The New York Times Co. is sticking by its May 1 deadline to gain $20 million in cost-saving concessions from Boston Globe unions or shutter the paper. That doesn’t mean the Globe would close next Friday, but owners would make the decision then. Expect this one to go down to the last minute.
The Boston Globe has a story explaining its much-maligned lifetime job guarantees. The deals negotiated 15 years ago have become a hot potato as Times Co. has threatened to close the Globe unless $20 million can be cut from the expense line. The story has some interesting background on how guarantees grew out of management’s successful efforts to seize control from the unions more than 30 years ago.
Guarantees are almost unique to the newspaper industry, having first been negotiated in the 1960s when automation was threatening to put compositors and pressmen out of work. Publishers figured they could offer lifetime employment to people whose jobs were threatened and still make more money because the productivity benefits of automation were so great.
Another interesting motivation was the effect of automation on strikes. “The US newspaper industry averaged 30 to 40 strikes a year in the 1960s,” the Globe says, quoting industry analyst John Morton. “Now, they are rare. The last major newspaper strike occurred in Seattle in 2000.”
Of course, what seemed like a good deal at the time has become an anchor around some publishers’ necks as guarantees have limited their flexibility to manage expenses. In a similar move, the steel industry negotiated generous pension and health care benefits with its unions in the 1960s and 70s. Thirty years later, companies found themselves spending twice as much to pay retired employees as they paying productive workers.
New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger vowed to stay the course during a shareholder meeting earlier this week. He defended the Times Co.’s commitment to editorial quality and the validity of the advertising model, yet he hinted that other options were on the table. “”We continue to take a fresh, hard and deep look at various subscription, purchase and micropayment models,” he said.
Sulzberger may want to consider the experience of INDenver Times, a startup staffed mostly by members of the failed Rocky Mountain News. We told you about them on Monday, including their plans for an ambitious paid subscription model that includes “direct, real time conversations with our editors and writers…from 10 am to 5 pm every weekday.” Well, not so fast. INDenver Times just announced that it didn’t meet the 50,000-subscriber threshold it needed to pursue its novel business model and so won’t be going ahead with paid subscriptions. The announcement was murky on whether INDenver Times will go ahead at all. Various spokespeople talked around the importance of journalism but didn’t say whether that would include an ongoing commitment to this venture.
The Wall Street Journal carried this front-page banner headline week: “Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project.” The Journal doesn’t run many banner headlines, so this must be a big deal, right? Actually, apparently not. As Slate’s Jack Shafer explains, the breach in question poses no significant threat to the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet program. It amounts to theft of a maintenance manual. “The Chinese now know how many miles the F-35 can fly before its timing belt must be replaced, its oil changed, and its tires rotated,” he explains. Shafer also documents the putdowns from by Journal rivals Washington Post and New York Times, which both gave the story barely passing mention in their own pages. He also points to a recent piece in The Nation, intriguingly titled “Has the ‘Journal’ Lost Its Soul?” However, The Nation‘s servers appear to be down this morning, no doubt the victim of a Chinese hacker attack.
We’ll be watching with one sleepy eye next week as Sen. John F. Kerry holds hearings in Washington on the financial problems facing the newspaper industry. The fact that there is no support at any level of government for a bailout of the industry doesn’t faze Kerry, who appears to be more interested in appeasing the editors at the Boston Globe who have endorsed him for many years.
Also next week, we’ll be speaking in San Francisco on the topic of “World Without Media: What Will Fill The Void?” along with online journalism and social media expert JD Lasica at the New Communications Forum. This general session presentation begins Tuesday at 4:00. Click on the logo at left for a discount. Get an even bigger discount by registering with code SNCR New Communications Forum is one of the best social media events of the year. whoIts organizer, the nonprofit Society For New Communications Research has assembled a faculty of leading new-media thinkers who reserve some of their best stuff for the biannual conferences. Take a look at the agenda and see what we mean.
We’ll also be leading a panel on Wednesday on the topic of “Media in Transition: The Future of News in a Democratized World” at the co-located Inbound Marketing Summit. The three panelists are all newspaper industry veterans who have successfully made the jump to the digital world: Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher and Ken Doctor of Outsell. Click the image at right and use code VIPS50 to get half off the conference fee.
Nicholas Carr points us to a site maintained by one Timothy McSweeney, which is one of the funniest – and by that we mean “most droll” – online outposts we’ve encountered in some time – and by that we mean days. Check out the syllabus for an “Internet-Age Writing” class. A snippet:
“Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t!”
