…and they were optimistic.  McClatchy dumped water today on an already soggy earnings parade by checking in with a loss of $37.5 million, or 45 cents per share, for the first quarter. Excluding one-time charges, McClatchy said it lost $22.9 million, or 28 cents a share. Analysts had projected a loss of 11 cents.

The results are way down from a quarterly loss of $849,000 a year ago. What may be worse is that the company’s revenue fell to $365.6 million, down nearly $66 million from a year ago and well below analysts’ consensus expectations of $391 million.

The only good news is that McClatchy said it remained in compliance with debt obligations, which means it isn’t in danger of bankruptcy at the moment. They’re debating what this means at McClatchy Watch.

The New York Times Co., which is struggling just to hold its business together, reported a loss in the first quarter as advertising revenues dropped a sickening 27%. The only good news is that the company delayed some debt payments and the CEO said there are signs that ad spending might increase in the third quarter.

The company’s performance dramatically undershot Wall Street estimates, where analysts were expecting a loss of 3 to 6 cents a share. The actual operating loss was 34 cents. Even online revenue, which was traditionally been a bright spot, was down 5.6%.

Media General also disappointed the few analysts who continue to follow the company, reporting an operating loss of 77 cents a share on an 18% drop in revenue. One analyst had pegged the likely loss at 5 cents a share on revenues of $180 million. Actual sales were a little under $160 million.

Moody’s has downgraded Gannett Co. yet again. The agency lowered its rating of the publisher into junk territory earlier this year and has since lowered it again. Now Moody’s says Gannett may not have the necessary profits to meet the terms of one of its debt convenants. Gannett logged a 60% drop in profit on an 18% slide in revenue in its most recent earnings report.

And there are more earnings still to come.

Specialty Publishers Hold Their Own

The 10,000-circulation weekly Jackson County (Mo.) Advocate focuses on serving its own neighborhood and it’s doing just fine, thank you. Sure, its four-person staff works long hours to produce the weekly, but employees will also stop to talk with residents who stop by the office because that’s where the best stories come from. Like the local man who found an image of the Virgin Mary on a rock in his back yard. “You never know who’s going to come through the front door,” says Editor Andrea Wood, who’s interviewed in this five-minute report by local radio station KCUR. “We’ve done stories about people who had grown freakishly large pears. It’s about the community.”

Wood says the turmoil that’s killing large metro newspapers isn’t hitting hyper-local titles nearly as hard. “This industry is stable,” she says. “People use the [community newspaper] for scrapbooks. You’re never going to get that from the Internet.” Local businesses are also more stable and loyal advertisers.

The Advocate competes with the Kansas City Star, which has been cutting back local news coverage. That appears to be helping the Advocate. Circulation is growing and now tops 10,000 subscribers. The Star no longer sends reporters to cover local government meetings, leaving the Advocate as the main source of information about their community.

Further to the west, where the industry downturn has been very bad to the local newspaper industry, a veteran publisher of Chinese-language papers has actually started a new one. Brian Ho launched News for Chinese, a free monthly, just one month after the financial crisis hit. He admits that his motivations were unconventional: He got a great deal on real estate and started the business to keep the offices occupied while the market recovers. Nevertheless, local advertising has picked up nicely and, while he still isn’t making a profit, Ho says that may be in the cards. “If my newspaper can earn a small profit to support my employees, I will consider that as a success.”

Awaiting New Owner, Union-Tribune Frets About Its Politics

Alf Landon

Voice of San Diego reports on a conundrum at the Union-Tribune: it doesn’t know whether it’s conservative or liberal any more. The U-T has leaned to the right going back to 1936, when it endorsed Alf Landon for president even as Franklin Roosevelt won 62% of the vote. New owner Platinum Equity has no clear political bias. Its chief partner gave $20,000 to the McCain campaign, but the partner who has the most experience running newspapers seems to prefer Democrats. Also, Platinum is based in Los Angeles, causing some locals to worry that the owners won’t care about local politics. That could tip the balance of elections, since observers figure the newspaper’s endorsements typically deliver a 3-5% edge to candidates, who tend to be conservative. It will tip the balance even more if the new owners decide to adopt a liberal bias.

J-School Enrollments Soar As Jobs Vanish

Alana Taylor is an NYU journalism major who’s doing everything right, yet “I have no idea what I am going to do when I graduate,” she writes on MediaShift. The college junior has 4,000 Twitter followers, lots of professional connections on LinkedIn and a well-established personal brand, but the jobs just don’t appear to be out there. She interviews industry experts (including us) and gets discouraging news: working for a daily is a non-starter because many papers are going under and even the survivors aren’t paying a living wage. Starting a business is impractical in this economy. About the only hope for employment is to hook on with an Internet company and hope for the best.

Nevertheless, J-school enrollments are at an all-time high, which prompts BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy to ask “What are these people thinking?” Lacy writes on TechCrunch that her lack of journalism training made her a more successful journalist. “I don’t know how to write an inverted pyramid story or even really what that is. I do know how to write for different platforms, be scrappy and break news. I’ve had zero important alum connections and never got an internship at a big daily. And, in hindsight, that’s probably the greatest stroke of luck I could have had.”

Being free of the hidebound expectations of an irrelevant journalism style has freed her to adapt her reporting style to the new standards of the Web, she writes. In contrast, her friends who went to J-school found that the experience delivered no career value. In fact, it embedded habits that are proving to be liabilities in the free-form style of the Web.

Miscellany

This year’s Pulitzer Prize for local reporting goes to Paul Giblin (no relation), who teamed with Ryan Gabrielson for a five-part series in the East Valley Tribune about a local Sheriff’s questionable obsession with immigration enforcement. Unfortunately, the honor will be bittersweet for the Tribune, which laid off Giblin when it cut back to four-days-a-week last October. Jeff Bercovici notes the irony, and catches up with the Tribune’s publisher, who issues a rather embarrassing comment about winning journalism’s top prize:  “I don’t think [Giblin’s dismissal] diminishes at all, frankly, the excellent work they did on that project.”

Unions in San Francisco continue to strike a remarkably agreeable attitude toward Hearst’s demands that they help reduce expenses at the Chronicle by $50 million or face shutdown of the paper. The union representing delivery truck drivers agreed to let the paper cut between 90 and 100 driver positions by hiring subcontractors for home delivery. In return,  the drivers keep the right to deliver papers within the city limits. Annual savings are expected to top $5 million.

The Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise has reportedly laid off an unspecified number of employees. No word on body counts, but Gary Scott lists the names of 14 reporters and editors whom he believes got the ax.

