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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analyzing the Monitor‘s Exit from Print

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

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

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

When we spoke to Christian Science Monitor Editor John Yemma last month, we got the impression that print was central to the Monitor‘s mission for a long time to come. Looking back at that interview, we realize that Yemma never said anything about daily frequency.

So we suppose it’s no surprise that the Monitor used its 100th birthday year to announce that it’s shifting most of its resources online and scaling back to a weekly format. Given the trends in the business right now, the move is probably prescient. Below is today’s press release. We’ll have more from a Monitor spokesman within the next few days.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR ANNOUNCES SHIFT FROM PRINT DAILY TO ONLINE DAILY AND LAUNCHES WEEKLY PRINT PUBLICATION

– International Newspaper Embraces the Future of Journalism with a New Web-first Format –

Boston, MA, October 28, 2008 – The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to a daily online publication that operates 24/7.  The Monitor today announces that in April 2009 it will produce an enhanced, constantly updated version of its Web site, CSMonitor.com, and launch a weekly print edition and a daily electronic subscription product.  In addition, the Monitor will discontinue its daily print publication.

Consistent with the Monitor’s commitment to thoughtful, global news and perspective, its new Web edition will feature original reporting seven days a week, and its new weekly print publication will look behind the headlines and help readers understand global issues.

As recent years have shown, the future of journalism is the Internet.  By transforming itself into a daily online publication, the Monitor is the first major international newspaper to fully embrace that future, allowing its reporters to publish news as it happens.

In the coming months, the Monitor will make significant upgrades to its Web site, CSMonitor.com, including:

• Original reporting on global news and events seven days a week
• Continuously updated stories
• Global conversations between readers and Monitor staff
• Links to valuable content elsewhere on the Web

By launching its new Web-first format, the Monitor is remaining consistent with its original vision to be a daily publication as laid out by Monitor founder Mary Baker Eddy.  With the full commitment to 24/7 coverage via the Internet, the Monitor is now a true daily news outlet.

Although the Monitor’s Web site will be the home for its daily news coverage, the new weekly edition of The Christian Science Monitor will ensure the continuation of the Monitor’s thoughtful, unbiased, in-depth coverage in a print format.  The new publication will feature:

• The Monitor’s well-regarded analysis of both US and global news
• Weekly snapshots of life around the globe and news around the Web
• Profiles of individuals who are tackling tough problems and trying to make a difference
• Special emphasis on the environment, innovation, money & values

As part of its multiplatform format, the Monitor will also launch a new daily e-news edition which will be delivered via e-mail. The two to three page subscription product will include:

· An original column from the editors

· A selection of the most important Monitor stories of the day

· Links to other Monitor stories

“Like much of the news industry, the Monitor has embraced online reporting and is now one of the first publications to treat its Web site as its primary publishing format,” said John Yemma, editor of the Monitor.

“The Christian Science Monitor recognizes that daily print has become too costly and energy-intensive.  Online journalism is more timely and is rapidly expanding its reach, especially among younger readers,” said Yemma.  “There’s still a role for print, but one that is geared to weekends, when people still can find time to catch up, look behind the headlines, and experience the pleasures of print.  Our shift to a Web-first, multiplatform strategy is likely to be watched by others in the news industry as they contemplate similar moves.”

Monitor Managing Publisher Jonathan Wells added that the move to a Web-first format enables the Monitor to more effectively reach a global audience, and he emphasized the combined value of the Monitor’s Web edition and its new weekly print publication.  “We have a base of print readers that we can continue to serve by providing longer format journalism on a weekly basis,” he said.  “Ad revenues from our Web site and circulation revenue from our print and e-news editions will form the basis of our business model as the Monitor enters its second century.”

