Perhaps all those fresh-faced young journalism wannabes who are flooding J-schools across the country right now know something we graybeards don’t. While there’s still plenty of legitimate hand-wringing going on over the collapse of publishing institutions, some media seers are beginning to see promise where others see peril.

David Carr’s essay in The New York Times last weekend is drawing considerable attention and well-deserved praise for its glass-is-half-full perspective. Carr, who put in his time at the traditional media watering trough, observes that the technology-enabled young journalists he meets these days increasingly see the collapse of hidebound 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 writes. “Young men and women are still coming [to New York] to remake the world, they just won’t be stopping by the human resources department of Condé Nast to begin their ascent.”

We found ourselves nodding vigorously as we read this piece. Carr expresses no nostalgia for an industry that was built on the inefficiencies of traditional advertising that are now being Googled out of existence. Career paths that relied upon young journalists doing “marginal jobs for indifferent bosses doing mundane tasks” are being vaporized and replaced by a meritocracy in which the best may not only survive but thrive. We’re still a long way from the Promised Land, and it’s a scary world if your job security is based upon having outlasted everyone else, but it’s invigorating if you’re young, energetic and enabled with all the trappings of today’s technology.

New York City venture capitalist Fred Wilson agrees. “I believe the move from a velvet rope model to a meritocracy is a good thing and that the new media business we are building in the wake of the old one will be a better media business; leaner, faster, and controlled more by users than media moguls,” he writes. Amen. As sympathetic as we are to the many people whose careers and lives have been thrown into chaos by the collapse of traditional media, we continue to see a much brighter future once the wreckage is cleared away.

AOL to Automate the News

America Online, which recently announced plans to lay off a third of its employees, is breaking some new ground in the newsgathering field. The company plans to use automation to crawl the Web looking for stories that its visitors have indicated they prefer through their clicks and page views. The robot will then advise a team of increasingly dehumanized editors when and where to publish what it finds. AOL will also use its new venture, Seed.com, to outsource assignments to an army of (presumably low-paid) reporters and photographers.

It sounds impersonal and even a little creepy. The idea of building a new site based entirely upon the preferences of viewers strikes us as a little like the model at Digg.com, which generates boatloads of traffic, but tends toward stories about video games and loopy kids. Digg isn’t threatening to upend CNN.

Writing on FastCompany.com, Kit Eaton makes an interesting case for AOL’s actions creating a revenge effect. If social media is actually adding more of a human element to interactions between groups, does a service that removes much of the human decision-making make any sense? Eaton proposes that readers today actually expect more of the human element in their news coverage rather than less. Of course, we haven’t seen the AOL technology in action and human editors could tweak the parameters over time to make its selections look more like The New York Times. But we doubt it.

Miscellany

Last week we told you about a new daily newspaper that is being launched into the Detroit market, hoping to fill a void left by the reduced publication schedules of the two major dailies there. Well, the experiment didn’t last long. The Detroit Daily Press published just five issues before hitting “a bump in the road” and suspending further operations until the new year. The suspension was blamed on “lack of advertising, lateness of our press runs and lack of distribution and sales,” according to an announcement on the publication’s Facebook page. This sounds to us like more than just a pothole, but we hope the owners, who have courted this market before, can overcome their troubles and come back in 2010. Photographer Rodney Curtis offers an insider’s perspective. Having lost his job at the Detroit Free Press earlier this year, he’s now a double-dip victim of the industry’s troubles.

Some local television stations are now crowdsourcing the news assignment process. Broadcasting & Cable reports on stations in Milwaukee, Lancaster, Pa. and Little Rock that are opening their daily news budget meetings to outsiders through video, live blogs and Twitter. News directors say the experiment has been a mixed bag, since audiences that sometimes number over 100 can get stuck on gossip and minutia instead of general interest stories. However, they say the open-air meetings have also resulted in solid news tips, such as the WITI (Milwaukee) story on a father surprising his son at school upon returning from Iraq. The boy’s teacher had clued the station about the visit.

Add MediaNews and A.H. Belo to the short list of newspaper publishers who are considering joining Rupert Murdoch in his crusade against Google’s evil empire. Executives at both companies were quoted recently saying that they may withhold some paid content from Google’s search spiders. However, they indicated that they would not block access to free content. These statements are a minor blow to Google, which says it can work perfectly well with paid content and that publishers using paywalls need Google even more to make their content discoverable.