The New York Times’ Tom Zeller takes issue with Marriott’s recent decision to cut out delivery of newspapers to its hotel rooms because of environmental concerns. Assuming that guests are turning more to their laptops and PDAs for the news, Zeller wonders if the decision doesn’t actually increase carbon emissions. He finds evidence that in countries that produce most of their power from fossil fuels, a 30-minute snuggle with the newspaper is actually less damaging to the environment than a PDA power-read. Of course, you have to take into account the cost of delivery, the impact of logging trees for paper, etc. It’s all very complex.

Columnists are supposed to be controversial, and you have to give media critic and Newser exec Michael Wolff credit for stirring up controversy with his forecast that 80% of newspapers will die within 18 months. You also have to give media veteran Martin Langeveld credit for injecting reality into that outrageous comment. Langeveld pulls out his calculator and notes that for Wolff to be correct, two newspapers would have to close ever day for the next year-and-a-half. Sometimes mathematics is a great tool.

And Finally…

The 31 newly laid-off employees at the Raleigh News & Observer decided to poke some rather vicious fun at the newspaper’s owner. They mocked up a front page comparing McClatchy to the Titanic, which sank 97 years and one week ago. The parody portrays McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt as a happy-go-lucky ship captain who sees the icebergs coming but figures his ship will simply strike them a glancing blow and use the ice fragments for cocktails. “She was welded together from the hulls of several old steamships, including a leaky tub called the RMS Knight Ridder,” they write. You can download a PDF of the mock front page here.

New media enterprises are rising out of the ashes of their collapsed predecessors.

Sportswriter Sam Adams is one of several INDenver Times staff who introduce the new site on video

A group of 30 former Rocky Mountain News staffers has launched INDenverTimes, a professional-looking news site that aims to cover local news, sports, business, arts and entertainment, along with “a Denver perspective on national news.” The venture will take a novel approach to subscriptions when it begins charging for premium access in two weeks. Paid subscribers will get “access to the INsider Channel where you can have a direct, real time conversations with our editors and writers…from 10 am to 5 pm every weekday.” The channel will also go live if breaking news happens at other times of the day.

In its first month, the operation recorded 70,000 unique visitors and more than 311,000 page views, or about as much traffic as a top-500 blog. Funded by entrepreneurs Kevin Preblud, Brad Gray and Ben Ray “three Denver entrepreneurs” (we’re trying to get their names), the venture has a hybrid revenue model and has recruited an impressive list of writers and business-side executives. The site also looks clean and well-organized. Believe it or not, this venture is running on WordPress, the same content management system that powers this blog. They’re just doing a lot more with it.

Also, some former Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers have launched a nonprofit online newspaper with regional coverage. Seattle PostGlobe is basically a multi-author blog that covers news, sports, lifestyles and opinion. It’s very early-stage and looks it, but we’ll keep an eye on this bootstrapped operation as it gets its sea legs.

Street Brawl in Boston

The Boston Globe, evidently tired of all the razzing it was getting about its threatened shutdown, fires a return volley at crosstown rival Boston Herald. Weekday circulation at the Herald is off 38% in the last decade and the newsroom staff has been cut by half. Yadda yadda. What’s really interesting about this story is a comment posted by Tom Mashberg, the Herald Sunday editor who’s quoted in the piece. Mashberg reprints part of an e-mail sent to him by reporter Keith O’Brien in which O’Brien outlines plans to include Mashberg’s comments about the Globe‘s perilous situation that don’t appear in the story. He also notes that the fact that the Herald is actually profitable isn’t mentioned, either, despite a lengthy discussion about what the Herald is doing to survive. “Looks like the editors got hold of this and turned it into a hatchet job,” he says.

Jules Crittendon, a Herald editor, minces no words telling what he thinks of the Globe story and the Globe in general. “One Herald reporter is worth something like 5 to 10 Globies, for all their inflated sense of self-worth,” he writes. And he’s just getting started. Crittendon rips the Globe for a self-important attitude, lazy reporters, layers of redundant management, endless story lengths and on an on. If you hate the Globe to begin with, his blog entry will warm your heart.

The Globe‘s negotiations with its unions continue to be rancorous. The Newspaper Guild now says it will negotiate concessions related directly to cost cuts, but won’t talk about issues like the elimination of lifetime job guarantees for about 190 veterans and the end of seniority rules in layoffs. The Guild is also calling for negotiations to be performed in public and says it wants to deal directly with any potential acquirer on the cost-cut issue. The union’s defiance is a marked contrast to the relatively quick work the San Francisco Chronicle‘s unions made of Hearst’s demands to cut costs. By the way, Globe managers are feeling some of the pain, too. Bonuses have been eliminated for this year, affecting more than 200 people, including the publisher.

Government Bailout for News Infrstructure

Mark Cooper suggests a hybrid approach to saving quality journalism: a “media stimulus package” that could give new localized news services a platform upon which to build profitable businesses. ” Just as IT health and education funds seek to build a new infrastructure for public service in their areas, IT media funding can build infrastructure in the journalism space,” writes Cooper, who is a fellow at the  Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University.

Summarizing his argument on Huffington Post (a fuller discussion is here) Cooper notes that major metro dailies are being hit hardest by changes in reader and advertiser behavior because they need to be all things to all people. Although most major metros have discarded much of their national and international coverage, they’re still forced to do too much with too few resources. Shoring up these doomed businesses isn’t the answer, Cooper says. Instead, we should look to the existing media models “that are closest to the emerging citizen-media, like public governmental and educational cable channels on the TV side and low-power FM on the radio side.” These media have long been under-funded, but they have the best chance of molding their models to the new participatory journalism. As long as the US is pouring $1.6 trillion into broken banks, how about a few billion to lay the foundation for a new media infrastructure?

Uh-Oh. It’s Earnings Time

Gannett kicked off the earnings parade, which looks to be more of a funeral procession this year, announcing a60% drop in profit on an 18% slide in revenue. Bad as the numbers were, Gannett’s operating profits actually beat analysts’ expectations by a penny. They also weren’t as bad as the 30% declines expected by some analystsquoted in The New York Times last week.  Those analysts mostly agree that this is a 100-year flood for the industry with the combination of recessionary pressures, catastrophic business problems in some key advertising segments and rising paper and fuel costs sending many publishers into the red. They also agree that more papers are likely to close this year. The revenue plunge isn’t hurting small newspapers and broadcast outlets quite as hard, but even they are expecting double-digit declines.

