Here’s a news item we didn’t expect to see. Borrell Associates now predicts that U.S. newspaper revenue will rise in 2013, although only by a scant .5%. If the prediction holds true, it would be the industry’s first revenue increase since 2006.

Borrell’s optimistic newspaper forecast defies conventional wisdom. The research and consulting firm has no particular incentive to bolster the print newspaper business, but it has been forecasting a turnaround for a couple of years. CEO Gordon Borrell said he expects most of the revenue growth to accrue to small newspapers, which have been the most resilient segment of the business during its historic decline. Large dailies will continue to see the annual 4% to 6% declines that have been the norm for the last few years.

The turnaround is shaky, though. Pre-print ads, which typically bring in about 20% of all advertising revenue, could decline as the result of a sweetheart deal between the U.S. Postal Service and a large direct-mail company. The Newspaper Association of America’s howls of protest about the contract have so far fallen on deaf ears.

Borrell is also putting a lot of faith in local online advertising, which it predicts will grow 30% next year. Given that online ad growth at newspapers has been in the single digits annually for the last four years, that seems a stretch. You can hear all of Gordon Borrell’s comments in this recorded webcast.

There’s also good news in magazine land. The Magazine Publishers Association surveyed its members and found a 57% jump  in the number of brands advertising on all magazine media platforms since 2010. That includes tablet, online and print advertising.  The MPA also said magazine apps are some of the highest-grossing titles in the areas of lifestyle, health & fitness and news in the iTunes store.

Publishers apparently are a pretty upbeat bunch. A new study by Michael Jenner of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism finds that two-thirds of newspaper publishers are optimistic about the future, and only 4% are pessimistic. Jenner said the research is based on 450 in-depth interviews with senior publishing executives. They’re moving ahead aggressively on digital platforms, but 60% “do not envision a time in the future when their individual publications will no longer issue print versions of the news.” We admire their optimism, but that’s just nuts.

The Numbers from Nola

Ken Doctor has no illusions about the future. “We all realize that, at some point, daily print will go away,” he writes at the top of this financial analysis of the New Orleans Times-Picayune‘s frequency cuts. Doctor understands the economics of the news publishing business as few people do (his Newsonomics site is a must-read), and this analysis is a useful insight into the revenue and expense models of metro dailies.

Doctor estimates, for example, that circulation brings in about 30% of total revenue at the Times-Picayune and that the four daily editions that are being eliminated contribute between 25% and 30% of print ad revenues. The net result of the paper’s cutback from seven to three issues per week is about an 11% advantage in profitability, he estimates. That’s good, but there are big risks. One is that the T-P is bucking the trend of deriving more revenue from readers and actually doubling down on advertising as a strategy. In effect, it’s doing more of what got newspapers into trouble in the first place.

Meanwhile, the competitive news environment in the Big Easy has made the paper a tempting target for everything from a startup called The Lens to the Baton Rouge Advocate. “Simply, the T-P’s slimming has opened up a floodgate of competition,” Doctor writes. “That makes the distinctive value proposition of the T-P harder and harder to get paying readers to accept.”

That isn’t stopping owner Advance Publications from methodically duplicating the frequency-reduction strategy across its portfolio. The limited success of that strategy in Detroit, where the Free Press and Detroit News made similar frequency cuts nearly four years ago, isn’t necessarily a reliable guide. The Detroit media market is a lot less competitive than New Orleans’, and the strategy hasn’t stopped the steady drumbeat of circulation declines and layoffs.

Incidentally, Nola residents haven’t taken the T-P cutbacks lying down. Grassroots efforts to reverse Advance’s decision testify to the unsinkable spirit of that unique region.

Update, 10/17/12: A survey by Cribb, Greene reports that newspaper publishers are increasingly confident about the future. More than 40% said their local markets are improving, up from 14% in 2011. The percentage who expect profitability to improve this year rose to 52% from 39%, and those who expect advertising revenue to be higher in 2013 grew by a similar margin. Asked if they would buy a newspaper business in the current economic climate, about half said “no.” However, 69% responded “yes” or “maybe” when asked if they would recommend the newspaper business as a career for their children.

In case you missed it, the perpetually poverty-stricken Journal Register Co. is doing some pretty gutsy stuff. The company, which was delisted from the NASDAQ New York Stock Exchange two years ago, has a new CEO who’s interested in reinventing publishing. John Paton (right) has a blog and a Twitter Account. He also has the admiration of Jeff Jarvis, who doesn’t confer praise lightly.

What got Jarvis so excited was a July 4 experiment in which the company’s 18 dailies published using nothing but free, web-based tools. They called this the Ben Franklin Project in recognition of both the country’s birthday and Journal Register’s liberation from ancient proprietary production systems.

More importantly, the company changed the way it reported the news for that day. Readers were actively involved at the front of the process in directing the reporting staff and looking virtually over reporter’s shoulders as stories were prepared. “The Ben Franklin Project is the beginning of a new era of an open and transparent newsgathering process,” wrote Paton on his blog. This is a company worth watching again.

MediaShift has an excerpt from journalism educator Alfred Hermida about rethinking the role of the journalist in the participatory age. While Hermida doesn’t break a lot of new ground, he crystallizes some concepts we’ve been talking about here for some time, namely that the evolving role of the journalist is as aggregator and authenticator rather than original reporter. Quoting Tom Rosenstiel, Hermida describes the still-important role of the journalist as “a sense-maker to derive meaning, a navigator to help orient audiences and a community leader to engage audiences.”

He also quotes from an article by BBC World Service director Peter Horrocks that calls for an end to “Fortress journalism.” Horrocks writes, “In the fortress world, the consumption of journalism was through clearly defined products and platforms… but in the blended world of Internet journalism all those products are available within a single platform and mental space… the reader may never be aware from which fortress the information has come.”

In the world Horrocks describes, the audience pulls together its own newspaper, woven from bits and pieces assembled from various online sources. The consequence of this is that media organizations can’t afford to reinvent the wheel anymore. Each needs to focus on what it does best and pool efforts rather than duplicate them. So maybe 90 of those 100 journalists who currently attend a Presidential press conference can spend their time out in the field assessing reaction and gathering analysis rather than listening to the same thing. What a concept.

Miscellany

Advertiser optimism continues to grow. Advertiser Perceptions Inc. (API) reports that 32% of ad executives now expect to increase their ad spending over the next 12-months. That’s the largest percentage increase since API began asking ad execs about their intentions in 2007. A year ago, the figure was -5%. The 1,412 ad executives who were surveyed continue to be pessimistic about magazine and national newspaper advertising, with intentions to increase spending down 10% and 32% respectively. But even those sentiments are greatly improved over the -26%/-46% plans of a year ago. The biggest winners are digital and mobile media, with more than 60% of ad executives planning to increase spending there.

Give Tribune Co. credit for trying to diversify its revenue stream. The bankrupt company is dedicating 10 people to a new consulting business that will sell knowledge of social media and Internet advertising to small and mid-sized businesses. The new venture is called 435 Digital Services, a nod to Tribune Co.’s headquarter address at 435 N. Michigan Ave.

The Denver Post is going after a local political site, saying that Colorado Pols is stealing its copyrighted material. The political site, which generates marginal revenue, allegedly lifted between three and eight paragraphs of news articles from the Post and other publications. Colorado Pols says it doesn’t need the Post. “There’s thousands of other outlets out there,” says founder Jason Bane. Post owner Media News is one of those media companies that wants to raise the perceived value of its content. The company has confirmed that it will begin testing online pay models this summer at its newspapers in Chico, Calif., and York, Pa.

Speaking of pay walls, Time magazine now has one. Secure in its role as the only newsweekly left standing, the venerable but mostly irrelevant magazine is requiring readers who want to read online versions of its print article to subscribe to either the print or the iPad edition. They can then see the same stuff that’s in the magazine on a screen. Online-only content will continue to be free.

Circ Labs, the University of Missouri-backed startup that is developing a tool that learns from a user’s online behavior and delivers recommendations for content, has launched a prototype service prior to general release. The prototype installs a Firefox add-in that enables the browser to recommend an article and to read similar articles suggested by the algorithm. Users can share content with each other and be notified of new content as it becomes available.

To test, go to gocirculate.com and create an account. The confirmation page contains a link to the toolbar software. You can then browse and add pages to the knowledge base. We were able to install the menu bar, but couldn’t log onto the site for some reason, and Circ Labs provides no means to recover a password. We guess that’s why they’re calling this a test.

Buried in a lightweight study of the Internet habits of young women is this nugget: “Nearly half — 48% — of all respondents now claim to get more news through Facebook than from traditional news outlets.”  This number comes from Lightspeed Research and Oxygen Media, which surveyed the habits of 1,504 U.S. adults who use social media. The researchers also claim that 39% of women between the ages of 18 and 34 now describe themselves as Facebook addicts, and that a third of young women check Facebook before going to the bathroom in the morning. We supposed one needs one’s priorities.