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

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

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

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

Pressure to Go Private

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

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

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

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

Layoff Log

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More papers are dropping the Associated Press. The Columbus Dispatch becomes the latest media entity to just say no to the wire service, following by just days Tribune Co.’s blockbuster announcement that it would exit the consortium. The AP’s costs are a sore spot with budget-challenged publishers, as are its tendency to compete with them online.  Editors are frustrated by new rules that require them to insert tags on stories they contribute to the wire service, which the AP then publishes through its numerous Internet channels.  The editors complain that revenue-generating traffic is thus diverted to the AP from their own web sites.

The AP claims new pricing will cut newspapers costs by about 10% beginning next year and that it will share ad revenues with members.  Publishers, though, say the lower prices aren’t enough. The AP’s fees can exceed $1 million annually at some newsrooms, which is about the same cost as 12 to 15 salaries.  In light of the need to cut costs, newspapers are coming up with creative alternatives, including regional consortia and citizen contributions. The New York Times account says defectors will also turn to less expensive newswires to cover the void left by the AP.

Pundits Disagree on Media’s Future

The director of digital at the UK’s Guardian Media Group forecast two years of “carnage” in the traditional media industry.  Emily Bell said she could see five national newspapers in Britain going under during the next two years as well as “the regional press heading for complete market failure.”  Even successful media companies will have to prepare for a long period of losses, she said.  The culprit is undifferentiated content driven by the traditional role of media as representatives of their customers, rather than participants in a conversation.  The only way to avoid irrelevance is to change this mindset, Bell believes.

However, the global leader for entertainment and media practice at PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Hong Kong begs to differ. “Traditional media isn’t dead yet and won’t be for the next five years, ” Marcel Fenez told the World Association of Newspapers readership conference, Despite its rapid growth, digital advertising will represent just 10 per cent of total advertising for newspapers by 2012, he said. He forecast that global newspaper advertising (including digital) will grow 2.9 percent to $136.8 billion during that time.  Part of traditional media’s advantage is its willingness to collaborate, he noted.  By not trying to “gouge the other guy’s eyes out,” media companies can come up with the kind of creative partnerships that stymie other industries.

Another speaker at the same conference danced on the hyper-local theme. Randy Bennett, vice president for business development at the Newspaper Association of America, said newspapers need to fight back against stagnant readership growth by becoming the destination of choice for local activity. “We must be a trusted source for all relevant content created by us, or others – professionals or amateurs,” Bennett said. “We must give users a tool for extracting the content they need and create a platform for interactive conversation.” Is there a business model in all this?  Bennett admitted he was unaware of one but expected that large sites would come up with something

When Bad News is Good News

Publishers know that bad news sells, and new data from Nielsen Online proves that point. The service’s tally of unique visitors at the nation’s top newspaper Web sites in September showed that all but one (the Village Voice) were up by double- or even triple- digit percentages. The big winner was the Anchorage Daily News, which enjoyed a 928% spike in unique visitors, presumably due to interest in native daughter and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The irony of the financial crisis is that it has also been good for some segments of the publishing business. Reuters says business media are enjoying a short-term lift in readership and ad dollars, thanks to all the attention being drawn by Wall Street’s financial crisis. The question is what happens after reader interest cools? The long-term slowdown in advertising in conventional media is likely to continue and perhaps worsen beginning in the first quarter of 2009, experts predict.

Miscellany

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch says the unprecedented global financial crisis presents a buying opportunity for his company. Speaking at the company’s annual meeting on Friday, Murdoch said News Corp. just turned in its sixth straight year of record earnings and is sitting on $5 billion in cash, making it well prepared for further downturns in credit markets. The company has also renegotiated its credit lines to allow for longer payback periods.

No one, including News Corp. has been left untouched by the mess on Wall St., Murdoch said.  ”It has weakened advertising markets and beaten down our share price,” the 77-year-old CEO said. “We have prepared ourself well for this day.” With next year presenting “unprecedented challenges,”  News Corp. will look for acquisitions in growth businesses. India, eastern Europe and Asia have the most promise, Murdoch said. He also expressed “great confidence in our future,” apparently referring to News Corp.’s future, not necessarily everybody else’s.