And it isn’t just newspapers. “Magazines collectively recorded a 25.9 percent plunge in ad pages in the first quarter, with revenue falling 20.2 percent,” says Seeking Alpha’s Jeff Bercovici. ZenithOptimedia is projecting the worst declines in ad spending since it started keeping statistics in 1980: overall US spending down 8.7% with newspapers down 12% and magazines down 11%.

Miscellany

In a sign of the times, the world’s largest maker of newsprint has filed for bankruptcy protection. Abitibi-Bowater, which was formed from a 2007 merger, is struggling to pay $8.78 billion in debt. Even though the Canadian company controls 45% of the North American-based newsprint market, a steep drop in demand has slammed its business. The company has already cut paper production 25% this year. Its 25 pulp and paper mills and 30 wood products plants will continue to operate for now, but some are likely to close as part of the restructuring.

Employment levels in American newsrooms are now lower than they’ve been in more than 25 years, the American Society of Newspaper Editors reports.  The industry shed a record 5,900 jobs last year, more than double the previous record of 2,400 eliminated in 2007. Erica Smith pegs the number much higher at nearly 16,000 reported layoffs in 2008. Employment levels are now comparable to those from the early 1980s. The good news (we guess): there was a 21% rise in online-only journalists last year, to 2,300. Incidentally, the American newsroom remains mostly white: Minorities make up 13.4% of the workforce and 450 newspapers employ no minorities at all.

More people still rely on newspapers for their news than on the Internet, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Parade Publications and published by the Newspaper Project. The study of 1,004 US adults also found that 90% of Americans rely on printed or online newspapers for their news and that newspapers are the only medium used more for local than for national news. The research confirms what most people already know: newspapers are important news sources. It doesn’t cast any light on the real problem, though, which is how to create a business model for them that works.

Sam Zell now admits that his highly leveraged 2007 purchase of Tribune Co. was a mistake. For some reason, several news outlets thought this was newsworthy. Zell is always good for a quote, though: Commenting on the prospect of finding a merger partner for his bankrupt company, Zell said, “That’s like asking someone in another business if they want to get vaccinated with a live virus.”

The Orlando Sentinel laid off 50 people last week and didn’t announce it, according to an anonymous comment on this Chicago Tribune story. The person is right that there was no announcement, but we couldn’t confirm the layoffs.

The New York Times is cutting and consolidating some sections in order to save money. Gone are Escapes, a travel guide published on Fridays, as well as Sunday sections that only go to readers in the New York metropolitan area. They’ll be combined into a new Sunday section featuring regional information. Fashion coverage is axed from the weekly magazine and the guide to each day’s newspaper will be consolidated into a single page.

And Finally…

A reader in upstate New York reports on this example of an over-eager, and ultimately failed, Albany Times Union promotion:

I only wanted Sunday’s paper but then they started delivering Thursday and Saturday for free.

When I tried to stop the free Thursday and Saturday papers, they offered me the whole rest of the week for free. I said no, I only wanted Sunday. They said okay and for a while I only got Sunday deliveries, but then I started getting Thursday and Saturday again. I figured it had something to do with local ads on those days but it still annoyed me.

I was so frustrated that I decided to stop delivery altogether. That’s when I was told “You don’t want to put your paper carrier out of a job do you?”  And then they offered me a totally free subscription seven days a week for three months. I didn’t accept it. I just wanted them to stop delivering free papers that I didn’t have time to read and was just throwing out.

So the irony of the whole thing is that because they kept sending me free papers, they lost me as a customer.”

“Gannett Co., the largest U.S. newspaper publisher by circulation, reports earnings on Thursday, kicking off what is expected to be the ugliest quarter in recent memory for the industry,” says The Wall Street Journal in a blunt assessment of the coming earnings season. USA Today is expected to take it on the chin when Gannett announces its results. Forthcoming numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations are expected to show a six-month decline of about 100,000 in USA Today‘s 2.3-million circulation, largely as a result of lower occupancy in hotels.  Free hotel distribution accounts for more than half of the paper’s 2.3 million circulation.

Adding to USA Today‘s woes is Marriott’s decision to make room delivery of newspapers optional. Citing environmental concerns, the hotel chain said it will now offer guests a choice of papers or no paper at all, if they so choose.  Declining readership was also a factor in the decision, which will reduce daily circulation by about 50,000 across the US.  One quarter of travelers didn’t even crack open the newspaper that was delivered to their doorstep, a spokeswoman said.

Ugly Spat Over LA Times‘ Front-Page Ad

An internal battle of the Los Angeles Times over the publisher’s decision to run a front-page ad resembling news story highlights growing tension between editors and publishers as the industry revenue woes deepen.  The ad ran last Thursday below the fold in a position and typeface that some people believe could be mistaken for a news story (left). Charles Apple has an image of the entire front page. In an interview with TheWrap, LA Times executive editor John Arthur called the ad “horrible” and “a mistake.” However, the VP for entertainment advertising at the paper said Arthur’s boss, editor Russ Stanton, “approved both advertorial units.”

Not so, says Stanton, who told the Times’ own reporter that the ad ran over his objections. “There is not an editor in this nation — including me — who really wants to see something like that on the front page of his or her publication,” Stanton said. Publisher Eddy Hartenstein said he made the decision to run the ad because of the perilous financial situation at the newspaper. “I’m just trying to keep the lights on here, folks,” he told an angry newsroom last week.

Barriers to front-page advertising have been falling recently as publishers struggle to get creative. The New York Timesshattered tradition in January with a front-page strip ad for CBS and the Boston Globe followed suit just two weeks later.

Miscellany

Newspaper executives like to point out that their total readership — including the Web — is bigger than ever.  However, online ad revenue is still growing more slowly than the market as a whole, according to Alan Mutter.  The most alarming recent statistic: “Interactive revenues for newspapers dropped by 1.8% in 2008 to $3.1 billion at the same time overall online ad sales in the United States surged 10.4% to a record $23.4 billion,” Mutter writes. What’s more, newspapers’ online ad revenues today are 13.3% of the overall market, the lowest share ever.  Mutter suggests that the culprit is newspapers’ practice of up-selling print advertisers with discounted online campaigns, a strategy that grows weaker as print sales decline.  Publishers need to develop sites that look more like the Web and less like digital versions of their print products, he advises.

The Chicago Tribune is cutting another 20% of its already depleted newsroom staff. The paper didn’t say how many employees are left in the newsroom, but there were about 440 as of the most recent layoffs in February. The paper is also reorganizing some production groups, merging copy editing, page design, graphics, imaging and some photo editing into a single department.

