Sam Zell is getting credit from his critics for telling it like it is in this interview with  Condé Nast Portfolio at Quadrangle Group’s Foursquare media conference. The famously combative Tribune Co. CEO reinforces remarks he’s been making all year about treating newspapers like businesses. That means questioning everything from sales incentives to the importance of journalism prizes if they don’t contribute to the bottom line. Some nuggets:

I could tell you unequivocally that [the current newspaper] model is a failure, or that model has passed its time of relevance.

In the Tribune he took over, “every single newspaper had a cadre of salaried salesman. Now, you know, I’m just a businessman, but I’ve never seen any kind of a sales force that was effective if, in fact, they had no incentives.”

On home delivery economics: “If you go across the street and you buy a newspaper from a vendor, you will pay 50 cents. But if you get it home-delivered, which costs the company 10 times as much, you pay 30 cents…You try and make those numbers work, and it don’t make any sense.

Journalists are more than willing to tell you what they think you need to know. And to some extent, that’s a valid position, but I certainly don’t think it is the answer. And to the extent that you have journalists who are unwilling to listen and only want to talk, they really should give up journalism and become college professors.

If the goal is a Pulitzer, it’s in the wrong place. In other words, we’re not in the business of…underwriting writers for the future. We’re a business that…has a bottom line…I think Pulitzers are terrific, but Pulitzers should be the cream on the top of the coffee. They shouldn’t be the grounds…newsrooms have basically never recovered from Watergate, and everybody wants to be Woodward and Bernstein, and that’s the definition of success.

86 percent of the cost of the newspaper business is print, paper, distribution, and promotion. That’s untenable long-term and…short-term.

Mark Potts has been no Zell zealot, but he sees a lot of sensibility in the mogul’s remarks. “More so than a lot of people in the newspaper business, he’s dealing in a reality-based environment, not living in the past,” the recovering journalist writes. Newsosaur Alan Mutter, who’s also no Zell fan, largely agrees. And Mark Lacter of LA Observed, which has been a vehement Zell critic for his cost-cutting at the Los Angeles Times, applauds the CEO’s rationale. “Much of what Zell says is painful to read, but it would be a mistake to dismiss many of his views about the news business,” Lacter writes.

We were struck by Zell’s comments about the sales infrastructure he inherited. According to the CEO, Tribune Co.’s sales reps were effectively order-takers, competing with no one and holding a lifetime lock on their territories. In a harsh advertising environment, you wonder how any sales force can be competitive without incentives, particularly when their task is increasingly to sell low-margin online ads in high volume. Internet companies know that online ads require a fundamentally different compensation structure, a hungrier sales staff and a incentives that encourage reps to develop new business. It’s hard to believe that even a year ago, major newspapers were operating without those simple principles in place.

Speaking of Zell, we can’t help notice that it’s been more than two full months since the wonderfully snarky Tell Zell blog has posted an update. We’ve heard that management at the LA Times has recently been coming down on internal critics like a ton of bricks and we hope that the blog’s anonymous author, InkStainedRetch, is simply in hiding, waiting for another chance to ply his or her viciously eloquent talents at a future date.

Happy Thanksgiving to all our readers in the US!

Newspapers have to stop selling ads and start selling audience. Even more importantly, they have to sell what their business customers seek: awareness. That’s best accomplished by engaging many small audiences within the community and monetizing that through ad programs that span multiple channels.

That’s the gist of comments by Stephen Gray, managing director of the American Press Institute’s Newspaper Next project , in an interview with Mark Glaser last week. The piece has caused a stir in the blogosphere because of Gray’s suggestion that newspapers should learn to think of themselves as advertising agencies. In other words, their role could be to direct their customers’ marketing dollars to the channels that work best for the customer, whether the newspaper company owns them or not.

“It’s not just ‘buy banner ads on my news website,'” Gray says. “It’s ‘we can make your business effective on the Internet.’ And that might include doing your website or buying the keywords you should have on Google AdWords for our market.”

