The cure for the newspaper  industry’s ills was once thought to be a “hyper-local” focus, but that’s not proving to be the salve for New York City, which is suffering an unprecedented decline in local news coverage. The latest casualty is the New York  Daily News, which on Monday said it would cut its newsroom staff by half. The Washington Post points out that this means that a paper that employed 400 journalists in 1988 will have a reportorial staff of just 45 when the latest cuts new owner Tronc take effect.
U.S. newspaper employment has fallen by 55% since 2000, from 424,000 people to 183,300 in mid-2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Ironically, the cuts are hitting hardest in New York, which is one of the media capitals of the world. Politico notes that The Wall Street Journal shut down its own experiment in hyper-local journalism called “Greater New York” in 2016 while The New York Times has cut back on metro coverage and the Village Voice shut down its print edition last year. Newsday pulled out of Manhattan long ago and no one knows about the condition of The New York Post, whose finances are closely held secret of owner Rupert Murdoch.
BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith, who is a veteran New York reporter, summed it up best, telling the Post, “Politicians know nobody is watching in a state where everything from economic development to the electoral system is plagued by systematic corruption.” The Daily News has won 11 Pulitzer Prizes, including one last year for its work with ProPublica on the abuse of eviction rules in New York City.
Arthur Browne, who served as editor-in-chief of the Daily News last year, told the Daily Beast last year that the borough of Queens, which has 2.3 million residents, now has no full-time court reporter, despite the fact that it experiences 35,000 major crimes a year and that the local courthouse hears 200,000 criminal cases annually.
Robert York, the Daily News‘s new EIC, asked the staff for 30 days to define a new strategy, which was apparently not in place before the firings were announced. York has a 20-year-plus journalism career, including some recent successes with the Allentown, Pa. Morning Call, but his background has been mostly limited to features and photography, and he has no experience in the rough-and-tumble New York market.
Among the casualties was former Daily News EIC Jim Rich, who had reportedly resisted demands for further staff cuts. Rich didn’t respond to media inquiries, but issued this tweet, which sort of sums up the situation in NYC right now.

If you hate democracy and think local governments should operate unchecked and in the dark, then today is a good day for you.

— Jim Rich (@therealjimrich) July 23, 2018

Cuts are expected at other Tronc papers, which include The Baltimore Sun and The Chicago Tribune, but Tronc CEO Justin Dearborn said they wouldn’t be as draconian as they were at the Daily News. 

Image: Pixabay

Don’t forget to take our poll: Will the Detroit Experiment Succeed?

Want it? The Seattle Times Building

Few newspapers in the US are in worse shape that the Seattle Times, reports its rival, the Post-Intelligencer. How bad is it? “Dire,” in the words of Times Senior Vice President Alayne Fardella, who announced yesterday that the company will now freeze the pensions of non-union workers in addition to requiring them to take unpaid vacation. “It has been and continues to be a long and difficult fight for our survival.”

The Seattle Times Co. holds $91 million in debt, which is secured by a parking lot. The company  borrowed $233 million in 1998 to buy a string of newspapers in Maine which are now a white elephant that no one wants to take off its hands. The company has put up two of its four Seattle properties for sale. McClatchy Co.’s stake in the business, which it acquired for $102.2 million in 2006, is now worth less than $8 million. But they do have that parking lot.

McClatchy itself has to be considered a candidate for the endangered species list. Its stock closed at 75 cents a share yesterday, down from a high of nearly $71 five years ago. Its $5 million in cash is down from $30 million at the end of last year.  Having had no luck selling its newspapers, the company is now trying to sell property to stay alive. However, that may also be a losing strategy. At least a half dozen newspapers are trying to unload property right now, but buyers have every reason to wait them out, says an AP report. As publishers become more desperate to generate cash to meet debt obligations, they’ll further cut asking prices. This is also a terrible time to be selling real estate, which makes sellers even more desperate.

Success Without the Web

New York Times media critic David Carr is an staunch print guy and he found an ally in the TriCityNews (yes, that’s really all there is to its website), an alternative weekly out of Asbury Park, NJ that has thrived for a decade and is still growing 10% annually by aggressively ignoring the Web. Carr quotes publisher Dan Jacobson expressing astonishment that any print publisher would choose to undermine its  business by giving its product away for free. “Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads?” he asks. TriCityNews has never raised its advertising rates in 10 years and its costs are cheap enough that even small businesses can buy full-page ads.

Carr clearly loves this whole idea, but Recovering Journalist Mark Potts sees few lessons for major metro dailies in Asbury Park. The paper only has three employees, for cryin’ out loud, he notes. “Many small community papers, with and without Web sites, are doing just fine, and will continue to do so,” Potts writes. “Web or not, their readers have almost no place else to go.” He’s right, you  know. Pat Thornton chimes in with the observation that publisher Jacobson isn’t quoted once talking about journalism. He speculates that the paper is basically a community advertiser and that local news coverage has little to do with its success.

