Last week marked the one-year anniversary of Newspaper Death Watch, a blog I started on a whim but which has built enough readership to merit several hours of my time each week. In posting more than 150 entries over the last year and reading many times that many articles, I’ve learned a few things that I thought I’d share on this anniversary.

The catalyst for this blog was an essay I wrote nearly two years ago in which I predicted that the newspaper industry was about to undergo a business implosion that would be stunning in its speed and scope. I wasn’t by any means the first person to predict the collapse of the industry, but I was probably one of the few to foresee how fast it would occur.

That’s because I’ve followed the high tech industry for more than 20 years and repeatedly seen successful, stable businesses come apart at the seams when their environment changed: Digital Equipment, Compaq, Novell, WordPerfect, Wang Laboratories, Cullinet Software, Lotus, Silicon Graphics, and many others. It wasn’t a stretch to see two years ago that the same pattern was occurring in the newspaper business. The environment for publishers was changing in ways that would make their value proposition irrelevant very quickly. Demographic trends all pointed in that direction.

What went wrong

The inevitability of the industry’s self-destruction seems clear now, so there’s no news in that. But how could a business that was so stable and profitable for 150 years go into such a rapid tailspin? Two stories from the past year offered great insight into that question: Outgoing Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger’s farewell piece from the end of 2007 and Eric Alterman’s thoughtful analysis from the March 31, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.

Steiger’s piece was memorable for the stories it told about the excesses of the post-Watergate period. He remembers, for example, how one top editor put the kibosh on a proposal to tighten the belt by eliminating first-class travel for reporters. “I like flying first class,” Steiger quotes the man as saying with a smile. “You’re setting a bad example.” He also recounts internal struggles that occurred when newspapers went online, struggles that no doubt held back these papers from making the bold moves they needed to insure their survival. Steiger’s piece makes it clear that newspapers fumbled the opportunity to get out front of the Internet by focusing too much on protecting their print franchises.

Alterman notes the changes that occurred around the time of Watergate, when papers began to shed their partisan past and reposition themselves as impartial (read: bland) recorders of history. The scramble to win Pulitzers and duplicate the Washington Post‘s Watergate success resulted in millions of dollars being flushed on large Washington bureaus and expensive overseas correspondents. Basically, newspapers lost touch with their local constituencies and began writing for other journalists more so than for their readers.

Alterman also documents another ominous trend that began in the 1970s: the rise of the “insider journalist.” As reporters gained celebrity, their access to the great and powerful became a status symbol amongst their peers. Powerful people knew this, and they learned to exploit their access to leading journalists for their own gain as well. Readers weren’t served by any of this, and as the journalism world became clubbier during the 1980s and 1990s, the reading public lost interest.

This culminated in embarrassments like the Jayson Blair scandal and subsequent fallout in which a number of high-profile columnists at newspapers around the country lost their jobs. It was the low point of modern journalism: the profession had sunk so far that facts no longer mattered; if a reporter said something was true, then it must be true. Who had time to fact-check, anyway? There were gala dinners to attend and golf dates with a CEO.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Meanwhile, newspaper executives knew full well what was going on around them. Circulation began sliding in the mid 1980s and demographic trends made it clear that young people didn’t read newspapers. A few papers saw catastrophe coming and made the leap to national circulation. They will survive the carnage.

The rest were addicted to the healthy and predictable profit margins of their business. Executives knew they were over-exposed to advertising from the shrinking department store industry and that their classified ad franchises were horribly vulnerable to online competitors. But why do anything? Their investors were fat and happy and there was no need to rock the boat.

This complacency is common in industries on the brink of collapse. IBM averaged $8 billion in annual profits during the decade before it lost $8 billion and nearly went out of business. Big companies often enjoy their most profitable years just before the undertow of market change sucks them under.

Watergate’s sad legacy

It’s too late for the newspaper industry to save itself. The average regular newspaper reader is 55 years old. Fewer than one in five people under the age of 25 ever reads a newspaper. They’re not going to start reading one now.