Newspaper Next’s three-year project to figure out a strategy for the newspaper business has employed the services of Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, a book that should be required reading for every newspaper executive. The book examines the paradox of successful companies responding ineffectively to changes in their market that ultimately kill their businesses, even though they understand fully the implications of that failure.

Successful newspapers are reinventing themselves as comprehensive sources of local information through whatever channels people use. Gray tells of the experience of the Pocono Record, which sent out a team of reporters to interview local residents and find out what information was difficult for them to find. The paper rejiggered its products to deliver that information and saw print circulation group and Web traffic and sales surge 50%.

As far as what this means for journalists, Gray offers this provocative quote:

“[This is a] watershed moment, when people stop getting information from a [once a day] dropper. We now live on the ocean and can dip in at any time and get whatever we want. So we will spend a lot less time with things that are designed for everyone like news and spend a lot more time proportionately finding solutions for me and what will help me in my life today…I am preaching in the field that newspapers need to visualize themselves becoming the local information utility.”

Gray’s comments are right on the mark, but it’s doubtful that many newspaper executives have the insight or innovation to make the changes he recommends. In Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen points to numerous examples of executives in highly competitive, fast-changing industries who failed to respond to technology disruption. If the people who ran Digital Equipment Corp. or Novell were unable to accommodate change, why should we believe managers who have overseen comfortable local monopolies for the past several decades will fare any better?

Helium.com is a web site devoted to citizen journalism. We had a chance to speak with its VP of development, Peter Newton, on Monday. Newton is a long-time Boston Globe executive who came to Helium about two years ago to help invent a new approach to journalism. 

The site has about 5,000 regular contributors, who upload all manner of stories relating to their interests and activities.  Helium isn’t a news site; rather, it takes the type of material that people would have posted on blogs for nothing and offers it to the public and to publishing partners on a revenue-share basis. Newton said some citizens are earning thousands of dollars per year for their contributions.

Helium has useful advice on everything from Socrates to roasting turkey.  Contributed stories are evaluated by members and voted up or down the popularity stack.  Contributors share in advertising revenue as well as the modest license fees the company generates from distributing its content to publishing partners.  Most of those partners are small right now, but Newton says some big deals are imminent. In the Marketplace section, a few publications solicit articles by topic, paying between $48 and $120 per submission. There is also a list of citizen journalism awards available to aspiring writers.

One of Helium’s goals is to become a source of freelance content for publishers who want a low-cost alternative to standard freelance rates.  The site is founded on the assumption that expertise doesn’t have to cost $1/word and that knowledgeable people can now find an outlet for their expression. Helium isn’t profitable yet but hopes to get there within about a year.  With $17 million in venture capital, it’s off to a good start. 

Small is Beautiful…Or At Least Cheap

The New York Times reports upon the rise of small, focused investigative journalism operations that are succeeding where traditional newspapers are cratering.  Operating at the will of charitable organizations, in many cases, they pay their journalists anywhere from $30,000-$50,000 per year and provide highly targeted coverage of specific topics and regions.  Most of these organizations are small and have low traffic counts, but the big ones, like MinnPost in the Twin Cities and the St. Louis Beacon, can top 200,000 visitors per month.  While they provide only a fraction of the coverage of the mainstream media they displace, they are increasingly popular alternatives for journalists whose jobs have been swallowed up by the implosion of local dailies.

Do They Still Not Get It?

Baltimore Sun copy desk director John E. McIntyre relates the experiences of two colleagues who are making a living trying to give new-media advice to their ink-stained brethren.  Their frustration is summed up in this anecdote from one of them: Too many journalists think the reader’s pleasure is irrelevant, that the reader picks up the newspaper either to be instructed or to sit in awe of the literary talent being presented in it. In short, too many journalists are too full of themselves to succeed in the 21st century, when a newspaper needs to focus on what its readers want, since the readers’ choices of what to do with their time seem limitless. That is the challenge for young journalists of the 21st century, who I hope will save us all.” McIntyre concludes that young people are not hostile to newspapers as much as they are disdainful of being bored.  The idea that readers will suffer through paragraphs of tedious introduction in order to get to the meat of the story is at the heart of the disconnect between newspapers and their audiences. “We have to master the new technologies, both to acquire useful information and to convey it in the form in which readers prefer to receive it,” he says.

