Chicago Tribune Editor Gerry Kern sent a memo to staffers last week that challenges some shibboleths of journalism and appears to advocate for giving readers more entertainment at the expense of traditional community affairs.

The message reads like a mission statement. “We clearly are moving toward a 24/7 online business that also publishes in print once a day,” Kern says. While acknowledging the value of traditional fare like public service and investigative reporting, he also stresses the need to delight and entertain.

The nut graph is about halfway down, where Kerns relates that “One of the most revealing insights from recent research is how little excitement some people feel about their daily encounter with us. Many of our regular readers regard us like the electric company or water utility. Yes, everyone wants electricity and water and it’s a pain to do without them. But your soul just isn’t stirred by the sight of working faucet or wall socket.

“Without an engaged audience that finds value in what we offer, we cannot succeed. Journalism is not an abstraction that exists apart from the audience. It must deliver what the audience needs and wants.”

This sounds like a not-too-subtle message that Tribune staff need to take themselves a little less seriously and listen to their readers a little more closely.  If that means giving them record reviews and Sudoku puzzles, so be it.  The Tribune is about to debut a new design along the lines of its Tribune Co. brethren.  If their lead is any indication, you’ll see a lot more color and a little less gravity.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has apparently got the same religion.  The paper is upgrading its features sections with more emphasis on local entertainment and leisure destinations while merging its news sections and cutting back on commentary.

Also, the Tribune has a new managing editor with a track record of success addressing young audiences. Jane Hirt was the founding co-editor of Redeye a free tabloid aimed at Chicago commuters that is considered one of the Tribune’s more successful recent ventures.

All this may be too little too late. Fitch Ratings on Friday cut the debt rating of Tribune Co. to “CCC” and said default is a “real possibility.”  The assessment comes just a week after Tribune CEO Sam Zell said the company had paid down $807 million of borrowing to meet its obligations for the rest of the year.  Fitch isn’t very positive, though.  The firm believes lenders can expect to get between 31 and 50 cents per dollar of investment.

Too Much Time Spent on “Time Spent”

Editor & Publisher has its regular exclusive report on the amount of time people spend reading newspaper sites. At first blush, the numbers look bad. “Nearly half of the top 30 newspaper sites, ranked by total number of unique users, fell year-over-year,” E&P says. “Fourteen dropped slightly or significantly.”

E&P has been reporting the Nielsen numbers dutifully since Nielsen said it would rely on “time spent” as the most important attribute of newspaper website stickiness a year ago, but a review of some historical numbers shows that this metric has its limitations. Look at the examples below, taken from previous E&P accounts.

	May ‘07	July ‘07	May ‘08	July ‘08
New York Times	29:36	27:21	28:52	32:03
Wall Street Journal	14:46	12:17	8:27	18:28
USA Today	12:39	11:48	13:00	16:17
Philly.com	10:11	6:59	8:03	5:07
Houston Chronicle	25:44	14:20	21:43	25:21
Star-Tribune	36:36	22:36	27:18	36:39
AVERAGE	21:35	15:54	17:54	22:19

While these numbers aren’t necessarily indicative of the overall health of the industry, they demonstrate how unreliable the “time spent” figure can be. Look at The Wall Street Journal, which presumably has enough readers to make its figures consistent.  What on earth happened this past May to cause such a drop-off in reader interest?  And what happened over the next three months to cause a revival?

Similarly, the Houston Chronicle tanked in July, 2007 but recovered spectacularly in the year since.  And are readers in Minnesota staying home this summer cruising the Internet instead of driving?  How else to explain such a dramatic recovery?  We’re sure the people Philly.com would like to know the answer.

Here’s some interesting perspective on the subject.

Miscellany

Media General’s publishing revenue fell nearly 19% in July compared to a year ago as the sour Florida economy continue to eat away at its business.  Classified advertising revenue plunged 32.5% with real estate falling an incredible 47%.  Online revenue was up a scant 5.7%,

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The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel laid off 22 employees to reach its goal of 130 total job cuts after a voluntary buyout program failed to achieve the magic number.

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Valleywag digs up some old screenshots in a trip down memory lane as it tells of “5 ways the newspapers botched the Web.”  Reading the account, you get the sense that there were some smart people who saw the opportunities in online publishing as early as 1983 but cluelessness about how people would use the Web combined with a compulsion to protect their print franchises scuttled the early innovations.  It’s a depressing account of opportunities lost.