A team of enterprising publishers in the UK has produced a four-page newspaper created entirely by hand. “Every word and every image and every mark of any kind in The Manual was drawn by a team of volunteers – mostly illustrators,” a blog entry says. “Each copy of the paper has been numbered in a limited edition of around 100.” The experiment foresees a day when “handmade qualities can transform newspapers from ‘junk’ to collectable.” Sounds like a neat idea.

Just two months after Puerto Rico lost its only daily English-language newspaper, a new suitor has stepped in. The Puerto Rico Daily Sun will be available starting this Wednesday by subscription and at newsstands. The paper will be staffed largely by members of the now-defunct San Juan Star. Few details were released. The publisher said an upcoming press conference would reveal more.

The Seattle Times Co. may be close to selling its newspapers in Maine, but that probably won’t save it from having to make deep cuts early in the new year.  Al Diamon, Maine’s most widely-read media critic, reports that “two informed sources in the newspaper industry” says a company called Maine Media Investments could buy the Blethen Maine Newspapers by the end of the month. The chain has been an albatross for the Seattle Times, which has enough of its own problems on the opposite coast. Diamon quotes sources as saying more deep cuts are expected in January.

The new executive editor of the Merced Sun-Star in California’s heartland mixes metaphors and crows about his performance at the free throw line in one of the more delightfully clueless homespun essays we’ve seen by a scribe in a while. Our favorite line is this drug reference (emphasis added): “The newsroom…is down to seeds and stems in terms of numbers of reporters, photographers, copy editors and sports writers.” Someone should put Mike Tharp in touch with the Merced County Sheriff’s department, which destroyed about six tons of marijuana plants the previous day.

Unlike many newspapers, the Death Watch functions as a nonprofit (although, in the recent words of Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson, the same thing could be said about many newspapers these days), so an extremely busy week has forced us to pull back on updates.  Here are a few recent items we’ve noticed.

WNYC’s On the Media has an audio interview with Lee Abrams, Chief Innovation Officer at Tribune Co. Abrams addresses the widespread perception that he is, well, a little crazy. Are you slightly unhinged? the radio station asks? “Maybe, if that’s what it takes,” Abrams responds. He also praises some advertising sections for being readable and useful and chides journalists for not accepting that fact. And he’s surprised that papers like the Chicago Tribune don’t promote more forcefully the fact that they have reporters on the ground in placed like Baghdad.

“I’ve never seen an industry more negative,” Abrams says, citing a Tribune editorial that called the paper’s recent makeover nothing more than a campaign to publish on the cheap. “That’s typical of the whole newspaper businesses’ point of view. I’ve never seen an industry more negative in articles like that…If [the industry] was in free fall, you’d think they’d be trying more things.”

Abrams has been more outspoken recently.  He was at the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media & Money Conference this week, where he tweaked one of Tribune Co.’s South Florida properties for running stories that even the reporters agreed were boring.  Abrams also challenged what he called the myth that staff cuts cheapen content and he called the idea of a government bailout for the industry “terrible. Newspapers would then focus on this ultra-elite point-five-percent and create these papers that are just unreachable to a mass audience,” he said.

Robert Thomson, the Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, seems to agree.  “Part of the problem is… you had a journalistic culture which was very self-indulgent, self-reverential and self-referential.  It wasn’t referring to reader’s interests’ but more to journalistic self-devotion,” he told the crowd.

Gawker’s Nick Denton says The New York Times is planning 20% staff cuts in the newsroom, with the feature sections and magazine staffs to absorb the brunt of the hit.  He doesn’t quote any sources, though.

The 120,000-circulation Winnipeg Free Press will be on an erratic publishing schedule for a while after 1,000 employees walked off the job on Monday, demanding a new contract.  The union is asking for a 3% increase on a multi-year contract.  Publisher Bob Cox said the Free Press will continue to publish via its website and won’t charge readers for missed papers.