Miscellany

The Virginian-Pilot will cut 125 jobs, or about 10% of its workforce.  Tactics include shutting down a free daily newspaper geared to Generation Y readers, reducing the size of the newspaper by about 40 pages a week and eliminating the business section.  The Pilot provides an unusually frank account on its website, quoting editor Dennis Finley as saying that those laid off include some of his most senior managers.  “One of the goals was to keep as many reporters on the street as possible,” Finley says.  Particularly disappointing is the closure of Link, a free daily newspaper targeting the 18-to 34-year-old demographic group.  The Pilot‘s average circulation has been falling, but less than the national average for newspapers.  A price increase is also in the cards.  

Here’s a welcome breather for the newspaper industry: newsprint prices have stabilized. The companies that sell newsprint are quietly saying that they have no plans to raise rates next year.  However, that doesn’t compensate for the likely increases in the price of gasoline. While gas has gotten cheaper lately, many experts believe that $4/gallon gasoline is a likelihood for next summer, which will still significantly affect newspapers that distribute by truck.

The Chulchavox blog relates two items we missed:   

• The Denver alternative weekly Westword says that staff members of the Longmont, Colo. Times-Call newspaper have been invited to the publisher’s holiday party – as parking valets. Staffers will reportedly earn what they get for their day jobs, only they’ll be parking the cars of rich people in attendance.
•  The Newark Star-Ledger has reassigned a reporter and a deputy photo edit to the mailroom in order to keep their jobs.

The blogger also quotes from Martin Legeveld, of News After Newspapers, commenting upon the follow-up land from the American Press Institute’s CEO conference held last week. Participants agreed to reconvene in six months to explore additional collaboration ideas.  “What are they thinking?” Langeveld says.  “What will be left six months from now?”

The McClatchy Company reported that consolidated revenues in October decreased 17.8% and advertising revenues declined 20.4% over the previous year.  The bright spot was a 12.4% gain in online advertising revenues.

Six Apart is offering laid-off journalists free blog accounts worth $150 per year.  More than 300 applications rolled in during the first eight days. Of course, you can also get free blog accounts at Blogger.com and WordPress.com, not to mention several other places.

The Maine-based Lakes Region Weekly has cut six positions through a combination of layoffs and the elimination of unfilled positions.

And Finally…

Out-Of-Town News, the Harvard Square kiosk that has served newspapers and magazines from around the world to an eager audience of students and erudite residents of Cambridge, Mass., will go out of business at the end of this month.  The city Council of Cambridge, Mass. has voted to extend the lease in an effort to keep the business in Harvard Square, but the prospects look grim.  The newsstand has been in operation since 1945, but business has been challenging for several years.

Vol. 1, No. 1

It isn’t a newspaper, but to millions of computer enthusiasts, PC Magazine is an institution. It led the uprising of PC-empowered office workers against corporate IT departments in the 1980s and peaked at 1.2 million circulation in the 1990s. Issue sizes once ran to 500+ pages and the magazine supported a staff of more than 300 people. Its product reviews were considered the gold standard in the industry.

So the announcement this week that PC Magazine will exit the print market and go online-only was a turning point of sorts. With circulation down by half and an advertising base that has switched its budgets almost entirely online, the move makes sense. Expect to see more tech titles follow.

Longtime tech writer David Strom and I devote 14 minutes to a eulogy and look to the future in this podcast. Strom also has his own memorial here. Former PC Mag editor-in-chief Michael Miller also has a few thoughts.

Technology media has been a leading indicator of change in other media sectors. InfoWorld was the first major tech title to abandon print and many publishers have scaled back on size and frequency to keep their ink-on-paper operations viable. Most will tell you that they run print at break-even and make all their profits online. That was apparently the situation at PC Mag. Readers of tech publications are naturally more Internet-savvy than the general population, so the shift to the Internet was evident in the tech market several years ago. Look to that market as a leading indicator of where the media in general is going.