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Your obedient editor will be on vacation for a few days and posting less frequently, to the relief of newspaper executives everywhere.

Editor & Publisher has a 3,000-word special report on the newspaper industry’s prospects that doesn’t turn up much new ground but documents the panic that has set in across the business. Everything is on the table, industry execs now say. In the coming year, expect a lot of papers to eliminate money-losing Monday, Tuesday and Saturday editions, dump their classified advertising sections and combine forces with rivals or outsource overseas. Recent redesigns like those at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel are intended to be produced by smaller staffs. Some papers consider giving up on courting the youth audience and decide to just focus on giving their older readers something they’ll want to consume for the next 25 years.

The problem is that newspaper are tinkerers, not re-inventers, the piece concludes. Their core skills are mis-matched to the enormity of the task that faces them, and the unrelenting declines in business have left them with no option to think through bigger changes. Noting the waning interest in the the “Newspaper Next” program, the American Press Institute’s Drew Davis quotes one board member as saying, “We are like drowning people, who are treading water as fast as we can. And you people are throwing life preservers and we can’t even get our hands out of the water to reach them.”

In its first year, Newspaper Next reached some 6,000 people, but since API rolled out its 2.0 version last February, the response has not been anywhere near that, says Davis. The biggest newspaper companies, he adds, are most conspicuous in their absence.
Not everyone is as dour as the people quoted by E&P. Kevin Slimp reports on a recent meeting by a group of consultants, speakers and trainers who call themselves the Media Specialists Group. They discussed the future of newspapers and, while they agree that big dailies are mostly toast, they’re generally optimistic about circulation trends among regional and focused titles. Expect to see a lot more free distribution and segmentation, they say. Newspaper publishers will also do more contract printing and use their delivery channels to distribute advertising.

Decline is Worse Than Numbers Indicate

Vin Crosbie submits the most lucid, dispassionate and coherent explanation for the decline of the US newspaper business that we’ve seen since Eric Alterman’s groundbreaking piece in The New Yorker this spring. The industry’s problem isn’t the Internet, he argues, it’s the steady loss of respect for and contact with its readers, a trend that began more than 30 years ago. While absolute circulation has declined only 14.5% since 1970, the real decline is more like 45% when adjusted for population growth. Only a third of Americans say they read a newspaper yesterday and only 46% read one regularly, down from 71% in 1992.

Crosbie skillfully skewers the online readership data that newspaper execs use to obscure their problems, pointing out that readers who visit four or five times a month can’t be compared to subscribers. He also dismisses the so-called “passalong rate,” which dying publications like to use to inflate circulation numbers

In the end, he predicts that half of all American dailies will be gone – both online and in print – by the end of the next decade. He promises more analysis of what went wrong in essays today and next week.

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In his analysis, Crosbie also ticks off the precipitous decline in newspaper share values over the least few years, ranging from 65% at Gannett to 99% at Journal Register, yet Morningstar believes the companies are still overvalued. In a report subtitled “The newspaper business is in terminal decline,” Matthew Coffina analyzes the outlook for Gannett, The New York Times Co., Lee Enterprises, McClatchy and GateHouse Media and sees, at best, relatively fast ongoing deterioration of their businesses. “[We] consider the newspaper industry unattractive as a whole,” he writes.

Is Yahoo Friend or Foe?

First, Yahoo created an ad consortium and invited newspapers in so they could sip from the cup of online spending. Now it’s competing with its partners. In an Agence France Presse story (carried, ironically, on Yahoo News), Glenn Chapman reports that Yahoo is here to stay as a primary news source. It’s got feet on the street in Beijing for the Olympics (following the herd there) and has scored coups with recent interviews with South Korean president Lee Myung-bak and George W. Bush, who gave his first Internet-only interview to Yahoo. One of its tactics is apparently to ask readers to submit questions during interviews with dignitaries, which is kind of cool, when you think about it. (via Josh Catone).

For some reason, the industry’s troubles are hitting particularly hard in New Jersey. Newsday gathers up the bad news: Gannett just 120 jobs in six Jersey papers. The owner of the Newark Star-Ledger says the paper is on track to lose $30 million to $40 million this year. And the Hackensack Record just sold its building and will turn most of its staff reporters into “mobile journalists,” which is a new euphemism for “stringer.”