Reading accounts of the industry’s mistakes, I’ve become increasingly convinced that Watergate was the worst thing that ever happened to the newspaper industry. It transformed the role of the reporter from anonymous scribe to media celebrity. It distracted editors from the needs of their readers and diverted investment from productive local channels into wasteful global folly. For almost 30 years, the industry got away with these mistakes because it was the only game in town. Had executives acted a decade ago to dominate the online age, they might have saved themselves. But in this day of blogs, Wikipedia and Craigslist, newspapers don’t have a compelling value proposition.

Sure, online traffic is growing and online dollars are inching upward, but the top line is falling too fast. The union contracts negotiated two decades ago can’t be easily changed, the presses still need to be maintained and delivery truck drivers need to be paid. At some point during the next two years, the revenue and expense lines will cross, but there will be little left to cut without turning major metro dailies into expensive supermarket advertisers. There will be massive consolidation and a lot more layoffs.

I’ll continue to chronicle the sad decline of an American institution on this blog, but I’ll also write about some of the exciting experiments that are transforming journalism across multiple media. I firmly believe a new kind of journalism that embraces blogs, camera phones, Twitter, wikis, hyperlinks, search engines and millions of ordinary citizens will be far richer and more vibrant than the one that preceded it. We just have to clean up an ugly mess first.

More Goodwill Write-downs; Debt Burden Ties Owners’ Hands

Goodwill is becoming harder and harder to find in the newspaper business these days and recent financial moves tend to confirm that. Editor & Publisher reports that Belo and McClatchy collectively took more than $1.75B in goodwill write-downs at the end of the first quarter to recognize the lost value of their media properties. The piece goes on to look at other goodwill write-downs in recent history, including the New York Times Co.’s recognition that more than half the value of its New England properties had declined since 1993. Goodwill is just a paper loss, but it reflects a business’s recognition that the value of an asset has declined and probably won’t come back in the foreseeable future.

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Follow the Media looks at the increasingly crushing debt burden that newspapers face. As media companies went deeply into hock to finance big consolidation ventures in the 1990s, they saddles themselves with payment terms that now force them to do everything in their means just to service the debt load. The piece concludes with a description of the spiral into which the industry has fallen: “Print newspapers will continue to cut expenses, some of which we the readers will notice and some we won’t, their editorial and advertising product will continue to deteriorate, and eventually we readers will reach the point where we decide we are no longer getting our money’s worth and we all go elsewhere. The gamble for publishers is just how much deterioration we will accept before we truly abandon ship?”

Demographic Trends Headed in Wrong Direction

Another sign that newspapers have all the demographic trends going against them: MediaPost cites a comScore report that found that “18- to-24-year-olds were 38% more likely than the general population not to read a newspaper in a typical week. The 35-44 cohort were 9% more likely not to read one. The flip comes with the 45-54 cohort, which were 24% more likely than the general population to read one.” The good news is that young people who care about news are big users of newspaper websites. The bad news is that online revenues are less than 10% of sales at most big newspapers.

Zell Gets Pissed

Is Sam Zell losing it? He’s recently been quoted saying that he never expected an 18% revenue decline in one year and he’s become increasingly belligerent in his meetings with employees recently. BNet has more. By the way, have you seen the video of Zell telling one of his reporter employees, “F**k you?” It’s here on YouTube. He mutters the comment under his breath at the end of a response to an Orlando Sentinel’s reporter’s pointed question about how newspapers can thrive by giving readers what they want when all readers want is stories about puppy dogs.

And Finally…

Maybe it’s time to get while the getting is good? Romenesko documents a trio of retirements of veteran journalists, including:

• Palm Beach Post Publisher Tom Giuffrida;
• Austin American-Statesman Editor Rich Oppel; and
• Gannett Newspaper Division chief Sue Clark-Johnson.