And also: “Students will work to make their blogging more vivid using the fundamentals of the craft, such as imagery, foreshadowing, symbolism, and viral paparazzi photos of celebrity nip slips.”
The New York Times Co., which is struggling just to hold its business together, reported a loss in the first quarter as advertising revenues dropped a sickening 27%. The only good news is that the company delayed some debt payments and the CEO said there are signs that ad spending might increase in the third quarter.
The company’s performance dramatically undershot Wall Street estimates, where analysts were expecting a loss of 3 to 6 cents a share. The actual operating loss was 34 cents. Even online revenue, which was traditionally been a bright spot, was down 5.6%.
Media General also disappointed the few analysts who continue to follow the company, reporting an operating loss of 77 cents a share on an 18% drop in revenue. One analyst had pegged the likely loss at 5 cents a share on revenues of $180 million. Actual sales were a little under $160 million.
Moody’s has downgraded Gannett Co. yet again. The agency lowered its rating of the publisher into junk territory earlier this year and has since lowered it again. Now Moody’s says Gannett may not have the necessary profits to meet the terms of one of its debt convenants. Gannett logged a 60% drop in profit on an 18% slide in revenue in its most recent earnings report.
And there are more earnings still to come.
The 10,000-circulation weekly Jackson County (Mo.) Advocate focuses on serving its own neighborhood and it’s doing just fine, thank you. Sure, its four-person staff works long hours to produce the weekly, but employees will also stop to talk with residents who stop by the office because that’s where the best stories come from. Like the local man who found an image of the Virgin Mary on a rock in his back yard. “You never know who’s going to come through the front door,” says Editor Andrea Wood, who’s interviewed in this five-minute report by local radio station KCUR. “We’ve done stories about people who had grown freakishly large pears. It’s about the community.”
Wood says the turmoil that’s killing large metro newspapers isn’t hitting hyper-local titles nearly as hard. “This industry is stable,” she says. “People use the [community newspaper] for scrapbooks. You’re never going to get that from the Internet.” Local businesses are also more stable and loyal advertisers.
The Advocate competes with the Kansas City Star, which has been cutting back local news coverage. That appears to be helping the Advocate. Circulation is growing and now tops 10,000 subscribers. The Star no longer sends reporters to cover local government meetings, leaving the Advocate as the main source of information about their community.
Further to the west, where the industry downturn has been very bad to the local newspaper industry, a veteran publisher of Chinese-language papers has actually started a new one. Brian Ho launched News for Chinese, a free monthly, just one month after the financial crisis hit. He admits that his motivations were unconventional: He got a great deal on real estate and started the business to keep the offices occupied while the market recovers. Nevertheless, local advertising has picked up nicely and, while he still isn’t making a profit, Ho says that may be in the cards. “If my newspaper can earn a small profit to support my employees, I will consider that as a success.”
Alf Landon
Voice of San Diego reports on a conundrum at the Union-Tribune: it doesn’t know whether it’s conservative or liberal any more. The U-T has leaned to the right going back to 1936, when it endorsed Alf Landon for president even as Franklin Roosevelt won 62% of the vote. New owner Platinum Equity has no clear political bias. Its chief partner gave $20,000 to the McCain campaign, but the partner who has the most experience running newspapers seems to prefer Democrats. Also, Platinum is based in Los Angeles, causing some locals to worry that the owners won’t care about local politics. That could tip the balance of elections, since observers figure the newspaper’s endorsements typically deliver a 3-5% edge to candidates, who tend to be conservative. It will tip the balance even more if the new owners decide to adopt a liberal bias.
Alana Taylor is an NYU journalism major who’s doing everything right, yet “I have no idea what I am going to do when I graduate,” she writes on MediaShift. The college junior has 4,000 Twitter followers, lots of professional connections on LinkedIn and a well-established personal brand, but the jobs just don’t appear to be out there. She interviews industry experts (including us) and gets discouraging news: working for a daily is a non-starter because many papers are going under and even the survivors aren’t paying a living wage. Starting a business is impractical in this economy. About the only hope for employment is to hook on with an Internet company and hope for the best.