Novel Concept

Jason Mandell writes about a writer’s novel approach to sustaining investigative journalism using a community support model. David Cohn, a former tech and science reporter for Wired, has created Spot.Us, a place where journalists can float ideas for investigative reporting pieces and get funded by visitors, who vote with their wallets for the stories they like. The results are then syndicated to partner outlets. “If you get 100 people to give just $15, that’s enough to pay a journalist to do a story on something that will benefit the community,” Cohn told Mandell. Spot.US is partially funded, ironically, by Knight Foundation. Knight-Ridder was forced to sell out to McClatchy two years ago and has suffered along with its acquirer. Maybe Spot.Us is a way to begin to build at least a shell of a new vision for investigative journalism.

Layoff Log

How bad is morale at USA Today? The Gannett Blog floats the possibility that the national daily, which has so far escaped outright layoffs, may finally be on the chopping block. What’s most interesting, though, is the 50+ comments, most of them from people purporting to be USA Today employees, describing the dour mood in the halls and speculating about a big meeting next week with the publisher. There’s also an interesting account of a recent internal meeting at which tensions flared between print and online staff. Apparently, online is now the favored child at McPaper and some of the print veterans resent it.

Also,

• The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is now offering a buyout to “the majority of regular full-time employees.” This is its third job reduction this year.
• The Rockford (Ill.) Register Star laid off 13 employees and closed its Springfield bureau. A round of voluntary buyouts this spring wasn’t enough. from April to June that resulted in the departure of 17 employees. The publisher wouldn’t rule out further cuts.
• Warren Buffett’s Buffalo News may be somewhat insulated by Berkshire Hathaway’s might, but it’s still offering a small buyout. The package is good, though, starting at $60,000 and going up. Staffers were surprised to learn of the offer first on the newspaper’s website, though.
• The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press is laying off six people, which is only about 3% of its staff. A 50-year-old columnist says he “didn’t see it coming.”
• The St. Petersburg Times avoided layoffs as 200 people accepted a buyout. The early-retirement package took out 40 percent of the paper’s staff of 50-and-older employees.

And Finally…

Slate’s Jack Shafer Ron Rosenbaum hates pencil puzzles, and his rant against a practice that he sees growing in popularity is worth reading just for gems like his characterization of Sudoku as the “mind-numbing hillbilly heroin of the white-collar class.” Shafer Rosenbaum picks up copies of Will Shortz’s Funniest Crossword Puzzles and let’s the first “down” clues speak for themselves:

4. Highly ornamented style

5. Tell ___ glance

Whoa, dude, you’re killin’ me!

Puzzle addicts could cure cancer if they’d apply their brains more appropriately, like by reading a book, he says. “For you puzzle people: Reading is a seven-letter word for what you’re depriving yourself of every sad minute you’re spending on your empty boxes.” In the end, “there are two kinds of brains. Those hardwired to obtain deep pleasure from arranging letters in boxes and those hardwired to get the creeps from the process.”

It’s very funny. Now, back to our puzzle…

When the Web became a consumer phenomenon a decade ago, newspaper executives first shivered and then rushed in to what they believed would be a gusher of growth. Online channels appeared to deliver incremental new readership, and advertisers were eager to reach more eyeballs.

Most publishers took the path of least resistance to exploiting the online opportunity. They simply layered the job on the existing ad sales force. Reps were given packages and incentives to upsell print advertisers with incremental business. And it all worked great. Until recently.

Ad Age sums up the alarming news that online ad sales by newspaper businesses is beginning to decline. Among the publishers reporting drops in the most recent quarter are Tribune, Scripps and Lee. For now, sales are dropping in the single-digit percentage range, but the falloffs are a sharp contrast to the 20%+ annual growth of the online ad market in general.

Why is this happening? Simply stated: greed. When most newspapers went online, they slapped the same stuff they were producing in print into an HTML template and uploaded it to a server. Today, few of them offer any reader interaction outside of a basic commenting capability and some shortcuts for bookmarking stories to Digg. The stuff they post online is still cut and pasted from print. There’s been no investment, no innovation and no effort to keep up with Web 2.0 evolution.

More problematic is that newspapers have failed to establish and train dedicated online sales forces. Their reps did okay when online ads were a simple add-on to free value-add to an ROP advertiser, but now that the online business is becoming the engine of growth, those simple upsells don’s work very well.

