Helium.com is a web site devoted to citizen journalism. We had a chance to speak with its VP of development, Peter Newton, on Monday. Newton is a long-time Boston Globe executive who came to Helium about two years ago to help invent a new approach to journalism. 

The site has about 5,000 regular contributors, who upload all manner of stories relating to their interests and activities.  Helium isn’t a news site; rather, it takes the type of material that people would have posted on blogs for nothing and offers it to the public and to publishing partners on a revenue-share basis. Newton said some citizens are earning thousands of dollars per year for their contributions.

Helium has useful advice on everything from Socrates to roasting turkey.  Contributed stories are evaluated by members and voted up or down the popularity stack.  Contributors share in advertising revenue as well as the modest license fees the company generates from distributing its content to publishing partners.  Most of those partners are small right now, but Newton says some big deals are imminent. In the Marketplace section, a few publications solicit articles by topic, paying between $48 and $120 per submission. There is also a list of citizen journalism awards available to aspiring writers.

One of Helium’s goals is to become a source of freelance content for publishers who want a low-cost alternative to standard freelance rates.  The site is founded on the assumption that expertise doesn’t have to cost $1/word and that knowledgeable people can now find an outlet for their expression. Helium isn’t profitable yet but hopes to get there within about a year.  With $17 million in venture capital, it’s off to a good start. 

Small is Beautiful…Or At Least Cheap

The New York Times reports upon the rise of small, focused investigative journalism operations that are succeeding where traditional newspapers are cratering.  Operating at the will of charitable organizations, in many cases, they pay their journalists anywhere from $30,000-$50,000 per year and provide highly targeted coverage of specific topics and regions.  Most of these organizations are small and have low traffic counts, but the big ones, like MinnPost in the Twin Cities and the St. Louis Beacon, can top 200,000 visitors per month.  While they provide only a fraction of the coverage of the mainstream media they displace, they are increasingly popular alternatives for journalists whose jobs have been swallowed up by the implosion of local dailies.

Do They Still Not Get It?

Baltimore Sun copy desk director John E. McIntyre relates the experiences of two colleagues who are making a living trying to give new-media advice to their ink-stained brethren.  Their frustration is summed up in this anecdote from one of them: Too many journalists think the reader’s pleasure is irrelevant, that the reader picks up the newspaper either to be instructed or to sit in awe of the literary talent being presented in it. In short, too many journalists are too full of themselves to succeed in the 21st century, when a newspaper needs to focus on what its readers want, since the readers’ choices of what to do with their time seem limitless. That is the challenge for young journalists of the 21st century, who I hope will save us all.” McIntyre concludes that young people are not hostile to newspapers as much as they are disdainful of being bored.  The idea that readers will suffer through paragraphs of tedious introduction in order to get to the meat of the story is at the heart of the disconnect between newspapers and their audiences. “We have to master the new technologies, both to acquire useful information and to convey it in the form in which readers prefer to receive it,” he says.

Miscellany

The Virginian-Pilot will cut 125 jobs, or about 10% of its workforce.  Tactics include shutting down a free daily newspaper geared to Generation Y readers, reducing the size of the newspaper by about 40 pages a week and eliminating the business section.  The Pilot provides an unusually frank account on its website, quoting editor Dennis Finley as saying that those laid off include some of his most senior managers.  “One of the goals was to keep as many reporters on the street as possible,” Finley says.  Particularly disappointing is the closure of Link, a free daily newspaper targeting the 18-to 34-year-old demographic group.  The Pilot‘s average circulation has been falling, but less than the national average for newspapers.  A price increase is also in the cards.  

Here’s a welcome breather for the newspaper industry: newsprint prices have stabilized. The companies that sell newsprint are quietly saying that they have no plans to raise rates next year.  However, that doesn’t compensate for the likely increases in the price of gasoline. While gas has gotten cheaper lately, many experts believe that $4/gallon gasoline is a likelihood for next summer, which will still significantly affect newspapers that distribute by truck.

The Chulchavox blog relates two items we missed:   

• The Denver alternative weekly Westword says that staff members of the Longmont, Colo. Times-Call newspaper have been invited to the publisher’s holiday party – as parking valets. Staffers will reportedly earn what they get for their day jobs, only they’ll be parking the cars of rich people in attendance.
•  The Newark Star-Ledger has reassigned a reporter and a deputy photo edit to the mailroom in order to keep their jobs.

The blogger also quotes from Martin Legeveld, of News After Newspapers, commenting upon the follow-up land from the American Press Institute’s CEO conference held last week. Participants agreed to reconvene in six months to explore additional collaboration ideas.  “What are they thinking?” Langeveld says.  “What will be left six months from now?”

