeted advertising. “These guys are in a world of hurt and we as a community need to find economic models that will fund really great content,” he said. He noted ruefully that sketchy coverage of the war in Iraq is a particularly compelling example of the loss of investigative resources.

Redesigns Called “Reinventions”

South Florida SunSentinel before and after That’s the South Florida Sun-Sentinel before (left) and after its forthcoming redesign. Or should be say the SunSentinel? That’s right. As Charles Apple wryly notes, amid the cutbacks at Tribune Co., the new SunSentinel has laid off a hyphen.

Apple quotes SunSentinel design director Paul Wallen saying, “Although our median reader is in the mid to late 50s, our target audience is almost a generation younger. We’re after occasional readers, people who don’t feel they have the time or enough interest to read our paper on a regular basis…We want the paper to feel vibrant and alive, much like the community it serves.” The new design formally launches on Sunday. To get a larger (and different) example, click on the image at left.

Another Tribune Co. property, the Baltimore Sun, will debut a new design on Aug. 24. No prototypes are being floated yet, but Editor & Publisher quotes Sun publisher Tim Ryan saying the overhaul is a “reinvention.” There’ll be three sections: news, sports and features. The features section will be called “You” in a nod to the complete USATodayification of the American newspaper industry. Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams called the Sun redesign “a tour de force package that’s going to help re-write the Tribune Co. — and newspapers.” We’ve already shared our opinion on the business value of redesigns.

Milwaukee Feels the Pain

The Milwaukee Business Journal writes of forthcoming layoffs at the Journal Sentinel as the paper struggles to meet its goal of a 10% staff cut. The piece illustrates the scope of the industry’s pain. Milwaukee should be a good newspaper town. It’s got a solid blue-collar middle class, people who don’t change their habits very quickly. The Journal Sentinel has a near-monopoly position, with 70 percent readership among Milwaukee adults on Sundays and about 50 percent on weekdays. Yet ad revenue is down 13 percent so far this year on top of an 8 percent decline in 2007 and 4 percent in 2006. Sunday circulation is down 16% from a decade ago.

The story has the obligatory Newspaper Association of America quote about combined print/online audiences being larger than ever, but the nut graph is a quote from a Morningstar analyst: “For every dollar daily newspapers have lost in print revenue, they’ve been able to replace it with only 15 cents in revenue from their Web sites.” The only way newspapers can survive the online shift is to get smaller, the analyst says. It’s just that no one knows how small they have to get.


A Journal Sentinel columnist is taking a buyout package and looking ahead. In this wistful, but ultimately uplifting farewell column he reminisces on the joys and frustrations of journalism and looks forward to taking a chance and spending some time with his family.

Miscellany

Former New York Times editor John Darnton recently retired from the paper. But instead of writing a tell-all memoir, he’s aired some dirty laundry in the form of a murder mystery called Black and White and Dead All Over (order it on Amazon). Reviewer Seth Faison knows many of the people who appear in Darnton’s fiction, including Publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Executive Editor Bill Keller. Faison praises the book for offering candid insight on the politics, chaos and juvenile behavior that characterizes a city newsroom. Darnton may lose friends as a result of this bitingly satirical work, but he’s made for darned good summer reading.


Tucson Citizen assistant city editor Mark B. Evans has some kind words for political bloggers who are, in some cases, outclassing the area’s newspapers in political coverage. We ignore these new voices at our peril, he says. Newspapers are falling further behind, so why not welcome these emerging opinion leaders into our fold and benefit from the readership and revenue they can bring?


The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader is trying to further reduce staff through buyouts. Kentucky’s largest newspaper already cut its workforce from 417 to 382 in June, but that wasn’t enough. Executives didn’t set a target figure for this round of cuts.


The Christian Science Monitor‘s Jan Worth-Nelson has quietly, subtly replaced her morning newspaper with a MacBook and an RSS feed, but she still remembers the days when reading the Sunday paper was a treasured ritual. Sadly, cutbacks at the LA Times have made the paper less relevant to her Sunday mornings and she misses the thrill that came with snapping open that first issue of the day to drink in the fresh news that it promised.