Sun, Post Head Toward Indistinguishability

Timothy A. Franklin is stepping down as editor of The Baltimore Sun, the Associated Press reports. He’ll be replaced on Jan. 1 by J. Montgomery Cook, who’s currently director of content development for the Baltimore Sun Media Group. Franklin is head off to Indiana University to chair a new sports journalism program at his alma mater. He said his decision was unrelated to the turmoil at the Sun, which has shed more than 150 jobs this year. The AP report provides a helpful graphic showing where Baltimore is. Meanwhile, in a move designed to make both newspapers less relevant to their local audiences, the Sun and the Washington Post have a new deal to share articles and photos. This will make two major metro dailies less than 40 miles apart from each other even harder to tell apart.

Miscellany

Now that Detroit’s News and Free Press have broken the ice by backing away from daily frequency, everyone is jumping into the pond. The University of Missouri-backed Columbia Missourian will eliminate Saturday and Monday editions in a bid to save $350,000 annually. And the Klamath Falls (Ore.) Herald and News will mess with time itself by cutting it Monday edition and introducing a new “Monday on Sunday” section. We know that readers just can’t wait to get started thinking about the first day of the work week when they’re enjoying their Sunday morning coffee.

Nine weekly newspapers in Connecticut will close in January if a buyer isn’t found in the next week. It looks like a done deal, though, since the staffs have already reportedly been laid off.

The New York Times has admitted that a letter to the editor from the mayor of Paris criticizing Caroline Kennedy’s bid for Senator Clinton’s seat is a fake. The letter characterized Kennedy’s ambitions as being “in very poor taste,” which was not the kind of language Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe would ordinarily use, according to one French editor. She called the mayor’s office, which also professed surprise.  The Times said it’s reviewing its authentication policies. Editor & Publisher has more.

We briefly thought we were back in 1996 when we read that GateHouse Media is suing the Boston Globe for linking to its stories. So-called “deep linking” suits went out of fashion a decade ago. Of course, with its shares trading at four cents, GateHouse may be out for whatever it can get. We think “frivolous” is too generous a term for this threat.  We agree with Jeff Jarvis and will leave it at that.

Death Watch editor Paul Gillin was interviewed for an hour on Bob Andelman’s Mr. Media show on Blog Talk Radio yesterday. Click the link to listen or see the Blog Talk Radio widget in the sidebar to the left.

And Finally…

More than 30 million people have Elfed Themselves, making this three-year-old OfficeMax promotion one of the most successful viral marketing campaigns in history. Better hurry before it’s too late!

It looks like 2009 will be a make-or-break year for many media companies, thanks to an advertising climate the some forecasters are predicting will the worst in generations.

Media economist Jack Myers is predicting an “advertising depression,” says Dow Jones. “Myers, a longtime industry consultant who runs JackMyers.com, is now forecasting an unprecedented three straight years of declines in advertising and marketing spending in the U.S. starting this year,” the wire service says. “To put that in perspective, the industry hasn’t suffered even a two-year spending decline in advertising since the 1930s.” The result will be a “massive shakeout” in industries that depend on advertising for their livelihood. Myers expects advertising spending in the U.S. to call 2.4% this year, 6.7% next year and 2.3% in 2010. His forecast roughly agrees with estimates by Publicis Groupe. The downturn will make it more difficult for media companions to effect the transformations that are necessary to survive in the customer-driven marketing environment of the future.

Meanwhile, Barclays Capital expects domestic ad spending to drop 10% next year, which is dramatically worse than performance during both the 1991 and 2001 recessions. The forecast is a substantial revision of Barclays’ prediction just two months ago that next year’s decline would be a less-drastic 5.5%. The investment bank sees trouble in the local advertising industry, which is often seen as the best hope for newspaper salvation. Local spending, which makes up some 39% of the $252.1 billion U.S. ad market, will fall 12.2% in 2009, while national spending will drop 8.4%. Barclays forecast that local ad spending would decline an additional 1.4% even when the broader market recovers in 2010. The one positive note: Internet advertising should increase 6.1% in 2009 and 12% in 2010, but that segment will still account for just 10% of ad spending next year.

Given those forecasts, it’s not surprising that asset values have tanked. “Some 30 US newspapers are up for sale…but few buyers have emerged in spite of rock bottom prices,” notes the Financial Times. Valuations have fallen by at least half compared to their highs and signs that the advertising environment is worsening aren’t helping, the paper says. To illustrate the degree of loss in asset values, the Boston Globe was valued at $650 million by a consortium of buyers just two years ago. Today, the value of the Globe and the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette combined is just $120 million. In fact, The New York Times Co.’s most valuable New England asset may be its equity stake in the Boston Red Sox. It was worth about $135 million before the financial crisis hit. And that’s without Mark Teixeira.