Tough times for the Newspaper Guild are shifting the union’s strategy from organizing laborers to simply surviving. Membership is down about 17% since 1986 and 2,000 Guild members have left this year alone. In a telling move, the union recently cut back the frequency of its internal newspaper from monthly to bimonthly and moved more content online. “Right now the biggest thing you’re fighting is the overall sense of impending doom,” is the uplifting quote from new Guild President Bernard Lunzer.

It’s so bad that the Guild is now focused on helping its longtime adversaries survive. The union recently pitched in to help finance an acquisition and it has worked actively with some newspaper owners to arrange concessions that would keep the titles afloat. It’s also beginning to organize people outside of the newspaper industry, such as interpreters in California courts.

The industry’s shift to online distribution hasn’t helped the Guild. Fobes notes that “Much of its power came from its ability to seize up a paper by asking sister unions running presses to strike.” With fewer copies to print and presses to staff, that club isn’t as big as it once was.

The Associated Press will reduce it staff by 10% over the next year. The cutback of roughly 400 positions will be accomplished by attrition to the greatest degree possible, according to CEO Tom Curley, but layoffs may be necessary. The AP instituted a hiring freeze several weeks ago. The pain being felt by member newspapers has hit the AP hard and the situation has worsened as several large members have announced plans to drop the subscription service in order to save money.

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

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

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

In Praise of Experience

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

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

In Condemnation of Euphemisms

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

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

Newspaper Outsourcing a Growth Industry

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

And Finally…

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

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

The newspaper industry is in chaos, but you wouldn’t know it at the Financial Times, the U.K.-based business daily that now sells more copies in the US than in the UK. In fact, the economic crisis has been good for business, says Caspar de Bono, managing director of Financial Times Business in a story in BtoB magazine.

The reason is that panicked investors want to know how the meltdown in the US is playing out in other countries, de Bono says. The FT, with its great international reach, is becoming a coveted source of information. US circulation is up 5% this year to over 140,000. Sales for the FT Group were up 11% in the first nine months and publishing sales were up 14%. With The Wall Street Journal setting its competitive sites on The New York Times, the time might be right for the FT to become a major salmon-colored alternative to America’s business daily.

News Without Newspapers

21^st News has a guest column by Gary Hook, former director of editorial operations at USA Today, about why he’s worried about journalism. Hook’s concerns were prompted by attending the Knight International Journalism Awards, which recognized two journalists who risked all to deliver the truth. Hook says their stories are inspiring, but at the same time he’s worried about who will carry on this kind of crusading work once many newspapers are out of the picture.

His answer may be in the award winners themselves: Aliaksei Karol, the editor-in-chief of the weekly Novy Chas in Belarus and Frank Nyakairu, a correspondent and freelancer who has documented human rights abuses in Africa. Neither of these men works for a major metropolitan newspaper. Novy Chas is published in print, but clearly serves more as a means of political expression than a profit-making concern.. Nyakairu is a freelancer and wire service correspondent who could just as easily write for paying Web publishers as for Reuters.

Both men were recognized for what they do, not the medium in which they do it. They are great journalists in spite of not working for a daily newspaper. Which makes Hook’s argument a little hollow. Early in the column, he quotes Walter Lippmann, who said, “The purpose of journalism is to give information on which the citizen can act.” There’s nothing in there about newspapers that we can see.

Miscellany

Alan Mutter takes a financial analyst’s eye to the profitability picture in the industry and concludes that further cuts are likely before year’s end. The problem is that profits are falling at a much faster rate than revenues, about 18 times the velocity of decline for 12 publishers he studied. Mutter uses EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), an accounting standard that strips out all the non-cash events that influence an income statement. Nearly every publisher in his analysis suffered year-over-year profit declines to 40% or more, with Sun-Times Media Group logging the most extreme decline at -1523%. “Not one publisher in the group of 12 was able to prevent its profits from falling faster than its revenues,” Mutter writes. And imbalance like that is unsustainable, meaning that more cuts are almost certain.