And Executive Editor Joel Rawson of The Providence Journal, who announced the previous week that he’ll retire soon, says the industry’s problems are not driving him out. He’s still got his health and he wants to spend more time flying, he says. Having cut his staff by 40% over the last 19 years has nothing to do with it.

The New Yorker devotes 6,600 meticulously edited words to the impending death of newspapers, examining objectively the promise and perils of a new-media world which writer Eric Alterman sees embodied in the Huffington Post. Drawing on sources ranging from Walter Lippman to The Simpsons, Alterman concludes:

• That the death of newspapers is inevitable;
• That the model that will emerge to replace them looks strikingly like that of the newspapers of 200 years ago; and
• That our democracy is probably better off for this trend, although the plight of people in “the dark” is worse.

Here are some excerpts. Everything is elliptical:

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.”

The McClatchy Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5-billion purchase. Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year. America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared.

Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they could believe “all or most” media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago, Nearly nine in ten Americans, according to the Sacred Heart study, say that the media consciously seek to influence public policies, though they disagree about whether the bias is liberal or conservative.

Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. “People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,” she says. “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

[Huffington Post] is poised to break even on advertising revenue of somewhere between six and ten million dollars annually, according to estimates from Nielsen NetRatings and comScore, the Huffington Post is more popular than all but eight newspaper sites.

The blogosphere relies on its readership, €”its community, €”for quality control.

Most posts inside the [Huffington] site, however, go up before an editor sees them.

Journalism works well, [Walter] Lippmann wrote, when “it can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch.” But where the situation is more complicated, journalism “causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation.”

When Lippmann was writing, many newspapers remained committed to the partisan model of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American press, in which editors and publishers viewed themselves as appendages of one or another political power or patronage machine and slanted their news offerings accordingly.

The twentieth-century model, in which newspapers strive for political independence and attempt to act as referees between competing parties on behalf of what they perceive to be the public interest, was, in Lippmann’s time, in its infancy.

[The piece goes into an analysis of a 1920s debate between Lippman and rival John Dewey over the nature and methods of democratic discourse.]

As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected, top reporters, anchors, and editors naturally rose in status to the point where some came to be considered the social equals of the senators, [P]olitics increasingly became a business for professionals and a spectator sport for the great unwashed

The Huffington Post was hardly the first Web site to stumble on the technique of leveraging the knowledge of its readers to challenge the mainstream media narrative. For example, conservative bloggers at sites like Little Green Footballs took pleasure in helping to bring down Dan Rather after he broadcast dubious documents allegedly showing that George W. Bush had received special treatment during his service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Talking Points Memo “was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the fired U.S. Attorneys to a boil,” a scandal that ultimately ended with the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a George Polk Award for Marshall, the first ever for a blogger.

During the Katrina crisis, for example, [Talking Points Memo] discovered that some of [its] readers worked in the federal government’s climate-and-weather-tracking infrastructure. They provided the site with reliable reporting available nowhere else.

Traditional newspaper men and women tend to be unimpressed by the style of journalism practiced at the political Web sites, Real reporting, especially the investigative kind, is expensive, they remind us. Aggregation and opinion are cheap.

In October, 2005, at an advertisers’ conference in Phoenix, Bill Keller complained that bloggers merely “recycle and chew on the news,” contrasting that with the Times‘ emphasis on what he called “a ‘journalism of verification,’ ” rather than mere “assertion.”

“Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out,” Arianna Huffington protested, “In the run-up to the Iraq war, many in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, lost their veneer of unassailable trustworthiness for many readers and viewers.”

Newspaper editors now say that they “get it.” Yet traditional journalists are blinkered by their emotional investment in their Lippmann-like status as insiders. They tend to dismiss not only most blogosphere-based criticisms but also the messy democratic ferment from which these criticisms emanate. The Chicago Tribune recently felt compelled to shut down comment boards [because they] “were beginning to read like a community of foul-mouthed bigots.”

[Huffington] predicts “more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism, €”wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting, A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom, €”with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times.”

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism.

Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

In “Imagined Communities” (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel’s comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” It is at least partially through the “imagined community” of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged.

 

Newsday in Play: Media Moguls Salivate

The New York Times has more details on Sam Zell’s interest in selling Newsday. In addition to the previously reported interest by Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman, it now appears that Cablevision also wants to get in on the bidding. Unless Cablevision wins, the most likely outcome is that Newsday’s production facilities will be combined either with Zuckerman’s Daily News or Murdoch’s New York Post, thereby putting heavy pressure on the loser. It’s been questionable for some time whether New York City could support three tabloids and this may decide the issue. For Zell, the sale of Newsday must be a defeat. As the Times points out, the deal “illustrates the paradox Tribune faces: The best way to raise cash to meet short-term demands is to sell the very same properties the company would want to keep in the long run because they generate healthy profits.”

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Variety analyzes the first few months of Zell’s Tribune ownership and concludes that the real estate magnate got more than he bargained for. The 15% decline in revenues was unexpected, insiders say, and that’s why extreme measures like layoffs and asset sales are on the table. Zell has tried to bring in managers who question everything, but the problems at Tribune Co. run deeper than a calcified corporate structure. The industry is imploding and that’s not good when there’s a $13 billion debt to service.

Faltering Economics

Alan Mutter comments on the potential impact of bond rating downgrades on the newspaper industry. In a helpful tutorial on the workings of the bond market, he explains why the near-junk status of Belo, GateHouse Media, McClatchy, Media General, MediaNews Group, Morris and Tribune increases their debt burden at a time when they can least afford it. Paying off bonds is simply a matter of growing the business faster than the debt burden, but newspapers are unable to do that right now. Lenders don’t want to run newspapers, so they’ll do what they can to right the business, but that usually means vicious cost cuts. In a worst-case scenario, the defaulting borrower’s assets are chopped up and the company shut down.

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On top of everything else, the price of newsprint is up over 10% in the last six months. The increases are offsetting many of the savings publishers had hoped to realize from resizing initiatives. Dow Jones spent $30 million to retrofit presses and manufacturing operations when it shrunk the Wall Street Journal a year ago. Those expenses may have done little more than stave off the impact of the rise in paper prices for a while.

 

Three From the Coast

Pasadena Weekly attempts to total up the newspaper layoffs in the Los Angeles area. It comes up with 70, including 31 pressroom workes at the LA Times, 22 at the LA Daily News and 10 in Pasadena (where there are now five reporters left to cover a dozen communities). The epicenter (‘scuse the reference) of coverage is LA Observed, which journalists are reportedly checking every half hour for more bad news.

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That’s the Press, Baby! proposes a novel explanation for the San Jose Mercury News’ implosion: geography. The author proposes that in a high-cost area like the South Bay, the Merc had to expand or be pecked to death by free local papers in the bedroom communities crowded into the narrow corridor between the bay and the mountains. There was simply nowhere to expand.

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Finally, the Los Angeles Times has an interesting new example of grassroots journalism. The Homicide Report blog, written by a reporter and one contributor, documents every homicide in Los Angeles County (which adds up to 165 as of this writing). It’s the type of reporting that only a professional news organization could do and it dramatizes that real people are affected by homicide, a topic that is often treated matter-of-factly by the news media.

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Continuing the dirge of dreary earnings that began on Wednesday this week, Tribune Co. wrapped up its last quarter as a publicly traded firm with a $78 million loss from continuing operations. The pattern was identical to that reported by Journal Communications, McClatchy and New York Times Co. yesterday: Classified revenue down 25%, hurt by a 34% drop in real estate advertising and a 28% decline in help-wanted; retail advertising off 10%; national down 11%. Most ominously, the publisher reported that Internet ad revenue was up only 6%.