Some Good News, Too

While admitting that 2009 will be a mostly crummy year for the economy, Poynter Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds sees reasons to believe better days are ahead. For one thing, oil is comparatively cheap right now and the price of paper is coming down. While you shouldn’t get comfortable with short-term trends in these commodities, at least they are two fewer factors weighing on the industry. The buyouts and layoffs of 2008 will show also benefits in 2009 as newspapers remove those costs from their books. And there are promising signs in newspapers’ online activities that may broadly benefit the industry. Edmonds is careful to hedge his bets, but he wants to exit the year on a positive note.

Cuts Take Toll on Quality

Print editors are accustomed to getting letters from readers taking them to task for erroneously saying the California Gold Rush started in 1845 instead of 1848 and  concluding, “Shoddy fact-checking like this makes me skeptical of anything you report in your journal.” Editors usually laugh off these missives, but with readers enjoying a bounty of choice these days and freely publishing their own critiques, the gaffes caused by overworked news staffs potentially become more damaging. Detroit NASCAR Examiner Josh Lobdell points out three major errors in a Detroit News story and questions how a newspaper in the Motor City can do such a shoddy job of covering motoring. The Sunday Business Post of Ireland restates almost verbatim what we suggested 2 1/2 years ago: that the cycle of cutbacks will lead to inferior products that people won’t want to read, which will harm circulation and lead to more layoffs. You don’t cost-cut your way to leadership.

If errors are your thing, read Craig Silverman’s year-end column in the Toronto Star about the worst publishing gaffes of 2008. Our favorite is the AP’s reference to Joseph Lieberman as a “Democratic vice-presidential prick.” There are plenty more on Silverman’s awesome blog, Regret the Error. Be sure to read his annual celebration of the worst errors and corrections in the media, an award he calls the Crunks. One of the best has to be this front page of northern New England’s Valley News, which actually managed to misspell its own name on its front page one day.

Report: Newspaper Sites Embrace Web Tools

The Bivings Group examined the websites of the 100 top U.S. newspapers to see what they’re doing with the Internet. While a few activities have changed little over the last year (RSS, reporter blogs and video), there have been striking increases in the use of some features:

• Fifth-eight percent of newspaper websites post user-generated photos, 18% accept video and 15% publish user-generated articles.  That’s way up from the 24% that accepted such material in 2007.
• Seventy five percent now accept article comments in some form, compared to 33% in 2007.
• Facebook-like social networking tools are beginning to gain traction, with 10% of newspapers now using them, or double last year’s figure.
• Three-quarters list some kind of most-popular ranking, such as most e-mailed or most commented. Just 33% had that feature in 2006.
• You can now submit articles to social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us at 92% of newspaper sites, compared to only 7% in 2006.
• Only 11% of websites now require registration to view full articles, compared to 29% last year.
• Other stats: 57% have PDF editions, 20% have chat, and 40% offer SMS alerts.

Don’t strain your eyes: Click the image below for a larger version. More charts and data is in the summary report.

Miscellany

Journal-Register has reportedly closed a chain of Connecticut weeklies. The North Haven Courier reports, “On Dec. 18, members of [the Shore Line and Elm City Newspapers, a weekly newspaper chain in the shoreline and Greater New Haven area] were notified they had been laid off…The affected papers include the North Haven Post, the East Haven Advertiser, the Branford Review, the Shore Line Times of Guilford and Madison, the Clinton Recorder, and the Pictorial Gazette and Main Street News in Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Essex, Deep River, Chester, Lyme, and Old Lyme…Joyce Mletschnig, who until Thursday was the Pictorial Gazette’s associate editor, said that their newspapers would be shut down.”

The Seattle Times is asking about 500 non-unionized employees to take a week’s unpaid vacation in order to avoid more layoffs. Employees can take the seven days off at any time over the next two months. Management at the Times, which has cut 22% of its staff this year, may believe that further layoffs will undermine quality to too great a degree, so it’s getting creative with strategy.

Russ Smith has some good quotes in a piece on Splice Today about what he believes is the inevitable demise of print newspapers. Smith, 53, is an unabashed newspaper fan but he’s noticed that even his contemporaries are dropping their print subscriptions or not noticing when the paper no longer arrives on the doorstep. He also notices that his kids and their friends are just as well-informed about current events as he, a counter to the conventional wisdom that young people don’t read. Smith boldly predicts that The New York Times will be sold by the end of 2009, with Rupert Murdoch on the short list of likely buyers. On the other hand, Murdoch may be content simply to let his nemesis fade away.