A Las Vegas publisher of niche newspapers and magazines laid off as much as 10 percent of its staff this week, or about 20 employees the Las Vegas Review-Journal says. Greenspun Media Group, a sister company of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, idled the editor of H&D, a glossy bi-monthly home and design magazine, a reporter for the special sections division at the weekly In Business Las Vegas and a few other people.

Writing for Reuters blogs, Robert MacMillan quotes former Merrill Lynch newspaper publisher analyst Lauren Rich Fine as being cautiously optimistic about the long-term outlook for newspapers.  “Most of these companies can still be decent businesses.  They just have to rethink their expectations,” Fine says.  MacMillan also has encouraging words from Goldman Sachs analyst Peter Appert, who believes that newspaper companies will survive in the long term, although at much lower margins.  What’s the timeframe?  At least five years, Appert believes. For now, he’s advising clients to underweight the stocks.

John Schuster wonders how long Tucson, Arizona can continue to be a two-daily town.  The East Valley Valley Tribune announced huge cutbacks last week and the rival Arizona Daily Star is owned by Lee Enterprises, a company that is in severe financial straits.  Meanwhile, public faith in journalism wasn’t helped by an incident at the student newspaper of the University of Arizona.  A student reporter was recently outed for submitting for stories that allegedly quoted fictitious sources.

Cincy Navigator

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

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

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

Future for Journalism Bright, Just Not So Much for Newspapers

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Double Ten Day, everyone. In Taiwan, they’re setting off firecrackers, dancing in the streets and still fretting about the loss of the mainland.

Tampa Bay Tribune: “Um, Never Mind.”

Tampa Bay residents took a break from following the success of their hometown baseball team to scream bloody murder about recent changes to the hometown newspaper. The Tampa Bay Tribune redesigned just one week ago, collapsing multiple news sections into a single main section and reorganizing several features. The paper also broadly cut the length of news stories.

The changes apparently didn’t sit well with readers, some 300 of whom canceled subscriptions while 10 times that many called or wrote letters of protest. “Apparently the folks who came up with the idea for New Coke have finally found employment designing newspapers,” read one letter.

Tribune executive editor Janet Coats listened, and it didn’t take long for her to issue a mea culpa and to promise immediate changes, including a return to sections. “People want sports in a separate section. . . they want to be able to hand sections around. Turns out, we had really disrupted the way people communicate with each other in the morning,” says Eric Deggans’ account on TampaBay.com.

Give the Tribune credit for thinking outside the box, for listening and for responding quickly to comments. In atmosphere of crisis, institutions don’t have the luxury of researching their decisions to death, and they shouldn’t have the arrogance to stick with them in the face of strongly negative reaction. We believe the Tribune will get brownie points from its readers for listening, which it richly deserves, because it must’ve been a helluva rough week in that newsroom.

Miscellany

Journalism iconoclast Patrick Thornton asks readers to take themselves back 10 years and describe how they would do journalism differently. Always perceptive commentator Tim Windsor responds with a 15-point laundry list of suggestions, many of which would work just as well today. There are a few disconnects in Windsor’s commentary – mySQL was barely known in 1998 — but his advice is sound for publishers who still talk about “eyeballs” and “lock-in.” (via Mark Hamilton)

A comment posted on Gannett Blog notes that revenues at USA Today are running 11% under plan on a budget of 1% under plan. “Someone has to make up for that 10 percent difference,” the anonymous commenter writes. “That is not even taking into account a prospective collapse in Christmas advertisements.” USA Today employees are wondering if they should file for back overtime pay given the likelihood of layoffs.

Newsosaur Alan Mutter has a creative idea for the growing ranks of newspapers that are scrapping unprofitable Monday editions and scaling back to six days a week. Why not create a special interest edition on a popular topic like sports and deliver it free on Mondays instead? The savings achieved by axing a single edition don’t amount to much in light of the formidable fixed costs that most newspapers maintain, Mutter says. Newspapers would be better off swallowing the modest incremental cost of continuing to publish on Mondays while giving readers a product they really want and salespeople something exciting to sell. It makes sense to us.