Evidence is mounting that Sam Zell had no idea what he was getting into. Having initially declared that the Tribune Co. wouldn’ t downsize its way to profitability, he has hacked more than 500 jobs and is talking of further cuts. Zell said he planned to keep the company mostly intact, but in announcing disappointing quarterly earnings on Thursday, the company said it has ““begun a strategic review of certain Tribune assets.” There’s now talk that Newsday is on the block, with media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman sniffing around.

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a contest for the best reader-submitted video opposing Sam Zell’s proposal to sell naming rights to the Chicago Cubs. The winner was a college student who interns at the Tribune. The Trib has some fun with winning its rival’s contest in this clip, which also includes the winning video.

Three Big Publishers Tell Same Sad Story

Continuing to bang the drum slowly, Editor & Publisher reported financial results from three big newspaper publishers on Wednesday, each of them dismal:

• Journal Communications’ February revenue fell 7.5%, dragged down by catastrophic results at the flagship Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Check out these numbers from the Brew City: national ads down 31%, direct marketing down 54%, help-wanted ads down 31% and real estate ads down 26%. The only bright spot was online revenue, which was up 16%, but only to $1.1 million.
• McClatchy had a similar tale of woe, reporting that total revenue in February slid 11.7%. National advertising was off nearly 13%, while classified advertising declined 25%. The recession hit classifieds particularly hard as real estate and employment advertising both dropped more than 30%
• Finally, The New York Times Co. said that ad sales that fell 6.6% in February, largely due to plunging classified revenue (off 19%) and double-digit advertising declines at its New England group, including the Boston Globe. While the Times stopped short of blaming God for its troubles, it did note that March results will be “adversely affected” by the early Easter this year. Easter is traditionally a slow advertising period.

There was one bright spot, though. USA Today advertising jumped 14.5% in February. “Strong growth in the travel, technology, financial, packaged goods, retail, advocacy and pharmaceutical categories offset lagging the telecommunications and automotive advertising at the paper, Gannett said.” Here at the Death Watch, we’ve been saying all along that a few national newspapers will survive and actually thrive as the industry collapses. Count on The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and USA Today to come out the other end, as all made the jump to national distribution when they had the chance. Business travelers need a morning paper, and that’s an attractive audience for national advertisers.

And Yet Editors Still Don’t Get It

Here’s another indication that newspaper editors are still blissfully clueless about the long tail. The fifth annual “State of the American News Media” study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism finds that as newspapers cut staff, they’re actually concentrating their remaining resources in fewer places, which means they’re overlapping each other more. “You have in a sense more reporters across more outlets, but they are all covering a fairly narrow band of stories,” the project’s director told Reuters. “There are more people congregating at the White House, fewer at any one government agency.” So we’re still going to have 150 reporters covering a presidential press conference at which everyone sees the same thing instead of cutting back on White House coverage and redeploying staff locally, where it might actually do us some good.

Recognizing Unsung Victims of Newspaper Meltdown

MarketWatch Video deploys an international team of journalists to rip the lid off the story of the unappreciated victims of the newspaper industry implosion: journalist bars. The seven-minute story takes us to San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and New York, where bartenders reminisce about five-hour lunches and payday parties and mourn the decline of conversation. There’s even a 45-second clip from London, where the reporter’s only apparent contribution to the story is to show us that he’s in London. Hey, that’s more than the Boston Globe can say!

Hapless Sun-Times May Be Next Big Downturn Victim

Could the Chicago Sun-Times be the next big city daily to shut down? Read this BusinessWeek profile and you’ll probably come to that conclusion. Once a hard-hitting scourge of local politicians, the Sun-Times has been slammed by a combination of the industry downturn and management misdeeds that landed two former executives in jail. Having hacked away at costs in an effort to stabilize the ship, the paper that once won seven Pulitzers in one 20-year stretch is now reduced to haranguing rival Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell while also outsourcing its delivery to him. Concludes BW: “it’s hard to see how the Sun-Times will be around much past its 61st birthday next year.”