Writing on Slate, Jack Shafer takes on joint operating agreements as the great sucking sound that weakened the newspaper industry.  “The tragedy of the joint operating agreements is that instead of making the stronger paper stronger, the arrangement tends to weaken it,” he says, pointing to the San Francisco Chronicle as the poster child example. “Had the Chronicle and the Examiner been forced to compete on the business side in 1965 instead of to collaborate, a clear victor would have a fighting chance at surviving in today’s environment.” Instead, the Chronicle was forced to support the weaker Examiner to the point that both papers were worse off.

The Gannett-owned Observer & Eccentric Newspapers will cease publication of five print and Web editions of the Eccentric chain in suburban Detroit on May 31. Gone are the Birmingham, West Bloomfield, Troy and Rochester editions of the Eccentric. Two other newspapers will be merged into the South Oakland Eccentric, serving nearby communities. The consolidation will result in the loss of 44 jobs.

The Huffington Post has published a terse set of editorial guidelines, demonstrating that the standards being applied to citizens journalists don’t differ all that much from those practiced by mainstream media.

And Finally…

Is that a penguin on the telly? Well, a few penguins, actually, but click the image to see the truly awesome spectacle of what happens when penguins congregate. This is one of the photos on Incredimazing, a website devoted to collecting bizarre images submitted by people like you and me. If you want to scramble your brain, check out the M.C. Escher car.

The New York Times Company shocked the newspaper industry last week with its threats close the Boston Globe on May 1 unless Globe unions give back $20 million in concessions.  There’s new evidence that the May 1 date is a bluff and that closing down the Globe could cost the Times more than keeping it in business.

The Newspaper Guild is taking an initially defiant stance on the Times’ request that the union shoulder half of the $20 million in targeted cost savings. “We’re willing to consider some concessions but not the draconian amount they put forth,” said union president Daniel Totten, in an apparent call of the Times’ bluff. He also characterized the Times’s demand for freedom to lay off people without regards to seniority as “a nonstarter.” Globe reporter Scott Allen, who has a lifetime employment guarantee, commented “Now, nobody thinks that if we make these concessions, there won’t be more cuts in a few months.” Yes, Scott, we think you can count on that when the paper is losing $85 million a year.

The very act of closing the paper would trigger huge expenses in itself. The Boston Herald analyzed public records and found that union members could be entitled to up to 50 weeks of severance pay and that underfunded pension liabilities could swell the total cost to more than $100 million.  Contractual obligations also make the Globe a tough property to sell, since few buyers would want to assume open-ended liabilities like the lifetime employment pledges to 435 employees.  The only way to cancel the guarantees, apparently, is to close down the paper.

If the Times Co. plans to carry forward with its threats, it has yet to tell the government. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) act requires most employers with more than 100 employees to give 60 days’ notice of plant closings and mass layoffs.  The Times Co. hasn’t yet filed a WARN notice, although it could still shutter the paper and pay employees for 60 days thereafter.

The Globe is raising its newsstand prices by as much as 60% in a gamble that readers will help pick up some of the bill for keeping the paper afloat. Residents outside of Boston will now pay $4 for a Sunday paper, compared to the current $2.50.

The Globe‘s crosstown rival Herald, which can barely disguise its glee in covering this story, also reports that four Guild leaders and six governing board executives are among those with lifetime job guarantees. Those guarantees are one of the biggest obstacles to selling the paper and are a primary negotiating point between the Times Co and the Globe unions.  The guarantees are causing friction within Newspaper Guild ranks, as some members believe that the leadership will be unwilling to negotiate in good faith out of fear of losing their jobs.

The Herald’s rapacious columnist, Howie Carr (left), skewers his blue-blooded competition for a series of past errors provoked by lapses in judgment.  Too bad there are no hyperlinks; it would’ve been nice to read the background on this stuff.

Meanwhile, the Globe itself notes a trend: newspaper owners are increasingly using the threat of closure to extract concessions from their unions. Hearst’s success in gaining significant givebacks from the union in order to keep the San Francisco Chronicle afloat may have prompted the Times Co. to threaten the Globe with oblivion. Also, Members of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild in Seattle were scheduled to vote this week on accepting a wage freeze and two weeks of unpaid furloughs in exchange for keeping the Seattle Times afloat. A similar holdup is going on in Maine. Could it be that newspaper owners are merely posturing in order to gain concessions from the unions? Nah, they both have the higher goal of quality journalism in mind.

Is AP Worst Content Thief?

A new blog called The Future Of Newspapers features a guest column by veteran Denver sports writer Dave Krieger that poses a curious question: How can the Associated Press proposed to champion the intellectual property rights of newspapers when the AP is itself the worst violator of those rights? Krieger notes that readers don’t make a distinction between the source of information and where they consume it. News from the Denver Post that appears on ESPN.com is presumed to be from ESPN.

“Why should any newspaper in the Internet age be a member of an organization that takes that paper’s original material, rewrites it and distributes it around the world without attribution or compensation? In fact, an organization that charges the newspaper for the privilege?” The AP had some utility when newspapers were expected to provide national and international coverage, but obligation is gone now.  For most metro dailies, the AP is nothing more than a subscription service that pirates their content and distributes it free on the Internet.  He has a point.

Miscellany

Executives might want to look at what’s going on at the Virginian-Pilot, where management reports that the financial outlook is brightening even as it lays off another 40 employees.  The company has cut nearly 20% of its workforce in the past year and reduced its newsroom staff by 30% since early 2007, but it has also taken some initiatives to diversify and grow revenue. These include targeted websites, expansion of entertainment coverage and contracts to deliver national newspapers in its region. While print revenue continues to fall, management said online revenue is growing. The newspaper turned a profit in the first quarter and March was its best month in a year.

Boston University’s newspaper asks three journalists-turned -academics if university partnerships could be a solution to newspapers’ financial troubles.  They agree that university endowments could be an important source of support for failing journalist enterprises and that universities have a duty to support worthy cultural and public service institutions.  However, educational institutions are not known for acting quickly and trustees would probably balk at taking on financial liabilities as daunting a complex as those that the industry faces.