The Hopi Tribal Council has decided to close down the Hopi Tutuveni, which is the primary newspaper covering Hopi lands. The 6,000-circulation paper, which has been publishing since the 1970s, was called “ineffective” by one tribal Council maker and didn’t merit continued funding by the budget-pressed group.

It’s the end of an era, of sorts, at the Washington Post. The paper plans to close down its last three domestic bureaus – in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago – at the end of this month in a significant retrenchment that focuses on the Washington area. The move continues a recent trend toward embattled big-city dailies shutting down the remote offices as they attempt to go hyperlocal. David Carr quotes Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli as saying “We are not a national news organization of record serving a general audience.” The Wall Street Journal announced plans to close its Boston bureau last month.

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.

After nearly losing its two daily newspapers a year ago, Detroit is actually adding one to the stable. The Detroit Daily Press will launch next week with daily newsstand distribution at first and home delivery scheduled to begin in about a month. This is actually the title’s second appearance; it originally appeared in 1964 and lasted for about four months before folding. The owners, who said they came out of retirement to take another shot at the Detroit market, plan to distribute 200,000 daily copies and charge a fraction of what their competitors charge for newsstand sales and advertising space.

Brothers Mark and Gary Stern say they have enough capital to make a go of it for two months and need 150,000 paying subscribers to break event after that. In light of that short timeframe, the quote in Editor & Publisher seems a little odd: ” “This is a permanent situation for us.” However, the brothers say they have raised private capital and have a much more efficient operating model that does away with unions and captive printing presses, so perhaps they have cash on hand to last much longer. The operation will employ about 60 people. It has recruited several veterans of the Detroit newspaper industry.

The Detroit market was roiled early this year when the Free Press and the News scaled back their home delivery operations to three and two days per week, respectively, in the name of saving costs. Few details have emerged on the financial success of the experiment. Both saw circulation declines in the first half of this year, but well within the average range for the industry

Local writer Isak Dinesen notes that the Stern brothers are Detroit natives and so may have an affinity for their local area. She also points to a Facebook page and online mockup (above) of the new title. The promotional language advertises “paper delivered seven days,” which is a direct reference to its competitors’ reduced schedule.

Miscellany

The question of whether readers are willing to pay for news appears to come down to how you ask the question. Alan Mutters tallies up recent research and finds that the percentage of Americans who say they’d crack open their wallets ranges from a low of 20% (Forrester Research) to a high of 53% (American Press Institute). The amounts vary widely, too. We’d suggest the wording of the question and the makeup of the sample group has a lot to do with the variations. That and the fact that Internet research is inherently unreliable. Forrester at least has been doing this for a long time.

Jeff Jarvis hits the nail on the head again with an essay about the new business model for news organizations. He observes that the cost model for a successful online title is about 10% that of a print property. In other words, there’s money to be made online, but requires the cost structure to be radically changed. The problem is that most newspaper publishers  can’t stomach the idea of eliminating 90% of their staff. Of the major metro dailies that have closed this year, only one — the Seattle Post-Intelligencer — has successfully shifted it is cost model to match the online revenue opportunities. Recent reports have indicated that the P-I actually is profitable online, although few details are available.

It isn’t human nature to shoot nine out of every 10 employees. So for many publishers, it’s easier simply to go under completely. That’s why Jarvis argues that bankruptcy is a bit of a magic potion. It’s an opportunity to get out from under debt, blow up the unions and completely restructure the way an organization works. Unfortunately, he correctly points out that those publishers that have gone through the bankruptcy procedure — which is most of them — have mostly failed to do more than trim a few expenses here and there. That isn’t going to save them; it will just postpone the inevitable.

The New York Times will end its Times Extra aggregation experiment in two weeks, about a year after launching the feature. The company insists that the decision isn’t a backtrack from the goal of aggregating outside content but rather than the content would now be presented within stories rather than on a dedicated site.

The New York Sun, a weekdaily that shut down a year ago, has been rejuvenated online. It will be resurrected for a 20-week run featuring crosswords from famous puzzle editor Peter Gordon for $1 per week. No word on whether management will decide whether to continue publishing the paper, but we expect that revenue will be an important factor.