Raleigh News & Observer Staff Writer Mark Schultz writes with passion about why he got into newspapers and why they’re still relevant. His best line comes in an account about interviewing a woman in her trailer home in Mexico: “We enter people’s lives for an hour and ask for instant intimacy.”

The Knoxville News Sentinel has apparently managed to avoid the carnage that has devastated many of its brethren. In an upbeat column plainly titled “News Sentinel is NOT going out of business,” Editor Jack McElroy pays homage to owner E.W. Scripps Co. for shrewdly diversifying its revenue stream and not loading up on debt. He also says the News Sentinel wisely diversified into TV and specialty publishing to insulate itself from the newspaper advertising downturn. Critics naturally accuse the paper of selling out to political interests.

The New York Times will launch “Instant Op-Ed” next month in a bid to compete with instant cable television analysis. The Web feature will post immediate expert viewpoints on breaking news, according to Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal.

And Finally…

The Baltimore Sun’s John McIntyre asked readers to contribute the best line heard in the workplace. They come through with some winners. Our favorite: “Yeah, he thinks he’s God’s gift to sliced bread.”

It looks like 2009 will be a make-or-break year for many media companies, thanks to an advertising climate the some forecasters are predicting will the worst in generations.
Media economist Jack Myers is predicting an “advertising depression,” says Dow Jones. “Myers, a longtime industry consultant who runs JackMyers.com, is now forecasting an unprecedented three straight years of declines in advertising and marketing spending in the U.S. starting this year,” the wire service says. “To put that in perspective, the industry hasn’t suffered even a two-year spending decline in advertising since the 1930s.” The result will be a “massive shakeout” in industries that depend on advertising for their livelihood. Myers expects advertising spending in the U.S. to call 2.4% this year, 6.7% next year and 2.3% in 2010. His forecast roughly agrees with estimates by Publicis Groupe. The downturn will make it more difficult for media companions to effect the transformations that are necessary to survive in the customer-driven marketing environment of the future.
Meanwhile, Barclays Capital expects domestic ad spending to drop 10% next year, which is dramatically worse than performance during both the 1991 and 2001 recessions. The forecast is a substantial revision of Barclays’ prediction just two months ago that next year’s decline would be a less-drastic 5.5%. The investment bank sees trouble in the local advertising industry, which is often seen as the best hope for newspaper salvation. Local spending, which makes up some 39% of the $252.1 billion U.S. ad market, will fall 12.2% in 2009, while national spending will drop 8.4%. Barclays forecast that local ad spending would decline an additional 1.4% even when the broader market recovers in 2010. The one positive note: Internet advertising should increase 6.1% in 2009 and 12% in 2010, but that segment will still account for just 10% of ad spending next year.
Given those forecasts, it’s not surprising that asset values have tanked. “Some 30 US newspapers are up for sale…but few buyers have emerged in spite of rock bottom prices,” notes the Financial Times. Valuations have fallen by at least half compared to their highs and signs that the advertising environment is worsening aren’t helping, the paper says. To illustrate the degree of loss in asset values, the Boston Globe was valued at $650 million by a consortium of buyers just two years ago. Today, the value of the Globe and the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette combined is just $120 million. In fact, The New York Times Co.’s most valuable New England asset may be its equity stake in the Boston Red Sox. It was worth about $135 million before the financial crisis hit. And that’s without Mark Teixeira.

Some Good News, Too

While admitting that 2009 will be a mostly crummy year for the economy, Poynter Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds sees reasons to believe better days are ahead. For one thing, oil is comparatively cheap right now and the price of paper is coming down. While you shouldn’t get comfortable with short-term trends in these commodities, at least they are two fewer factors weighing on the industry. The buyouts and layoffs of 2008 will show also benefits in 2009 as newspapers remove those costs from their books. And there are promising signs in newspapers’ online activities that may broadly benefit the industry. Edmonds is careful to hedge his bets, but he wants to exit the year on a positive note.

Cuts Take Toll on Quality

Print editors are accustomed to getting letters from readers taking them to task for erroneously saying the California Gold Rush started in 1845 instead of 1848 and  concluding, “Shoddy fact-checking like this makes me skeptical of anything you report in your journal.” Editors usually laugh off these missives, but with readers enjoying a bounty of choice these days and freely publishing their own critiques, the gaffes caused by overworked news staffs potentially become more damaging. Detroit NASCAR Examiner Josh Lobdell points out three major errors in a Detroit News story and questions how a newspaper in the Motor City can do such a shoddy job of covering motoring. The Sunday Business Post of Ireland restates almost verbatim what we suggested 2 1/2 years ago: that the cycle of cutbacks will lead to inferior products that people won’t want to read, which will harm circulation and lead to more layoffs. You don’t cost-cut your way to leadership.
If errors are your thing, read Craig Silverman’s year-end column in the Toronto Star about the worst publishing gaffes of 2008. Our favorite is the AP’s reference to Joseph Lieberman as a “Democratic vice-presidential prick.” There are plenty more on Silverman’s awesome blog, Regret the Error. Be sure to read his annual celebration of the worst errors and corrections in the media, an award he calls the Crunks. One of the best has to be this front page of northern New England’s Valley News, which actually managed to misspell its own name on its front page one day.