Variety’s website has adopted DailyMe’s behavioral tracking and recommendation technology called Newstogram.  Newstogram generates data on user’s interests to deliver visitors content, advertisements and e-commerce opportunities tailored specifically to them, based on their specific interests and behavior. DailyMe started life as a customized news service for consumers but has morphed into a customization engine that publishers can serve up to their visitors. Readers get filtered news and publishers get better insight into what motivates readers.

And Finally…

Roy Rivenburg is still at it. The jokester who dreamed up Not the LA Times two years ago continues to tweak the nose of the West Coast’s most self-important newspaper. A recent story has Times editors arguing over whether it’s better to start articles with the time or the weather. The inspiration is this page of formulaic opening sentences extracted from the real newspaper. “If I don’t find out the time of day in the first sentence, I stop reading,” says one subscriber.

The New York Times is building a paywall despite the 2005-2007 disaster that was TimesSelect. On Wednesday, the Times announced the decision to start charging for access beyond a specified number of articles beginning in 2011. Details, including the fee and the access threshold, weren’t revealed. The Times is leaving itself plenty of leeway to modify or even call off the program, knowing that the eyes of a $35 billion industry are upon it. “We can’t get this halfway right or three-quarters of the way right. We have to get this really, really right,” said Times Co. publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.

The Times is stepping with characteristic caution into territory that its own coverage acknowledged has both “tempted and terrified” publishers. The most well-read newspaper in America is under pressure to set a precedent that others can follow while at the same time preserving its dominance and an online revenue stream that is a growing part of its business.

A Q&A on the Times‘ website sounds almost apologetic in tone. It points out that readers will continue to have full access to Times content from search engines but will not be able to click through to other stories on the website without paying a fee. Readers will be entitled to access a certain number of articles each month at no charge, but the limit was not specified. The decision to announce the paywall a year before implementation gives the Times some breathing room to assess reaction and set thresholds that readers can live with. The article in the Times notes that most readers still arrive at NYTimes.com via search engine, meaning that their experience will be undisturbed. The piece also notes that reader reaction on the Times’ website has been modestly favorable toward the move.

Even if the Times‘ paywall experience is successful, there’s no guarantee that other newspapers will be able to duplicate it. The newspaper enjoys a cachet that few other titles can duplicate and it’s likely that some readers will support the initiative in the name of keeping the hallowed title afloat. The same can probably not be said for the Chicago Tribune.

The New York Post reports that New York Times Co. minority owner Carlos Slim is a big fan of paid content and has been  pushing Times Co. executives behind the scenes to take the plunge. TimesSelect was an early stab at paid content that floundered when columnists complained that their visibility plummeted when a price was put on their work.

The problem with paywalls is that they cannibalize Web traffic that could otherwise be monetized with advertising. ClickZ reports that Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey predicts that ad revenues for NYTimes.com will drop by up to 50% after the paywall is erected. It also notes that Newsday saw website traffic drop 21% in the month after it built a limited paywall last fall. The trick is to find the right balance and The New York Times, with its history of online innovation, is the best candidate to reach a happy medium.

The Times is diversifying its revenue through a novel partnership with four institutions of higher learning that deliver Times expertise as online courses. This spring, the Times will start awarding certificates to paying students. For example, Ball State University just launched a six-week course on video storytelling that bestows certificates in “emerging media journalism” co-validated by the Times and Ball State. We love this idea. While tuition will never be a major revenue stream for the old Gray Lady, it is at least a diversification out of the declining advertising business. And with more citizens wanting to learn the craft of storytelling, perhaps a course with Times reporters and editors is something they’d be willing to pay for.

Internet Out of the Courtroom

Print journalists can take some heart – while new-media advocates roll their eyes – at two court decisions last week that limit the dissemination of trial coverage over the Internet. First, the U.S. Supreme Court overrode a trial judge’s decision and blocked video coverage of a federal trial about the constitutionality of California’s law banning gay marriage. Then a Florida judge ruled later in the week that a Florida Times-Union reporter couldn’t live blog a capital murder trial.

The California case is important because it involves a highly polarized issue that has implications in other states. A 5-4 conservative majority ruled that the judge in the case had erred by initially allowing video of the trial to be streamed to other courtrooms even though that practice is usually denied in federal cases. However, the justices did not address the bigger constitutional question of whether live video is permissible in legal proceedings.

In the Florida case, the judge banned a reporter from live blogging because he said the noise was distracting. A second reporter who was texting notes from the courtroom on a cell phone was also told to cut it out. However, a third reporter who was writing notes on paper was not disciplined. The tweeting journalist had drawn a more than 1,300 followers on Twitter for her coverage of the trial.

The cases illustrate the discomfort that new media is creating in the trial courts. The capability of anyone to relate the events of a trial would seem to comply with the founding fathers’ desire for legal transparency, but the fact that those narratives can now be communicated worldwide makes some jurists nervous. Both of these issues are likely to need a Supreme Court resolution.

Miscellany

When Nielsen orphaned Editor & Publisher in a sale of several of its titles to e5 Global Media last month, the staff at the venerable newspaper industry trade publication held out for a rescue. It came. Duncan McIntosh Co., an Irvine, Calif.-based publisher of trade magazines that ironically include FishRap News (which has nothing to do with newspapers), has picked up E&P and will continue more or less uninterrupted publication. “We’re all very excited around here about the news,” said staffer Mark Fitzgerald, who gains a promotion to editor in the process. Monthly print publication will resume next month and entries on the magazine’s two blogs – Fitz & Jen Give You the Business and the E&P Pub – have already resumed. Hooray.

The parent company of MediaNews Group, Inc. will file for bankruptcy, the 13^th such filing by a U.S. newspaper publisher in the last 13 months. But it doesn’t look like MediaNews plans to stay in Chapter 11 for long. It has a debt restructuring plan in place that will cut its debt from about $930 million to $165 million and swap senior debtors’ paper for stock. The 116 creditors will have a majority of stock but not voting control. The Hearst Corp. and the family of MediaNews co-founder Richard Scudder are reportedly giving up interests in the company. Hearst took a $300 million stake in MediaNews in 2006 and that investment is now effectively worthless.  MediaNews said newspaper operations, employees and suppliers wouldn’t be affected and that the debt restructuring plan would enable the company to quickly emerge in better financial condition.

Dan Bloom has come up with a new word for newspapers. He calls them “snailpapers.” Only the longtime newspaperman insists this is a term of endearment, not derision. He thinks maybe if newspapers poked more fun at themselves instead of getting all righteously indignant about new media, they would generate more sympathy. More on his blog.

The Greenwood Lake (N.Y.) News is shutting down after 46 years, idling a small staff. The weekly had been honored for  editorial quality by the New York Press Association.

Dramatic Effect

We get some unusual requests at the Death Watch and always try to be helpful, but we were stumped by this inquiry from Amy Wimmer Schwarb, a 15-year journalism veteran:

“What’s more old-school than the print-on-paper newspaper we both love?” she writes. “The theater, of course. I’ve been working on and off for the past 18 months on a script that I’m about to start submitting to play competitions around the country. The title is ‘Dash Thirty Dash: An Allegory for the End Times.’ The piece celebrates the fun and beauty of the business and documents the suicide of newspapers.

“My concern about submitting this play through traditional channels is that I want it to be seen NOW, and sometimes, such channels have long lag times. Through your online travels and contacts, do you have any suggestions for how I might distribute this work? In my dreams, it will be performed in small independent theaters around the country.”

We couldn’t help, but perhaps you can. Post any ideas below as comments, or e-mail us using the contact box on the right and we’ll put you in touch with Amy directly.

We don’t entirely agree with Michael Kinsley’s piece in the Atlantic this week criticizing newspapers for verbosity, but we’ll defend to the death his right to say it (briefly). Kinsley (below right) eviscerates both The New York Times and the Washington Post for their coverage of health care reform by dissecting lead paragraphs and quotation choices. Are all these words really necessary? Kinsley thinks not.

The Post, for example, leads its story with 13 words of pointless Presidential rhetoric and then proceeds to quote other lawmakers making equally vapid statements. Readers don’t care if legislators are “answering the call of history,” Kinsley notes. They want to know what happened. Unfortunately, reporters and editors have been trained to frame everything within the bigger context of “what it means,” and in the process have obscured news of the actual event.

Perhaps the most controversial point in the piece is Kinsley’s criticism of the standard journalistic tactic of attributing analysis where attribution really isn’t needed. He cites a recent New York Times story about the unintended consequences of regulatory crackdowns on Wall Street bonuses. It turns out some executives who were forced to take stock instead of cash are now making a killing as financial stocks rebound. The reporter clearly considers this irony, Kinsley notes, but she’s not allowed to say that. So she digs up a quote from an obscure trade editor to validate what everybody already knows.