Nevertheless, J-school enrollments are at an all-time high, which prompts BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy to ask “What are these people thinking?” Lacy writes on TechCrunch that her lack of journalism training made her a more successful journalist. “I don’t know how to write an inverted pyramid story or even really what that is. I do know how to write for different platforms, be scrappy and break news. I’ve had zero important alum connections and never got an internship at a big daily. And, in hindsight, that’s probably the greatest stroke of luck I could have had.”
Being free of the hidebound expectations of an irrelevant journalism style has freed her to adapt her reporting style to the new standards of the Web, she writes. In contrast, her friends who went to J-school found that the experience delivered no career value. In fact, it embedded habits that are proving to be liabilities in the free-form style of the Web.
This year’s Pulitzer Prize for local reporting goes to Paul Giblin (no relation), who teamed with Ryan Gabrielson for a five-part series in the East Valley Tribune about a local Sheriff’s questionable obsession with immigration enforcement. Unfortunately, the honor will be bittersweet for the Tribune, which laid off Giblin when it cut back to four-days-a-week last October. Jeff Bercovici notes the irony, and catches up with the Tribune’s publisher, who issues a rather embarrassing comment about winning journalism’s top prize: “I don’t think [Giblin’s dismissal] diminishes at all, frankly, the excellent work they did on that project.”
Unions in San Francisco continue to strike a remarkably agreeable attitude toward Hearst’s demands that they help reduce expenses at the Chronicle by $50 million or face shutdown of the paper. The union representing delivery truck drivers agreed to let the paper cut between 90 and 100 driver positions by hiring subcontractors for home delivery. In return, the drivers keep the right to deliver papers within the city limits. Annual savings are expected to top $5 million.
The Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise has reportedly laid off an unspecified number of employees. No word on body counts, but Gary Scott lists the names of 14 reporters and editors whom he believes got the ax.
The New York Times’ Tom Zeller takes issue with Marriott’s recent decision to cut out delivery of newspapers to its hotel rooms because of environmental concerns. Assuming that guests are turning more to their laptops and PDAs for the news, Zeller wonders if the decision doesn’t actually increase carbon emissions. He finds evidence that in countries that produce most of their power from fossil fuels, a 30-minute snuggle with the newspaper is actually less damaging to the environment than a PDA power-read. Of course, you have to take into account the cost of delivery, the impact of logging trees for paper, etc. It’s all very complex.
Columnists are supposed to be controversial, and you have to give media critic and Newser exec Michael Wolff credit for stirring up controversy with his forecast that 80% of newspapers will die within 18 months. You also have to give media veteran Martin Langeveld credit for injecting reality into that outrageous comment. Langeveld pulls out his calculator and notes that for Wolff to be correct, two newspapers would have to close ever day for the next year-and-a-half. Sometimes mathematics is a great tool.
The 31 newly laid-off employees at the Raleigh News & Observer decided to poke some rather vicious fun at the newspaper’s owner. They mocked up a front page comparing McClatchy to the Titanic, which sank 97 years and one week ago. The parody portrays McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt as a happy-go-lucky ship captain who sees the icebergs coming but figures his ship will simply strike them a glancing blow and use the ice fragments for cocktails. “She was welded together from the hulls of several old steamships, including a leaky tub called the RMS Knight Ridder,” they write. You can download a PDF of the mock front page here.
New media enterprises are rising out of the ashes of their collapsed predecessors.
Sportswriter Sam Adams is one of several INDenver Times staff who introduce the new site on video
A group of 30 former Rocky Mountain News staffers has launched INDenverTimes, a professional-looking news site that aims to cover local news, sports, business, arts and entertainment, along with “a Denver perspective on national news.” The venture will take a novel approach to subscriptions when it begins charging for premium access in two weeks. Paid subscribers will get “access to the INsider Channel where you can have a direct, real time conversations with our editors and writers…from 10 am to 5 pm every weekday.” The channel will also go live if breaking news happens at other times of the day.
In its first month, the operation recorded 70,000 unique visitors and more than 311,000 page views, or about as much traffic as a top-500 blog. Funded by entrepreneurs Kevin Preblud, Brad Gray and Ben Ray “three Denver entrepreneurs” (we’re trying to get their names), the venture has a hybrid revenue model and has recruited an impressive list of writers and business-side executives. The site also looks clean and well-organized. Believe it or not, this venture is running on WordPress, the same content management system that powers this blog. They’re just doing a lot more with it.