The McClatchy Company reported that consolidated revenues in October decreased 17.8% and advertising revenues declined 20.4% over the previous year.  The bright spot was a 12.4% gain in online advertising revenues.

Six Apart is offering laid-off journalists free blog accounts worth $150 per year.  More than 300 applications rolled in during the first eight days. Of course, you can also get free blog accounts at Blogger.com and WordPress.com, not to mention several other places.

The Maine-based Lakes Region Weekly has cut six positions through a combination of layoffs and the elimination of unfilled positions.

And Finally…

Out-Of-Town News, the Harvard Square kiosk that has served newspapers and magazines from around the world to an eager audience of students and erudite residents of Cambridge, Mass., will go out of business at the end of this month.  The city Council of Cambridge, Mass. has voted to extend the lease in an effort to keep the business in Harvard Square, but the prospects look grim.  The newsstand has been in operation since 1945, but business has been challenging for several years.

Sobering news out of the American Press Institute’s executive confab in Reston, Va. last week. The newspaper industry is in a full-blown crisis and radical surgery is needed to save it, according to an executive summary. CEOs learned about the classic stages of a crisis and ran the numbers on their own businesses. All but one of the public companies in the room was “below the safe stage,” the summary said, meaning that they’re at real risk of bankruptcy.

There were strong words from the podium. Turnaround specialist James Shein of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University said one of the biggest hurdles to progress is “the industry’s senior leadership, including some people in this room…I am not sure you can take a look at your industry with fresh eyes.” Remedies that were discussed ranged from waiting out the economy to hiring experts like scientists or bank regulators to replace some reporters (wait’ll you see the bill on that one). Everyone who’s still around will come back in six months to revisit the situation.

There was undoubtedly some debate about asking the government for a bailout, as the auto industry as done. Ain’t gonna happen, says Alan Mutter. For one thing, government bailouts are intended for industries that have the potential to turn things around and grow again, which is highly iffy proposition for the newspaper business. Paradoxically, a government handout would also compromise one of the most common arguments for supporting the press, which is that it provides a vital watchdog function. “It is difficult to imagine how the vigor and independence of the press would be maintained if the industry depended on the largesse of the very government officials it is supposed to be watching,” Mutter writes. Finally, the industry is just too small to make a difference in the health of the overall economy.

In Praise of Experience

Few news scribes are as eloquent and engaging as The New York Times’ David Carr and you’d do well to read this column about the foolhardiness of firing experienced employees. Pointing to veteran reporters and columnists who have been sacrificed on the altar of cost-efficiency, Carr says newspapers are effectively cutting off their nose to spite their face. Once the short-term profit boost is complete, these organizations, “won’t stay relevant to readers with generic content ginned up by newbies with no background in the communities they serve,” he writes. Read the column for more gems like that.

St. Petersburg Times columnist Eric Deggans was referenced in the Carr column, and he posts a thank-you for the recognition and an elaboration on the practice of laying off experienced people. Deggans notes that his newspaper has few senior journalists writing any more; most of the old-times have made the jump to management or left the paper. He wonders if the loss of veteran old-timers will leave a gap for the next generation: “I wonder if we’ll reach a point where only the best writers can keep doing the job as they age, creating a bit of a generation gap between writers and editors,” he asks. That would be a loss because youngsters need the wisdom of older scribes who aren’t their bosses, Deggans says.

In Condemnation of Euphemisms

It isn’t a layoff, it’s an evolution. At least, that’s how a column by Ventura County Star Editor Joe Howry describes it. “At The Star, our plans were to continue intensifying our focus on local news… Life, in the form of the economic downturn, has forced us to speed up those plans,” he wrote last Sunday.

What really happened is that the Star recently laid off 44 people and consolidated its weekday paper to conserve space. In Howry’s view, though, the cutbacks are simply part of an “evolution” centered around “preserving the quality and quantity of local news.” Not once does his editorial mention layoffs or cost reductions. LA Observed’s TJ Sullivan finds absurdity in the message. Sullivan doesn’t doubt it was painful for Howry to let so many people go, but he thinks they deserved a more honorable send-off that to be referred to as victims of efficiency. Journalists are supposed to tell the truth, he says. Don’t candy-coat downsizing. Admit it sucks and move on.

Newspaper Outsourcing a Growth Industry

Research and Markets has released a report entitled “Offshoring By US Newspaper Publishers” that sees big growth in the newspaper outsourcing industry, particularly in India. About 2,300 people were employed offshore to serve US and UK newspaper companies in July, 2008, the report says. Most of the work is in ad production. Overall revenues of the business are estimated at $35 million this year (quick calculation: about $15,000 per head), growing to $120 million by 2012. “The total offshore opportunity from newspaper publishers is estimated to be approximately $3.5 billion,” the summary says, although it doesn’t specify whether that’s an annual figure or a total of several years. However, vendors still “need to build client confidence in terms of delivering consistently good quality of output and quick turnaround.” You can download your own copy for 437 euros (about $555).