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Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun-Times Media Group (STMG) reported a dismal fourth quarter 2007 net loss of $59.1 million, up from $34.6 million a year earlier. Editor & Publisher notes that “STMG, which publishes about 100 dailies and non-dailies in the Chicago market, is in the midst of a study of ‘strategic alternatives,’ including a sale of all or part of the company.”And to highlight how bad things are, “STMG launched a plan to reduce operating costs by $50 million by June 30, 2008. Among the measures the company undertook was outsourcing distribution to the rival Chicago Tribune, outsourcing ad production, newsroom and management layoffs, and folding some newspapers.” Can you imagine outsourcing distribution to your competitor?

Profitless in Seattle

Wanna buy a newspaper? Or three of them, actually. The Seattle Times. Co. is trying to unwind its ill-advised 1998 decision to go into debt to buy three newspapers in Maine. Apparently, the purchase was homage to the paper’s founder, who hailed from the Pine Tree State. However, the cash-strapped company can no longer afford such folly and is looking to dump the Portland Press Herald, Waterville Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal. There’s even talk that Portland’s newspaper union might buy the local rag. Perhaps that’d be a way to restore the 27 jobs the paper recently cut.

Dow Jones Surveys the Damage

Regular NDW readers won’t find much new in this Dow Jones story about the perilous state of the U.S. newspaper industry, but it is a good wrap-up of recent events. It’s generous to the industry in recounting why newspapers didn’t invest more aggressively online a few years ago. Quoting:

“For one, many newspapers were scared away from online ventures when the dot- com boom turned to a bust in 2000. In order to fully nip online competition in the bud, however, newspapers would have needed to invest heavily in burgeoning Web ventures before those entities got too expensive. For many newspapers, that kind of investment was not within their means.”

Not within their means. That’s like driving a car on bald tires because new ones are not within your means. Newspapers have had gross profit margins of more than 20% for decades. There were plenty of “means” to invest if owners had simply seen the bullet train that was heading at them. The post-bubble period was the best time in a decade to buy into the Internet. So why didn’t any newspaper companies do that?

The best quote in the story comes from McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt, who told a December conference that a “significant portion” of the current troubles the industry faces are “cyclical.” Right. So is global warming.

Envisioning the Future of Journalism

The Editors Weblog interviews Jim Brady, Executive Editor of Washingtonpost.com, who provides sensible insight on the future of journalism. Newspapers aren’t going away, he says, but many smaller papers are finding that the economies of scale of online publishing make it a more sensible route that newsprint. Journalism itself will also evolve to include more reader interaction, with readers doing more of the legwork. “Iif journalists allow readers, not to investigate for them, but to help them flag and acquire easily accessible information, it makes investigative journalism easier to do than it was fifteen years ago, when the journalists had to make dozens of phone calls and go down to the public library.”

Online Media Baron’s Advice: Blow It All Up

Billionaire entrepeneur and former AOL top executive Ted Leonsis has a 10-point plan to rescue the newspaper business. It basically comes down to blowing up the existing model, going entirely online and distributing through every available channel. Oh, and search-optimizing. Veteran journalists will love this suggestion:”Get rid of senior editors. Turn them into algorithmic managers…Knowing statistically what content gets the best click through across all media is a key deliverable. Newspapers need math majors running big swaths of the organization…There are too many English majors in key positions.”

Milestone Award for New-Media Publisher

A landmark event in online journalism occurred in late February, when Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for its coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys. This New York Times account points to the difference between the new breed of online reporting and traditional print journalism. Chief among them is the involvement of readers in the process. “There are thousands who have contributed some information over the last year,” the paper quotes Talking Point’s Joshua Micah Marshall as saying. Marshall has even been known to give “assignments” to his readers, asking them to comb through official documents. His journalism also mixes original reporting with generous links to other information online. It’s very Wikipedia-like. And it’s working. The reader- and advertising-funded site gets about 400,000 page views a day and has about 750,000 unique visitors a month.