Also, some former Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers have launched a nonprofit online newspaper with regional coverage. Seattle PostGlobe is basically a multi-author blog that covers news, sports, lifestyles and opinion. It’s very early-stage and looks it, but we’ll keep an eye on this bootstrapped operation as it gets its sea legs.
The Boston Globe, evidently tired of all the razzing it was getting about its threatened shutdown, fires a return volley at crosstown rival Boston Herald. Weekday circulation at the Herald is off 38% in the last decade and the newsroom staff has been cut by half. Yadda yadda. What’s really interesting about this story is a comment posted by Tom Mashberg, the Herald Sunday editor who’s quoted in the piece. Mashberg reprints part of an e-mail sent to him by reporter Keith O’Brien in which O’Brien outlines plans to include Mashberg’s comments about the Globe‘s perilous situation that don’t appear in the story. He also notes that the fact that the Herald is actually profitable isn’t mentioned, either, despite a lengthy discussion about what the Herald is doing to survive. “Looks like the editors got hold of this and turned it into a hatchet job,” he says.
Jules Crittendon, a Herald editor, minces no words telling what he thinks of the Globe story and the Globe in general. “One Herald reporter is worth something like 5 to 10 Globies, for all their inflated sense of self-worth,” he writes. And he’s just getting started. Crittendon rips the Globe for a self-important attitude, lazy reporters, layers of redundant management, endless story lengths and on an on. If you hate the Globe to begin with, his blog entry will warm your heart.
The Globe‘s negotiations with its unions continue to be rancorous. The Newspaper Guild now says it will negotiate concessions related directly to cost cuts, but won’t talk about issues like the elimination of lifetime job guarantees for about 190 veterans and the end of seniority rules in layoffs. The Guild is also calling for negotiations to be performed in public and says it wants to deal directly with any potential acquirer on the cost-cut issue. The union’s defiance is a marked contrast to the relatively quick work the San Francisco Chronicle‘s unions made of Hearst’s demands to cut costs. By the way, Globe managers are feeling some of the pain, too. Bonuses have been eliminated for this year, affecting more than 200 people, including the publisher.
Government Bailout for News Infrstructure
Mark Cooper suggests a hybrid approach to saving quality journalism: a “media stimulus package” that could give new localized news services a platform upon which to build profitable businesses. ” Just as IT health and education funds seek to build a new infrastructure for public service in their areas, IT media funding can build infrastructure in the journalism space,” writes Cooper, who is a fellow at the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University.
Summarizing his argument on Huffington Post (a fuller discussion is here) Cooper notes that major metro dailies are being hit hardest by changes in reader and advertiser behavior because they need to be all things to all people. Although most major metros have discarded much of their national and international coverage, they’re still forced to do too much with too few resources. Shoring up these doomed businesses isn’t the answer, Cooper says. Instead, we should look to the existing media models “that are closest to the emerging citizen-media, like public governmental and educational cable channels on the TV side and low-power FM on the radio side.” These media have long been under-funded, but they have the best chance of molding their models to the new participatory journalism. As long as the US is pouring $1.6 trillion into broken banks, how about a few billion to lay the foundation for a new media infrastructure?
Gannett kicked off the earnings parade, which looks to be more of a funeral procession this year, announcing a60% drop in profit on an 18% slide in revenue. Bad as the numbers were, Gannett’s operating profits actually beat analysts’ expectations by a penny. They also weren’t as bad as the 30% declines expected by some analystsquoted in The New York Times last week. Those analysts mostly agree that this is a 100-year flood for the industry with the combination of recessionary pressures, catastrophic business problems in some key advertising segments and rising paper and fuel costs sending many publishers into the red. They also agree that more papers are likely to close this year. The revenue plunge isn’t hurting small newspapers and broadcast outlets quite as hard, but even they are expecting double-digit declines.
And it isn’t just newspapers. “Magazines collectively recorded a 25.9 percent plunge in ad pages in the first quarter, with revenue falling 20.2 percent,” says Seeking Alpha’s Jeff Bercovici. ZenithOptimedia is projecting the worst declines in ad spending since it started keeping statistics in 1980: overall US spending down 8.7% with newspapers down 12% and magazines down 11%.
In a sign of the times, the world’s largest maker of newsprint has filed for bankruptcy protection. Abitibi-Bowater, which was formed from a 2007 merger, is struggling to pay $8.78 billion in debt. Even though the Canadian company controls 45% of the North American-based newsprint market, a steep drop in demand has slammed its business. The company has already cut paper production 25% this year. Its 25 pulp and paper mills and 30 wood products plants will continue to operate for now, but some are likely to close as part of the restructuring.