BusinessWeek is reportedly set to lay off 100 people in the wake of its acquisition by Bloomberg LP. It appears that layoffs will be across the board, with employees who are in the line of fire being asked to submit resumes, news clips, and 250-word statements about their qualifications for continuing to work at the esteemed business publisher. BusinessWeek becomes property of Bloomberg on Dec. 1.

The Associated Press laid off 57 union workers, including 33 editors. The newswire is seeking to cut its personnel expenses by 10% by the end of the year.

Citizen journalism startup AllVoices will start paying professional journalists to cover beats, although the compensation is a meager $250 for now. The site has more than 200,000 registered members, most of whom contribute their work for free. AllVoices’ CEO Amra Tareen said the program is intended to recognize that these are “tough times for many journalists as news organizations downsize” and noted that reporters could earn more than the basic fee if their stories generate a lot of traffic. We profiled AllVoices last year.

And Finally…

Go to the basic Google home page and start typing a question. See what the Genius Google, in its near-infinite wisdom, thinks you’re asking when it provides all those “helpful” suggestions in a drop-down box. It turns out that certain kinds of queries generate amusing suggestions. For example, type “Is there any” (sans quotation marks) and see what Google suggests you really mean. (Okay, so we stole that from TheNextWeb.com.) Let’s get creative… Type in “why will” or “how come” or even “why is it that” and see what you come up with. The results are so strange that this feels like a big practical joke on Google’s part, but it does lend itself to endless experimentation.

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.

There are more signs that the advertising environment is improving. IDC says global online ad spending just 1% to $14.6 billion. While that’s still down, it’s an improvement over the negative 5.6% growth registered in the second quarter and the smallest drop since the ad market started going south a year ago. IDC expects the US market to decline another 1% or so in the fourth quarter, but now foresees growth by the first or second quarter of 2010. IDC says search advertising will lead the industry out of its slump, but that the big winner is Microsoft’s Bing, not Google. However, Bing may not hold its gains once growth returns. Display advertising continues to be a downer. America Online, which derives most of its ad revenue from display units, saw its online ad revenue fall 23% in the quarter. AOL has lost nearly half its market share over the last four years.

Miscellany

The Awl takes a graphical look at the circulations of major US newspapers over the last two decades. The data is predictably horrible, but the chart makes some trends clearer. One is that the precipitous circulation declines began almost at the same time – around 2006. Another is that the trends haven’t been consistent for everyone: The Wall Street Journal has more or less held its own while the New York Post’s circulation today is only slightly below 1991 levels. “The once-captivating battle of the New York City tabloids has become completely moot,” the author notes. In fact, the the only battle in New York now seems to be a race to the bottom.

The biggest loser in the timeline is the Los Angeles Times, whose 50% drop in circulation over the last 20 years is the visual equivalent of a topographic map of the Grand Canyon. Whatever malaise is afflicting US dailies, the LA Times has got a triple dose of the illness.

Jeff Jarvis has a 25-minute video of an anti-protectionist speech he made to Munich Media Days a week ago, but what caught our eye was a comment by a reader that attempts to explain the changing economics of journalism. Bob Wyman notes that mass media economics of the past century made it a virtue for journalists to be objective because that was how you amassed the largest possible audience in markets defined by geography. Once the geographic limitations were lifted, the rules changed. Today, journalist maximize their value by being leaders in advocating certain points of view. Specialization and bias (supported by expertise) become a source of differentiation.

“This will result in greater quality of journalism on specialist interests being made available across the board as well as probably increased revenues to individual journalists who are successful at becoming leaders in particular market segments,” Wyman comments. This is worth pondering for journalists who mourn the loss objectivity in their profession. Bias may actually be a factor that makes them distinctive and marketable in the future.

The Wall Street Journal had the Detroit Media Partnership on the hot seat last week with a story about advertiser involvement in editorial decisions  the Detroit Free Press, including story topic and placement. While not alleging direct advertiser interference, the Journal story, which was provocatively headlined “Major Detroit Newspaper Takes Cues From Advertisers,” pointed to a 10-page package on Medicare open enrollment that appeared on Nov. 1 that it said was inspired by an idea submitted by Humana and that carried extensive advertising from the health care provider. Retailer Target was also involved in conceiving and scheduling recent articles on secondary school education that were placed adjacent to Target ads. “The publisher has redrawn…traditional boundaries,” the Journal wrote. “Generally, papers make layout decisions within the newsroom, not in connection with ad placements.”