Miscellany

The New York Times has closed its quarterly sports magazine Play because of slow ad sales. Assistant Managing Editor Gerald Marzorati called the closure the “hardest professional call I’ve ever made in my life,” but with the magazine losing six-figure sums every year, there was no viable alternative. The quarterly was said to be a favorite of New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The Times explored several options to keep the magazine afloat, including cutting editorial staff, publishing it only online and signing a single advertiser for each issue. New York Observer says no staff positions will be cut because the content was mainly freelanced and the only staff employee will be reassigned within the organization.

The Erie (Pa.) Times-News will use a “generous” buyout to reduce staff by 25 employees, or 9 percent of its 273-person workforce. The buyout, which is available to 51 employees, provides up to five years of company-paid health insurance, or an equivalent flat payment, plus a $10,000 signing bonus for each eligible employee who accepts. The paper has actually been growing weekday circulation in the past year, but “broad economic market conditions” mandate the cuts. The publisher said no layoffs will be necessary in 2009 if enough people accept the offer.

The Sun-Times Media Group (STMG) is cleaning house in a concession to two big shareholders. Several board members will resign in the first stage of a complete restructuring of the governing body. The company will also lose a special monitor who was assigned to keep an eye on things following an earlier scandal in which two executive were jailed for stealing. STMG is also deregistering its Class A common stock and will now trade on the pink sheets, which require less regulatory overhead.

The industry’s malaise is spreading overseas. The UK’s Independent is laying off 20% of its staff, or about 90 people. The company’s managing director said the business is “racking up losses that would threaten the very survival of these papers.” Trinity Mirror, which is the country’s largest local newspaper publisher, recently said it had quietly closed 28 titles this year.

The southern California-based North County Times has cut 25 newsroom jobs, or about 25% of its workforce. Ironically, the paper also has a column this week by John Van Doorn, who was laid off after 58 years as a reporter and editor. The veteran New York newspaperman could be excused for being cynical about the whole thing, but his farewell piece (pre-published in Editor & Publisher) is actually quite uplifting.
Van Doorn thanks an industry that gave him the opportunity to “reside in 11 countries and work in 35, rub shoulders with presidents, prime ministers and a king or two, and with ordinary people far more substantive, such as the North County population.” And he’ll be back. “I cannot not write,” he concludes, inducing paroxysms in Microsoft Word’s grammar checker.

And Finally…

This year may go down as the worst ever for the newspaper industry, but 2008 also ironically included one of the best single-day sales milestones in history: the day after the presidential election. Issues flew off the newsstands in record numbers following Barack Obama’s victory, as readers sought to capture a moment in history.

Now the Chicago Sun-Times is going one step further by offering 44 copies of its Nov. 5 front page as a “museum wrap fine art giclée print on canvas.” If, like us, you’ve managed to live your entire life without knowing what giclée is, Ed Chasen Fine Art describes it as “a French term used to describe a specialized process in which pigmented inks are applied to canvas or paper to reproduce a fine art reproduction.” Regardless, the first 15 copies have so far failed to elicit a single bid starting at $350 each on the auction site, although there are still several days left.

The newspaper industry is in chaos, but you wouldn’t know it at the Financial Times, the U.K.-based business daily that now sells more copies in the US than in the UK. In fact, the economic crisis has been good for business, says Caspar de Bono, managing director of Financial Times Business in a story in BtoB magazine.

The reason is that panicked investors want to know how the meltdown in the US is playing out in other countries, de Bono says. The FT, with its great international reach, is becoming a coveted source of information. US circulation is up 5% this year to over 140,000. Sales for the FT Group were up 11% in the first nine months and publishing sales were up 14%. With The Wall Street Journal setting its competitive sites on The New York Times, the time might be right for the FT to become a major salmon-colored alternative to America’s business daily.

News Without Newspapers

21^st News has a guest column by Gary Hook, former director of editorial operations at USA Today, about why he’s worried about journalism. Hook’s concerns were prompted by attending the Knight International Journalism Awards, which recognized two journalists who risked all to deliver the truth. Hook says their stories are inspiring, but at the same time he’s worried about who will carry on this kind of crusading work once many newspapers are out of the picture.