Ken Doctor has the scoop and the schedule on CNN’s upcoming two-day offsite at which the cable TV network will pitch its services as an alternative to the Associated Press. Doctor thinks CNN’s coveting of major editors has gotten too little attention, and when you look at the numbers, it’s hard to disagree. CNN has more journalists than either the AP or Reuters, and it’s got more delivery channels, too. Amid a nationwide revolt against the AP’s licensing and fee policies, CNN’s argument on Dec. 1 and 2 could be persuasive. However, Doctor proposes nine questions that he thinks the execs in attendance should pose to their host first. He’s hoping they get an answer because the network has been unwilling to offer anyone for an interview.

Once-fierce rivalries in the Metro newspaper business are giving way to calls for collaboration. The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram used to compete toe-to-toe for readers, but with circulation and revenues going south, there’s talk of a news alliance. The two companies recently began delivering each other’s papers to local markets and discussed but later discarded a joint printing agreement. More collaboration is probably on the way, however. Star-Telegram columnist Mitchell Schnurman outlines in detail the financial realities as well as the culture shock engendered by the idea of an alliance.

Speaking of Dallas, documentary filmmaker mark Birnbaum and Dallas Morning News film critic Manny Mendoza have teamed up on “Stop the Presses,” a dark documentary about the future of newspapers. The Rocky Mountain News interviews them, but gives the piece only scant space and no room for the filmmakers to say anything. Kind of like a story in print.

Bay Area News Group has rescinded layoffs of eight workers after the union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. The union says it wants to explore alternatives to layoff, such as “asking employees who were thinking of leaving, if they want to save someone else’s job.” If you can unravel the meaning of that statement, please comment.

“Bring it on!” cries the Boston Globe’s Joan Venocchi in a cheeky send-up of auto makers, labor unions and other failed institutions that hope to find succor at the government teat. Venocchi sees a parallel to her own profession. Sure, the newspaper industry is in trouble, she says, but “No one in government is going to back a newspaper bailout and no one should…If newspapers aren’t producing news in a format that people want to purchase, it’s the industry’s problem. If Detroit isn’t producing cars people want to buy, that’s Detroit’s problem – not the taxpayers’. Her logic is sound. There was no excuse for the AMC Gremlin.

BusinessWeek‘s Jon Fine tackles the same topic as Venocchi, though his angle is a bailout plan for the newspaper industry. With tongue planted in cheek, Fine proposes that the government adopt the industry crisis as its own and shell out billions to cover the industry’s debts while providing each household with an Amazon Kindle in a rescue plan thinly disguised as a green initiative.

Michael Sifton is out as chief executive of Canada’s Sun Media Corp. after just a year on the job. He’ll be replaced by Pierre Karl Peladeau, the CEO of parent company Quebecor Inc. “Disappointing” results in the company’s publishing and Internet businesses was cited.

60 Minutes’ Andy Rooney ditches his usual satiric tone in a homage to the newspaper industry that gave him his start. “I wouldn’t trade [my newspaper column] for all the stations that broadcast this television commentary. The money I’d trade,” he says. Rooney got his start with Stars & Stripes before World War II, and the industry taught him all about journalism. How sad to see it in such trouble. “There’s been a steady decline in the ciruclation of newspapers, but it’s strange that there’s no decline in the faith people put in them,” he says. TV has benefited from some great journalists, he says, but it’s not the same. “There are more pictures on television. That’s about it.”

Lee Abrams and friend

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

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

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

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

New/Old Journalism Clash in Washington Park

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

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

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

Layoff Log

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

Magazine Ad Pages Drop, Holiday Season Looks Grim

These numbers are just gruesome. Quoting:

On Oct. 28, the Conference Board announced that its consumer confidence index had plummeted to an all-time low of about 38 out of 100, a drop of over one-third from its level of 61.4 in September. The expectations index–which evaluates consumer sentiment about the future–went even lower, dropping from 61.5 to 35.5. Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board’s research center, said the decline in the confidence index was “the lowest reading on record” since the index began tracking consumer attitudes in 1985.

Macy’s said it will eliminate all magazine advertising in the first half of 2009, although its holiday marketing budget is still largely intact. Subsequently, The New York Times reported that Neiman’s specialty retail segment–including Neiman Marcus Stores and Bergdorf Goodman–saw sales tumble 27.6% in October, while Nordstrom is down 15.7%, and Target fell 4.8%.