This last point is a slippery slope for news organizations. Facing competition from bloggers whose stock in trade is opinion, journalists are redoubling their efforts to sound impartial. Of course, impartiality doesn’t really exist, so reporters search for third-party sources whose opinions validate their own. Bloggers have no such limitations, so they are free to get to the point, state an opinion and move on. This has the effect of actually making blogs more efficient to read than stories in the mainstream media.

We don’t think it’s that simple. The most common complaint we hear about the decline of mainstream media is that people don’t know whom to trust anymore. By at least taking a stab at presenting an unbiased view, mainstream news organizations can save readers from having to triangulate multiple perspectives to form their own opinions. The risk, as Kinsley accurately observes, is that reporters pick and choose analysis that matches their own. That’s worse than misleading; it’s downright deceptive.

We have always believed the smart people have the capacity to hold opinions while also fairly representing multiple points of view. We see nothing wrong with the reporter in the Times piece writing a separate opinion, whether as a blog entry or something else, that states the view of an informed observer. If anything, that should encourage a reporter to present a more balanced perspective in the piece that’s labeled news. Just don’t mix the two.

Freelance Free Fall Threatens Quality

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, James Rainey laments the freefall in freelance compensation that is forcing writers to scramble to make a fraction of what they made two or three years ago. With publishers paying as little as five cents a word for assignments advertised on Craigslist, journalists are finding they can’t afford to practice their craft and are fleeing the profession.

The problem is systemic. Advertising doesn’t pay the bills the way it used to and online publishers have to shovel information into a bottomless pit in order to generate revenue. As advertising gets cheaper, the pit only gets deeper. Amateur writers and offshore competitors who work at a fraction of the traditional freelance wage are attractive new sources of words.

But what are those words about? As the pressure to generate traffic intensifies, online publishers are tempted to push out anything that will drive page views. So the news is increasingly dominated by sex, drugs and “Twilight” instead of investigative or interpretive journalism.

This is a real problem. And there are precious few ideas what to do about it. There will always be an elite cadre of journalists who can command a living wage for what they do, but the vast middle class of meat-and-potatoes reporters are seeing their livelihood seep away. A lot of publishers are working on ways to make advertising more profitable through better targeting and contextual relevance, but until those new models emerge, the freelance market will become less and less appealing for quality journalists.

Miscellany

Usage of newspaper websites is trending slowly upward, although the numbers reported by various sources remain surprisingly small. The Readership Institute says the percentage of people who never use newspaper websites has dropped from 70% in 2003 to 62% in 2008. The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers says about 20% of the population accessed  a newspaper site in the past 30 days. On the other side of the equation, Scarborough Research reported a couple of months ago that  74% of American adults read a paper in print or online during the past week. Pew Research reported a year ago that 35% of American rely primarily on newspapers for news. Each survey examines slightly different slices of the public, but the discrepancy between the figures from all four sources indicates that someone is asking the wrong questions.

Hyperlocal news site EveryBlock added its first major enhancements since its purchase last summer by MSNBC.com. Visitors will now be able to post their own announcements, which will show up in the localized views that the service provides. PaidContent.org asks what the appeal of advertising will be if advertisers can simply publish their own notices for free. Presumably they’ll get some kind of enhanced placement.

Speaking of PaidContent, it’s hiring. The website is seeking reporters with specialties in either digital entertainment or the combination of tech, media and finance. Both jobs are based on the West Coast.

Former Baltimore Sun copy chief met John McIntyre continues to document the declining investments publishers are making in copy editing. He notes that Media General will consolidate the copyediting of three of its largest newspapers into one desk and that the Minneapolis Star Tribune is cutting 30 editorial jobs, with more than half of them coming from the copy desk. The paper says it won’t sacrifice quality. “Uh-huh,” McIntyre comments.

They’re taking the concept of hyperlocal seriously in the Netherlands. Telegraaf Media Groep has moved the former editor-in-chief of the Dutch tabloid Spits to lead a new venture that will create a network of hyperlocal information platforms. Details are still sketchy, but Bart Brouwers says the venture will ideally incorporate existing local bloggers. He also has some interesting ideas about slanting advertising to be written in more of a blog style to engage the audience rather than pushing messages. Imagine that.

As 2009 draws to an end, about the best thing anyone in the US newspaper industry can say about it is, “Thank God it’s over.”

This was unquestionably the worst year in the history of the business. Circulation plummeted to pre-World War II levels and advertising revenues hit regions not seen since the Johnson administration. The year opened on a dismal note with the closure of major dailies in Denver and Seattle and threatened shutdowns in San Francisco, Boston and Chicago. Many pundits predicted a bloodbath with dozens of dailies folding during the year.

But then the unexpected happened. Union concessions and deep cost cuts brought the Boston and San Francisco papers back from the brink. While smaller dailies did give up the ghost in Tucson and Ann Arbor – and more than 100 weeklies shut down – the doomsday scenario never occurred. Instead, publishers came to grips with the reality of their plight and made earnest attempts to stabilize their operations. In a January column on WallSt.com, former Financial World magazine and Switchboard.com president Douglas McIntyre listed “Twelve Major Media Brands Likely To Close In 2009.” In fact, only one – Gourmet magazine – did.

As the year wore on, signs emerged that sales declines are slowing and circulation revenue from the core of loyal readers is making up some of the advertising gap. A broad consensus has emerged that the ink-on-dead-trees model is mortally wounded, giving publishers permission to turn their attention from saving a dying industry to managing it profitably downward while investing in new ventures that have growth potential.

Creative revenue ideas ranging from pay walls to behavioral targeting sprung up this year. Enrollments in journalism schools hit all-time highs and undergrads said they are approaching their careers with the idea of building personal brand rather than working for a big metro daily. Many industry veterans applauded their spirit.

As the second decade of the new millennium begins, there is a palpable sense of optimism, not only about the economy but also the potential to reinvent journalism. It’s an attitude we have tried to encourage in our own small way, for this blog long ago turned its attention from death to rebirth.

We’ll be posting less frequently during the first six months of 2010 as we tackle a new book on business-to-business social media. Your comments and many words of encouragement have been a constant source of delight in this otherwise dreadful year. We wish you better times in 2010. Keep your chin up.

For now, here are some of the more memorable items from the 178 entries we posted this year, presented in no particular order

Uppers

• Doc Searles presented a well-reasoned argument why journalism isn’t disappearing from the earth but simply following the path already blazed by business. Much as personal computers and open source software moved computing innovation from the center to the ends of the network, journalism is undergoing a similar metamorphosis, he wrote. Journalism isn’t going away so much as being democratized.

• Life magazine published a delightful collection of classic photos – like the one of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen at right – about the contribution of newspapers to our culture under the banner of When Newspapers Mattered.

• The Library of Congress offered free access to a searchable database of dozens of daily newspapers stretching back to 1880. Nearly 1.5 million pages have already been scanned.

• A team of publishing veterans that includes Backfence founder Mark Potts and super-blogger Jeff Jarvis announced GrowthSpur. The startup is building a back-end business system that it hopes will enable bloggers and small publishers to quickly monetize their businesses while building a network that multiplies opportunity for every member.

• A team of veteran journalists and news technologists joined forces to create a technology to enhance the Web browsing experience while creating a new revenue stream for content producers. Startup CircLabs is developing a tool that learns from the user’s online behavior to deliver recommendations for relevant content. Founders include three top officials from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

• News-editor-turned-Silicon-Valley-entrepreneur Alan Mutter proposed ViewPass, a subscription service that would aggregate editorial content and collect visitor data that could be used to sell higher-priced ads. Mutter estimated that the system could more than double the CPMs that publishers charge advertisers and would manage copyrights more effectively than the current haphazard system.

• Former Rocky Mountain News Washington correspondent ME Sprengelmeyer penned a splendidly written essay about the joys of rediscovering his journalist roots as publisher of a small weekly newspaper.

• In a moving retrospective, Christian Science Monitor Editor John Yemma reminded us why he admired Walter Cronkite.

• “My beat at The Globe and Mail is the dead,” wrote Sandra Martin in a superbly written piece on the craft of obituary writing, one of the least understood and most often satirized disciplines in journalism.

• Writing in The New York Times, David Carr presented a glass-is-half-full perspective about the future of journalism. Carr observed that the new breed of technology-enabled young journalists see the collapse of media institutions as an opportunity to make a name for themselves based upon merit rather than survival. “The next wave is not just knocking on doors, but seeking to knock them down,” he wrote.

• A new Bay Area nonprofit was funded to the tune of $5 million by a local investor. The venture is a collaboration between public broadcaster KQED and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

• The Knight Foundation funded nine new-media projects to the tune of $5.1 million. The biggest winner was DocumentCloud, a project conceived by journalists from The New York Times and ProPublica to create a set of open standards for sharing documents. Other winners included one to help citizens use cell phones to report and distribute news, a project to develop a media toolkit for mobile applications and an online space where the people can report and track errors in the media.