His answer may be in the award winners themselves: Aliaksei Karol, the editor-in-chief of the weekly Novy Chas in Belarus and Frank Nyakairu, a correspondent and freelancer who has documented human rights abuses in Africa. Neither of these men works for a major metropolitan newspaper. Novy Chas is published in print, but clearly serves more as a means of political expression than a profit-making concern.. Nyakairu is a freelancer and wire service correspondent who could just as easily write for paying Web publishers as for Reuters.

Both men were recognized for what they do, not the medium in which they do it. They are great journalists in spite of not working for a daily newspaper. Which makes Hook’s argument a little hollow. Early in the column, he quotes Walter Lippmann, who said, “The purpose of journalism is to give information on which the citizen can act.” There’s nothing in there about newspapers that we can see.

Miscellany

Alan Mutter takes a financial analyst’s eye to the profitability picture in the industry and concludes that further cuts are likely before year’s end. The problem is that profits are falling at a much faster rate than revenues, about 18 times the velocity of decline for 12 publishers he studied. Mutter uses EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), an accounting standard that strips out all the non-cash events that influence an income statement. Nearly every publisher in his analysis suffered year-over-year profit declines to 40% or more, with Sun-Times Media Group logging the most extreme decline at -1523%. “Not one publisher in the group of 12 was able to prevent its profits from falling faster than its revenues,” Mutter writes. And imbalance like that is unsustainable, meaning that more cuts are almost certain.

Ken Doctor has the scoop and the schedule on CNN’s upcoming two-day offsite at which the cable TV network will pitch its services as an alternative to the Associated Press. Doctor thinks CNN’s coveting of major editors has gotten too little attention, and when you look at the numbers, it’s hard to disagree. CNN has more journalists than either the AP or Reuters, and it’s got more delivery channels, too. Amid a nationwide revolt against the AP’s licensing and fee policies, CNN’s argument on Dec. 1 and 2 could be persuasive. However, Doctor proposes nine questions that he thinks the execs in attendance should pose to their host first. He’s hoping they get an answer because the network has been unwilling to offer anyone for an interview.

Once-fierce rivalries in the Metro newspaper business are giving way to calls for collaboration. The Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram used to compete toe-to-toe for readers, but with circulation and revenues going south, there’s talk of a news alliance. The two companies recently began delivering each other’s papers to local markets and discussed but later discarded a joint printing agreement. More collaboration is probably on the way, however. Star-Telegram columnist Mitchell Schnurman outlines in detail the financial realities as well as the culture shock engendered by the idea of an alliance.

Speaking of Dallas, documentary filmmaker mark Birnbaum and Dallas Morning News film critic Manny Mendoza have teamed up on “Stop the Presses,” a dark documentary about the future of newspapers. The Rocky Mountain News interviews them, but gives the piece only scant space and no room for the filmmakers to say anything. Kind of like a story in print.

Bay Area News Group has rescinded layoffs of eight workers after the union filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board. The union says it wants to explore alternatives to layoff, such as “asking employees who were thinking of leaving, if they want to save someone else’s job.” If you can unravel the meaning of that statement, please comment.

“Bring it on!” cries the Boston Globe’s Joan Venocchi in a cheeky send-up of auto makers, labor unions and other failed institutions that hope to find succor at the government teat. Venocchi sees a parallel to her own profession. Sure, the newspaper industry is in trouble, she says, but “No one in government is going to back a newspaper bailout and no one should…If newspapers aren’t producing news in a format that people want to purchase, it’s the industry’s problem. If Detroit isn’t producing cars people want to buy, that’s Detroit’s problem – not the taxpayers’. Her logic is sound. There was no excuse for the AMC Gremlin.

BusinessWeek‘s Jon Fine tackles the same topic as Venocchi, though his angle is a bailout plan for the newspaper industry. With tongue planted in cheek, Fine proposes that the government adopt the industry crisis as its own and shell out billions to cover the industry’s debts while providing each household with an Amazon Kindle in a rescue plan thinly disguised as a green initiative.

Michael Sifton is out as chief executive of Canada’s Sun Media Corp. after just a year on the job. He’ll be replaced by Pierre Karl Peladeau, the CEO of parent company Quebecor Inc. “Disappointing” results in the company’s publishing and Internet businesses was cited.

60 Minutes’ Andy Rooney ditches his usual satiric tone in a homage to the newspaper industry that gave him his start. “I wouldn’t trade [my newspaper column] for all the stations that broadcast this television commentary. The money I’d trade,” he says. Rooney got his start with Stars & Stripes before World War II, and the industry taught him all about journalism. How sad to see it in such trouble. “There’s been a steady decline in the ciruclation of newspapers, but it’s strange that there’s no decline in the faith people put in them,” he says. TV has benefited from some great journalists, he says, but it’s not the same. “There are more pictures on television. That’s about it.”