If you talk to most veteran print sales reps, you’ll quickly learn that they have no idea how to sell online advertising. The language and metrics are foreign to them. That’s not surprising, given that their incentives have historically been heavily loaded toward print sales. Print generated a disproportionate amount of their revenue and commissions, so they sold what brought in the money. Their motivations aren’t difficult to figure out. Sales people are coin-operated. They prefer the path of least resistance and sell what’s easiest to sell.

The problem is that upselling print advertisers is a losing business when those advertisers are fleeing print. This forces sales reps to prospect for new business, and all that new business is coming in online. What’s more, the revenues and commissions from that business are much lower than what the reps have been accustomed to. And they have to learn a whole new language and process to bring the business in the door.

So now you’ve got ad sales reps who have been taught how to close $10,000 deals that carry a 1% commission suddenly selling having to sell $500 deals that take just as much time to close. Even if you hike the commissions to 5%, it’s still a pretty unappetizing prospect for most of them. The fact that the products are uninspiring and expensive makes things worse. That means reps are basically selling brand and reputation, and newspaper brands are now becoming a liability.

Some nimble publishers have experimented with setting up online-only sales staffs and training new recruits in the intricacies of selling a highly targeted and measurable medium. They’re on the right track. Those that have deputized their print sales people to peddle banner ads as a companion to their ROP contracts are headed off a cliff. Sadly, that’s probably most of them.

Gannett Loses Control

What do you do when a blogger becomes the chief source of information about what’s going on inside your company for employees of that company? That’s the conundrum that’s facing Gannett these days, as Jim Hopkins’ independent Gannett Blog has apparently gone viral. Hopkins reveals some recent traffic statistics: 91,000 visits and 189,000 page views in the last 30 days. That’s serious blog traffic, folks. What’s more, the site is being swarmed by Gannett employees. It’s become the virtual watercooler for a company of 46,000 people

The conundrum for Gannett is what to do about Hopkins. So far, it’s chosen a strategy of benign neglect, which is a huge mistake. Hopkins remarks that Tara Connell, Gannett’s chief spokesman (and interestingly, a former managing editor at USA Today) has gone almost silent recently as rumors have swirled about layoffs and cutbacks. Meanwhile, check out the volume of comments on each post on the blog. Gannett’s strategy (and we suspect this isn’t Connell’s decision) is about as wrong-headed as it could be. It is allowing a brush fire to grow out of control. What’s worse is that it’s failing to address an important channel to its own employees, who are the most valuable spokespeople it has.

One of the great ironies of watching the newspaper industry collapse has been to see the same media icons that have long scolded institutions for their insularity become reclusive and inwardly focused when the spotlight is turned on them. Gannet Blog is exhibit A in how not to handle a new influencer.

Stiff Upper Lip at the Sunday Times

The UK’s The Guardian sits down with John Witherow, who’s edited the Sunday Times for 14 years, for his first interview in nine years. Jane Martinson finds the 56-year-old Witherow to be charming, disarmingly unpretentious and energetic. He’s full of passion for newspapers and optimistic about the future. Speaking of uber-boss Rupert Murdoch, with whom Witherow speaks every week, he says, “He intuitively believes in newspapers and thinks they can be successful. He believes that all titles should aim to expand their circulation.”

The Sunday Times has had limited recent success in that area. Witherow admits that a price hike to £2 two years ago was a tactical mistake that cost the paper 100,000 readers. Still, at 1.15 million weekly copies, it’s a profit engine that earns £50 million a year.Witherow is excited about a new design that has added full color. He doesn’t see his 14-year tenure in one of the country’s most visible journalism jobs as a liability. He loves the experience of reading newspapers and views it as his challenge to pass along that enthusiasm to others.

DirectTV Pioneer Takes Over at the LA Times

Broadcast veteran Eddy Hartenstein takes over as publisher at the beleaguered Los Angeles Times. The paper runs a terrific profile of the guy. Hartenstein is “regarded by many as the father of the satellite TV industry,” having germinated and nurtured the idea of delivering by satellite what had previously been available only over wires. He’s an analytical thinker who also has the people skills to lead an organization. He prefers to stay out of the spotlight and let his accomplishments speak for him. People respect and like him. He had lunch with Times editor Russ Stanton for 3½ hours before agreeing to take the job. Sam Zell assured him that Tribune Co. won’t micro-manage the operation. And mark this quote from Zell about the Times: “This [the Times] is a keeper.” Let’s see if that promise holds up when the next debt payments come due.