The Free Press was pretty steamed. Romenesko has the letter that Free Press Editor/Publisher Paul Anger sent to the Journal. The Freep didn’t consult with advertisers on any story content, although it did work with them on schedules, Anger said. “We did nothing to compromise the newsroom while creating a win-win-win for our news coverage, for readers, and for advertisers,” he wrote. Anger also tweaked the Journal for carrying a special section on mutual funds stuffed with ads from investment firms on the same day that the story about the Free Press appeared.

The Claremont (N.H.) Eagle Times, which died in July and rose from the ashes last month under a new owner, is in the news again. This time it’s over the state of New Hampshire’s unusual decision to guarantee part of a $250,000 loan to the paper’s new owner, Pennsylvania-based Eagle Printing & Publishing LLC. The New Hampshire Business Finance Authority, a state agency, agreed to guarantee 75% of the loan because of the potential for the Eagle Times to preserve and create new jobs in the area. The nearby Valley News devotes some 1,100 words to its analysis, focusing on the potential conflicts of interest created by a debtor covering the very same politicians who are providing its sustenance. However, no pols quoted in the piece seem to believe things will change that much over a lousy $187,500 in capital.

Quote from a short piece by Paul Bradshaw on Online Journalism Blog about monetizing content and audience: “I think there’s an enormous amount of vanity among journalists who forget that people buy and bought newspapers not just for journalism but crosswords, cartoons, TV listings and indeed advertising.”

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.)

Media-watchers are interpreting yesterday’s horrifying Audit Bureau of Circulation audit numbers that show newspaper circulation falling at an accelerating rate. Alan Mutter takes calculator in hand and figures that readership is at historic lows. “Newspaper circulation now is lower than the 41.1 million papers sold in 1940, the earliest date for which records are published,” he writes. In those days about 31 percent of the population read a newspaper. Today, it’s less than 13%.

Mutter’s analysis draws quite a few comments, several of whom quibble with his math. Martin Langeveld cites figures that are even more alarming than Mutter’s: In 1940, publishers distributed 118 newspaper copies for every 100 households. Today, the equivalent number is 33 copies per 100 households, down from 53 per 100 less than a decade ago.

Writing in the Atlantic, Megan McArdle chooses a blunt headline for her analysis: “This is the End of the Newspaper Business.” In her view, publishers are now at the end of their ropes. They’ve cut all they can cut and still put out a respectable product. The industry is in a death spiral. “We’re eventually going to end up with a few national papers, [most likely] The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and The New York Times…But in 25 years, will any of them still be printing their product on the pulped up remains of dead trees? It doesn’t seem all that likely.”

McArdle’s predictions sound eerily similar to what we wrote more than three years ago in an essay entitled “How the Coming Newspaper Industry Collapse Will Reinvent Journalism.” We picked the same three dailies to survive but gave print only about 15 more years. We tried to place the essay in a few big dailies at the time but were rejected. Too implausible, the editors said.

In a release that served as a preamble to the ABC numbers, the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) provided some context for the circulation plunge. Its latest numbers reveal the impact of publishers’ recent efforts to tighten up on circulation in order to reduce churn and acquisition costs. As a result, newspapers are seeing “higher levels of subscribers retaining subscriptions, with subscriber ‘churn’ falling dramatically to 31.8 percent in 2008, compared with 54.5 percent in 2000.” Publishers are also raising single-copy rates and discounting more aggressively for subscriptions.

The NAA’s analysis is an important counterpoint to the hand-wringing that’s going on over the ABC numbers. At least part of the decline in US circulation is intentional. Publishers are cutting back on free distribution and deeply discounted promotions in an effort to make circulation a profit center. That’s good business sense, although it’s hardly a long-term strategy.

Miscellany

More local weeklies are closing.

• Oklahoma’s Midwest City Sun will shut down this week after nearly three decades, idling 10 employees.
• The Shoreline/Lake Forest Park (Wash.) Enterprise will print its last edition tomorrow and four other weeklies in the area will be combined into a single edition, appropriately named publisher Allen Funk announced. Enterprise features Andrea Miller editor puts the loss in human terms. “This leaves more than 65,000 people in north King County without a newspaper devoted solely to coverage of the communities they live in,” she wrote in a thoughtful e-mail to us. The Enterprise has be around more than 50 years and its lineage actually stretches back to 1904, she wrote in a 2007 history.