Rosa Brooks fires a parting shot in her swan song as a Los Angeles Times columnist. She’s going to the Pentagon as advisor to the undersecretary of Defense for policy, but she fears that the evisceration of her industry will leave the American public wanting. She “can’t imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the news industry has more or less collapsed.” Brooks believes that the government must step up to the plate and subsidize journalism, which isn’t the same as subsidizing media. The problem with existing subsidies is that they “have actually contributed to the decline of high-quality journalism by enabling monopolies, freezing out smaller and locally controlled media outlets and encouraging large corporations to treat the news as just another product,” she writes. The issue isn’t how to save the media, but how to save quality.

The Reno (Nev.) Gazette-Journal is laying off 35 people, or about 10 percent of its workforce, and closing a weekly paper in Carson City. These are in addition to 61 other positions eliminated since December.  Do the math, and the paper has cut almost 25% of its workforce in the last four months.

Veteran newsman Ric Cox has launched a blog called “Save Our Tribune” that’s dedicated to “rescuing Chicago’s leading newspaper.”  In one of his initial posts, he suggests ways that the Tribune can make online subscriptions palatable to users who are accustomed to getting news for free.

And Finally…

Some residents of Omaha, Neb. have created a satirical website to celebrate “Totally bogus news from the mid-heartland.”  The principal target of its barbs is the Omaha World Herald, “which has laid off employees twice (usually after throwing an extravagant party for an ex-publisher), cut back circulation, and now runs obits where it used to run op-eds,” according to a promotional message. One of the early posts notes the possibility that the state may create a precedent in capital punishment due to a typographical error. “The state might be replacing the electric chair with ‘lethal infection’ rather than the intended ‘lethal injection,'” the editors write, noting that some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee actually like the idea. One of them “added an elegant provision permitting the use of a piece of rusty barbed wire to begin the process and inject the pathogens,” says the site.

McClatchy Co. CEO Gary Pruitt addressed the Newspaper Association of America’s annual convention on Monday. Here are his remarks, courtesy of the NAA.
Each year at McClatchy’s shareholders meeting, we conclude with a video highlighting the work of our photojournalists over the past year. I pick a song that I think speaks to the year and we set the photographs to the music. This year, I wasn’t sure which song to choose. I like the Rolling Stones, and they have several songs that fit our current economic environment:

• “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” of course. But also consider …
• “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”
• “19th Nervous Breakdown”
• “Shattered” and
• “Gimme Shelter”

But I really don’t feel fatalistic. I speak to you this morning with a strong sense of resolve and hope. We have a serious fight on our hands, but I believe we are up to it. So I thought it more appropriate to select a battle song for this year’s video – the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to be specific – as we fight to ensure that truth does indeed go marching on. See what you think …. (Plays DVD)

Public Service Mandate

I came to newspapers not as a journalist or a businessman but as a First Amendment lawyer from Berkeley, California. So as you might expect, I’m passionate about free speech and a free press. I believe in the idea – and the ideal – that newspapers should provide high quality public service journalism so that the public can fully participate in democracy. This is not just some abstract concept. There is emerging empirical evidence to support the important relationship between democracy and the press.
A study published in The Journal of Law, Economics and Organization in 2003 looked at the per capita circulation of newspapers in different countries around the world and among the states in our own country. The study found that the lower the circulation, the greater the political corruption. Of course, the First Amendment isn’t a business model. Making the case that we’re important to society – proving it, even – does not guarantee our success. It just means the stakes are high. It is up to us to devise a business model that will sustain quality, public service journalism.
Our critics and the naysayers aren’t going to do it. This is the challenge before us. So while there were easier times to lead newspapers, there has never been a more important time.
Future generations will judge how we do. Or, as Abraham Lincoln said so eloquently in 1862 during an even more historic fight: “We can not escape history … The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.”

Competitive History

I think history has much to teach us. As Mark Twain said, “History may not repeat itself but it does rhyme a lot.” Newspapering, for much of its history, was a fiercely competitive, rough-and-tumble, dog-eat-dog, low-margin business.
Consider The Sacramento Bee. In the first 30 years of its life, from 1857 to 1887, 80 newspapers came and went in the Sacramento market. That was a tough business. The number of daily newspapers in the United States peaked in the early part of the 20th century. There have never been more newspapers before or since.
Not coincidentally, that same time period witnessed the birth of a new medium — commercial radio. First radio and then television emerged, taking share from existing media, namely newspapers. Many people predicted newspapers would go out of business – and many did. So many, in fact, that by the second half of the 20th century, all but the largest cities in the United States had only one daily newspaper. And then a funny thing happened. Those successful, scrappy, surviving newspapers got rich because there was no other print or classified advertising competition. It’s a noteworthy paradox that the development of radio and TV ultimately led to the enrichment of newspapers.
For the first time in the history of newspapers, profit margins exploded and newspapering became an easy and lucrative business. Warren Buffett once said: “You want to invest in a business that even your stupid cousin could run, because one day he will.” That was the newspaper business in the second half of the 20th century. As newspapers’ profit margins grew, so did their cost structures. Ah, but we were so much older then; we’re younger than that now.

New Disruption

The Golden Age of newspapering wasn’t to last. With the maturation of the Internet over the past decade, a new medium has emerged, a virulent competitor again taking advertising share from all existing media, especially share of classified advertising. The Internet’s impact has been particularly disruptive at large metro papers with their higher cost structures and greater dependence on classified advertising.
Some of our critics seem to think newspapers were blindsided by the Internet’s potential impact. But we deserve credit for the considerable progress we’ve made online. The U.S. newspaper industry generated $3 billion in digital revenue last year. At McClatchy, 15% of our advertising revenue today comes from online.
McClatchy, a company founded before the advent of electric lights, will generate nearly $200 million dollars in digital revenue this year at a higher profit margin than our print business. Our digital revenue and online audience grew by double digits last year and, we operate the leading local internet business in each of our daily newspaper markets.
None of which is to say this transition is easy or that we haven’t made mistakes along the way. Secular transitions are always disruptive and painful for all media — what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “the creative destruction of capitalism.”

Working On It

My point is that newspaper companies, to varying degrees, were working their way through it, difficult as it was. The game-changer was the arrival of the deepest and most painful recession in generations. It’s the combination of the secular shift and the cyclical downturn that has created a very real crisis for newspapers.
Many of our critics conflate the secular and the cyclical. They see the revenue declines brought about by the recession as proof we can’t weather the secular transition. This leads to the wrong, but increasingly popular conclusion, that there’s no viable future for newspaper companies.