Miscellany

• The Chicago Tribune has cut 70 of newsroom positions – or about 13% of its total editorial headcount of 550 – in recent weeks. That’s more than most people expected, according to rival Chicago Sun-Times. The mood in the newsroom is described as “tense,” which is probably an understatement.
• More signs that the Modesto (Calif.) Bee is being absorbed into the Sacramento borg. The paper is offering a buyout to all of its 200+ employees, its second such offer this year. Last month, the paper said it will stop printing in Modesto and move those operations to Sacramento. That cost 33 full-time and 127 part-time employees their jobs. In April, the Bee extended a buyout plan to about 100 employees, 11 of whom took it. The McClatchy Co, which owns the franchise, is trying to cut overall expenses by 10%.
• The Indianapolis Star will lose 23 employees as part of the bigger cuts at Gannett. The story didn’t specify the size of the paper’s total workforce.
• Tucson Newspapers, which publishes The Tucson Citizen, will eliminate some 30 jobs, also as part of the Gannett cutbacks.
• The anonymous “Retch” at TellZell is exhorting readers to fill out an online petition. “It calls for Sam Zell to add two seats to the Tribune board of directors: one to represent the workers and another to represent readers.” Seeing as the workers own the means of production at Tribune Co., it doesn’t seem a half-bad idea. However, they’ve got to get more than the 128 signatures so far.

We Miss Copy Editors Already

From CIOInsight.com

And Finally…

If you’ve ever taken a “money shot,” you’ll appreciate this gallery of pictures that were taken just at the right time. A good 90% of them were no doubt accidental, but let’s pat the photographers on the back anyway. Everyone needs a good pat on the back once in a while.

The inclusive model of journalism that is evolving online will demand more editors than the media world has ever seen. In effect, all journalists will become editors. They will learn to gather first-person accounts and combine them with expert insights to create a tapestry of information. They may then be called upon to tend and update those stories for years. Journalists will be at the vortex of an information swirl, and their ability to sort through and harmonize information from many sources will be their principal value.

These new rules will demand a different set of skills than the ones historically taught by journalism schools and demanded by professional editors. As we have noted in earlier essays, the role of the reporter will become less prominent in the value chain. In the past, reporters were taught to gather and sift through large amounts of information, discarding selectively as time and space limitations dictated. In the future, space limitations will be irrelevant. Every bit of information can be captured and archived forever. Time demands will both shrink and expand.

Deadlines Compress, but Stories Never Die

They’ll shrink because deadlines will be constant and unrelenting. Journalists will be under pressure to publish news in near real-time. This will demand new aggregation and organization skills. A single journalist will no longer be the funnel — or bottleneck, depending on how you view it — for news events. Ordinary citizens will deliver important news accounts as they happen. A journalist’s competitors will no longer be a handful of regional print and broadcast outlets but an army of interested stakeholders who, in many cases, are more knowledgeable about the topic than the reporter.

It will be futile for a news organization to compete with this kind of citizen firepower. The only rational strategy is to co-opt it. That means reporters must develop relationships with people closest to the story, create the means to capture their observations and perspectives and deliver them quickly. Reporters will become, in effect, editors supervising a loosely formed team of interested stringers.

On the back end, time frames will lengthen considerably as news stories become archives. The Wikipedia model is perhaps the best illustration of this. On Wikipedia, stories begin as a “stub” and grow to sometimes epic proportions. Journalists will no longer write just “the first draft of history,” but will help to shape an archival account of considerably more long-term value. In some cases, a journalist’s career may become tied to a single story that he or she tends and enriches over time.

Promise and Problems

This model has great potential but also great challenge. The loss of trust is a huge issue. While not everyone trusts the news media, they can at least be reasonably certain that professional editors are working in their best interest. The inclusive journalism model has no such guarantees. Anyone can publish anything he or she wishes online, so editors will be needed to arbitrate conflicting claims.

This will certainly require old-fashioned reporting techniques. When the facts can’t be discerned from field reports, it will still be up to the professional journalist to get on the phone and verify them. Readers will come to trust these professional truth-sayers, whether they be individual journalists or media institutions. That’s an important point. In the future, readers may make little distinction between The New York Times and an independent journalist as long as they believe they can trust the source. As Matt Drudge demonstrated a decade ago, trusted brands can emerge without the blessing of media institutions.

Disclosure Trumps Verification

News will increasingly be published without the rigorous fact-checking that information consumers have come to expect. This is a controversial issue, but all trends point to accuracy becoming less vital as a criteria for publication than it is today.