Report: Newspaper Sites Embrace Web Tools

The Bivings Group examined the websites of the 100 top U.S. newspapers to see what they’re doing with the Internet. While a few activities have changed little over the last year (RSS, reporter blogs and video), there have been striking increases in the use of some features:

• Fifth-eight percent of newspaper websites post user-generated photos, 18% accept video and 15% publish user-generated articles.  That’s way up from the 24% that accepted such material in 2007.
• Seventy five percent now accept article comments in some form, compared to 33% in 2007.
• Facebook-like social networking tools are beginning to gain traction, with 10% of newspapers now using them, or double last year’s figure.
• Three-quarters list some kind of most-popular ranking, such as most e-mailed or most commented. Just 33% had that feature in 2006.
• You can now submit articles to social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us at 92% of newspaper sites, compared to only 7% in 2006.
• Only 11% of websites now require registration to view full articles, compared to 29% last year.
• Other stats: 57% have PDF editions, 20% have chat, and 40% offer SMS alerts.

Don’t strain your eyes: Click the image below for a larger version. More charts and data is in the summary report.

Miscellany

Journal-Register has reportedly closed a chain of Connecticut weeklies. The North Haven Courier reports, “On Dec. 18, members of [the Shore Line and Elm City Newspapers, a weekly newspaper chain in the shoreline and Greater New Haven area] were notified they had been laid off…The affected papers include the North Haven Post, the East Haven Advertiser, the Branford Review, the Shore Line Times of Guilford and Madison, the Clinton Recorder, and the Pictorial Gazette and Main Street News in Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Essex, Deep River, Chester, Lyme, and Old Lyme…Joyce Mletschnig, who until Thursday was the Pictorial Gazette’s associate editor, said that their newspapers would be shut down.”

The Seattle Times is asking about 500 non-unionized employees to take a week’s unpaid vacation in order to avoid more layoffs. Employees can take the seven days off at any time over the next two months. Management at the Times, which has cut 22% of its staff this year, may believe that further layoffs will undermine quality to too great a degree, so it’s getting creative with strategy.

Russ Smith has some good quotes in a piece on Splice Today about what he believes is the inevitable demise of print newspapers. Smith, 53, is an unabashed newspaper fan but he’s noticed that even his contemporaries are dropping their print subscriptions or not noticing when the paper no longer arrives on the doorstep. He also notices that his kids and their friends are just as well-informed about current events as he, a counter to the conventional wisdom that young people don’t read. Smith boldly predicts that The New York Times will be sold by the end of 2009, with Rupert Murdoch on the short list of likely buyers. On the other hand, Murdoch may be content simply to let his nemesis fade away.

Raleigh News & Observer Staff Writer Mark Schultz writes with passion about why he got into newspapers and why they’re still relevant. His best line comes in an account about interviewing a woman in her trailer home in Mexico: “We enter people’s lives for an hour and ask for instant intimacy.”

The Knoxville News Sentinel has apparently managed to avoid the carnage that has devastated many of its brethren. In an upbeat column plainly titled “News Sentinel is NOT going out of business,” Editor Jack McElroy pays homage to owner E.W. Scripps Co. for shrewdly diversifying its revenue stream and not loading up on debt. He also says the News Sentinel wisely diversified into TV and specialty publishing to insulate itself from the newspaper advertising downturn. Critics naturally accuse the paper of selling out to political interests.

The New York Times will launch “Instant Op-Ed” next month in a bid to compete with instant cable television analysis. The Web feature will post immediate expert viewpoints on breaking news, according to Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal.

And Finally…

The Baltimore Sun’s John McIntyre asked readers to contribute the best line heard in the workplace. They come through with some winners. Our favorite: “Yeah, he thinks he’s God’s gift to sliced bread.”

We’re anticipating that the R.I.P. column to the left could get quite a bit longer in 2009, and it’ll probably start with the Rocky Mountain News. The venerable Denver newspaper (at 149 years, it is said to be the longest-running business in Colorado) was put up for sale last week by E W Scripps. No one, however, thinks Scripps will find a buyer. If so, the Rocky will close around mid-January.