Howard Rheingold has an interesting essay on how to get more out of Twitter. Best advice: keep the list of people you’re following short and engage in meaningful interactions with them. He also doesn’t tweet what he had for breakfast. (via Mark Hamilton)


End of an era: In a nod to the realities of advertiser pressure and a weakening print market,  Rolling Stone will ditch is unique, awkward trim size and switch to a standard format effective with the Oct. 30 issue. The magazine’s size will be reduced from 10″ x 11 3/4″ to 8″ x 10 7/8″.

And Finally…

Bad warning sign

People always celebrate success, but they don’t give enough credit to really creative failure. Thank goodness, then, for The Fail Blog, a photographic tribute to failures big and small. Don’t look at this site in the office. Your colleagues will wonder why you’re laughing so hard. And don’t, under any circumstances, view it while you’re drinking milk, if you know what we mean.

By paulgillin | - 7:59 am - Posted in Facebook, Fake News, Hyper-local, Paywalls

Eric Schmidt, CEO, GoogleGoogle CEO Eric Schmidt, whose company has played a critical role in the destruction of the US newspaper industry, bemoaned the decline of investigative journalism, a discipline he called “fundamental to how our democracy works,” in remarks at the the recent Ad Age Madison & Vine conference in New York. The executive said a fundamental challenge to the industry is that readers are spending less time on content and thus less time being monetized. The idea that new advertising models will emerge to support quality journalism after the newspaper industry collapses is misguided. “The evidence does not support that view,” he said.Schmidt observed that newspapers are being challenged by the triple whammy of advertising competition, high newsprint prices and a decline of non-targeted advertising. “These guys are in a world of hurt and we as a community need to find economic models that will fund really great content,” he said. He noted ruefully that sketchy coverage of the war in Iraq is a particularly compelling example of the loss of investigative resources.

Redesigns Called “Reinventions”

South Florida SunSentinel before and after That’s the South Florida Sun-Sentinel before (left) and after its forthcoming redesign. Or should be say the SunSentinel? That’s right. As Charles Apple wryly notes, amid the cutbacks at Tribune Co., the new SunSentinel has laid off a hyphen.
Apple quotes SunSentinel design director Paul Wallen saying, “Although our median reader is in the mid to late 50s, our target audience is almost a generation younger. We’re after occasional readers, people who don’t feel they have the time or enough interest to read our paper on a regular basis…We want the paper to feel vibrant and alive, much like the community it serves.” The new design formally launches on Sunday. To get a larger (and different) example, click on the image at left.
Another Tribune Co. property, the Baltimore Sun, will debut a new design on Aug. 24. No prototypes are being floated yet, but Editor & Publisher quotes Sun publisher Tim Ryan saying the overhaul is a “reinvention.” There’ll be three sections: news, sports and features. The features section will be called “You” in a nod to the complete USATodayification of the American newspaper industry. Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams called the Sun redesign “a tour de force package that’s going to help re-write the Tribune Co. — and newspapers.” We’ve already shared our opinion on the business value of redesigns.

Milwaukee Feels the Pain

The Milwaukee Business Journal writes of forthcoming layoffs at the Journal Sentinel as the paper struggles to meet its goal of a 10% staff cut. The piece illustrates the scope of the industry’s pain. Milwaukee should be a good newspaper town. It’s got a solid blue-collar middle class, people who don’t change their habits very quickly. The Journal Sentinel has a near-monopoly position, with 70 percent readership among Milwaukee adults on Sundays and about 50 percent on weekdays. Yet ad revenue is down 13 percent so far this year on top of an 8 percent decline in 2007 and 4 percent in 2006. Sunday circulation is down 16% from a decade ago.
The story has the obligatory Newspaper Association of America quote about combined print/online audiences being larger than ever, but the nut graph is a quote from a Morningstar analyst: “For every dollar daily newspapers have lost in print revenue, they’ve been able to replace it with only 15 cents in revenue from their Web sites.” The only way newspapers can survive the online shift is to get smaller, the analyst says. It’s just that no one knows how small they have to get.


A Journal Sentinel columnist is taking a buyout package and looking ahead. In this wistful, but ultimately uplifting farewell column he reminisces on the joys and frustrations of journalism and looks forward to taking a chance and spending some time with his family.