The reason is that published information is no longer archival. Online reports can be changed at any time, which means that the impact of incorrect information is greatly diminished. Today, publication is no longer an end but a beginning. Disclosure will become more important than confirmation. Readers will come to accept that not all the facts are confirmed as long as those shortcomings are disclosed.

The fit and finish that has been characteristic of print publications will diminish in importance. While this is a difficult idea for many editors to accept, the reality is that online information consumers are more tolerant of typos, grammatical errors and structural inconsistency than print readers (this blog is perhaps a good example!). While some media outlets will continue to take pride in delivering high quality finished product, many readers will accept a trade-off between perfection and timeliness. Top editors are already coming to accept this. Faced with staff cuts and the need to do more with less, major newspapers are discovering that they no longer need a dozen editors to touch every front-page story.

In short, journalists will need to significantly broaden their range of skills.. The journalist of the future will be a resourceful, online-savvy and relationship-driven aggregator of information with the ability to apply reportorial shoe-leather where needed. Deadlines will contract on the front end, but stories may live for years in a continually updated archive. The journalist will become part reporter, part editor and part librarian, playing a pivotal role in framing the stream of events and opinion for an audience that demands context.

Other posts in this series:

The Future of Journalism, Part I

The Future of Journalism, Part II

Tribune Co. posted a $4.5 billion loss on a massive writeoff of goodwill to reflect the lower value of its newspaper assets. There was no good news in the results. Print revenue was down 15%, classified revenue off 26%, circulation sales down 2%, even online revenue was down 4%. The company’s next move will be to sell the Chicago Cubs, Wrigley Field and possibly its famous headquarters building in Chicago to meet a debt payment. After that, it’s a matter of crossing fingers and hoping that the economy improves enough to make more asset sales possible.

Alan Mutter thinks the Tribune writeoff may be the largest ever by a new owner. He pulls out the calculator and estimates that the value of the company has declined $20 million a day under Sam Zell’s leadership. Of course, Tribune is owned by its employees, so everyone shares Sam’s pain. Only Sam’s not feeling much pain because his highly leveraged position is funded almost entirely by other people’s money. Mutter’s Default-o-Matic ranking now rates Tribune as the company most likely to default on its debt. “At its new Caa2 [junk bond] rating, Tribune’s issues are considered to have a 48.3% chance of not being repaid,” he writes.

Needless to say, the not-so-loyal opposition at Tell Zell finds more to hate in the numbers. Pointing out that Tribune’s investment in its television assets actually increased in the quarter along with revenues, the anonymous blogger comments, “They realize that investing in the product can produce increases in revenue.” True ’nuff, but when a 7% increase in investment yields a 2% increase in sales, that’s the equivalent of selling dollar bills for 95 cents. You’ll sell lots of product and still lose your shirt.

For Zell and crew, this is simply race against time. Ken Doctor sums up the company’s dilemma: It’s bailing water in a rising storm tide and desperately hoping that the storm will stop. The more assets it sells (and there are rumors that the LA Times may be the next big property to go), the fewer resources it has to generate revenue to meet its debt payments. At some point, this model simply collapses.

The only scenarios that can rescue Tribune Co. from ultimate default are either a reinvigoration of the newspaper industry (unlikely) or a turnaround in the real estate market (more likely, but not soon). But with many economists now predicting that the hoped-for 2009 economic turnaround probably won’t happen, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which this company survives intact much beyond the end of next year. What does that mean for all the employee retirement funds being held in the form of Tribune stock?

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The heavy debt load borne by many newspaper owners continues to take its toll. Cox Enterprises is looking to sell the Austin (Tx.) Statesman and 28 other regional newspapers in hopes of raising enough money to meet its debt obligations. Cox also owns the better-known Atlanta Journal Constitution but is selling the Statesman because the paper is profitable and may fetch a better price. Don’t count on it, says analyst John Morton. “The sales value of newspapers has probably dropped in half in the last five years,” he’s quoted as saying. “There are a lot of newspapers that are up for sale and there are no takers.” (via Romenesko)

Media Organizations Pull Back on Convention Coverage

Now this is progress. Newspapers are reducing their reporting staffs at the political conventions by up to 20% this summer, apparently in response to the fact that these vacuous, over-scripted media circuses are becoming less and less relevant to an American public that finally has alternatives. The fact that American Idol is the most popular alternative is beside the point.