Downers

• The New York Times published a jaw-dropping correction from its July 17 “appraisal” of Walter Cronkite’s career. Among the eight errors in the story where Wikipediable factoids such as the date of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Ombudsman Clark Hoyt was blunt in his explanation: “A television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work…editors who should have been vigilant were not.” The critic, Alessandra Stanley, has a history of being so careless with facts that in 2005, “she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts.”

• The owner of Editor & Publisher, which has covered the newspaper industry for 125 years, announced that it will shut down the magazine.

• The bankrupt Tribune Company sent “14 reporters, columnists and photogs to this year’s Super Bowl, even though neither Super Bowl team came from a city where Tribune actually has a newspaper,” observed Mark Potts.

• The Printed Blog, a venture by serial entrepeneur Josh Karp that sought to flip the online publishing model by delivering blogs in print, shut its doors after just a few months.

• The Journal News of Westchester County fired all 288 employees and invited them to re-apply for 218 jobs. Managers had two weeks to conduct interviews and decide who got to stay.

• Many publishers apparently took advantage of recent changes to Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) rules to overstate their real readership numbers. The rules changes enabled publishers to count “bundled” subscriptions of paid and online editions as two subscribers, even if only one person was doing the reading.

• Ahwatukee (Ariz.) Foothills News staff writer Krystin Wiggs told of being victimized by an elaborate hoax concocted by a young man who claimed to be a gifted and successful chef. The man convinced Wiggs that he had won scholarships to culinary school and landed a sous chef job at a top restaurant at the age of 21. He even enlisted an accomplice to masquerade as head chef at the restaurant for a phone interview.

• BusinessWeek was put up for sale for $1. It was no bargain, since the legendary newsweekly was on track to lose $75 million this year. Bloomberg eventually paid up and then took a hatchet to the senior staff.

• After a tense four-month staredown with The New York Times Co., the Boston Globe’s largest union voted to accept a package of pay cuts, benefit reductions and other concessions that was worse than the one it had rejected a month earlier. The union chief was later charged with misappropriating funds by, among other things, faking a countersignature on his own paycheck.

• Sydney Morning Herald technology writer Asher Moses was publicly embarrassed over comments he made about a sex scandal involving a prominent former rugby star. Although the comments were made during his off hours, Moses’ impartiality was widely questioned.

• Amazon.com had a chance to win friends among the ranks of newspaper publishers by offering paid subscriptions to their products via the Kindle e-reader. Unfortunately, Amazon’s onerous licensing terms entitled it to keep 70% of the subscription fees.

• Todd Smith, who was shot on the job while working as a reporter for the Missouri-based Suburban Journals chain of newspapers, was called to a meeting at headquarters on April 15. Smith thought that maybe the staff had won an award for coverage of the massacre. Instead, he learned that he and several others were being laid off.

• Boston Herald Sunday editor Tom Mashberg reprinted an e-mail exchange between him and Keith O’Brien, the author of a harshly critical story about the Herald that appeared in the rival Boston Globe. The e-mail outlined O’Brien’s intention to include negative comments about the Globe in his story as well as the fact that the Herald was profitable while the Globe wasn’t. None of that information appeared in the final piece. “Looks like the editors got hold of this and turned it into a hatchet job,” Mashberg wrote.

• Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth (right) canceled plans for a series of dinners at her home after an overzealous Post marketing executive issued flyers positioning the events as a way for sponsors to buy access to the paper’s journalists and members of Congress. Weymouth said the promotions “should never have happened.”

• French President Nicolas Sarkozy said his government would double its advertising in print and online newspapers in an effort to prop up an industry that many people believe needs a radical overhaul more than money. That’s on top of previously announced subsidies that give every 18-year-old French citizen a free newspaper subscription.

• The Chicago Tribune’s marketing department launched an experimental project to seek feedback on stories that hadn’t yet been published or even fully reported. A group of 55 reporters signed an angry e-mail in protest. Editor Gerould Kern issued a statement calling the experiment “a brief market research project.”

• A survey of 1,400 people by Britain’s YouGov found that media people consume an average of 44 drinks a week, or almost twice the recommended maximum.

• In a Vanity Fair profile of New York Times Co. CEO Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., Mark Bowden described one management offsite exercise in which Times Co. executives played a game that challenged them to decide between safe choices and riskier but potentially more rewarding long shots. An employee who had seen many groups play the game observed, “This is the most conservative group I have ever seen.”

• The Houston Chronicle devoted just 208 words to news that it was laying off 12% of its staff, or nearly 200 people. In fact, the Chronicle didn’t even mention a body count. A Wall Street Journal story was the source for the number.

• A press release from the Washington Times, as reprinted on Talking Points Memo, also buried the lead about its own bad news: “The Washington Times today announced that it will begin producing a more focused Monday through Friday edition designed to feature its most distinctive news and opinion content.” In other words, it was killing the Sunday edition.

• Kubas Consultants polled 500 newspaper executives in November and found them to be optimistic that the worst is almost over. Blogger Alan Mutter e-mailed the researcher who conducted the survey and learned that even he didn’t believe the resutls. “Optimism is better than slitting your wrists,” reasoned Ed Strapagiel.

• A new newspaper in Detroit, the Daily Press, published just five issues before hitting “a bump in the road” and suspending further operations until the new year.

• ZDNet blogger Richard Koman alleged that Yahoo had passed the names and e-mail addresses of hundreds of thousands of bloggers to Iranian authorities during the country’s controversial election. It turns out Koman‘s unnamed source for the story was an Iranian blogger with a vested interest in spreading misinformation. Paul Carr ranted about the incident and ZDNet retracted the entry and apologized.

Signs of the Times

• The online-only Huffington Post set up a small investigative unit to examine the nation’s economy. The online news site is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and others on the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million and a staff of 10 investigative journalists to coordinate work done by freelancers.

• HuffPo also began writing two different headlines for some stories and showing them randomly to viewers for five minutes. After that time, the headline that generates the most clicks becomes the default.

• The Providence Journal took hyperlocal to heart by moving all its local coverage to the front and banishing national and international news to a separate section.

• TV stations in Milwaukee, Lancaster, Pa. and Little Rock opened their daily news budget meetings to outsiders through video, live blogs and Twitter. News directors said the experiment has been a mixed bag, but has resulted in some solid news tips.

• The New York Times shattered tradition in January with a front-page strip ad for CBS. The Boston Globe followed suit just two weeks later. And the Los Angeles Times ran a page-one ad (at right) in a position and typeface that some people believed could be mistaken for a news story. Executive editor John Arthur called the ad “horrible” and “a mistake.”

• Science and technology columnist Dave Brooks of the Nashua Telegraph handed over partial control of his blog on the Telegraph website to the University of New Hampshire news service so that it could “post items about science and social science research at the university…directly on GraniteGeek whenever it wants.” Said Brooks, “Slightly to my surprise, reaction in the newsroom has been uniformly favorable.”

• Reader’s Digest filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

• Three Connecticut alternative publications – the Hartford Advocate, New Haven Advocate and Fairfield County Weekly – outsourced all editorial content for one week’s issue to freelance journalists in India. Editors assigned journalists 7,700 miles away to principally cover local news, entertainment and culture.

• Writing under the pseudonym of @TheMediaIsDying, microblogger Paul Armstrong racked up more than 21,000 followers for his stream of tweets about the troubles of mainstream media.

• Several blogs were started to tote up the gloomy layoff numbers across the US. They included The Layoff List, Layoff Blog, Jobless and Less, The American Lawyer Layoff List and the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker.

• One print paper did just fine this year. The Slammer boasts a newsstand profit margin that “is four times that of most local dailies, and its circulation has grown to 29,000 – up nearly 50 percent from 20,000 just last year,” wrote The Christian Science Monitor. The Slammer is full of mug shots, crime reports and allegations of misdeeds and carries the slogan “All Crime, All the Time.”

• The Wall Street Journal launched an interactive map showing “adverse events at the top 100 newspapers” since 2006.

• Condé Nast closed four magazines, including the 70-year-old Gourmet. September ad page figures for the publisher showed a stunning fall of nearly 1,700 pages.

• The 12,000-circulation Newport (R.I.) Daily News instituted a paywall that requires online visitors to pay nearly two-and-a-half times as much for a yearly subscription as print subscribers do. “Our goal was to get people back into the printed product,” publisher Albert K. Sherman, Jr. told Nieman’s Edward J. Delaney.

• More newspapers began pooling resources to share stories, with consortia forming in Florida, Tennessee, New York and New Jersey. In New York, five newspapers banded together to exchange content in the largest such arrangement since the share-nicely trend began in 2008. Bloomberg and the Washington Post did a deal to create the Washington Post News Service With Bloomberg News. The alliance includes a revenue-sharing agreement to create a co-branded online business section on the Post’s website in the first quarter of 2010.