Gannett CEO’s fine, even if his company isn’t

Gannett Blog tap dances on Gannett CEO Craig Dubow‘s substantial 2007 pay package, pointing out the absurdity of Dubow earning nearly $3 million in 2007 despite turning in the second world stock performance among major newspaper companies. Lots of anonymous angry comments follow Jim Hopkins’ description.

They’re doing something right in Canada

• The newspaper malaise in the U.S. may be mainly a U.S. phenomenon for now. The Toronto Globe and Mail reports on research by Newspaper Audience Databank that shows that Canada’s two national papers both saw a slight increase in weekday readership last year. The Globe and Mail’s weekday readership increased 3.9 per cent to a shade over 910,000, while The National Post’s weekday readership grew 2% to 538,400. Both papers’ Saturday circulation declined. The story goes on to say that the business picture is holding up somewhat better in Canada than in the U.S., although it’s far from good.
• Meanwhile, Marketing Charts reports that 61% of Canadians say that they’d rather look at the ads in a newspaper than watch them on TV, according to a national survey by Ipsos Reid for the Canadian Newspaper Association. What’s more, an astronishing number of Canadians read newspapers mainly for the ads, scan pages looking for advertising or consult newspapers looking for holiday sales promotions. What do people know in Canada that those in the lower 48 don’t?

A very funny takeoff at Tribune Co.

Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20 Year Club pointed to this very funny video by WGN Morning News sports anchor Pat Tomasulo spoofing Sam Zell’s exhortation to Tribune Co. staffers that “You Own This Place.” Watch till the end as weatherman Tom Skilling to steals the show.

The uneasy transition to online

Billionaire sports fan Mark Cuban weighs in on newspaper bloggers. Responding to a local newspaper’s protest over the exclusion of its staff blogger from the Dallas Mavericks’ locker room (Cuban owns the Mavs), Cuban criticizes newspaper blogging as “probably the worst marketing and branding move a newspaper can make…By taking on the branding, standard and posting habits of the blogosphere, newspapers have worked their way down to the least common denominator of publishing in what appears to be an effort to troll for page views.”

Cuban says that treating bloggers like mainstream media should be an all-or-nothing proposition. You must either admit or exclude everyone, but don’t play favorites because a blogger has a mainstream media business card. Some 20 commenters largely agree. Cuban’s position has kicked up quite a storm of debate, with some people saying he’s simply trying to get back at a reporter he doesn’t like.

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An award-winning newspaper reporter talks about how she made the leap to online media and how other ink-stained wretches can do the same thing. Michele Nicolosi comments, “In the very near future, we will all be online journalists…The outlook for online journalists — those that play well, learn about and care about the online publication as much as we all cared about the paper 15 years ago — is much, much better than it is for people who are dragging their feet, refusing to change the way they work to accommodate the new needs of the online product.”

Two Midwest Dailies Cut Staff

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch will elminate 31 jobs, mostly out of operations and marketing. No newsroom positions will be cut. The publisher said the P-D is performing pretty well, considering, but that the housing slump had hurt ad revenues. The story didn’t say how many people the paper employs.

The Duluth News Tribune plans to cut between 15 and 30 workers, or anywhere from 6% to 13% of its workforce. The company said the cuts were prompted by an ad revenue slide of more than 10%.

A Hostile Takeover in Long Beach?

It’s still too early to add the Long Beach Press-Telegram to the RIP list, but it looks like the paper is headed in that direction. MediaNews Group, which owns both publications, has said that it plans to consolidate the Press-Telegram with the Torrance Daily Breeze. That process is under way, and it looks like the Daily Breeze is running the show. Its publisher and editor will now effectively run the Long Beach paper, and the “consolidation” is mainly a matter of cutting jobs in Long Beach and requiring people to apply for the same jobs in Torrance. The Press-Telegram now has just 10 reporters covering 19 communities. Did we mention that the Press-Telegram is a unionized paper and the Breeze isn’t?