Traditional Media Hit Harder Than In Past Recessions

It used to be that three mainstream media channels – newspapers, radio and magazines – reliably predicted the economy’s decline into a recession and its recovery. That all changed about three years ago. Newspapers and magazines fell while the economy was rising and show no sign of anticipating a recovery. The results, writes Erik Sass:

“While softening ad revenue anticipated the two previous economic downturns by about a year, in the most recent case, the slowdown for magazines, newspapers and radio began about three years before. In addition, the declines have already proven to be steeper in this pre-recession period than at the height of the previous ones. This suggests that all three traditional media, suffering from both secular and macroeconomic trends, are poised to suffer unprecedented losses in the economic downturn that is now unfolding.

Cleveland Plain Dealer increases job cuts to 50

CanWest cuts 560 jobs, five per cent of workforce

Cost pressures and plunging share prices prompted Canadian publisher and broadcaster CanWest Global Communications Corp. (TSX:CGS) to cut 560 jobs – about five per cent of its workforce – Wednesday as the company faces a rougher economy and more competition.

The company, which employs about 10,500 people in Canada, said the cuts would save $61 million a year.

The company, once worth billions, now has a stock market value of about $85 million.

The Winnipeg company said about 210 jobs will be cut at through a restructuring of news operations at CanWest Broadcasting’s E! stations.
CanWest Publishing, which operates the former Southam chain and other papers, will see about 350 positions disappear through a restructuring of the community newspaper group.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

The New York Post‘s Phil Mushnick beats up on a favorite print-media whipping post: TV news:

The freshest genuine news that local TV newscasts now provide are weather forecasts, unless you count updates and previews of “American Idol,” “Survivor” and “Dancing With The Stars.”

Quoting a friend from TV land: “Today? There are reporters I work with who just want to be on TV. They’d be game-show hosts. It doesn’t matter to them. The only original stories we report these days is what [bleep] to watch on the network, that night. It’s depressing.”

It’s frightening stuff. The decline of newspapers is far more than a story about newspapers. It’s a huge TV story, an encouraging trend for the corrupt and a development that should scare the daylights out of everyone else.

Schiller Leaves ‘Times‘ To Lead NPR

NPR is already crowing about the appointment of Vivian Schiller, formerly general manager of NYTimes.com, as its new CEO. Schiller guided the Times through some difficult periods, including its migration from a part-paid to an all-free business model. She also oversaw two redesigns that were considered groundbreaking. At NPR, she’s expected to accelerate a multimedia makeover that will expand the organization’s footprint broadly into video.

Michael Rosenblum

Here are a couple of interesting ideas about the future of journalism that we thought were worth reading/viewing.

The Online Journalism Blog has clips of video visionary Mark Rosenblum addressing the Society of Editors conference this week. Rosenblum ditched a top job at CBS to go out on his own and demonstrated that a single journalist with a video camera and a Macintosh can duplicate the work of an entire television video team at a tiny fraction of the cost. He has spent the last six years helping organizations like the BBC and the Voice of America reinvent themselves as foundries of video journalism.

Any idiot can operate a video camera, Rosenblum says in colorful and often off-color language. You don’t need news trucks or production teams or half-million-dollar editing consoles. Give reporters a videocam and a Mac, train them how to use the technology and send them out to find stories. They can even work out of their homes. It’s that drop-dead simple. “You are not in the newspaper business,” he says. “You are in the business of going into your communities, finding stories, processing them and delivering them back to your clients and charging advertisers for those eyeballs.”

Rosenblum urges editors to embrace new technologies instead of worrying about how to monetize them first. We’re not going back to the way things were, so move ahead with confidence. Transform your newsrooms into multimedia centers and decentralize your organization. “You are magnets for talent,” he tells the editors. So do something with it. “You will not survive unless you have the courage to embrace this new technology and go for it all,” he concludes. There are three videos. We found the first to be most illuminating.