• In Moscow, the the GazetaPacket began delivering news, crosswords, recipes and advertising on printed paper bags.

Numbers

• A Pew Research study in January found that the Internet passed newspapers as the preferred source of news among Americans. The survey of 1,489 adults found that 40% get most of their national and international news online, compared with 35% who rely primarily on newspapers. Television continued to be the number one choice, at 70%. Among people under 30, however, the Internet is now as popular as television for news.

• In March, Mark Potts toted up the market capitalizations of publicly held newspaper companies in the US and came to a striking conclusion: Their combined value was just $1.3 billion, or a little more than the $1.1 billion that The New York Times Co. paid for the Boston Globe in 1993. Valuations had recovered somewhat by year’s end.

• One-third of Americans under the age of 40 told Rasmussen Reports that Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart (right) and the Colbert Report are replacing traditional news outlets.

• A survey of 95 editors by the Associated Press Managing Editors found that newsroom workers between the ages of 18 and 35 were the most likely to be laid off, despite the industry’s need to increase its appeal to precisely that age group.

• Nevertheless, journalism schools saw an astonishing surge in enrollments. “According to an annual survey by the University of Georgia, the number of undergraduates enrolled nationwide in journalism and mass communication schools jumped more than 41% between 1997 and 2007,” reported the Capital Times of Madison, Wisc.  Also, Forbes.com noted that journalism schools at Columbia University, the University of Maryland and Stanford University saw significant spikes in applications in 2008 — 30 percent, 25 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

• A poll by Zogby International found that only one in 200 people believes newspapers will be a dominant source of information in 2014. In addition, 56% of adults said that if they were only allowed one source of news, they would choose the Internet, compared to 41% for television, newspapers and radio combined.

• Martin Langeveld calculated that in 1940 publishers distributed 118 newspaper copies for every 100 households. Today, the number is 33 copies per 100 households, down from 53 less than a decade ago.

• Ninety-three percent of all newspaper sales “can now be attributed to kidnappers seeking to prove the day’s date in filmed ransom demands,” reported The Onion in a hilarious spoof of the industry’s downturn.

Notable Quotes

“Our newspaper’s biggest revenue source today is foreclosure notices.”

–Clifford Buchan, editor of the Minnesota-based weekly Forest Lake Times.

“That’s like asking someone in another business if they want to get vaccinated with a live virus.”

-Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell, commenting on the prospect of finding a merger partner for his bankrupt company.

“Most people would hear you say that, and they would say, you know, he doesn’t — with all due respect, you don’t get it.”

–Charlie Rose to Mortimer Zuckerman regarding the latter’s plans to continue publishing the New York Daily News because, among other things, his 11-year-old daughter is going to be the next publisher.

“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.”

–McSweeney’s Internet-age writing syllabus and course overview

“JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

-The UK’s Guardian in an April Fool’s Day announcement that it would cease print publication after 188 years and go Twitter-only.

“There was nothing [in these newspapers] of remote interest [to] just about any sentient being. But that’s not what the paper’s editors were aiming for. The point is that there was nothing there that could possibly offend anyone.”

— Bill Wyman’s blunt, sometimes savage essay on Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing

“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.”

–BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy writing on TechCrunch

“As I rose through the editorial ranks of various magazines, I was encouraged to cultivate a mild contempt for readers.”

– MIT Technology Review Editor Jason Pontin in a prescription for saving print media

“The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press – high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication – is over. But will The New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.”

– Clay Shirky

“Newspapers are an important part of our lives, not to read, of course, but, when you’re moving you can’t wrap your dishes in a blog.”

-Stephen Colbert quoted in the Columbia Journalism Review

“There’s an enormous amount of vanity among journalists who forget that people buy newspapers not just for journalism but crosswords, cartoons, TV listings and indeed advertising.”

-Paul Bradshaw on Online Journalism Blog

“‘Jon and Kate’ for first mention, ‘Jesus, ENOUGH’ afterwards.”

@FakeAPStylebook, a Twitter-based parody that has quickly amassed more than 82,000 followers.

“Completion of a tower that will give Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport controllers technology and visibility to monitor air traffic for the foreseeable future, settling a contract that will keep the controllers on the job and redefining air space corridors, are keys to the Valley airport’s future, Robert Sturgell, FAA deputy administrator, said Thursday.”

-Unattributed quote cited by former Baltimore Sun copy chief John McIntyre as an example of the tortured inverted pyramid prose that is driving readers to blogs

“It’s safer to make an outrageous statement about Saddam Hussein than to make a mild criticism of a local car dealer. It’s something newspapers don’t like to admit. It has always mattered who pays the bills.”

-Alternative weekly publishing veteran Jeff vonKaenel

“This is the thought of the day and this is where you put the thought of the day as if anyone has a thought for the day. And can’t work out what the hell is going on. But who knows what is happeningishness. – Jesus Mark 7:21-23 (Bible for Today)”

-Dummy copy mistakenly published as the Thought for the Day in Australia’s Advertiser

Images

The AP posted this photo of discarded newspaper racks languishing in a San Francisco junkyard. Updated: This was the consequence of a new city ordinance banning stand-alone newspaper racks. However, the image acquired particular power in light of the industry’s plight.

An ad created by the North Carolina Press Association to urge citizens to fight legislation that would allow local governments to post public notices on the Web instead of in local newspapers appeared to portray newspaper readers as old and technophobic.

Christopher Ave, the political editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, isn’t a copy editor but he’s sympathetic to the pain of wordsmiths around the country who are falling victim to layoffs. He created this clever music video to dramatize their plight.

This monologue by a resident of Santa Cruz, Calif. testifying before the city council about, we think, vegetables, raises questions about whether as a population we can, you know, express stuff.

A 26-year old Berkeley musician named Jonathan Mann joined forces with the staff of the East Bay Express to come up with a solution to newspapers’ business problems. Wait till the end to hear it.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News took very different approaches to commemorating their final issues.

In one of the final feature stories in Editor & Publisher, which is closing after 125 years, Jennifer Sabba has an interesting dissection of the circulation experiment at the Dallas Morning News. That paper was one of the first to dig into the economics of circulation pricing in order to better understand elasticity. Newspapers have traditionally derived only about 20% of their revenue from circulation, but the wholesale collapse of categories like classified advertising has forced them to get creative. The Morning News is one of several newspapers have experimented with turning the screws on loyal customers to see how much more they would pay for a print product.

It turns out that pricing elasticity isn’t absolute. Research conducted by the Morning News found that readers were willing to pay more if they thought they were getting more in the bargain. Specifically, the most important topics they identified were national news, local news, business, state, sports and investigative journalism, in that order. “If the paper raised the subscription price but readers felt they were getting more content, the fall-off in volume would be around 10%. At the same price, if readers felt like they were getting less content, volume would fall by 40%.”

The Morning News responded by jacking up its home delivery prices an audacious 66% in one year. However, it also expanded its news hole and launched a free edition that’s distributed to about 200,000 homes four days a week. As a result, in the most recent six-month period, the paper reported one of the largest circulation declines of any major newspaper: 22.1%. But that may not be a bad thing for the bottom line. The paper is sticking with its pricing strategy in the belief that the overall business impact will be positive. That’s the philosophy executives at Hearst Corporation adopted with the San Francisco Chronicle last year. The Chron has hiked its subscription rate 63% in the last 18 months and seen circulation plummet. However, it has reportedly also stabilized a business that was losing $1 million a week in 2008.

Sabba’s story provides a new context for understanding the dizzying drop in newspaper circulation over the last few years. While the declines are troubling, they are at least in part voluntary as publishers shed unprofitable circulation and focus on loyal readers. This isn’t a long-term growth strategy, but print isn’t going to be a long-term growth proposition anyway. The thinking behind the strategy actually makes sense in light of the inevitable shift that news organizations must make from print to digital distribution. If there is a cash cow, then milk as much profitability out of it as possible while transitioning the rest of the business to a new economic model.

Debating Paid Models

Rupert Murdoch is apparently getting sick of being portrayed as an old fuddy-duddy who wants people to pay for information that should be free. So he’s taken his case to the Wall Street Journal. In a December 8 opinion, the News Corp. CEO says journalism is the foundation of a free society and blogger “theft” of the hard work of reporters and editors is undermining the value of quality information. Murdoch rejects suggestions that news organizations should become nonprofits as well as the possibility of a government bailout. “The future of journalism belongs to the bold, and the companies that prosper will be those that find new and better ways to meet the needs of their viewers, listeners, and readers,” he writes. But he also states that the economic future of the industry can’t be sustained by online advertising. Instead, readers must be convinced to pay a “modest amount” for good information. “The critics say people won’t pay. I believe they will, but only if we give them something of good and useful value. Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing,” Murdoch says. Unfortunately, he provides no research or factual evidence for his belief.