Michael Rosenblum

Here are a couple of interesting ideas about the future of journalism that we thought were worth reading/viewing.

The Online Journalism Blog has clips of video visionary Mark Rosenblum addressing the Society of Editors conference this week. Rosenblum ditched a top job at CBS to go out on his own and demonstrated that a single journalist with a video camera and a Macintosh can duplicate the work of an entire television video team at a tiny fraction of the cost. He has spent the last six years helping organizations like the BBC and the Voice of America reinvent themselves as foundries of video journalism.

Any idiot can operate a video camera, Rosenblum says in colorful and often off-color language. You don’t need news trucks or production teams or half-million-dollar editing consoles. Give reporters a videocam and a Mac, train them how to use the technology and send them out to find stories. They can even work out of their homes. It’s that drop-dead simple. “You are not in the newspaper business,” he says. “You are in the business of going into your communities, finding stories, processing them and delivering them back to your clients and charging advertisers for those eyeballs.”

Rosenblum urges editors to embrace new technologies instead of worrying about how to monetize them first. We’re not going back to the way things were, so move ahead with confidence. Transform your newsrooms into multimedia centers and decentralize your organization. “You are magnets for talent,” he tells the editors. So do something with it. “You will not survive unless you have the courage to embrace this new technology and go for it all,” he concludes. There are three videos. We found the first to be most illuminating.

Maegan Carberry files a report from the Web 2.0 Summit for Editor & Publisher, scolding the newspaper industry for not leading change and enabling conversation between their readers. “What is a journalist if not someone who hopes to enable others with the information they need to solve the problems of our time? To connect individual citizens with their communities? Shouldn’t newspapers be the ones championing this enterprise?” she writes.

Carberry tells of election night coverage that combined Twitter, Digg and Current TV to enable viewers to effectively control the information they were consuming. Too many mainstream media reporters still regard these tools as something they use to enhance their work, she says. What they don’t realize is that the tools  are central to the experience that media companies need to give their constituents. She also has a nice list of interesting Twitter pundits to follow.

Miscellany

Canadian correspondent Mark Hamilton rounds up the latest financial news from media companies north of the border. It isn’t pretty. Another Canadian, National Post‘s Jonathan Key, outlines the three print models that will survive the newspaper collapse. Okay, we won’t keep you in suspense. They are: business media (The Economist), premium upscale media (The New Yorker) and hyper-local media (your community newspaper).

Steve Outing quotes a missive he received from a retired management consultant whose observations should be relevant to the industry honchos gathered behind closed doors in Reston tomorrow: “Newspapers are cutting staff and in so doing, totally curbing their capability to produce a quality product and thereby even have a chance to survive. The result is an ever deepening and ever tightening death spiral.”

The Charlotte Greensboro News & Record has offered all its employees a buyout in an effort to reduce its staff by 8 to 10%, according to a haiku-like story on the paper’s website.

The Associated Press is launching two youth-oriented mobile websites via Virgin Mobile. AP Entertainment and CUBI (“Can You Believe It?”) will offer the “latest film, TV, and music news,” and “off-the-beaten-path news from around the world,” respectively.

As newspapers begin to wind down their print operations, many will take the same course as the East Valley Tribune of suburban Phoenix. Faced with steadily dwindling circulation and a cost structure that doesn’t scale proportionately, the 100,000-circulation daily has scaled back its print schedule to two four days per week. That makes it the largest daily to swallow that pill. The Christian Science Monitor all but abandoned the print market two weeks ago and a few smaller dailies have trimmed Monday or Saturday editions to save money.

The Tribune signaled this move in October, when it laid off 40% of its staff and shifted to a free distribution model. BusinessWeek notes that Wisconsin’s Capital Times took a similar approach last spring, cutting its print schedule from six to two days and abandoning paid circulation in favor of free distribution. The Capital Times had only 16,500 paid subscribers at the time, but that number has increased to 85,000 since the shift was made. Of course, circulation statistics for a non-qualified free publication are practically meaningless, but the number looks good.

Other papers are likely to follow this path. Print isn’t necessarily a bad business, but daily print is becoming a terrible one. Most major metro dailies make the majority of their profit on Thursday and Sunday editions while losing money on Monday, Tuesday and Saturday. It makes sense to start cutting where the revenues are lowest.

Circulation is also a dicey business. While paid circ is marginally profitable for many papers, that isn’t always the case. As the economy deteriorates, it’s going to become more difficult to convince people to pay for information they can get on their computers for free. Advertisers like paid circ, but they’re also learning to accept that the new generation of readers doesn’t expect to pay for information. As the Web has monetized eyeballs, the perceived value of paid circulation has declined.