Last night was the American television debut of Stop The Presses: the American Newspaper in Peril, a 2008 film that claims to be the only documentary about the industry’s downfall. Directors Mark Birnbaum and Manny Mendoza interviewed “reporters, editors, media critics, journalism professors, students and newspaper readers to document the historic role of newspaper journalists as public watchdogs.” They also talked to many journalists like Ben Bradlee and Ken Auletta. It appears that the filmmakers are going to let their work trickle out through localized TV showings over the next year. You can buy a copy at prices ranging from $25 to $250 at AMS Pictures. Now that the vid has appeared on television, it will no doubt pop up online somewhere, but we would never point to a pirated copy. Just who do you think we are? Commenters are another story.

And Finally…

If you’re a newspaper history buff, have we got websites for you. Life just published a collection of classic photos involving newspapers under the banner of When Newspapers Mattered. It includes gems like the image below of Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen sitting amidst the newspaper headlines that galvanized his reputation as the kingpin of crime. Cohen and the Los Angeles media enjoyed a mutually beneficial relationship, as he sold a lot of newspapers. He and William Randolph Hearst were reportedly pals.

The Library of Congress is now also offering free access to a searchable database of dozens of daily newspapers stretching back to 1880. The service is part of National Digital Newspaper Program, a partnership between the National Endowments for the Humanities, the Library of Congress, and state projects “to provide enhanced access to United States newspapers published between 1836 and 1922.” Nearly 1.5 million pages have already been scanned. It’s unclear how exhaustively they’ve been indexed, but news buffs can view images like the front page from the San Francisco Call-Chronicle-Examiner documenting the earthquake of 1906 (below).

Circulation at major metro daily newspapers fell at more than twice the rate of last year’s record declines, although extenuating circumstances may be partly to blame.

Audit Bureau of Control (ABC) numbers released today showed that daily newspaper circulation plunged 10.6% for the six months ended Sept. 30 compared to the same period a year ago. Sunday circulation was off 7.5%. In the same period a year ago, average daily circulation fell 4.6%, while Sunday papers were down 4.9%. Only one newspaper – The Wall Street Journal – showed an increase in circulation and it was a meager .6%. It blew past USA Today to become the US leader in circulation as USA Today posted a 17% circulation decline, largely as a consequence of the loss of Marriott’s hotel-distribution business.

The New York Times was down 7.3% and its neighbor New York Post was off 18.8%. Both blamed extenuating circumstances. The Times has been pruning unprofitable circulation as it seeks to make subscription revenue a bigger piece of its top line. The Post blamed its plunge in part on an April, 2007 decision to double its newsstand price. The Post didn’t explain why it took two years for the price increase to show up in the circulation figures.

The figures may have also been impacted by recent ABC rules changes that tighten up the ability for newspapers to count bulk and sponsored copies in their total circulation. That doesn’t change the fact that this is the last news the industry needs to hear right now.

A wall (not to scale)

Newsday will join the slowly growing ranks of newspaper publishers that charge for access. Beginning next Wednesday, the Long Island daily will begin charging a $5 weekly fee for access to most of its content. Subscribers to the print edition or to owner Cablevision’s Optimum Online service will continue to get Newsday for free. A limited amount of Newsday coverage will still be free online, including the home page, school closings, weather, obituaries, classified and entertainment listings, but nearly everything else will go behind the paywall.

Newsday is keeping an open mind about the idea, saying it will listen to reader feedback and quickly adjust the free/paid mix accordingly. “If there is something that is of critical need for Long Islanders to be aware, we would give them access,” said Debby Krenek, managing editor and senior vice president/digital media. She added that the pay wall won’t be a major issue to local readers, since 75% of them subscribe to either the paper or Optimum Online already. Newsday said readers are taking the announcement in stride, but responses to its news story would indicate otherwise. Of 20 comments posted this morning, not a single one supports the paywall move.

Glynnis MacNicol performs an interesting non-scientific paywall-related experiment based upon comments on The New York Times’ coverage of its own layoffs. She notes that of the 502 comments on reporter Richard Perez-Pena’s blog entry about the news, nearly one-third offered to pay for access to Times content. Some said they had actually volunteered to pay in the past but were told they couldn’t. We’re going to take her word on the math.