Karthika Muthukumaraswamy has a thoughtful post on Online Journalism Blog about how to make paywalls work. She summarizes conventional wisdom that paywalls only succeed when the publication has content that has a high perceived value, usually for a focused audience. The problem with most news organizations is that they’ve been trained to make their information appeal to the broadest possible readership. So how do you change the mindset? Muthukumaraswamy suggests that the best course may be a dual track: continue to deliver broadly appealing information for free while analyzing traffic to determine where the high-value readers are. Then ask them to pay for access to that information. In that vein, “Steven Brill’s Journalism Online plans to charge only the most frequent users who seek very specific content while allowing cursory surfers to avail of most topical news for free.” Don’t demonize Google – she quotes research estimating that search engines can deliver about 50 cents a day of revenue per unique visitor – but don’t make it an either/or proposition, either. The key is to get focused on the numbers and seek your area of highest value.

Speaking of pay walls, The New York Times is mulling the online subscription option but isn’t tipping its hand about its plans yet. Senior Vice President for Digital Operations Martin Nisenholtz told the UBS Global Media and Communications Conference in New York City last week that there’s too much at stake to make this an all-or-nothing proposition. The company values its relationship with Google but is looking at the paid options employed by the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as the possibility of just staying free. There is some evidence that the financial free-fall is turning around at the Times, and staff cuts that have trimmed 25% of the workforce could reestablish some stability.

Traffic figures are in for the first month of Newsday‘s bold experiment to charge a $5 monthly fee for access to most of the content on its website. Declines of 21% in page views and a little under 20% in unique visitors were within expectations, according to management. Year-over-year page views were down 35% and unique visitors off 43%, but that compares to unusually busy election year numbers from a year ago. Management isn’t saying how much of the advertising revenue decline was made up by subscription fees. Newsday‘s numbers also can’t be taken as a benchmark for the industry, since a provision of the plan enables the many Long Island subscribers to Cablevision’s Optimum Internet service to get access for free.

Miscellany

The Journalism Shop surveyed 75 former Los Angeles Times journalists and found that more than half believe the paper will not survive in the long term. Only one in six thought the Times would weather the storm that is buffeting the industry. The poll is hardly scientific, but it has some interesting findings about how the former staffers see their future jobs (more than a third expect to exit the profession entirely) as well as whether and how they believe journalism can survive. The generally dour findings show that the journalists believe the media is descending into a mud pit of top 10 lists and celebrity gossip.

Google continues to try to make nice with newspaper publishers while at the same time introducing new products that threaten their business. Editors Weblog points us to Living Stories, a Google Labs feature that aggregates news from around the Web and organizes it by content. The prototype uses content derived from a partnership with The News York Times and the Washington Post. The feature appears to be a modest evolution of Google News at this point, although there is certainly potential for more innovation. One neat feature is a timeline atop some of the news packages that tracks important milestones in the evolution of a story. According to a post on the Google blog, the content is being maintained by staffers at the two newspapers. Google continues to insist that it has no plans to get into the original content business. The blog entry also says the company will provide open source tools that news organizations can use to adapt the service to their own needs.

It appears the Associated Press has begun to turn the tide of customer defections that began last year when the service raised its rates. Some 180 newspapers canceled their AP contracts after the revised rate structure was announced, but now 50 have come back, although not necessarily under the full licensing plan. The Minneapolis Star Tribune is the latest to rescind its cancellation.

The dismal circulation figures reported by the US newspaper industry a couple of weeks ago may actually have been optimistic. There’s new evidence that many publishers took advantage of recent changes to Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) rules to actually overstate their real readership numbers. The blogosphere is having a field day with this one.

The catalyst was this AP piece that points out that changes adopted by the ABC seven months ago now enable publishers to count “bundled” subscriptions of paid and online editions as two subscribers, even if only one person is doing the reading. This continues recent trends by the bureau to loosen rules and give its publisher customers more flexibility to pump up their numbers. In the spring of 2008, for example, the ABC made it possible for publishers to declare as paid circulation copies that sell for as little as a penny.

The AP story doesn’t pinpoint how many news organizations benefited from the rules change in the most recent reporting period, but notes that 59 newspapers counted at least 5,000 electronic editions in their weekday circulations. If those numbers were backed out, the record 10.6% drop in the most recent six-month period would probably have been even worse. The story cites several examples of papers that showed declines in print subscribers but were still able to post circulation increases by counting delivery of electronic editions.

However, numbers games don’t fool anybody in the world in which smart people with spreadsheets can quickly analyze them. As Mark Potts points out, “Fudging the numbers may make internal constituencies happy, but they’ll bite you in the long run. Advertisers can count, too.” In other words, you can slice the numbers any way you want, but it doesn’t count for a hill of beans if customers don’t come in the door.

Electronic editions are basically digital versions of the print product that readers can download for the sake of convenience, ecology or availability. Jim Brady tweets wryly, “Nothing shows that you ‘get’ digital more than trying to deliver it to people in exactly the same form it appears in print.”

The circulation gains are part of a broader campaign by publishers to distract people from the reality of plunging circulation and ad revenue. Scarborough Research released a much-cited report recently that documented that 74% of American adults read a paper in print or online during the past week. These statistics look impressive, but qualifiers like “adult” and “in print or online” color the numbers. The newspaper industry has largely lost the youth market and online distribution is a mixed blessing at best.

Publishers are playing numbers games of their own. Mark Hamilton notes that the industry has largely abandoned circulation figures in favor of research-driven readership numbers that report the number of people who have read or looked into a newspaper in the past seven days. These figures serve to buttress the argument that newspapers are still a core element of American life while obfuscating the fact that subscribership is down.

And even large circulation numbers don’t equal business success. Alan Mutter contrasts the circulation strategies of two Bay Area publishers: Hearst’s San Francisco Chronicle and MediaNews Group. The Chron has all but abandoned discount circulation in a quest to cut its operating losses and drive circ revenue to 45% of total sales next year. MediaNews is taking the opposite course. It has used aggressive discounting to become the most widely circulated publisher in the area. The combined circulation of MediaNews papers in the region is now nearly triple the Chron’s. MediaNews president Jody Lodovic calls his strategy a long-term view, but is junk circulation good for anybody? The Chronicle‘s strategy is to stabilize its business, which may be a more rational plan in an unpredictable economy.

Whatever the numbers, advertisers are speaking more loudly with their dollars. US newspaper advertising revenue fell by nearly 28 percent in the third quarter from $8.9 billion to $6.4 billion. If you extrapolate that out to a full year, the US newspaper industry has shrunk by nearly half since 2006, when it reported $49.2 billion in revenue. The AP quotes Newspaper Association of America (NAA) president John Sturm positioning the figures in the context of a dismal economy, but it’s hard to find any bright spots when even online advertising was off 17%.

Miscellany

All may not be lost for the East Valley Tribune, which earlier this month announced plans to shut down at the end of the year. The paper reported on Friday that an unnamed buyer has emerged who plans to keep the paper operating both in print and online. The buyer also plans to keep a “substantial” number of Tribune employees on the payroll. There were no other details. Freedom Communications, which owns the Tribune, has been seeking a buyer since early this year, but no serious offers emerge prior to a Sept. 1 bankruptcy filing. In fact, Freedom’s chief financial officer said one bidder offered to take over the business only if Freedom paid him to do so

Count Twitter cofounder Biz Stone among the army of skeptics about Rupert Murdoch’s plans to remove News Corp. properties from Google’s search index. Saying Murdoch’s scheme is likely to “fail fast,” Stone told a London audience that the Australian media magnate should instead focus on “how to make a ton of money out of being radically open rather than some money by being ridiculously closed”. He suggested that Twitter’s crowdsourced model offer some opportunities and that the company would be willing to work with newspaper publishers. Twitter executives also said last week that the service will soon announce a plan to start making money off of the estimated 60 million members it has acquired.

And Finally…

Ed Padgett pointed us to this clever music video by Christopher Ave, the political editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who isn’t a copy editor but who is sympathetic to the plight of wordsmiths around the country who are falling victim to layoffs. The slick production, which looks like it was recorded in a newsroom, includes the following refrain:

I was there to fix your grammar
When you thought it wouldn’t matter
Cut all your extraneous blather down

AP Stylebook is my bible
Helped me stop a suit for libel
But nothing ensures my survival now

And I don’t know what I’ll do
After I am through
Killing my last adjective

Mallary Jean Tenore tells the story behind the video on Poynter Online. It has less than 800 views, so go visit it and add to its five-star rating.

The debate over whether search engines are friend or foe to the newspaper industry continues to grow and become more complex.