As we’ve pointed out many times, the practice of sending 15-20 reporters to transcribe the same speeches that the TV cameras are already capturing makes no sense. With both parties’ nominations sewn up months ago, there is nothing happening at these conventions that’s going to make a difference to the democratic process. The most interesting insight to come out of the conventions is the speeches by the up-and-coming party insiders, and those are broadcast anyway.

Interesting tidbit in this story: some 320 bloggers are credentialed for the two conventions this summer, compared to just 42 in 2004. These people are mostly traveling on their own dime and they will work tirelessly because each and every one is competing with all the others. Instead of sending staff reporters to cover the convention, couldn’t newspapers contract with some of these bloggers for exclusive interviews and color pieces? Wouldn’t that be a lot cheaper than paying full-time staff and travel expenses? Is anyone actually doing this? Share your comments.

Miscellany

Wirting in Editor & Publisher, former editor and ad sales rep Maegan Carberry says the unspeakable: journalists have to learn how to help their employers make money. “I was aghast when I asked the (UCLA) Bruin staffers how many of them knew what a CPM (cost per thousand) was and my question was met with resounding silence,” she writes. “Same for an Alexa ranking or Google Analytics. Viewing the news through a myopic editorial lens is prohibitive to success.” Journalism schools still appear to be teaching their students to think of themselves as siloed and separated from the business side, a luxury no one can afford any more. Quoting a colleague, Carberry relates, “The person who figures out the revenue model for 21st century journalism will be a hero in the industry along the lines of Gutenberg with his printing press.”

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CNN is actually hiring. It plans to expand its number of bureaus to 20 from 10. Some of these new staff will be what the news network calls “all-platform journalists.” They each get laptops, cameras and online editing tools as well as the capacity to upload video reports from their remote locations. Some may get canteens and K-rations, too. CNN’s SVP of newsgathering insightfully observes, “Everyone’s a reporter now. Even our viewers.”

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Tell Zell analyzes a curious list of laid-off staff that was distributed to departing LA Times employees and calculates that older workers were more likely to lose their jobs. Twenty-one percent of workers over 50 were terminated, compared to 10% of workers under 40. Naturally, the entire internal memo is on the site for all to e-mail to their friends.

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Blethen Maine Newspapers continues to exemplify the concept of bleeding staff.It’s cutting 20 full- and part-time positions at the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. That’s about 10 percent of the payroll. A lot of the laid-off employees are from the pressroom. Blethen unsuccessfully tried to shore up its business by doing commercial printing work, but that market collapsed as the economy worsened.

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The Newspaper Guild is going to become more active in trying to reinvent the industry, says its incoming president. Bernie Lunzer says the union will actively investigate new ownership models, since the old ownership models have failed so badly. “There are non-profits, co-op ownership along the lines of what was used in agriculture for many years,” he tells E&P. And he won’t rule out the possibility that the Guild could take an ownership stake in some concerns. Lunzer says the Guild is also going to take a strong stand in defending newspaper ad salespeople, who are increasingly threatened with a move to 100% incentive-based competition. Fear is not a good motivator for sales people, he says.

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In other union news, Philadelphia’s two biggest unions have agreed to forego a $25/week raise they had negotiated for Sept. 1. Members apparently want to help company ownership avoid total financial collapse. They might give a call to their colleagues in Honolulu and share this perspective.

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Sun-Times Media Group (STMG) is outsourcing its inbound classified advertising sales to Buffalo-based Classified Plus. It didn’t say how much the move would save. Classified Plus handles calls for more than 200 newspapers in the U.S. The way things are going, it may soon be able to do that with a single employee.

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David Esrati’s “How Newspapers can become relevant in a Web 2.0 world” reads like an extended blog comment, but has some sound advice for how newspapers can learn a few things from Google and other  Web properties.

And Finally

This 2 1/2 minute video has scored over 11 million views on YouTube, and if you watch it, you’ll understand why. It’s an incredible love story that could only be told in this medium. What a heartwarming story of love across the boundaries of time and species.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose company has played a critical role in the destruction of the US newspaper industry, bemoaned the decline of investigative journalism, a discipline he called “fundamental to how our democracy works,” in remarks at the the recent Ad Age Madison & Vine conference in New York. The executive said a fundamental challenge to the industry is that readers are spending less time on content and thus less time being monetized. The idea that new advertising models will emerge to support quality journalism after the newspaper industry collapses is misguided. “The evidence does not support that view,” he said.Schmidt observed that newspapers are being challenged by the triple whammy of advertising competition, high newsprint prices and a decline of non-targeted advertising. “These guys are in a world of hurt and we as a community need to find economic models that will fund really great content,” he said. He noted ruefully that sketchy coverage of the war in Iraq is a particularly compelling example of the loss of investigative resources.