Black Humor at the Merc

It’s difficult to figure out from this AP story just how many SJ Mercury employees were cut, but we think it was 50. In any case, 20 of them were newsroom employees who got laid off or took buyouts. Employees marked the occasion by dressing in black and gathering for a noon ceremony. This is the fourth round of cuts at the Merc since 2006. HR experts will tell you that cutting by dribs and drabs is not the way to reduce staff. Better to do one deep, painful layoff and get it over with.

Washington Post Goes Buyout Route

Following the paths taken recently by the New York Times and Bay Area Newspaper Group, the Washington Post Co. offered buyouts to employees who are 50 or over and have at least five years of service. Publisher Katharine Weymouth didn’t say how many jobs were to be cut and the buyouts weren’t offered to everybody. She noted that she couldn’t rule out layoffs. The Post story says that more more than 100 of the 785 newsroom employees meet the new criteria.

Feeling the Chill Downeast

The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram will eliminate 27 jobs – requiring 15 layoffs -and cut the size of its news hole. No reporters will be laid off, although some editorial jobs will be cut. The publisher cited a continuing gloomy business climate. The Time Record in nearby Brunswick laid off 10 employees last month.

The state of Maine’s Department of Economic and Community Development is investigating layoffs of 10 people at the Times Record in Brunswick. Apparently the new owner financed the purchase of the paper in part with tax-free bonds from the Department, which put the state in the difficult position of financing local layoffs to support an out-of-state publisher.

Also…

The New Haven Register hasn’t announced anything, but you can’t tell a journalist not to share a good story. The paper’s Capitol reporter, Greg Hladky, told someone at the Courant that he was one of five people let go in “cuts” (not necessarily layoffs). The NH Register editor couldn’t be reached for comment and that’s all she wrote.

Staff Reductions Taking Their Toll

The steady stream of newspaper staff and budget cuts is beginning to be felt on the street.

Politico reports on the shrinking ranks of regional reporters covering Capitol Hill – the local Regional Reporters Association’s membership has dropped from 200 to 84 in a decade – and suggests that a lot of politician shenanigans may be going uncovered thanks to the dearth of watchdogs looking out for local interests. However, the story notes that specialty newsletters and publications like Congressional Quarterly have grown their staffs and that the total size of the congressional press pool has stayed about the same as a result.

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Ken Doctor notes the broad trend toward cuts in newspaper business coverage and speculates about how newspapers can maintain a foothold in this area, which is often critical for ad sales. He sees national and international organizations like Dow Jones and Reuters increasingly syndicating their coverage to smaller papers in almost pre-packaged form.

E&P Totes Up the Numbers, and They Aren’t Good

Top U.S. newspapers have lost about 1.4 million copies in daily circulation, says Editor & Publisher. Declines of 20% or more have occurred at the LA Times, SF Chronicle and Boston Globe. Only two papers covered in the report – USA Today and the New York Post – managed to increase circulation. Factors include competition from other print and online media, publisher iatives to cut discounted or free copies and the creation of a national do-not-call list.

Despair and hope

Veteran journalist-turned-academic Tim McGuire writes a remarkably somber confession on his Arizona State University blog titled “I suddenly feel a lot worse about the future of newspapers.” The catalyst was comments by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. Hoffman apparently said that newspapers’ model of mixing profits with civic responsibility is fatally flawed. The two objectives just don’t mesh. This and other comments left McGuire, 58, feeling like he and others of his generation just don’t get the Internet enough to envision a newsroom’s future. Strong words for a man who’s supposed to be doing just that for his students. “Hoffman convinced me I’m way out of my element,” he comments.

Reid Hoffman weighs in with a lengthy comment on McGuire’s post, proposing to offer “some rays of hope.” However, there’s little hope evident in what he says.

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Meanwhile, the publisher of the San Antonio Express-News exhorted his colleagues to fight the good fight at the Texas Daily Newspaper Association’s annual convention. Thomas Stephenson said that investing in digital platforms is only part of the solution. Newspapers have to earn reader loyalty and then make it easy for advertisers to reach them through whatever channels they can.