Absolutely we’ve got a future. But just what does it look like and how do we hurry up and get there? Alan Kay, the visionary computer scientist, once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” That’s where we are today. It’s up to us to invent that future.
There is no silver bullet. There are no easy answers. And, sadly, as we have seen already, not every newspaper will make it. But here is what I see going forward:

Reinvention

Print remains viable now and into the future. Most newspapers today are profitable even in the depths of this crippling recession. More than 100 million adults in the United States read a printed newspaper every day – more than watched the Super Bowl. As troubled as the U.S. economy is, if 100 million consumers want and use something, that product usually doesn’t go away.
Sixty-one percent of 18 to 34-year-olds read a newspaper in an average week. So much for the notion that younger people don’t read newspapers.
Despite all these positives, newspapers alone are not enough. Our future depends on becoming successful hybrid media companies – fully engaged and vested in digital publishing and digital platforms as we have been historically with print. This isn’t breaking news. In the month of January, 44 percent of all U.S. internet users visited a newspaper website. And audience growth at newspaper websites is outpacing overall U.S. internet audience growth.
So we’ve been moving in this digital direction for some time – but we need to accelerate the pace and sharpen our focus. We need to establish our brands and offer our services on many different platforms. We need to leverage social media, mobile technology and the web’s interactivity as our communities and customers change how they acquire and share information.
This economic downturn makes it difficult to take risks, but we need to experiment smartly and partner where it makes sense. We need to learn from our mistakes, adjust and move on. Let’s listen to our audience and our advertisers – not conventional wisdom.

Transform the Business

The same technology that challenges us on the revenue side offers savings on the expense side through centralization, collaboration and outsourcing. We must continue to shed those legacy, 20th century, monopoly cost structures that weigh us down, limit our flexibility, jeopardize our health.
Think of the newspaper company of the future as an athlete – lean, fit and trim, yet muscular where we need to be. We need to ensure strength in our newsrooms and advertising sales staffs – our two most powerful assets, our core competencies and our social responsibility. Even today, with all the downsizing across our industry, we have the largest newsgathering operations in our markets by far. No other local media outlet is as well equipped to produce and deliver the high value, premium local content that’s growing our total audience in print and online. And we know that audience growth remains the best predictor of long-term success for any medium.
While we’ve done a good job growing audience, we need to do a better job of leveraging our sales forces. We must empower our sales staffs to sell our full portfolio of print and digital products – giving them the right tools, training and incentives. Also, think of the possibilities of harnessing that large, local sales staff to sell on behalf of others and share revenues. The untapped potential of local digital advertising in each of our markets is why internet giants like Yahoo and Google seek partnerships with newspapers. We need to mine that local digital revenue stream. We can’t afford to fumble the opportunity.
Lastly, we need to accept the reality that we’re in a tougher, more competitive business, now and forever. Ours is a business that’s still viable and vital – just with a smaller margin for profits and a smaller margin for error. Let’s appreciate how lucky we are to work in the media business in this critical time of transition. Our actions count. No unbearable lightness of being here. The ball is in our hands and the game is on the line.

I’d like to leave you this morning with a bit of inspiration from Bob Dylan and his song “Silvio.” Although written more than 20 years ago now, I think Dylan’s lyrics speak to the newspaper industry today:

Stake my future on a hell of a past
Looks like tomorrow is coming on fast
Ain’t complaining ’bout what I got
Seen better times, but who has not?

Vanity Fair uses a lot of words to describe Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. in its 11,000-word profile of the New York Times Co. chairman, but “complex” isn’t one of them. That isn’t to say that Sulzberger isn’t bright. It’s just that he appears to be ill-suited to cope with business problems that are swamping executives with far more business savvy and seasoning.

Mark Bowden’s profile is sympathetic, even moving in places, but it won’t put shareholders of the New York Times Co. at ease. Sulzberger, who is the fourth member of his family to run the company, is clearly a hard-working, well-meaning, engaging man. When he assumed stewardship of the company in the late 1990s, he saw his job as being to keep the ship on course. That worked well until tectonic shifts began reshaping the business began around 2001. Since then, we get the sense that Sulzberger has been way out of his league.

“The Sulzbergers embody one of the newsroom’s most cherished myths: Journalism sells,” Bowden writes. “But as a general principle, it simply isn’t true. Rather: Advertising sells, journalism costs.” The Sulzberger family has always operated on the principle that investing in a quality product will lead to business success, and Sulzberger has perpetuated that value in the face of recent overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Throughout his 20-year tenure at the Times, he has concentrated his investments in traditional media like the Boston Globe while demonstrating almost blithe ignorance of the changing publishing landscape.

Agnostic = Indifferent

Bowden homes in on Sulzberger’s famous quote that he is “platform agnostic.” Agnosticism implies lack of commitment, but it also reveals a basic misunderstanding of new media. “When the motion-picture camera was invented, many early filmmakers simply recorded stage plays, as if the camera’s value was just to preserve the theatrical performance and enlarge its audience,” Bowden writes. “The true pioneers realized that the camera was more revolutionary than that. It freed them from the confines of a theater.” So it is with newspapers today. The issue isn’t the platform, but rather the basic approach to news. The Times’ traditional top-down style is less and less meaningful to an audience that wants diversity and immediacy and online revenues simply won’t support a large, vertically integrated organization.

The Times Co. has made a few spot investments in Internet ventures like About.com and its website is arguably the best (and most well-trafficked) of any newspaper in the world. However, these times demand reinvention of the business and the Vanity Fair piece implies that Sulzberger is not the guy to do it. In contrast, it singles out Rupert Murdoch as the company’s most dangerous competitor and potential acquisitor.

Described as a “lightweight” and even “goofy” at one point, Sulzberger is clearly a nice and likable guy but not one given to tough decisions. He is a fan of pop psychology team-building exercises, even though they make his hard-bitten managers groan. And he is prone to risk avoidance. Bowden describes one management offsite exercise in which executives played a game that challenged them to decide between safe choices and higher risk but potentially more rewarding long shots. An employee who had witnessed many groups play the game observed, “This is the most conservative group I have ever seen.”

The Vanity Fair piece doesn’t attempt to cast any new light on the problems facing the newspaper industry; it’s a profile of the man who is perhaps under more pressure than anyone to come up with a solution. This is a complex profile of a man who doesn’t sound very complex. That can’t be good news for the Times.

Miscellany

The Associated Press, which has drawn much scorn from newspapers for its licensing terms, is cutting prices again. At its annual meeting in San Diego, the news cooperative announced $35 million in rate assessment reductions for 2010 on top of $30 million it made this year. The service also said members can now cancel their membership with one year’s notice instead of two. The AP also threatened to “pursue legal and legislative actions” against websites that don’t license news content and that it would track news distributed to members to see if it’s being misused. The AP may be in a better position than any of its member news outlets to actually enforce such a policy and it has the clout to put together a consortium of members to charge for news access if the law permits it.