Employment levels in American newsrooms are now lower than they’ve been in more than 25 years, the American Society of Newspaper Editors reports. The industry shed a record 5,900 jobs last year, more than double the previous record of 2,400 eliminated in 2007. Erica Smith pegs the number much higher at nearly 16,000 reported layoffs in 2008. Employment levels are now comparable to those from the early 1980s. The good news (we guess): there was a 21% rise in online-only journalists last year, to 2,300. Incidentally, the American newsroom remains mostly white: Minorities make up 13.4% of the workforce and 450 newspapers employ no minorities at all.
More people still rely on newspapers for their news than on the Internet, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Parade Publications and published by the Newspaper Project. The study of 1,004 US adults also found that 90% of Americans rely on printed or online newspapers for their news and that newspapers are the only medium used more for local than for national news. The research confirms what most people already know: newspapers are important news sources. It doesn’t cast any light on the real problem, though, which is how to create a business model for them that works.
Sam Zell now admits that his highly leveraged 2007 purchase of Tribune Co. was a mistake. For some reason, several news outlets thought this was newsworthy. Zell is always good for a quote, though: Commenting on the prospect of finding a merger partner for his bankrupt company, Zell said, “That’s like asking someone in another business if they want to get vaccinated with a live virus.”
The Orlando Sentinel laid off 50 people last week and didn’t announce it, according to an anonymous comment on this Chicago Tribune story. The person is right that there was no announcement, but we couldn’t confirm the layoffs.
The New York Times is cutting and consolidating some sections in order to save money. Gone are Escapes, a travel guide published on Fridays, as well as Sunday sections that only go to readers in the New York metropolitan area. They’ll be combined into a new Sunday section featuring regional information. Fashion coverage is axed from the weekly magazine and the guide to each day’s newspaper will be consolidated into a single page.
A reader in upstate New York reports on this example of an over-eager, and ultimately failed, Albany Times Union promotion:
I only wanted Sunday’s paper but then they started delivering Thursday and Saturday for free.
When I tried to stop the free Thursday and Saturday papers, they offered me the whole rest of the week for free. I said no, I only wanted Sunday. They said okay and for a while I only got Sunday deliveries, but then I started getting Thursday and Saturday again. I figured it had something to do with local ads on those days but it still annoyed me.
I was so frustrated that I decided to stop delivery altogether. That’s when I was told “You don’t want to put your paper carrier out of a job do you?” And then they offered me a totally free subscription seven days a week for three months. I didn’t accept it. I just wanted them to stop delivering free papers that I didn’t have time to read and was just throwing out.
So the irony of the whole thing is that because they kept sending me free papers, they lost me as a customer.”
“Gannett Co., the largest U.S. newspaper publisher by circulation, reports earnings on Thursday, kicking off what is expected to be the ugliest quarter in recent memory for the industry,” says The Wall Street Journal in a blunt assessment of the coming earnings season. USA Today is expected to take it on the chin when Gannett announces its results. Forthcoming numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations are expected to show a six-month decline of about 100,000 in USA Today‘s 2.3-million circulation, largely as a result of lower occupancy in hotels. Free hotel distribution accounts for more than half of the paper’s 2.3 million circulation.
Adding to USA Today‘s woes is Marriott’s decision to make room delivery of newspapers optional. Citing environmental concerns, the hotel chain said it will now offer guests a choice of papers or no paper at all, if they so choose. Declining readership was also a factor in the decision, which will reduce daily circulation by about 50,000 across the US. One quarter of travelers didn’t even crack open the newspaper that was delivered to their doorstep, a spokeswoman said.
An internal battle of the Los Angeles Times over the publisher’s decision to run a front-page ad resembling news story highlights growing tension between editors and publishers as the industry revenue woes deepen. The ad ran last Thursday below the fold in a position and typeface that some people believe could be mistaken for a news story (left). Charles Apple has an image of the entire front page. In an interview with TheWrap, LA Times executive editor John Arthur called the ad “horrible” and “a mistake.” However, the VP for entertainment advertising at the paper said Arthur’s boss, editor Russ Stanton, “approved both advertorial units.”