The Boston Herald would like to charge for access to its website but says it probably won’t do so unless rival Globe does the same. The Globe says it’s unlikely to take that plunge. Any cooperation on that front between Boston’s only two dailies would undoubtedly invite government scrutiny.

Miscellany

Nearly half of all newspaper journalists believe their newsrooms are moving too slowly into the digital age, according to a report by Northwestern University’s Media Management Center (MMC). While the majority of the 3,800 respondents still work in print, only 6% were characterized as “Turn Back the Clock” journalists who wish digital would just go away. Half of the respondents would be happy to work in digital as much as in print and 12% are true digital enthusiasts. Surprisingly for an industry that’s experiencing so much turmoil, 77% said they’re satisfied with their jobs and two in three say they expect to be working in the news business two years from now.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for the New York Times Co. Just one week after taking the Boston Globe off the market, the company announced plans to lay off 100 newsroom employees and a nearly 17% drop in third quarter revenue. The drop was driven by a 26.9% decline in advertising revenue. Circulation revenue actually rose 6.7%. The stock jumped, however, on a positive outlook by CEO Janet Robinson: “We have seen encouraging signs of improvement in the overall economy and in discussions with our advertisers,” she said.

Craig Silverman

“Content-sharing is now moving into its next phase by bringing stories online and looking at ways to share revenue,” writes Craig Silverman in a MediaShift article on a new round of agreements between major content providers. The trend began in Ohio last year, when a group of non-competitive newspapers started swapping articles for their next day’s edition. Similar informal consortia were later set up in Florida, Tennessee, New York and New Jersey. Now Bloomberg and the Washington Post have done a deal to create the Washington Post News Service With Bloomberg News. The novel part of the arrangement is a revenue-sharing agreement that will create a co-branded online business section on the Post‘s website in the first quarter of next year. The two companies will share ad revenue from the venture.

In addition, a group of members of the Associated Press Sports Editors will soon launch a federated content-sharing alliance. Members will be able to reprint each other’s stories without special permission, but online excerpts will be limited to 150 words with a link back to the original source. About 60 newspapers have expressed interest in joining the consortium, which plans to launch the service in November.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune is replacing its Saturday edition with one that could be called “Sunday light.” The edition will be delivered early on Sunday and will include the content that subscribers usually get in their Saturday edition plus Sunday’s comics and ad inserts. It will be priced at 50 cents, or the same price as the regular Saturday edition.

Paid-content advocate Steven Brill (right) has been busy defending his position lately. He squares off over the pay wall issue with visionary Clay Shirky on McKinsey & Co.’s website.  Shirky says forget about charging readers for content. They’ll pay only if the information is “necessary, irreplaceable and unshareable.”  The Financial Times can get away with charging for online access because people make money from the information they find there, but few outlets have the kind of audience demographics to do the same. On the sharability point, Shirky notes that preventing paying subscribers from sending interesting information to their friends goes against the grain of the Internet, thereby subverting the pay wall by its very nature.

Brill begs to differ. The point is not to charge everyone for access, he says, but rather to charge those people who are most committed to the product and are willing to pay. So a college newspaper could ask alumni to pay for a subscription in order to subsidize free copies for the students. Brill says he basically agrees with Shirky but thinks publishers should go after subscription revenue where they can get it. He resorts to that most annoying of branding tactics by inserting that little ™ symbol whenever he mentions his own products. We at the Death Watch™ just hate that.

Brill was also at an event sponsored by the Paley Center for Media that put him up against National Public Radio CEO Vivian Schiller, iconoclast Jeff Jarvis and media consultant Shelly Palmer. The most damning quote came from Vivian Schiller, who was previously general manager of NYTimes.com during the newspaper’s ill-fated TimesSelect experiment. The pay-walled venture “made $10 million, but I don’t think it was worth it,” she said. “Trying to force a change in audiences’ behavior is the fundamental problem I have with some of these pay wall models.” PaidContent.org’s David Kaplan notes that despite the debate format, the panelists really weren’t that far apart on the fundamental issues. All of them believe publishers need to find new ways to monetize their audiences. It’s just that most believe that charging for content that readers can find elsewhere for free is not the way to do it.