The Wall Street Journal confirms speculation that the New York Times will shut down the web site of sister paper International Herald Tribune and host the news instead on a co-branded “global edition” of NYTimes.com. The Journal also reports that the Houston Chronicle will lay off 10 employees after failing to reach its goal of 90 volunteers for a buyout program. (via Romenesko)

The UK’s Express Newspapers group has been so shaken by circulation declines that it has sharply cut back on staff and taken to letting some reporters post their stories directly to the printed page. The resulting gaffes prompted one unidentified staff member to send a sharp rebuke to his colleagues about their sloppiness — including a reference to a couple from Wales as being English and a description of an island as “floating” (islands don’t float) — and to identify 20 serious errors in the most recent Sunday edition. Rival Guardian gleefully tells all.

And Finally…

Back in May we marked the launch of a new blog called Praying for Papers, with the stated purpose of encouraging “anyone who is touched by this shift in our industry to include it each day in their prayer life.” Having noted its launch, we feel compelled to point out that the most recent post was on July 11, when author Mike Koehler said he was going on vacation. We haven’t heard from him since. Either he’s having a great vacation, his prayers have been answered, or he’s given up hope. We’re not sure which.

Journalism junkies have been closely watching the example of Digg.com to see if the wisdom of crowds really is better than the judgment of editors. According to David Chen, it isn’t. Writing on Mashable, Chen offers a detailed deconstruction of Digg’s recent decision to jettison some of its top users, apparently for trying to manipulate the system.  The weeding-out process was positioned as a routine cleanup intended to eliminate abusers of the community adjudication process, but it was actually an acknowledgment that decision-making by the masses has serious flaws, Chen concludes.

It’s been common knowledge for a couple of years that the Digg model lent itself to manipulation by a small number of people. In fact, there’s evidence that up to half the stories on Digg’s enormously influential home page were contributed by just 100 users.  By taking draconian action to ban members who had, in some cases, contributed hundreds of hours of effort to building the site, Digg is admitting that it has been unable to figure out an algorithmic solution to the abuse.

The problem isn’t in programs, but in people.  Individuals can attain fame within the community by contributing stories that are ranked highly by other users.  Active members discovered early on that by forming “friend” relationships with many others, they could enhance their performance and popularity.  In other words, the more you voted for another member’s contributions, the more the other member voted for yours.  As time went on, an elite corps grew more powerful, to the point that their contributions can achieve high visibility regardless of merit.

“In the years following its creation, Digg became less a democracy and more a republic, with a select few users responsible for the majority of front page stories,” Chen writes. Digg has tinkered with its settings to try to mitigate this factor, but some members responded by writing scripts that routed around the problem.  It became a giant cat and mouse game that eventually forced Digg to insert human editors at some levels to arbitrate the process.  So much for the wisdom of crowds.

Chen contends that the blockade may irreparably damage Digg’s reputation, although the site will continue to be a huge source of traffic for publishers who are lucky enough to be listed there.  At the very least, the conundrum points out the limits of a purely democratic model of news judgment.  Even successful sites like Wikipedia rely up a small cadre of elite editors to make most of the important decisions. People with significant experience in online communities agree that a very tiny percentage of members contribute the vast majority of content.  It appears that editors, whether bubbled up from the community or appointed by management, are inevitably needed to maintain order

Should this be taken as a condemnation of the community journalism model and validation for the rule of editors?  Absolutely not.  As Wikipedia has demonstrated, armies of ordinary people can create a phenomenal information resource.  However, leaving all decision-making to a group without providing rules or oversight invariably results in the ascendance of an elite.  in the case of Wikipedia, that elite is self-regulating.  In the case of Digg’s more juvenile crowd, it’s a frat party.