Buyers won’t surface because, as Wayne State University’s Ben Burns says in a colorful quote in the rival Denver Post, it would be like “buying an anchor that’s already been thrown overboard.”

Except it would be more like being chained to that anchor. The Rocky is on track to lose $11 million this year and no one is forecasting a revival of the advertising market until at least the third quarter of 2009. Any buyer would also assume a 50% share in the Denver Newspaper Agency, a joint venture set up in 2001 to operate both the Rocky and the Post in such a way that both papers can survive. The Agency is now losing money and its governance structure makes it difficult for any buyer to make changes without going through approvals and competitive disclosures.

The most likely buyer would be the Post, but quotes by Publisher Dean Singleton last week left little doubt about that possibility: “We wish Scripps well as it leaves the Denver newspaper market,” wrote Singleton in a letter to employees. Why would Singleton want to buy the Rocky, anyway? It’s cheaper and easier to let the paper fail and then pick up whatever assets and people the Post needs to fill in the gaps. There would also be less likelihood of an antitrust challenge under that scenario.

The Rocky employs 220 people in the newsroom, all of whom will lose their jobs if the paper fails. The paper has a rich journalistic tradition, including two Pulitzer Prizes as recently as 2006. People aren’t exactly dancing in the streets at the Post, however. As columnist William Porter notes, “I feel like I did upon hearing an old adversary was terminally ill: bad for him and bad for myself, because in butting heads we somehow made each other better.”

It seems oddy fitting, by the way, that one of the Rocky‘s recent Pulitzers was for a photo essay called “The Final Salute.” As of this morning, there are nearly 300 comments on the story on the Rocky website about the sale.

Politico Reports Strong Response to New Wire Service

Attempting to exploit newspapers’ frustration with the Associated Press, CNN has stepped into the breach with its own international news network. But the cable company may face some unexpected competition: The Politico. The Washington-based boutique news service, which specializes in Capitol Hill coverage, has signed up 67 newspapers for its news service over the last three months. They include the Arizona Republic, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as all 27 dailies owned by Advance Publications. Several of its new clients are in dire financial circumstances and have cut back upon or eliminated their Washington bureaus. That makes Politico’s value proposition compelling. As we’re written before, The Politico continues to be an example of how specialized journalism can fill the gap left by broad-based media titans in an era of micro markets.

Miscellany

• Newsday will slash 100 jobs, or about 5% of its workforce, in its third headcount reduction of the year. According to a report on Newsday.com, “In the newsroom, the photo operation would be restructured with 20 photographers told to reapply for new positions. Also impacted would be three sports columnists and a reporter-researcher in the Albany bureau.” Most open positions will also be eliminated. Newsday has cut 250 jobs this year, or about 9% of its staff.
• MediaPost’s Media Daily News runs the summary numbers and they’re ugly (right). Gannett has cut headcount from 41,000 in 2000 to about 29,000 today. Tribune Co. is down 30% to 18,000 people. The New York Times Co.’s workforce is about 26% smaller than it was in 2000. McClatchy has reduced its workforce by more than the number of employees it picked up with the acquisition of Knight-Ridder in 2006. In all, the big newspaper publishers have cut more than 25% of their staff in the last eight years, and there are few spots on the horizon that indicate that employment might come back. By the way, Erica Smith’s Paper Cuts layoff tracker puts total 2008 US newspaper layoffs and buyouts at 15,153 and counting.
• A dozen Baltimore Sun employees have left the company and three were laid off in the first announced job reductions since the paper’s 100-employee blood bath in August.

The Baltimore Sun Media Group announced this morning that it will lay off 100 people out of its 1,400-person staff, with a disproportionate percentage of the cuts coming from the newsroom. The unit, which owns the Baltimore Sun and several community newspapers, told the Newspaper Guild that 55 to 60 jobs would be cut on the Sun‘s editorial staff, or about 20% of total newsroom employment. The paper will offer buyouts through July 18 and then use layoffs to meet its total job reduction goal.

The Hartfort Courant will cut 57 newsroom jobs, or nearly a quarter of its total editorial staff, along with a corresponding reduction in news pages. At its peak in 1994, the Courant employed 400 journalists. With the most recent cuts, that number falls to 175.

The focus on the editorial department is interesting in light of recent criticism by Tribune Co. executives of journalist productivity. CEO Sam Zell and COO Randy Michaels made it clear in a call with investors early this month that writers and editors would increasingly be measured by the quantity of their output. They said that most papers in the Tribune portfolio would lose pages and staff in the coming months and outlined plans for a series of redesigns that kicked off with a new look for the Orlando Sentinel this week.