While the industry debates the question of how to transition newspapers to a viable economic model for the future, papers like the Monitor and the Tribune are blazing a trail that many will probably follow. The cutbacks may be painful, but the brand survives and print continues to play a role in the business, although a reduced one.

Perhaps the newspaper executives who are meeting behind closed doors in Reston, Va. this week will bandy about this idea. Or perhaps not. Jeff Jarvis nails it with this commentary on the hush-hush affair: “These are the very same proprietors of the newspaper industry’s decline. What they need is not the same old executives but new people with new ideas,” he opines. If Jarvis was running the event, “I’d fly in people from Google and a bunch of successful tech companies as well as innovators and entrepreneurs in news and let them do all the talking.” Not a bad idea. Read the comments on his post.

Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly stated that the Tribune had scaled back frequency to twice a week. It actually cut back to four days a week. The Orange County Register has more.

A selection of stories snipped from the Web. Descriptions are quoted directly from the source.

Virginian-Pilot Considers Layoffs, Other Cost-Cutting Measures

The president and publisher of the Virginian-Pilot said the newspaper and its affiliated companies are considering layoffs before the end of the year because of steep declines in advertising revenue.”We have no sacred cows. Everything is on the table,” Maurice Jones told Virginian-Pilot readers last week. Possible moves include layoffs, raising the price of the newspaper, reducing page count, closing some of the businesses associated iwth the newspaper, and decreasing the circulation area.

McClatchy-owned Star lays off 50

This latest job reduction comes after The Star’s layoff of about 30 employees on Sept. 17 in addition to roughly that many who had accepted the newspaper’s most recent early-buyout offer, publisher Mark Zieman told employees in an internal e-mail on that date.

Zell’s Tribune Co. takes big Q3 hit

The Chicago-based newspaper and TV station owner reported a $124 million loss for its third quarter, compared with a profit of $84 million a year earlier. Operating revenues were down 10% to $1 billion…Fueling the red ink at Tribune were a 13% year-to-year decline in publishing revenues to $654 million. Advertising revenues sank 19%, or $111 million, compared with the year-earlier benchmark. Even its interactive revenues declined 7% to $4 million…The biggest ad declines came in the sectors most immediately hammered by the economic downturn: retail outlets, furniture and hardware stores, and department stores. Automotive advertising was also down, along with telecom services and movies, Tribune said. The largest revenue declines came from the Chicago Tribune, Hartford Courant and Los Angeles Times.

Time Inc. Seeks Volunteers for Job Cuts at Magazines – NYTimes.com

Editors on Monday asked for about 100 volunteers to give up editorial staff jobs at Time, People, Sports Illustrated and a few other Time Inc. magazines, and the company announced the elimination of a similar number of jobs in its business operations. The cuts are the first steps toward what Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, has said will be the elimination of about 600 jobs worldwide, most of them at its 24 magazines in the United States.”

E.W. Scripps Co. joins the growing ranks of newspapers that are cutting broadly across their portfolios. The company will lay off about 400 people as it struggles with profits that plunged from $16.6 million a year ago to a loss of $21 million in the most recent quarter. Editor & Publisher reports that layoffs have already happened at Scripps-owner papers in Knoxville, Tenn. and Evansville, Ind. The National Press Photographers Association has more details on where the cuts are coming, including elimination of 20% of the newsroom in Ventura, Calif. Other newspaper holding companies that have cut broadly in recent months include Gannett and A.H. Belo.

Looks Like a Newspaper, Smells Like a Newspaper

They’re having a good old-fashioned hockey brawl in Toronto over the publication at left. It’s called Our Toronto (no, you won’t find it online anywhere) and it’s a quarterly communication from the mayor’s office that looks an awful lot like a newspaper. Or at least some city council members and watchdog groups think it’s awful. They use terms like “travesty,” “offensive propaganda” and “Pravda” to describe what Mayor David Miller says is simply an honest attempt to inform citizens about what’s going on in their city.

Our Toronto will be mailed to residents’ homes and also published online and translated into languages ranging from Chinese to Urdu. The editor is city communications director Kevin Sack and Mayor Miller will have a column in each issue. The cost to the taxpayers is about $850,000 a year.

Debate centers upon whether this is a propaganda sheet masking as a legitimate news organ or simply a propaganda sheet. Critics complain that all the content is positive about the mayor, but Mayor Miller says he’s simply doing what every other elected official does in providing facts and updates to his constituents. In any case, it’s interesting to see somebody getting into the newspaper business these days.