Maegan Carberry files a report from the Web 2.0 Summit for Editor & Publisher, scolding the newspaper industry for not leading change and enabling conversation between their readers. “What is a journalist if not someone who hopes to enable others with the information they need to solve the problems of our time? To connect individual citizens with their communities? Shouldn’t newspapers be the ones championing this enterprise?” she writes.

Carberry tells of election night coverage that combined Twitter, Digg and Current TV to enable viewers to effectively control the information they were consuming. Too many mainstream media reporters still regard these tools as something they use to enhance their work, she says. What they don’t realize is that the tools  are central to the experience that media companies need to give their constituents. She also has a nice list of interesting Twitter pundits to follow.

Miscellany

Canadian correspondent Mark Hamilton rounds up the latest financial news from media companies north of the border. It isn’t pretty. Another Canadian, National Post‘s Jonathan Key, outlines the three print models that will survive the newspaper collapse. Okay, we won’t keep you in suspense. They are: business media (The Economist), premium upscale media (The New Yorker) and hyper-local media (your community newspaper).

Steve Outing quotes a missive he received from a retired management consultant whose observations should be relevant to the industry honchos gathered behind closed doors in Reston tomorrow: “Newspapers are cutting staff and in so doing, totally curbing their capability to produce a quality product and thereby even have a chance to survive. The result is an ever deepening and ever tightening death spiral.”

The Charlotte Greensboro News & Record has offered all its employees a buyout in an effort to reduce its staff by 8 to 10%, according to a haiku-like story on the paper’s website.

The Associated Press is launching two youth-oriented mobile websites via Virgin Mobile. AP Entertainment and CUBI (“Can You Believe It?”) will offer the “latest film, TV, and music news,” and “off-the-beaten-path news from around the world,” respectively.

As newspapers begin to wind down their print operations, many will take the same course as the East Valley Tribune of suburban Phoenix. Faced with steadily dwindling circulation and a cost structure that doesn’t scale proportionately, the 100,000-circulation daily has scaled back its print schedule to two four days per week. That makes it the largest daily to swallow that pill. The Christian Science Monitor all but abandoned the print market two weeks ago and a few smaller dailies have trimmed Monday or Saturday editions to save money.

The Tribune signaled this move in October, when it laid off 40% of its staff and shifted to a free distribution model. BusinessWeek notes that Wisconsin’s Capital Times took a similar approach last spring, cutting its print schedule from six to two days and abandoning paid circulation in favor of free distribution. The Capital Times had only 16,500 paid subscribers at the time, but that number has increased to 85,000 since the shift was made. Of course, circulation statistics for a non-qualified free publication are practically meaningless, but the number looks good.

Other papers are likely to follow this path. Print isn’t necessarily a bad business, but daily print is becoming a terrible one. Most major metro dailies make the majority of their profit on Thursday and Sunday editions while losing money on Monday, Tuesday and Saturday. It makes sense to start cutting where the revenues are lowest.

Circulation is also a dicey business. While paid circ is marginally profitable for many papers, that isn’t always the case. As the economy deteriorates, it’s going to become more difficult to convince people to pay for information they can get on their computers for free. Advertisers like paid circ, but they’re also learning to accept that the new generation of readers doesn’t expect to pay for information. As the Web has monetized eyeballs, the perceived value of paid circulation has declined.

While the industry debates the question of how to transition newspapers to a viable economic model for the future, papers like the Monitor and the Tribune are blazing a trail that many will probably follow. The cutbacks may be painful, but the brand survives and print continues to play a role in the business, although a reduced one.

Perhaps the newspaper executives who are meeting behind closed doors in Reston, Va. this week will bandy about this idea. Or perhaps not. Jeff Jarvis nails it with this commentary on the hush-hush affair: “These are the very same proprietors of the newspaper industry’s decline. What they need is not the same old executives but new people with new ideas,” he opines. If Jarvis was running the event, “I’d fly in people from Google and a bunch of successful tech companies as well as innovators and entrepreneurs in news and let them do all the talking.” Not a bad idea. Read the comments on his post.

Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly stated that the Tribune had scaled back frequency to twice a week. It actually cut back to four days a week. The Orange County Register has more.