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

Virginian-Pilot Considers Layoffs, Other Cost-Cutting Measures

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

McClatchy-owned Star lays off 50

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

Zell’s Tribune Co. takes big Q3 hit

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

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

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

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

Looks Like a Newspaper, Smells Like a Newspaper

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

And Finally…

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

We caught up with Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma today to see how the big shift from mostly print to mostly online is going. It’s going pretty well, Yemma said. Only about 15% of comments received have been negative and peers have mostly applauded the Monitor for making the bold move. We recorded the 10-minute conversation and present it below for your listening pleasure.

Now comes the hard part. In order to sustain the business in the long run and free it from an ongoing church subsidy, the Monitor needs to roughly quintuple traffic to CSMonitor.com. That’s because the operation needs to shift from an economic model driven largely by revenue to one based on advertising. The bigger hurdles may be internal. With the likelihood of some staff reductions looming, Yemma needs to keep morale high while phasing in a new editorial model.

That new model was described in a panel discussion the previous evening as “perfection vs. good enough.” Publishers are oriented toward producing perfect products because it’s impossible to change them once they’re in the field. That means sweating a lot of details that take time and reduce potential impact. The Monitor and others are wrestling with finding the right balance between the legacy of perfection and the emerging culture of “good enough” reporting in which details – and that may include facts – aren’t always 100% right.

Ultimately, Yemma doesn’t see the Monitor as being a cutting-edge online publication as much as one that can lead its traditional audience smoothly into a new age. The demographics of the audience at the previous evening’s panel on The Future of Journalism were telling. Many of the attendees were over 60. That’s not surprising, as the average age of the traditional news media consumer creeps toward retirement. “We’re not on the cutting edge of new technology. We’re on the cutting edge of bring the mainstream along into this new world,” he said. We wish him luck.

Listen to the recording (10:12) Right-click and choose “save” to download

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Finally…

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

The Christian Science Monitor will host a live event and simultaneous webcast at 7 p.m. EST this evening about The Future of Journalism. We’ll be there twittering the proceedings as pgillin. Join Twitter and follow me to see my notes. You can also follow the Christian Science Monitor on Twitter. The publisher says a URL for the webcast will be posted today, but we haven’t seen anything yet. Check back with the website later if you’re interested in watching the live event.

The Folger Library in Washington, D.C. is best known for housing one of the world’s great Sheakespeare collections, but on a visit last weekend we were intrigued to discover that it’s currently also hosting an exhibit on early newspapers.

We’re talking very early newspapers, as in those that emerged within the first couple of centuries after the printing press was developed. The style and topical choices of those early efforts look strange and even comical now, but you can see elements of modern organization and editorial voice emerging. In fact, the exhibit points out that many standards of layout, arrangement and frequency are over 300 years old.

Early account of Parliamentary proceedings

I took a few notes and snapped a few photos before being politely informed that photography was prohibited (click on the images to see enlargements). The history of newspapers is fascinating. They were an almost instant success.

They were also a distant mirror of today’s explosion of blogs and citizen media. Back in the 17th century, there were no commercial newspaper publishers. Journals were published by people who had the skill and money to use the press to promote an agenda. Often, these people had strong political biases or they wrote salacious accounts purely for the purpose of selling papers. There was no such thing as impartial journalism. Every title produced by these “pamphleteers” had something to sell.

Report on the 30 Years War

Yet the public evidently found value in what they said, because newspapers were an immediate success. Favorite topics included freakish occurrences: giant storms, conjoined twins, murder, atrocities and the supernatural. In fact, early newspapers were so sensational that Ben Jonson was moved to ridicule readers  for “wasting money on salacious and inaccurate news.”

Not all of it was inaccurate, though. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) gave birth to the modern newspaper. Citizens wanted to know how the conflict was going on the continent and whether England was going to be drawn in. A small number of professional journalists made a living reporting the facts of the war for anyone who would pay them. Their reports were hugely popular in England. Prior to the 17th century, news had been passed entirely by personal letter and word-of-mouth, which quickly distorted the facts. While early newspapers weren’t always accurate or unbiased, they were a lot better than the system that preceded them.

Account of the sensational murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey (1678)

The English press was heavily regulated throughout much of the 17th century, but rogue publishers constantly sprouted up to do battle with the government. Publishing was dangerous in a day when ordinary mail was routinely scanned by law enforcement officials for evidence of treason. if you could be arrested for what you said in a letter, imagine the risks taken by a pamphleteer!

Weekly London death notes, including 29 people who died of "teeth"

Drop by the exhibit if you’re in the D.C. area before Jan. 31, 2009. Here are a few other nuggets I learned:

• The first newspapers were called “corantos”. That word later became “courant.”
• The first courant was the Conventicle Courant of 1682. The first daily courant was published in 1702. The Hartford, Conn. Courant is a descendant of those first journals and is the only newspaper in the US to still call itself a courant.
• The first newspaper to call itself a “post” was probably The London Post of 1644.
• The first known illustrated ad appeared in 1680. It was for a mysterious product called  “Indian water-works.”
• The weekly newspaper report of London deaths in 1680 included 57 people who died from “griping in the guts,” 29 from “teeth” and 2 from “evil.”