Rupert Murdoch says he will really go ahead with his stated plans to remove his portfolio of publications from Google’s search index. Jonathan Miller, News Corp’s chief digital officer, told the Monaco Media Forum on Friday that the company would begin blocking Google’s search spiders within a few months. Miller said Google brings in an army of one-click visitors who are “the least valuable traffic to us…You can survive without it.” He also said Murdoch intends to lead the industry in the just-say-no campaign. A Google spokesman responded that the search engine sends about 100,000 clicks to news organizations every minute. TechCrunch estimates that Google drives about one quarter of the total traffic to The Wall Street Journal.

While there’s no doubt that Murdoch is serious about drawing a line in the sand on this issue, the decision to talk about it this far in advance indicates that this is a negotiating tactic. Much as Hearst and the New York Times Co. wrung concessions from unions by threatening to close the papers they own, Murdoch may be looking to extract some kind of licensing deal from Google in return for backing down.

The Journal and the Financial Times are the only two daily newspapers that are having any success with a paid subscription model because both provide information that subscribers see as essential to their business. Few other newspapers can make that claim, which is why paywalls have been so difficult to implement.

Miller’s comment about drive-by visitors is worth noting. Publishers and auditors tend to look at traffic as the ultimate metric of success, but there are different kinds of traffic. Sex and celebrities drive page views just as they sell newsstand copies, but that kind of traffic is undesirable to most advertisers and extremely hard to monetize. If Murdoch has decided that his core base of paying and print subscribers are sufficient to run the company, he may be choosing to press his advantage while he still has leverage. The Wall Street Journal was the only large US newspaper to show any growth in the recent Audit Bureau Of Circulation report and Murdoch may have decided that he doesn’t need the casual visitor in order to be successful.

The Bing Factor

Media entrepreneur Jason Calacanis thinks Murdoch wants to do a deal. He suggests that the publishing tycoon could strike an exclusivity agreement with Microsoft Bing. This would have the win-win effect of driving revenue from Microsoft’s deep pockets while also upping the ante in the search wars. It’s an intriguing idea, and few other companies have the throw weight to pull it off.

Bing appeals to news executives as a foil for Google. TechCrunch reported last week that Microsoft held a secret meeting with representatives of some of Europe’s largest newspapers to discuss throwing its weight behind ACAP, a protocol that provides a variety of access controls over content. TechCrunch says Microsoft told the European publishers that it’s ready to commit £100,000 to fund development of ACAP, which permits search engines, for example, to index the full content of an article while displaying only part of it to a casual visitor. The report speculates that Microsoft may be hoping to use publishers as allies in a flank attack on Google by striking deals that give Bing exclusive or semi-exclusive access to their content.

Bloom Fading from User-Generated Content Rose?

Is user generated content beginning to lose some of its shine? Current TV, the cable channel founded by former Vice President Al Gore is in the process of retooling its content model to emphasize acquired and compiled programming while cutting back on standalone viewer submissions. The company will lay off 80 people in the process. Current TV says that while it’s as gung ho as ever on user-generated content, it will shift to a style of programming that sounds more reminiscent of America’s Funniest Home Videos than full length amateur documentaries. Chief Operating Officer Joanna Drake Earl also said “viewer-created ad messages” have been a huge success, with viewers preferring them by a 9-1 margin and advertisers reporting higher recall rates.

The Current TV downsizing bookends a year that began with the shutdown of another prominent user generated media company, 8020 Media. That publisher had a brief moment in the spotlight when it produced two print magazines consisting entirely of submissions from readers. The experiment proved that user-generated content is no panacea, however. The task of sorting through thousands of articles and photographs and turning them into professional-looking copy was little more efficient than working with professional journalists. The advertising downturn didn’t help.

The troubles of these prominent experiments shouldn’t be seen as a referendum on citizen media. Scores of other ventures are ongoing and an increasing number of events are being reported first through channels like Twitter. The most viable models appear to be those that combine citizen reports with moderation by professional editors. Perhaps America’s Funniest Home Videos had this all figured out years ago.

Miscellany

If you’re following this Twitter thing that everyone is so excited about, you should check out a couple of new resources. Twitter Times is “a real-time personalized newspaper generated from your Twitter account” and it’s a pretty good metaphor for the way trust is awarded in the new world of democratized information. The service chooses news and blog posts mentioned in the Twitter streams of people you follow. The result is a digest that looks like a newspaper, only the stories are selected by your friends.

The algorithm behind Twitter Times is obscure and the site appears to be the work of a single Russian programmer named Maxim Grinev (right). While it doesn’t try to capture every recommendation from trusted sources, its constantly changing selection of content pretty much reflects the topics we are interested in. Users can share personalized home pages with each other and, of course, follow tweeters mentioned therein.

Also check out MuckRack.com. It’s a collection of jounalist Twitter feeds set up by a small group of people who call themselves Sawhorse Media. Journalists have to apply for inclusion and list a publication they are affiliated with before being added to the list. The qualification criteria seems a bit outdated to us in this age of citizen media, but the resulting list is a pretty good lineup of media pros. MuckRack is one of 16 identical sites that run the topical gamut from beauty to beer. It seems that lists are all the new rage on Twitter.

The wrangling over Philadelphia’s two bankrupt newspapers continues to grow more bizarre. A Federal district court judge last week ruled that the creditors trying to take control of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News must make a cash offer for the papers rather than simply taking control of them from the bankrupt Philadelphia Newspapers, LLC. The two parties have engaged in months of legal wrangling, even trading accusations of document theft. The new ruling opens the bidding to third parties as well as current ownership, with the courts apparently trying to steer the matter toward a resolution that keeps both newspapers operating.

Publishers can take heart in recent numbers from Scarborough Research that indicate that newspapers continue to be at the center of American reading habits. Writing on Media Post, Scarborough’s Bob Cohen cites the following 2009 stats:

• 74% of adults read a paper in print or online during the past week. Newspaper readership in some markets reach upwards of 90%;
• 19% visited a newspaper website during the past week;
• 70% of American adults read a printed newspaper during an average week.

Scarborough’s numbers jive with other data that indicates that newspaper readership — online and in print — continues at all-time highs. The problem is monetizing the low-value web traffic. Cohen suggests that publishers need to do a better job of selling the centrality of their products to the audience’s daily habits. “Aggressive self-promotion, while not a natural inclination of this culture, could go a long way in these unusual times,” he writes.

Just minutes ago, an Ontario judge allowed Canwest Global Communications to save the hemorrhaging National Post by moving it the paper into a group with its other dailies. Why Canwest wants to do this is not clear. Today was set to be the end of the line for Post, a conservative broadsheet tabloid that has shouldered much of the blame for parent Canwest Global’s financial troubles. The Post has apparently been losing prodigious amounts of money – 139 million Canadian dollars over the last seven years – but has also had a curious booster effect on Canwest’s other properties by buying services from them and spreading around corporate overhead costs. The Post’s value as an accounting tool may have reached its limit, however. A committee of Canwest creditors said it would stop covering the paper’s losses after today. The last-ditch effort to shuffle the paper in with its peers won’t save it in the long run if losses continue.

Former CIO Takes Over at Boston Globe

The publisher of the Boston Globe is retiring after 27 years with the New York Times Co. and three tumultuous years at the helm of its New England properties. He’ll be succeeded by a former chief information officer, which is an interesting choice given the need for the Globe to transition to the digital age.

P. Steven Ainsley, 56, called his three years as publisher “difficult but enormously gratifying.” He’s certainly right about the first part. Ainsley navigated the organization through a near-death experience this year, eventually wringing more than $20 million in concessions out of stubborn unions. This week the Globe reported a record 18.4% year-over-year drop in circulation, making it one of the worst performers among the 300-plus US newspapers tracked by the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

Successor Christopher Mayer, 47, is a longtime Globe executive who is currently Senior Vice President of Circulation and Operations and formerly chief information officer for the New England Media Group. He’s the first Globe insider installed as publisher by the NY Times Co. since its 1993 purchase of the paper. His most notable recent achievement was a price increase that “drove revenue up sharply,” according to a Globe report. His technology background should be an asset in helping the organization transition to a digital world. It’s also notable that he has no sales or editorial experience. Mayer appears to be an operations guy, which is what floundering newspapers need right now.

Miscellany

A survey of 2,404 US adults by Ipsos Mendelsohn and PHD found that 55.5% say they would be “very unlikely to pay for online content” while only 16.5% said they might pay. Be careful of reading too much into these figures, though. If the question was worded to ask respondents if they want to pay for something they now get for free, it’s not surprising that the majority said no. Publishers who are erecting pay walls are presumably offering some value that readers don’t get for free today, right? Right?

A bankruptcy judge early this week formally approved the sale of the Chicago Sun-Times and more than 50 suburban publications to a local businessman who bought the whole package for $26.5 million. There were no serious bidders other than financier James Tyree, who insisted that unions agree to 15% pay cuts before he’d proceed with his offer. They did agree after mounting a feeble bluff attempt. Tyree said he plans to “grow the company by seeking new revenue opportunities, to adapt and lead change in the rapidly transforming news industry, and to become profitable.” The Sun-Times Media Group’s financial position was severely weakened by a damaging series of scandals involving several former executives who are now in jail.