Bloggers Need Shield Laws

Writing on Media Shift, Clothilde Le Coz says a double standard applies when it comes to shield laws for citizen journalists. She notes that 37 states have passed laws that protect journalists from prosecution for failing to reveal their sources. Now there is a bill awaiting Senate approval that proposes to implement a shield law on a national level. The problem is that the bill defines journalists as people who work for professional media organizations. Bloggers are not specifically addressed in its language, which seems a rather blatant oversight these days.

Le Coz cites the 2005 case of journalist and blogger Josh Wolf, who was jailed for failing to hand over video of a clash between protesters and police during the G8 summit. Wolf spent a month in jail but was eventually released under the terms of California’s shield law. “Imagine what would have happened if Wolf wasn’t a journalist and couldn’t argue his right to protect his sources?” Le Coz writes. “He would have been forced to give up his footage and thus become an accomplice in the arrest of protesters.”

Blogger anonymity is a thorn in the side of many professional journalists, but the writer argues that it’s an essential tool for bloggers in some countries if they are to speak freely at all. Even in the US, the rise of citizen journalism as a legitimate complement to mainstream media would seem to argue for an extension of legal protection to those who happen to be on the scene when something happens and who report the details.

Miscellany

If you have a couple of hours to kill and want to trace the history of the Boston Globe‘s near-death experience at the hands of owner New York Times Co., PaidContent.org has a link list of its coverage in reverse chronological order.

USA Today‘s loss is The Wall Street Journal‘s gain. As the Gannett-owned week daily announced a plunge in daily circulation figures earlier this week, the Journal reported a year-over-year increase of .8%, making it the top-circulating US daily. The shift in industry leadership has more to do with accounting practices than actual leadership habits. USA Today attributed much of its circulation plunged to Marriott’s decision to stop distributing the paper free to all guests in its hotels. Meanwhile, changes in Audit Bureau of Control rules now permit the Journal to count more of its deeply discounted copies as legitimate circulation.

“We bought BusinessWeek to invest in it,” says Bloomberg Chief Content Officer Norm Pearlstine in an interview with PaidContent.org. The former Wall Street Journal and Time, Inc. executive says Bloomberg did have some reservations prior to its blockbuster acquisition of the struggling newsweekly, which was announced earlier this week, but that the financial publisher sees BusinessWeek as a tool to expand its reach into the executive suite. Bloomberg intends to invest in the magazine’s editorial staff and become a “true newsweekly,” meaning 52 issues a year and no games during slow times. Paid content.org has a history of the BusinessWeek sale in links.

Huffington Post is doing some pretty creative stuff with customization, reports Zach Seward on the Nieman Journalism Lab. It’s 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. Huffington Post is also toying with the idea of regional versions of its homepage that would serve up, for example, a different menu of stories to the lunchtime crowd in New York than to people just arriving at their workplace in Los Angeles.

After years of cutbacks and sales declines, the Dallas Morning News is fighting back by raising subscription prices and investing in better journalism. The seven-day home delivery rate just jumped 43%, making the Morning News one of the US’s most expensive metro dailies. The paper has also added pages, increased local news and sports coverage, expanded its recipe section and introduced a new feature in the business section. And it’s looking to hire five reporters. “We need it to continue to be profitable so that we have the funds to invest to make the transition…to digital,” says publisher Jim Moroney.

If you’re using WordPress for your blog (and who isn’t these days?) then be sure to check out this list of 85 WordPress plug-ins for blogging journalists. They include gems like BackType Connect, which pulls comments posted about you on other social media sites into your own pages, and Global Translator, which translates entries into 34 different languages. We’ll include a plug here for Apture, a utility that makes it drop-dead simple to insert links and media into posts without going through the tedious download and upload process. See our ham-handed application of Apture in the Wikipedia clip above. We’re still learning.

And Finally…

Ninety-three percent of all newspaper sales “can now be attributed to kidnappers seeking to prove the day’s date in filmed ransom demands,” reports The Onion in a hilarious spoof on the industry downturn. It seems that evildoers just can’t get enough of “the smell of ink coupled with the mildew odor of a windowless basement.” Publishers are seizing the opportunity to cater to this influential audience by targeting advertorials and special sections devoted to ski masks, abandoned warehouses and industrial meat freezers.