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

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

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

Layoff Log

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

Miscellany

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

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

And Finally…

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

The top 23 US newspapers collectively lost about 6% of daily circulation over the past six months, indicating that even the most compelling Presidential election in a generation isn’t stirring people to subscribe. Ironically, the news came the same week that the Newspaper Association of America reported that traffic to newspaper websites was up almost 16% in the third quarter. The contrast underscores the trend toward consumers turning to newspapers for information but preferring not to read in print.

The downturns were especially bad in towns like Houston, Newark, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Boston, where consumers have plenty of choices and strong media operations in nearby cities. The Washington Post and New York Times suffered the smallest percentage declines, indicating that those papers that made the leap to national circulation a few years ago are struggling less. In fact, the two biggest national dailies – USA Today and The Wall Street Journal – actually had small circulation increases.

Editor & Publisher doesn’t provide raw circulation decline numbers, but we reverse-engineered them out of the published data. Here are our estimates of total declines among the 23 papers that lost circulation:

Other than a concentration in the northeast, the most precipitous declines don’t follow any clear pattern. This is similar to the story six months ago, when the top 10 Sunday newspapers lost 635,000 circulation in one six-month period. Alan Mutter provides the historical perspective. American newspapers have lost nearly a quarter of their circulation since 1984, he says.

Layoff Log

Ugly week…

• The Orange County Register will lay off 110 people, or about 8% of its workforce, in the fourth staff cut this year and the six since 2006. Publisher Terry Horne said the reductions are part of a process to become a “different kind of company.” The company will be “more focused on Interactive and make more of an effort in the print business,” whatever that means.
• The Santa Rosa Press Democrat will lay off 16 people, 10 of them in the newsroom, in the California paper’s third headcount reduction in a year. The newsroom is now about 30% smaller than it was in 2004. The publisher said the weakening economy has cost the paper some major retail advertisers.
• The Memphis Commercial Appeal will lay off 27 workers, or about 4% of its workforce. The cuts include 11 editors.
• McGraw-Hill will cut 270 jobs, but the company’s woes apparently aren’t due to the publishing industry’s implosion as much as to the bigger implosion on Wall Street. The media and information division actually grew revenue 5%, with business-to-business publishing leading the way. It was the market data and analysis businesses that got clobbered. McGraw-Hill has trimmed 670 jobs this year.
• The Cape Cod Times will cut six newsroom jobs and will close bureaus in Falmouth, Orleans and Sandwich, MA. The paper’s owner also plans to consolidate printing operations. The reductions amount to a little less than 10 percent of the Times’s editorial staff. They include three full-time and three part-time positions.

Miscellany

The New York Times’ David Carr has an exceptionally lucid account of the troubles afflicting the newspaper industry and the implications for us all. The twist at the end is especially effective – and troubling.

Writing in Fortune, Richard Silkos is optimistic that the newspaper industry will survive and thrive, although he’s not sure in what form. Silkos sums up the caterwauling by financial analysts and dismisses it as opportunistic. In the long term, the industry outlook is better described by Disney CEO Bob Iger, who said, “It would be hard to dispute the universal appeal of a product that promised to practically deliver the news of the world to your doorstep every morning in a neatly produced, printed package.” Someone’s going to make a killing when the industry recovers, Silkos says. Just you wait.

The editor of the Echo in Suffolk, England, has been jettisoned after 32 years, and he does not go quietly into the night. David Hart uses the occasion of his farewell column to protest the proclivity of media executives to treat editors like replaceable parts. In reality, the editor is deeply ingrained into the community, Hart writes, quoting Malcolm Muggeridge: “Like a man with a white stick, tapping his way blindly through events first in order to try to guide others coming after.” Hart thanks his readers for letting him lead them through the shadows all these year, but one gets the sense he’d use the stick differently on his boss.

The Associated Press has been under mounting pressure from newspapers that object to its fee structure, and now it has a new problem: CNN. The Atlanta-based cable network is wooing editors at some major newspapers with promises of a news service that will “provide stories of interest to your newspaper and online readers — breaking news, national, international, business, politics, consumer, medical, and more.” And it’s hosting several top editors at a three-day, all-expenses-paid event in Atlanta next month to tell them more. Meanwhile, the AP is further reducing rates in a frantic effort to stave off defections.

And Finally…

“The American newspaper may be dying. But this one, the oldest college daily, isn’t going anywhere,” chirps the Yale Daily News in a stirring kickoff to its 132^nd year. It seems the president of Yale still makes time every day to speak to the campus paper and, with the university kicking off its biggest expansion in 50 years, there’s plenty to write about and plenty of eager students to read what the editors write. Booya!