Miscellany

Former New York Times editor John Darnton recently retired from the paper. But instead of writing a tell-all memoir, he’s aired some dirty laundry in the form of a murder mystery called Black and White and Dead All Over (order it on Amazon). Reviewer Seth Faison knows many of the people who appear in Darnton’s fiction, including Publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Executive Editor Bill Keller. Faison praises the book for offering candid insight on the politics, chaos and juvenile behavior that characterizes a city newsroom. Darnton may lose friends as a result of this bitingly satirical work, but he’s made for darned good summer reading.


Tucson Citizen assistant city editor Mark B. Evans has some kind words for political bloggers who are, in some cases, outclassing the area’s newspapers in political coverage. We ignore these new voices at our peril, he says. Newspapers are falling further behind, so why not welcome these emerging opinion leaders into our fold and benefit from the readership and revenue they can bring?


The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader is trying to further reduce staff through buyouts. Kentucky’s largest newspaper already cut its workforce from 417 to 382 in June, but that wasn’t enough. Executives didn’t set a target figure for this round of cuts.


The Christian Science Monitor‘s Jan Worth-Nelson has quietly, subtly replaced her morning newspaper with a MacBook and an RSS feed, but she still remembers the days when reading the Sunday paper was a treasured ritual. Sadly, cutbacks at the LA Times have made the paper less relevant to her Sunday mornings and she misses the thrill that came with snapping open that first issue of the day to drink in the fresh news that it promised.


Howard Rheingold has an interesting essay on how to get more out of Twitter. Best advice: keep the list of people you’re following short and engage in meaningful interactions with them. He also doesn’t tweet what he had for breakfast. (via Mark Hamilton)


End of an era: In a nod to the realities of advertiser pressure and a weakening print market,  Rolling Stone will ditch is unique, awkward trim size and switch to a standard format effective with the Oct. 30 issue. The magazine’s size will be reduced from 10″ x 11 3/4″ to 8″ x 10 7/8″.

And Finally…

Bad warning sign
People always celebrate success, but they don’t give enough credit to really creative failure. Thank goodness, then, for The Fail Blog, a photographic tribute to failures big and small. Don’t look at this site in the office. Your colleagues will wonder why you’re laughing so hard. And don’t, under any circumstances, view it while you’re drinking milk, if you know what we mean.

By paulgillin | August 8, 2008 - 7:53 am - Posted in Fake News, Google, Hyper-local

Nine summers ago, I left a job running a 75-person newsroom to become the sixth employee at an Internet startup. That was the thing to do in the late 90s, when stock options were plentiful and the Internet promised boundless reward. By 2002, that had all changed, and many dot-com entrepreneurs were slinking back to their old employers, asking if they could have their jobs back.

That didn’t happen to me, though. The media startup I joined, TechTarget, actually grew through the technology nuclear winter. It went public last year (although the stock has recently been sucked down by the media stock malaise) and now employs about 600 people.

One thing we did early on that challenged conventional wisdom was to tear down walls between advertising and editorial. At previous employers, it was accepted that sales people and editors not only never talked, they were often openly hostile toward each other. My new organization didn’t have cultural barriers like that, so we experimented with a more collegial process.

Ad sales and editorial people sat together in biweekly meetings to discuss story budgets and the sales climate. Things got pretty testy sometimes, but the debate was open and honest. Instead of calling people names behind their backs, each side shared stories about its successes and challenges. Over time, the relationships grew to be, if not chummy, at least respectful.

Once people respected each other, they began to work collaboratively. Management urged along the process by putting in place a bonus plan that rewarded everyone for a business unit’s financial success. Sales reps and editors openly batted around ideas for products that would have both advertiser and reader appeal. They came up with a lot of innovations. It turned out that collaborating didn’t mean infringing. Boundaries were still respected, but conversation wasn’t prohibited. Imagine that.

It was my job as chief editor to insure that the quality and integrity of the editorial product weren’t compromised. In five years in that role, I never once felt that my principles were violated. If ever there was a challenge, I appealed to the CEO, who always came down on the side of editorial quality.

Incidentally, a handful of people switched groups over these five years, including a few editors who realized their true calling was in sales.

This experience came to mind today reading Chris O’Brien’s Five Steps to Foster Innovation in the Newsroom. Among them: “Find new ways to get people from different areas to work together. This includes editorial and business side (Sorry, but it’s long past time to kill this sacred cow).”

Amen to that. Stick a fork in that well-done bovine. Building moats between the revenue side and the product side was excusable when profits were healthy, but now is the time to discard assumptions. Ad sales people aren’t contagious and talking with them won’t make you compromise your principles. If it does, then you have bigger problems.