Tribune Co. stands alone in its focus on cutting editorial staff. Most publishers have tried to limit newsroom layoffs out of concern about harming the quality of the product. Tribune Co. executives appear to have no such reservations. Zell and Co. are making a big bet that cuts in quality won’t significantly damage circulation, which is the key to advertising revenue. In a quote on Courant.com, Journalism Professor Rich Hanley of Quinnipiac University said of the shrinking Courant, “People could look at it and say, ‘This is nothing but a shopper on steroids.”

Here’s the memo from Sun Publisher Tim Ryan to employees:

The two key factors that will sustain our company for the future are customer satisfaction and financial stability. Achieving both goals is challenging in the very best of market conditions. In the face of today’s tough economy, adapting to consumer trends while maintaining our fiscal strength is proving to be even more difficult – yet even more critical.

Our long-term strategy of going on offense and creating growth opportunities will continue to get us closer to our goals. Already this year, we generated incremental Sun circulation gains, launched a new, free daily publication, b, which is the first of its kind in the market and, through our “explore” websites, delivered highly-localized news and information for the region’s consumers.

In spite of these early, significant wins, we struggled to achieve our performance goals. So, while we will stay on the offense, we are altering our game plan. In order to align ourselves more closely with our customers, we are retooling our business model, which will include enhancements to our newspaper. In August, 2008, The Sun redesign will debut, giving readers more of what they want – a more concise newspaper with more local news, personally relevant and useful content, consumer information, watchdog coverage, more graphics and better navigation.

By adjusting our business model and redesigning our core publication, we expect to stimulate readership growth and improve our financial performance. Regrettably, our new course also requires us to reduce our workforce by about 100 positions across BSMG. These actions are necessary for us to remain competitive and win in the future, and will enable us to create new targeted print and interactive media for the marketplace that satisfy both consumers and advertisers.

Transition Timeframe

The workforce reduction will include a combination of closing open positions, attrition, and voluntary and involuntary separation plans according to this timeline:

• Friday, June 27 – Voluntary separation packets will be available to all employees (availability to Guild-represented employees is being negotiated with the Guild). Volunteers will have two weeks, through Friday, July 11, to apply.
• Friday, July 11 – Thursday, July 17 – Volunteers will be notified whether their applications were accepted or not; decisions on involuntary separations will be made based upon voluntary results.
• Â Friday, July 18– Employees who are part of the involuntary separation plan will be notified. Voluntary and involuntary separations will occur in early August.

Human Resources, your leadership and plan documentation will provide further detail of plan terms, including compensation, savings/retirement funds and medical benefits. While Tribune does not have a formal severance policy, the formula that the company is using to determine benefits payable to employees affected by the current workforce reductions is more generous than any formula that the company may use after 2008.

Moving Forward

It is extremely difficult for all of us to lose colleagues and friends. However, while we cannot control the current economy, we can control what action we take to create a stronger future. We are, by far, Baltimore’s media leader, and through ongoing innovation to introduce new and exciting media for our marketplace, we will maintain our competitive position.

The leadership team and I will continue to keep you informed throughout this transition. Thank you for your patience, continuing contributions and commitment to our company

Tim

Honolulu Advertiser’s 600 Employees to Protest Contract Offer from Gannett – Hawaii Reporter, Feb. 19, 2008

[Demonstrating that unions are as clueless as ever, six unions that represent 600 employees at the Honolulu Advertiser are incensed at Gannett’s latest offer of a 1 percent increase in wages and a 1.5 percent bonus. Gannet is “doing great,” said Hawaii Rep. Neil Abercrombie, who evidently has not read Gannett’s latest earnings release or noticed that its stock is off 60% over the last three years. All the congressman wants is for Gannett to share some more of that bounty, since its future looks so bright. One is reminded of the UAW strikes in the 1970s, which were just what the US auto industry needed at the time. – Ed.]

[The editors at E&P should have read this story more carefully. It appears to contain good news for newspapers, but the numbers just don’t make sense. Tell me if you can untangle this:

According to new research, “the increase in the online newspaper audience is making up 28% of the losses in print readership.” Umm, what does that mean? Making up what? Circulation? Advertising revenue? It goes on to say that “from August 2004 through March 2007….online newspaper readership grew 14%.” Wow, that’s pretty pathetic, if you ask me. That would be an annual growth rate of less than 5%, which differs from all the other research that’s been done in this area. Finally, we learn that “70% of all newspaper web site visitors also read the print version.” It that’s true, it’s bad news. It indicates that newspaper Web sites are attracting mostly their own print subscribers. – Ed.]

‘Baltimore Sun’ Launches Youth-Oriented ‘b’ – MediaPost, Feb. 21, 2008

The Baltimore Sun is planning to launch a new free tabloid targeting younger readers called “b.” The first daily issue is set to appear on April 14. With a mix of typical tabloid fare and lifestyle content, the newspaper plans to freshen its pages by inviting readers to submit their own stories, photos and video to the newspaper and its Web site.