Miscellany

Too little, too late. The American Press Institute will host a “Crisis Summit” for the newspaper industry this week. Executives will gather behind closed doors to ponder what to do to reverse the industry’s downward spiral. Session leader James Shein says one of the purposes of the head-knock will be to “illuminate for newspaper industry leaders the urgency of their situation.” If any of those leaders still need to be illuminated in this respect, then shareholders should be demanding their heads on a plater.

Barack Obama’s win caused a big one-day surge in newspaper sales as people scrambled to get souvenirs of the historic event. One opportunist was asking $2,000 on eBay for a copy of the Charlotte Observer, of all things. Perhaps attendees at the API Crisis Summit can come up with ways to create more big news events so they can sell out at the newsstand and make a killing on online auctions.

Mark Gunther tells the encouraging story of a nonprofit organization that is funding entrepreneurs to solve pressing social problems, including the decline of traditional media. The group is called Ashoka, and among its investments are several citizen journalism organizations around the world. Gunther has details and links.

And Finally…

Sam Zell could be stuck with the Chicago Cubs for a while. The Wall Street Journal reports that the real estate billionaire-turned-newspaper magnate may be foiled in his effort to sell the storied franchise for $1 billion, the victim of a plunging real estate market and dried-up sources of capital. So Zell, who has said he’s not a baseball fan, could end up with a 50% stake in America’s Most Frustrating Team for some time to come. Perhaps that was on his mind when this photo was snapped during Game One of the National League Division series, where Chicago was swept in three games by a Dodger team that had won 13 fewer games during the regular season.

We caught up with Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma today to see how the big shift from mostly print to mostly online is going. It’s going pretty well, Yemma said. Only about 15% of comments received have been negative and peers have mostly applauded the Monitor for making the bold move. We recorded the 10-minute conversation and present it below for your listening pleasure.

Now comes the hard part. In order to sustain the business in the long run and free it from an ongoing church subsidy, the Monitor needs to roughly quintuple traffic to CSMonitor.com. That’s because the operation needs to shift from an economic model driven largely by revenue to one based on advertising. The bigger hurdles may be internal. With the likelihood of some staff reductions looming, Yemma needs to keep morale high while phasing in a new editorial model.

That new model was described in a panel discussion the previous evening as “perfection vs. good enough.” Publishers are oriented toward producing perfect products because it’s impossible to change them once they’re in the field. That means sweating a lot of details that take time and reduce potential impact. The Monitor and others are wrestling with finding the right balance between the legacy of perfection and the emerging culture of “good enough” reporting in which details – and that may include facts – aren’t always 100% right.

Ultimately, Yemma doesn’t see the Monitor as being a cutting-edge online publication as much as one that can lead its traditional audience smoothly into a new age. The demographics of the audience at the previous evening’s panel on The Future of Journalism were telling. Many of the attendees were over 60. That’s not surprising, as the average age of the traditional news media consumer creeps toward retirement. “We’re not on the cutting edge of new technology. We’re on the cutting edge of bring the mainstream along into this new world,” he said. We wish him luck.

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The Folger Library in Washington, D.C. is best known for housing one of the world’s great Sheakespeare collections, but on a visit last weekend we were intrigued to discover that it’s currently also hosting an exhibit on early newspapers.

We’re talking very early newspapers, as in those that emerged within the first couple of centuries after the printing press was developed. The style and topical choices of those early efforts look strange and even comical now, but you can see elements of modern organization and editorial voice emerging. In fact, the exhibit points out that many standards of layout, arrangement and frequency are over 300 years old.

Early account of Parliamentary proceedings

I took a few notes and snapped a few photos before being politely informed that photography was prohibited (click on the images to see enlargements). The history of newspapers is fascinating. They were an almost instant success.

They were also a distant mirror of today’s explosion of blogs and citizen media. Back in the 17th century, there were no commercial newspaper publishers. Journals were published by people who had the skill and money to use the press to promote an agenda. Often, these people had strong political biases or they wrote salacious accounts purely for the purpose of selling papers. There was no such thing as impartial journalism. Every title produced by these “pamphleteers” had something to sell.

Report on the 30 Years War

Yet the public evidently found value in what they said, because newspapers were an immediate success. Favorite topics included freakish occurrences: giant storms, conjoined twins, murder, atrocities and the supernatural. In fact, early newspapers were so sensational that Ben Jonson was moved to ridicule readers  for “wasting money on salacious and inaccurate news.”

Not all of it was inaccurate, though. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) gave birth to the modern newspaper. Citizens wanted to know how the conflict was going on the continent and whether England was going to be drawn in. A small number of professional journalists made a living reporting the facts of the war for anyone who would pay them. Their reports were hugely popular in England. Prior to the 17th century, news had been passed entirely by personal letter and word-of-mouth, which quickly distorted the facts. While early newspapers weren’t always accurate or unbiased, they were a lot better than the system that preceded them.