Traditionalists are still resistant. Over at the San Francisco Chronicle, whose future is probably less secure than any major metro daily’s, “real journalists” are appalled about the decision to give former mayor Willie Brown a column because of Brown’s history of alleged self-dealing. People who aren’t disgusted by Brown’s column “are people who don’t put journalism first,” says one insider.

Puh-leeze. Giving a popular ex-mayor a column sounds like a pretty interesting way to spur circulation. And if the purists have a problem with that, have it out in public. Let the Chron columnists and bloggers debate the issue in front of everyone instead of grousing in the men’s room. Too many editors continue to use the shield of journalistic integrity to duck new ideas and then complain to each other instead of airing their opinions in public.

Newspapers need strong chief editors who support collaboration. They also need publishers who will rally to the side of quality journalism when a dispute occurs. Reporters and editors need to get over the old biases that never made much sense to begin with. I can’t think of another industry in which the people who sell the product are at such odds with the people who make the product. If you can make a persuasive case for maintaining this rigid separation, please contribute to the comments section. I just don’t see it.

The Futility of Corporate Secrecy

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at the Gannett Blog. On Wednesday, Editor Jim Hopkins picked up on an item in one of the Gannett titles that said corporate finance and accounting operations were being consolidated and moved to Indianapolis. He suggested that recent cutbacks at other Gannett holdings point to layoffs of as many as 2,300 people, or about 5% of Gannett’s workforce.

Blogs are a petrie dish for speculation, so when Hopkins asked reader for input, they responded. Gannett folk from Asheville, Detroit, Louisville and elsewhere are jumping in with their local version of layoff rumors. It sounds like something’s coming, and it isn’t good. Absent from the discussion is Gannett, which certainly should be aware of this popular site. If the rumors are false, why isn’t someone from corporate stepping in and correcting them? Perhaps it’s because the rumors are true. Absent Gannett’s voice, people will tend to believe that silence is confirmation.

Go East, Young Journo

Media markets in India are booming, thanks to the surging economy and the growing middle class, and some discouraged US journalists are picking up and moving east. New dailies and magazines are popping up every week and they’re hiring. Some TV stations are paying ex-print reporters up to $180,000 to go on-air, and that kind of money goes a long way in India. Five recent graduates of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism recently joined the Hindustan Times and say the experience has been great and the opportunity is greater. One expat says he turns down two or three assignments a month. “I’d like to see more freelancers move to India. There are too many stories to cover and just not enough time to get to them all.’

Miscellany

San Diegans may have reason for cautious optimism. The owner of a local TV station says he may make a bid for the distressed Union-Tribune. Michael D. McKinnon was a print publisher back in the 50s and 60s and he doesn’t want to see a local institution in the hands of an outsider.


Just because it’s user-generated, doesn’t mean it’s profitable. In May, we told you about Everywhere and JPG, two new magazines from 8020 Media that break the mold by deriving most of their content from readers. Well, it turns out that Everywhere wasn’t everywhere with advertisers, so 8020 has shuttered it after only four issues in order to focus on JPG. Management prefers to use the term “on hold” and said it’s still committed to the model. Interesting side note: only two editors lost their jobs.


While owner Blethen Maine Newspapers continues to seek a buyer, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram bleeds. An unspecified number of people have been laid off in the fourth round of cuts in a year. The publisher is also adjusting trim size and consolidating some sections to save money on paper. Employee solidarity helped mitigate the pain; workers volunteered to take time off so that jobs wouldn’t be eliminated.


Management at the Los Angeles Daily News apparently thought that one way to boost sagging morale would be to implement a dress code. Employees didn’t agree. The idea has been scotched.


The McPherson (Kan.) Sentinel becomes the latest daily to eliminate its Monday edition. It will publish five days a week. Mondays are notoriously poor for ad sales.


James Cogan says it’s a great time to get into the newspaper business because chaos is a good time for innovation. We wish there were more people with his positive attitude.


Charles Apple has a practical, whimsical and uplifting essay on advice for the recently laid-off. Our favorite: “Your editor didn’t want to lay you off. Seriously. Make him/her a reference. Even if you have to apologize for throwing that potted plant during your HR interview.”

Comments Off on Time to Tear Down Those Walls