At Annual Meeting, Lee Enterprises Claims Growing Print Readership In ‘Toughest’ Year – Editor & Publisher, Feb. 20, 2008

They appear to be doing something right at Lee Enterprises. Quoting: “[T]he reach of Lee’s print and online newspapers between October 2006 and October 2007 increased to 71% of all adults inits markets from 67%. And while the percentage of adults who read only the print newspaper remained steady at 50%, the percentage who read both print and online editions grew to 16% from 11%… Lee advertising revenue declined 1.4% in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007, compared with an industry average decline of 7.4%.”

Help wanted. Desperately. – Reflections of a Newsosaur, Feb. 10, 2008

[Alan Mutter analyzes the crash of the newspaper help-wanted market, which he figures has contracted 54% in the last seven years. He traces the beginning of the end to 9/11 and cites newspaper smugness over their once near-monopoly on that business. Newspapers failed to understand that readers weren’t going to go to a single destination to find jobs. Increasingly, they want the jobs to find them. Unless newspapers understand that and act quickly, he says, they’re going to lose the half of the market that hasn’t slipped away yet. -Ed.]

Tribune Co. Will Cut Up to 500 Jobs – Editor & Publisher, Feb. 13, 2008
[New Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell initially told employees that he planned to grow the company out of its recent troubles, but those plans are evidently on hold for now. The layoffs only amount to about 2% of the total workforce. In a novel twist, they’ll be funded with overages from Tribune’s employee pension plan. The struggling LA Times will lose 40 to 50 editors. – Ed.]

Tribune Plans More Cuts; Courant May Lose 45 Jobs — Hartford Courant, Feb. 14, 2008
[The Hartford Courant will get caught up in the Tribune Co. layoffs, losing 45 positions, with 10 of them in the 240-person newsroom. -Ed.]

Tribune to cut 400 to 500 companywide, 45 at Sun — Baltimore Sun, Feb. 14, 2008
[It appears that 45 is the magic number for layoffs at Tribune Co. papers. The Baltimore Sun also expects to shed that many jobs. – Ed.]

New York Times Plans to Cut 100 Newsroom Jobs – New York Times, Feb. 14, 2008
[With 1,332 employees, the Times’ newsroom is still by far the largest in the industry. No competitor has more than 900 newsroom staffers. Nevertheless, pressure from shareholders can’t be ignored. An interesting note in this piece is that Rupert Murdoch says he’s committed to making the Wall Street Journal a formidable competitor to the Times and is ready to add to its 750-person newsroom staff in order to do so. – Ed.]

Star Tribune Sinks Deeper Into Oblivion – True North, Feb. 12, 2008
[The Minneapolis Star Tribune will cut 58 more jobs on top of the 145 positions it cut last spring. That will leave the paper with about 1,900 employees, or about 10% smaller than it was at this time last year. No editorial employees are affected by this round of layoffs. Most of the cuts are due to efficiences from an outsourcing contract.

In a recent memo, publisher Chris Harte echoed a now-familiar refrain: “Total revenue (print and internet advertising and circulation) is down almost $75 million in the last two years. Classified revenue has been the hardest hit part of our business, and our 2007 classified revenue was down over 50 percent from what it was at the start of the decade.” – Ed.]

Publisher GateHouse to cut 60 Mass. jobs – The Boston Globe, Feb. 14, 2008
GateHouse Media Inc. is cutting 60 positions at its Massachusetts publications, including The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, The Enterprise of Brockton, and dozens of suburban papers, according to an employee briefed on the plans.

Lost printing contract likely leading to job cuts – Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, Feb. 9, 2008
The News-Gazette will have to cut costs – and probably jobs – as a result of the Chicago Tribune’s decision to print all of its editions in Chicago, News-Gazette Publisher John Foreman said. The News-Gazette will continue printing the Tribune until April 26, when seven of the 24 jobs in the pressroom will be eliminated.

‘Charlotte Observer’ Announces Job Cuts – Editor & Publisher, Jan. 31, 2008

The Laurel Leader-Call, a mainstay in the small city of Laurel, MS for more than 100 years, published its final edition today. Residents and the paper’s 18 staffers weren’t given much notice; the announcement was made only on Monday by Publisher Mitchell D. Lynch.

The Leader-Call, which was purchased by a subsidiary of Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. in 1999, reduced its publication from daily to four days a week six months ago. Stunned staffers said the news was a surprise, and a farewell retrospective in the final edition reflects similar comments from members of the community.

The Leader-Call was founded in 1911 as the Laurel Daily Argus and the later changed its name to the Laurel Daily Leader  before assuming its current name in 1930.