The AP’s Canadian counterpart, called the Canadian Press, is laying off 25 people, or about 8% of its workforce. The service has been the victim of withdrawals by two of Canada’s largest publishers.

Newsosaur Alan Mutter is so fed up with people dancing on the graves of newspapers that he is banning newspaper-bashing comments from his blog. He can’t resist offering one last example, though.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel laid off 26 full-time and five part-time employees and proposed a third round of buyouts aimed at cutting newsroom staff.

And Finally…

Is this how you’d like your typical reader portrayed? It’s an ad created by the North Carolina Press Association to urge citizens to fight legislation which would allow local governments to post public notices on the Web instead in local newspapers. We don’t know about you, but the ad seems to imply that newspaper readers are old and technophobic (courtesy McClatchy Watch).

Two numbers stood out in Friday’s shocking news that the New York Times Co. was threatening to shut down the Boston Globe: $85 million and 450. The first number is the amount of money the Globe is expected to lose this year without union concessions. The second is the number of employees at the paper who have lifetime-employment contracts. All of those people should be very nervous right now.

The Times Co., which is groaning under $1.1 billion in debt, wants the unions to give up $20 million in concessions or face closure of the 137-year-old Globe, which has dominated the news business in Boston for more than 30 years. Given the size of the projected loss this year, $20 million seems like a modest amount. This would indicate that the Times Co. threat is merely posturing, as Alan Mutter argues. But ultimatums appear to be working in San Francisco, where the union just voted 10-1 to give the Chronicle broad authority to lay off employees without regards to seniority as well as to cut vacation time and extend working hours. The Chronicle and the Globe have similar audience characteristics.

The brass ring for Times negotiators has to be the 450 Globe employees who work under lifetime job guarantees. We knew such guarantees existed, but we hadn’t seen a count of the number of employees who have them until this past Friday; they comprise nearly a third of the unionized workforce. It’s hard to imagine any company handing out promises of that kind, but the Globe did that in 1993, when the economy was emerging from recession and businesses were being conservative about guaranteeing anything. Such management hubris testifies to the dominance the Globe enjoyed at the time over the Boston market, where its only competition is the working-class Herald and a string of suburban dailies.

We live in Globe country and can testify to the paper’s reach in the affluent suburbs. Drive through a quiet subdivision on any Sunday morning and the Globe is the paper you see in the driveways of the $700,000 homes. However, the tech-savvy Boston audience is also more open than most to online alternatives, which is perhaps one reason Boston.com is the sixth largest newspaper website while the Globe reported a circulation decline of more than 10% last November on top of an 8.3% decline six months earlier.

If the 450 employees each cost $100,000 on a fully loaded basis, that’s $45 million in annual costs over which management effectively has no control. We don’t have to comment on the lack of motivation that guaranteed employment must instill in a heavily unionized environment. If we were Times Co. management, though, we’d probably aim the first few blows of the ax directly at that soft middle.

The Globe covers its own news with reaction from community members ranging from fry cooks to U.S. Senators.

College student Adam Sell, who has interned at the Globe for two years, sent us a link to a Flickr photostream he created of the closing of the Globe‘s NorthWest bureau 10 days ago.

Miscellany

Two central Pennsylvania newspapers that have published separately with a single weekly combined edition will join forces on a permanent basis at the end of June. The Intelligencer Journal and Lancaster New Era will be published Monday through Saturday mornings with combined news and features operations but separate editorial pages.  The merger will result in the reduction of 60 full-time and 40 part-time positions, or about 20% of the workforce. Management said the combined circulation of 229,500 has been growing but that the economics of the publishing industry demands changes.

Publishers who are struggling with solutions to the revenue problem, none of them very appetizing, might want to look to Europe for inspiration. The big German publisher Axel Springer just reported record profits and is looking to expand overseas, possibly into the US.  Norway’s VG Nett charges citizens for access to its news through a cable TV subscription fee. And a group of papers in Belgium joined forces to force Google to remove their content from its search results. All in all, some papers in Europe are doing just fine, thanks to tight government partnerships and creative approaches to revenue

The Detroit Media Partnership, which publishes the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, has closed a deal with Plastic Logic to distribute the Plastic Logic Reader under purchase or lease to subscribers of the Detroit dailies as an alternative to paper delivery.  The reader is the size of an 8.5 x 11-in. pad of paper, weighs less than many print magazines and sports a touch-screen interface.

With the Minneapolis Star Tribune in bankruptcy, employees have started a grass-roots effort to save the paper. A group has launched a Facebook group (1,280 members, but only one discussion post since Jan. 17), a website (inactive as of this morning) and plans to hand out paper hats and scorecards at the Twins’ home opener. It’s probably going to take more than that.

If you like Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper, you probably won’t after reading this egotistical, self-indulgent monument to himself. If this is how newspaper columnists regard their own celebrity, it’s no surprise readers are turning elsewhere. But there are a couple of good anecdotes that illustrate how divorced these scribes are from their readers.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt will keynote the Newspaper Association of America national convention in San Diego this week. Schmidt, who is often considered the great Satan by newspaper publishers, has nevertheless been a vocal proponent of the need to help the industry.  It should be an interesting encounter. Schmidt is scheduled to speak on Tuesday at 10 a.m. PDT. You can listen to his remarks live. NAA will offer a moderated “Cover it Live” discussion on its PressimeNow! blog, where visitors can pose questions, share their thoughts and get live reactions from attendees.

The Sun-Times Media Group is considering ending publication of some of its suburban newspapers as it struggles to emerge from its recently declared bankruptcy.

A.H. Belo Corp., owner of the Dallas Morning News and three other daily newspapers, will cut employee salaries next month and suspend a retirement supplement to pension plan participants next year. Cuts will range from 2.5% to 15%, depending on an employee’s salary. The company’s CEO will also take a 20% cut in pay.

Last month we told you about St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Christopher Ave’s use of song to lament the layoffs of newspaper copy editors. Now, 26-year old Berkeley musician named Jonathan Mann has joined forces with the staff of the East Bay Express to come up with a solution to newspapers’ business problems. You have to wait to the end to hear it, but the three minutes are time well spent.