Two university researchers analyzed front-page coverage in four Argentine newspapers and found an inverse correlation between government funding and journalistic scrutiny of the government. The research indicates that, at least in Argentina, the government can buy favor with the media. Researchers compared the quantity of front-page coverage of government scandals over a 10-year period and matched that to publicly available data about how much the government spent on advertising month to month. The correlation was “huge,” said the Harvard and Northwestern University researchers. In fact, if “government ad revenue in a month increased by one standard deviation — around $70,000 U.S. — corruption coverage would decrease by roughly half of a front page.” Talk about measurable results! Advertisers should have it so good.

Writing on Nieman Journalism Lab, Joshua Benton wonders whether this should be an argument against a government bailout of public funding for distressed media companies. Perhaps, but given Argentina’s history of political repression and media censorship, it seems a stretch to compare the scenario to the US.

The Newport Daily News doesn’t want you to visit its website and it’s taking steps to make sure you don’t. The 12,000-circulation Rhode Island weekdaily is demanding that online visitors pay nearly two-and-a-half times as much for a yearly subscription as print subscribers do. That’s right: It’ll cost you $145 per year to get six weekly issues of the Daily News delivered to your door but $345 to get it online. “Our goal was to get people back into the printed product,” publisher Albert K. Sherman, Jr. tells Nieman’s Edward J. Delaney. Adds the newspaper’s executive editor, “It will be a print-newspaper-first strategy.” The Daily News´ strategy is helped somewhat by continuing problems at the Providence Journal, which has cut back on Newport coverage amid layoffs.

And Finally…

The mass-production city dailies, aimed at common denominators in the market for newspapers, seem to have passed their heyday. …The reason the mass-production dailies are declining is not, however, that there are no significant similarities in a city’s total market for news, but that the job once done by mass-production newspapers has been largely duplicated by television and radio news and feature programs, and by the mass-production weekly news magazines.

Sounds straightforward enough. Except Rothacker points out that it was written 40 years ago. (Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities, (Random House, 1969), 240.)

The CEO of the Associated Press is stirring up trouble in China. Tom Curley (right) took the opportunity of an address to the World Media Summit in Beijing to outline plans for an AP-led initiative to retake control of intellectual property produced by the organization and its members.

The three-part initiative includes the News Registry, which is a rights management and tracking system that includes some kind of digital licensing protocols. He also said the AP will create a NewsMap, which is a master index of original content submitted to the registry, and NewsGuide, which is “an aggregated body of unique news content,” that sounds a little bit like Google News only a lot harder to use. All this is happening under the banner of “Protect, Point and Pay,” the objective apparently been to make it really difficult for aggregators to access AP content without paying for it. Of course, history shown that, when faced with roadblocks like this, aggregators simply go elsewhere. No timeframe for the new initiatives was announced.

Jeff Jarvis is having none of it. The media iconoclast says he can’t help pointing out the irony of Curley’s choosing to unveil the AP’s plans in a land where government exercises tight control over what citizens may know. The whole idea indicates that the AP doesn’t understand the dynamics of the link economy and word-of-mouth transmission. Curley and his fellow control freaks, “are the ones killing newspapers, not the Internet,” Jarvis says.

Condé Nast ’09 Revenue Decline May Hit $1 Billion

If anyone doubts how hard this economy has hit the luxury sector, they have only to look at the dismal performance of Condé Nast. Newsweek reports that the upscale magazine publisher – one of the nation nation’s three biggest — may see its ad revenue drop by $1 billion in 2009. In light of that disaster, it’s not surprising that Condé Nast last week decided to close venerable publications like Gourmet and Modern Bride. The company still owns Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, GQ, Vogue, and Wired.

But for how long? Newsweek estimates that ad revenues at Architectural Digest are off by almost half and that Wired and Vanity Fairare off 35% and 27%, respectively. For the newspaper industry, there’s bad news, too. Condé Nast owns newspapers in more than 20 cities through its Advance Publications subsidiary. Cost-cutting could force cutbacks at those titles as well.

Glimmers of Good News

Newspaper stocks are finally coming back from the dead, but can they hold their gains? MediaPost points to encouraging news. Since April, Gannett stock has more than tripled from $3.81 to $12.50, McClatchy has quintupled to $2.56, and Media General has jumped 250% from $2.54 to $8.86. It could be that the current valuations better reflect reality, Erik Sass suggests. Newspaper stocks became such a hot potato during the revenue implosions of the last two years that investors may have forgotten that the companies still have valuable audiences and profitable businesses.

Another researcher says the online ad market is bottoming out. eMarketer analyst David Hallerman says ad declines in the second half of 2009 will be less than the first half’s 5.3% drop. These days, that’s considered good news. See the eMarketer chart above. It looks like the big gainer will be search while classified advertising will lose ground.

Miscellany

For beleaguered news industry veteran who happen to speak Portuguese, the new mantra may be “goes south, young reporter.” The people of Brazil are reading newspapers in bigger numbers than ever, reports The Guardian. Total circulation of Brazilian newspapers rose 12% in 2007, or nearly five times the global average. It was up another 5% last year. The cause, apparently, is rapid growth in the middle class, which is seeing disposable income increase and creating both advertiser and reader demand. Newspaper revenues have risen every year since 2001. Rio de Janeiro’s historic Olympic Games win will only add life to the party.

Ink-stained wretches who enjoy pointing out the failings of the blogosphere should read Paul Carr’s rant about an apparently flagrant miscarriage of journalistic justice by ZDNet. The story, which was the work of a ZDNet blogger named Richard Koman, alleged that Yahoo had passed the names and e-mail addresses of hundreds of thousands of bloggers to Iranian authorities during the country’s controversial election. It turns out Koman‘s unnamed source for the story was an Iranian blogger with a decidedly vested interest in spreading misinformation. ZDNet has since retracted and apologized for the misstep. Carr isn’t letting the publisher get off that easily, however. He lectures blog aggregators in general — and ZDNet in this particular — for shoddy journalism for not even passing the blog entry by a second set of eyes before posting it. Quoting Winston Churchill: “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

USA Today has defied the industry circulation trends with minimal losses for the last two years, but that’s all about to come to an end. The newspaper is expecting circulation to drop 17%, the largest decline in its 27-year history. That translates into a loss of nearly 400,000 daily copies. The losses are apparently due to USA Today‘s reliance on hotel distribution. Cutbacks in business travel, combined with Marriott’s decision to discontinue automatic deliveries to its guests, created a potent double whammy.

Chicago has a new newspaper magnate, and he says he’s not going to repeat the mistakes of the last one. James Tyree, 51, chairman of Mesirow Financial, can’t help being compared to Sam Zell, the real estate magnate who bought Tribune Co. in 2007 and presided over its rapid descent into bankruptcy. Tyree (right) says Sun-Times Media Group is different. For one thing, there’s no debt. For another, Tyree understands the Internet. He reads six papers daily, all of them online. He has also made no bones about the challenges facing the company and has wrung significant concessions from the unions as a precursor to acquiring the Chicago Sun-Times and 58 suburban titles. If all goes as planned, he will take over control of the company in late October, much to the relief of employees and the Internal Revenue Service, which is owed more than $600 million by former owners.

The Russian owner of the London Evening Standard has decided to stop playing pricing games and simply make the 182-year-old newspaper free. Alexander Lebedev (left) says the move will more than double distribution from 250,000 daily copies to 600,000. The billionaire banking magnate, who took over the paper earlier this year, says the loss of circulation revenue can be more than made up by advertising gains. However, skeptics say that’s a long shot in a market that has recently seen the loss of one free title (TheLondonPaper) and that shows no sign of an advertising upturn.

Canwest Global Communications will be run by a group of creditors as it attempts to dig out from more than $4 billion in debt. Canada’s largest publisher was granted bankruptcy protection late last week. The company owns a variety of broadcasting and print businesses including Global TV and the National Post. Its acquisition of the latter is now widely seen as the source of its current difficulties because it loaded down the company with debt.

The Claremont (N.H.) Eagle has been resuscitated and removed from our R.I.P. list after a new owner rehired about 20 staff members and relaunched the 8,000-circulation newspaper on a somewhat-less-than-daily frequency.

And Finally…

It often takes an insider who understands the existing cultural norms to effect real change. That’s why Dan Gillmor continues to be such an effective voice for new-media reform. The former San Jose Mercury News columnist posts a list of 22 ideas for “changing the way news is produced.” They include simplifying language to speak in facts, not euphemisms, linking aggressively to competitors’ content, doing away with the use of unnamed sources and illuminating the motives of the people behind reported stories. While some of Gillmor’s proscriptions may seem condescending, his manifesto reflects the way information is communicated in the emerging bottom-up world. More than 100 commenters contribute their own addenda.