Account of the sensational murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey (1678)

The English press was heavily regulated throughout much of the 17th century, but rogue publishers constantly sprouted up to do battle with the government. Publishing was dangerous in a day when ordinary mail was routinely scanned by law enforcement officials for evidence of treason. if you could be arrested for what you said in a letter, imagine the risks taken by a pamphleteer!

Weekly London death notes, including 29 people who died of "teeth"

Drop by the exhibit if you’re in the D.C. area before Jan. 31, 2009. Here are a few other nuggets I learned:

• The first newspapers were called “corantos”. That word later became “courant.”
• The first courant was the Conventicle Courant of 1682. The first daily courant was published in 1702. The Hartford, Conn. Courant is a descendant of those first journals and is the only newspaper in the US to still call itself a courant.
• The first newspaper to call itself a “post” was probably The London Post of 1644.
• The first known illustrated ad appeared in 1680. It was for a mysterious product called  “Indian water-works.”
• The weekly newspaper report of London deaths in 1680 included 57 people who died from “griping in the guts,” 29 from “teeth” and 2 from “evil.”

In its second round of layoffs in just seven months, the Seattle Times said it will cut 130 to 150 positions, with the ax falling particularly hard on the newsroom. The cutbacks amount to less than 10% of the Times’ overall employment of, but the 35 to 45 positions lost in the newsroom represent 13% to 17% of the 260-person editorial staff. The publisher also vowed to continue to combine and consolidate sections to cut back on production costs. A buyout will be extended for less than one week, after which layoffs will begin.

Parent company Blethen has been desperately trying to cut costs in any way possible, including outsourcing trucking operations and trying to unload a chain of newspapers in Maine. There were reports late last month that a buyer for the newspapers has been found, but all has been quite for the two weeks since then. The Times cut more than 270 positions in April, and the scope of the new round indicates that the deteriorating economy is taking its toll. Indeed, the publisher said the advertising downturn has quickened with the plunging stock market and that even the one bright spot – online advertising – has flattened.

Rival and duopoly partner Post-Intelligencer says it plans no layoffs, but that company has been in an “ironclad” hiring freeze all year and has reduced headcount significantly through attrition. With this newest round of reductions, the Times will have reduced its total staff from 1,879 at the end of 2007 to no more than 1,469, a reduction of about 22% in a single year.

Layoff Log

• LA Times staffers are girding for yet another round of cuts, this time to the paper’s Washington bureau. An anonymous memo posted on Romenesko late last week claims to detail a meeting with Times D.C. Bureau Chief Doyle McManus in which McManus outlined plans for a consolidated Tribune Co. bureau structure with several papers sharing reporters. The bureau will consist of 24 people, which will require an unspecified number of layoffs, the memo said. This Friday was targeted as the date of the layoff announcement. McManus disputed some of the details of the memo in a posting on Romenesko, but basically affirmed plans for the consolidated bureau structure.
• The Frederick (Md.) News-Post will lay off 16 employees, including four in the newsroom. No word on what percentage of total employment that represents.

Miscellany

The Gannett Company continues to pointedly ignore a website created by a former employee, even as The Gannett Blog has become a major source of news about job cuts at the company. Now The New York Times has selected Gannett as a poster child of corporate cluelessness in this piece about transparency in the blogosphere. According to the Times, Gannett still refuses to return any inquiries from blog editor Jim Hopkins, despite the fact that the his posts consistently spark dozens or even hundreds of comments. In acting as a virtual water cooler for the entire company, Gannett Blog has become the destination of choice for employees who want to learn what’s really going on at Gannett because the company provides so little information about itself. As the Times notes, in an increasingly transparent business world, silence is no longer an option.

The publisher of The New York Times has a provocative opinion to share. Asked at a recent conference if newspapers will even exist in a decade, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. responded, “We can’t care.” Those three words made the headline, but what Sulzberger was really saying was that the transition from print to digital media will proceed whether or not publishers want it. The Times’ recent moves to build a social network and to take down its paid registration wall are simply recognition of a changing media landscape, he said. Sulzberger believes print will have value far into the future and he chooses to look at the current turmoil in the industry as evolution rather than collapse.

And Finally…

Who is this person to the left? If you were a fan of 1960s sitcoms, you’d know him as one of the most recognizable faces on television but he doesn’t look nearly the same today. Click here to find out. AOL’s Memba Them site has photos of 160 celebrities as you once knew them and shots of those same folks today. It’s a tribute to, er, aging gracefully!