Not so, says Stanton, who told the Times’ own reporter that the ad ran over his objections. “There is not an editor in this nation — including me — who really wants to see something like that on the front page of his or her publication,” Stanton said. Publisher Eddy Hartenstein said he made the decision to run the ad because of the perilous financial situation at the newspaper. “I’m just trying to keep the lights on here, folks,” he told an angry newsroom last week.
Barriers to front-page advertising have been falling recently as publishers struggle to get creative. The New York Timesshattered tradition in January with a front-page strip ad for CBS and the Boston Globe followed suit just two weeks later.
Newspaper executives like to point out that their total readership — including the Web — is bigger than ever. However, online ad revenue is still growing more slowly than the market as a whole, according to Alan Mutter. The most alarming recent statistic: “Interactive revenues for newspapers dropped by 1.8% in 2008 to $3.1 billion at the same time overall online ad sales in the United States surged 10.4% to a record $23.4 billion,” Mutter writes. What’s more, newspapers’ online ad revenues today are 13.3% of the overall market, the lowest share ever. Mutter suggests that the culprit is newspapers’ practice of up-selling print advertisers with discounted online campaigns, a strategy that grows weaker as print sales decline. Publishers need to develop sites that look more like the Web and less like digital versions of their print products, he advises.
The Chicago Tribune is cutting another 20% of its already depleted newsroom staff. The paper didn’t say how many employees are left in the newsroom, but there were about 440 as of the most recent layoffs in February. The paper is also reorganizing some production groups, merging copy editing, page design, graphics, imaging and some photo editing into a single department.
Writing on Slate, Jack Shafer takes on joint operating agreements as the great sucking sound that weakened the newspaper industry. “The tragedy of the joint operating agreements is that instead of making the stronger paper stronger, the arrangement tends to weaken it,” he says, pointing to the San Francisco Chronicle as the poster child example. “Had the Chronicle and the Examiner been forced to compete on the business side in 1965 instead of to collaborate, a clear victor would have a fighting chance at surviving in today’s environment.” Instead, the Chronicle was forced to support the weaker Examiner to the point that both papers were worse off.
The Gannett-owned Observer & Eccentric Newspapers will cease publication of five print and Web editions of the Eccentric chain in suburban Detroit on May 31. Gone are the Birmingham, West Bloomfield, Troy and Rochester editions of the Eccentric. Two other newspapers will be merged into the South Oakland Eccentric, serving nearby communities. The consolidation will result in the loss of 44 jobs.
The Huffington Post has published a terse set of editorial guidelines, demonstrating that the standards being applied to citizens journalists don’t differ all that much from those practiced by mainstream media.
Is that a penguin on the telly? Well, a few penguins, actually, but click the image to see the truly awesome spectacle of what happens when penguins congregate. This is one of the photos on Incredimazing, a website devoted to collecting bizarre images submitted by people like you and me. If you want to scramble your brain, check out the M.C. Escher car.
Eric Alterman (right) lays waste to the value of political endorsements, which news organizations would have to sacrifice if they took public money. Who cares? asks Alterman, calling endorsements a “near total anachronism” in a world in which readers have so much choice of information. Endorsements haven’t been meaningful in a long time, say Alterman, journalism scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s conclusions in a 2004 study that “The direct effect of editorials does not appear to be significant…” So why is this such a hot potato in the public funding issue? The loss of the power to endorse candidates is often cited as the primary barrier to a public-funding solution for dying newspapers. In fact, endorsements work against news organizations, Alterman argues. “What endorsements do…is convince readers that the news they receive is being colored by bias expressed on its editorial pages.” And that perceived bias is a much bigger threat than endorsements that the public largely ignore. Alterman admits, reluctantly, that public funding may be the only approach that keeps journalism in the public interest alive. So get over the issue of taking sides in political debates.
Salon.com offers similar hope in profiles of several nonprofit organizations that are struggling to get by. It profiles Voice of San Diego, MinnPost.com and ProPublica, which are three startups producing quality journalism on a shoestring budget. Each has a somewhat different revenue model, with ProPublica existing largely at the behest of philanthropic funding while Voice of San Diego and MinnPost.com have hybrid models that include advertising, reader subscriptions and foundation support. All three operations have had some notable successes, but the journalists who work there admit that the working conditions are demanding.