Editor & Publisher looks at the list of solutions being proposed to the newspaper industry’s troubles and adds a new one into the mix: the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company, or L3C. An L3C “is a corporation that qualifies as a charity under IRS rules but runs as a for-profit business,” Mark Fitzgerald explains, and it’s gathering momentum as a rescue strategy among various chapters of the Newspaper Guild.

That’s right: The Newspaper Guild may get into the business of running newspapers, if only to save its membership from annihilation. An L3C is allowed to take investments from charities and nonprofits because it has a “social benefit.” This new kind of nonprofit is now permitted in several states and the Guild “is lobbying for federal legislation – expected to be introduced later this spring – that would explicitly include newspapers among businesses that have a ‘social benefit.'”  

Apparently, the thinking is that a lot of newspapers are going to come on the market selling at pennies on the dollar this year and this new tax structure would allow owners to spread out ownership among a great many entities, including businesses like printing press makers and auto dealers who have a vested interest in maintaining the business. Foundations would also be able to treat their donations as investments that could earn a return.

Another school of thought is to tear down antitrust rules that prevent newspapers from cooperating on fixing prices, E&P says. This could be a solution to the “content wants to be free” problem: If newspaper owners can legally collude to set prices and licensing fees for their content, then they can conceivably reverse the tide and charge for their product.

One thread is clear throughout the feature, though: No one is seriously arguing that newspapers should be publicly supported like National Public Radio. The consensus among owners and even Guild officials is that these businesses must stand on their own.

BTW, this story was just put online on April 1 after first appearing in E&P‘s print edition in March.

Sun-Times Parent is Bankrupt

Sun-Times Media Group, Inc. (STMG), which operates 59 newspapers and websites, including the Chicago Sun-Times, filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday. The company has been under severe financial and competitive pressure and was weakened by a fraud scandal that landed two previous executives in jail. Chairman and interim CEO Jeremy Halbreich said the company is looking at possible asset sales and new investments, and that it has sufficient resources to work through the bankruptcy process.

The Toronto Globe and Mail looks deeper into STMG’s financial situation and the ripple effect of the 2007 fraud convictions. Last year, the company lost $344-million on revenue of $324-million, as advertising revenue fell 18 per cent in the fourth quarter and is expected to drop 30 per cent in 2009. What’s more, STMG is contractually obligated to pay the former executives’ legal costs, which total $118 million so far. To top it all off, it may face a $510 million tax obligation as a consequence of illegal deductions those executives took.

Dour Pew Report Nevertheless Offers Hope

“This is the sixth edition of our annual report on the State of the News Media in the United States. It is also the bleakest,” reads the introduction to The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual State of the News Media report. It certainly delivers on that promise. We haven’t read all 180,000 words, nor are we likely to, but you can start with the executive summary if you want to dive in yourself.

The media overall had a terrible year in 2008 with the newspaper and magazine segments being hit the hardest and the cable TV industry providing the single bright spot. Cable networks actually increased their newsroom investments by an average of 7% during the year, with CNN adding bureaus in 10 cities. This modest growth wasn’t nearly enough to make up for the huge cost cuts in other media, though. By the end of 2008, all three TV networks had pulled their embedded reporters from Iraq. Newspaper circulations continued to decline; Sunday readership is off 17% since 2001.

The biggest disaster was in news magazines, with only one in four Americans reporting they’ve read one the day before. Time, which invented the genre, may be the only one left pretty soon, the report says.

Public trust in media dropped, but historical data shows that this trend is erratic. Interestingly, a vast majority of Americans (70%) believe the media favored Barack Obama in the most recent election. Even a majority of Democrats believe that.

Newspapers are in “free fall,” the report concludes, although “We still do not subscribe to the theory that the death of the industry is imminent. The industry over all in 2008 remained profitable,” turned in revenues of $38 billion and employed 45,000 professionals gathering and editing the news. There is reason to believe that traditional walls between online and print are falling and that newspapers are figuring out how to monetize targeted audience segments. They also appear to be much more open to working with aggregators and partners.

Still, the long-term outlook continues to be dim because of the economy, debt pressure and the unwillingness of investors to spend money in mature markets. The value that papers provide, though, is only increasing in importance. “In what traditionalists tend to dismiss as a cacophony of talking heads, celebrity infotainment, opinion-driven blogosphere exchanges and information overload, the integrity and sense-making of professionally done news should be more valuable than ever.”

The report also has an interesting section analyzing the practices and credibility of citizen media. It features an update of an earlier report that audited 64 citizen news sites. The new research should provide some comfort to established news organizations because it finds that, in general, they do a better job of incorporating citizen voices into their coverage than pure grassroots citizen operations. In particular, legacy news organizations are better at giving citizens a voice in published content and making it easy for readers to download and share information. In fact, the only area in which mainstream media’s citizen journalism ventures failed to outshine the grassroots sites was in linking to competitors’ content.

Finally, the report includes profiles of several new media ventures, ranging from NewHavenIndependent.org to MinnPost.com to GlobalPost.com.

Miscellany

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s buyout offer has 120 takers, which is more than was expected. As a result, the involuntary layoff total won’t be as high as many had feared. The newspaper management has been working with the union to restructure its contract. Even with the buyout, remaining employees will still see pay cuts and longer hours.

The Livingston County (Mich.) Daily Press & Argus has announced a “significant but unspecified number of layoffs” in its 95-employee workforce. Management would only say that the number was more than 10 and included Managing Editor Maria Stuart.

The Staunton (Va.) Daily News Leader will cut eight full-time employees and 15 part-timers from a workforce of unspecified size. Just one day earlier, the paper said it would outsource its printing operations to the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record. Laid-off employees include “press operators, mailroom workers and other employees charged with the production side of printing the paper every day.”

If you’re in Eugene, Oregon this afternoon, you can stop by the university at 4 p.m. and hear Boston Globe editor Martin Baron talk about the challenges facing newspapers, presumably including his own. The Globe laid off another 50 people last week.

The Guardian announced today that it will cease print publication after 188 years and go Twitter-only. All future content will be formatted to less than 140 characters and the newspaper has launched an ambitious effort to retweet its entire archive. 

“[Celebrated Guardian editor] CP Scott would have warmly endorsed this – his well-known observation ‘Comment is free but facts are sacred’ is only 36 characters long,” a spokesman said in a tweet that was itself only 135 characters long.”

The newspaper says it has found that many events that had previously required thousands of words to describe could be more efficiently communicated within the 140-character limit. For example, it has summarized its coverage of the JFK assassination as “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

The Guardian‘s decision is a bold move, but tough times call for tough decisions.