Joel Kramer, the editor and CEO of MinnPost, works without a salary and one of his reporters, Jay Weiner, traded in an $80,000-a-year job with a pension, health insurance, vacations and overtime at the Minneapolis Star Tribune for a post that pays about $700 for a 60-hour work week, with no benefits. Weiner’s motivations are altruistic. “I am so happy to not be at the newspaper,” he says. “We’re growing, there is freedom, we’re all involved in a product that we really want to make as good as possible.”
It’s exhilarating stuff, but even the leaders of these fledgling organizations admit that a publicly funded model is not the solution for big newspapers. “”Tell people to send us money,” says Kramer, in a plea that’s only half in jest.
With its liberal bias and nudge-nudge political insiderism, the Boston Globe has long been a lightning rod for criticism in New England. But with the region now facing the prospect of losing its largest daily newspaper, people of all political stripes are rushing to its side. Bloggers rallied last week to think up ideas to rescue the paper, which the New York Times Co. has threatened to close in a few weeks if the unions don’t make dramatic concessions.
More than 20 prominent Boston bloggers rallied last week to voice their support for the Globe (we can’t find an organizing body, but Beth Israel Deaconess CEO Paul Levy lists the participants), debating ideas ranging from public funding to subscription fees. Everyone seems to agree that local ownership is a necessity, particularly since so many local institutions have been swallowed by out-of-town owners in recent years.
The problem is that no one knows of any local investors who are willing to put up the money. There were rumors of a consortium organizing to buy the Globe back from the Times Co. a few years ago, but that talk ended when the newspaper industry tanked.
The Times Co.’s demands are rankling Globe unions. Management has reportedly asked Teamsters Local 1, which represents about 250 full- and part-time mailers, for $5 million in concessions, or about $20,000 per person. Demands include a 25 percent wage cut, near-virtual elimination of company healthcare contribution, elimination of sick and holiday pay and the end of lifetime job guarantees enjoyed by about 145 mailers. This is on top of concessions by the mailers two years ago that cut average pay by about $10,000.
Meanwhile, Globe writers are doing a little rallying of their own. Columnist Scot Lehigh asked readers last Wednesday to weigh in about the paper’s future and hundreds of them did, most with positive comments, he says. In fact, “I was surprised by how many subscribers said they’d pay more – some substantially more – for home delivery if it would help save the paper,” Lehigh says. They may soon get their wish. The Globe hiked its newsstand price by up to 40% last week. Many people also said they’d be willing to pay a fee to use Boston.com, the Globe’s successful Web venture. Lehigh thinks that’s a great idea: “It’s time we gave them the chance,” he concludes.
It’s a nice thought, but a subscription scheme would probably go the way of Times Select before too long. The problem is, as Alan Mutter phrased it in our recent interview, “Giving away all this content for free was the original sin.” Boston.com is the sixth largest newspaper website on the Internet, which is an accomplishment, since the newspaper is only the 14th largest in the US. Imposing a pay wall would send traffic down 90%. The Globe would then have a lot of explaining to do to advertisers. The flight of ad dollars would probably more than cancel out the reader revenue.
And then there’s the demographic elephant in the corner. Speaking to a class of University of Massachusetts students and administrators last week, we asked how many had read a printed newspaper within the last 48 hours. Out of approximately 45 people in attendance, five hands went up. Four of them belonged to people over the age of 35.
Neighborhood-based online news startups are proliferating, says The New York Times in a story that profiles three of them. Among the new entrants are EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch. Funding models range from angel investment to foundation grants but each startup agrees that geographic relevance is core to the news.
EveryBlock uses human editors to gather links to news stories and combine them with material posted by the burgeoning number of neighborhood bloogers. Patch pays journalists in each town it covers to attend school board meetings and interview people in coffee shops. Outside.in scans articles and blog posts for geographical cues and organizes the content by community.
They’re hoping to tap into a local online ad market that Kelsey Group estimates will double to $32 billion by 2013. Small business advertising needs are still being served predominantly by the Yellow Pages, making this the great frontier of online advertising.
The story questions whether the collapse of local newspapers will also kill off these startups, but EveryBlock’s Adrian Holovaty says, “In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish.”
The publisher of the Palm Beach Post won’t win many friends in the blogosphere with statements like, “The only information on the Internet worth reading for hard news is produced by news agencies like ours.” But that’s not surprising, considering his newspaper is “your ticket to democracy… Seventy-five cents a day is a small price to pay for freedom.” Or hyperbole.
Of course, we're on...
...and all these other places.
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