Redesigns Called “Reinventions”

That’s the South Florida Sun-Sentinel before (left) and after its forthcoming redesign. Or should be say the SunSentinel? That’s right. As Charles Apple wryly notes, amid the cutbacks at Tribune Co., the new SunSentinel has laid off a hyphen.

Apple quotes SunSentinel design director Paul Wallen saying, “Although our median reader is in the mid to late 50s, our target audience is almost a generation younger. We’re after occasional readers, people who don’t feel they have the time or enough interest to read our paper on a regular basis…We want the paper to feel vibrant and alive, much like the community it serves.” The new design formally launches on Sunday. To get a larger (and different) example, click on the image at left.

Another Tribune Co. property, the Baltimore Sun, will debut a new design on Aug. 24. No prototypes are being floated yet, but Editor & Publisher quotes Sun publisher Tim Ryan saying the overhaul is a “reinvention.” There’ll be three sections: news, sports and features. The features section will be called “You” in a nod to the complete USATodayification of the American newspaper industry. Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams called the Sun redesign “a tour de force package that’s going to help re-write the Tribune Co. — and newspapers.” We’ve already shared our opinion on the business value of redesigns.

Milwaukee Feels the Pain

The Milwaukee Business Journal writes of forthcoming layoffs at the Journal Sentinel as the paper struggles to meet its goal of a 10% staff cut. The piece illustrates the scope of the industry’s pain. Milwaukee should be a good newspaper town. It’s got a solid blue-collar middle class, people who don’t change their habits very quickly. The Journal Sentinel has a near-monopoly position, with 70 percent readership among Milwaukee adults on Sundays and about 50 percent on weekdays. Yet ad revenue is down 13 percent so far this year on top of an 8 percent decline in 2007 and 4 percent in 2006. Sunday circulation is down 16% from a decade ago.

The story has the obligatory Newspaper Association of America quote about combined print/online audiences being larger than ever, but the nut graph is a quote from a Morningstar analyst: “For every dollar daily newspapers have lost in print revenue, they’ve been able to replace it with only 15 cents in revenue from their Web sites.” The only way newspapers can survive the online shift is to get smaller, the analyst says. It’s just that no one knows how small they have to get.

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A Journal Sentinel columnist is taking a buyout package and looking ahead. In this wistful, but ultimately uplifting farewell column he reminisces on the joys and frustrations of journalism and looks forward to taking a chance and spending some time with his family.

Miscellany

Former New York Times editor John Darnton recently retired from the paper. But instead of writing a tell-all memoir, he’s aired some dirty laundry in the form of a murder mystery called Black and White and Dead All Over (order it on Amazon). Reviewer Seth Faison knows many of the people who appear in Darnton’s fiction, including Publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Executive Editor Bill Keller. Faison praises the book for offering candid insight on the politics, chaos and juvenile behavior that characterizes a city newsroom. Darnton may lose friends as a result of this bitingly satirical work, but he’s made for darned good summer reading.

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Tucson Citizen assistant city editor Mark B. Evans has some kind words for political bloggers who are, in some cases, outclassing the area’s newspapers in political coverage. We ignore these new voices at our peril, he says. Newspapers are falling further behind, so why not welcome these emerging opinion leaders into our fold and benefit from the readership and revenue they can bring?

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The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader is trying to further reduce staff through buyouts. Kentucky’s largest newspaper already cut its workforce from 417 to 382 in June, but that wasn’t enough. Executives didn’t set a target figure for this round of cuts.

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The Christian Science Monitor‘s Jan Worth-Nelson has quietly, subtly replaced her morning newspaper with a MacBook and an RSS feed, but she still remembers the days when reading the Sunday paper was a treasured ritual. Sadly, cutbacks at the LA Times have made the paper less relevant to her Sunday mornings and she misses the thrill that came with snapping open that first issue of the day to drink in the fresh news that it promised.

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Howard Rheingold has an interesting essay on how to get more out of Twitter. Best advice: keep the list of people you’re following short and engage in meaningful interactions with them. He also doesn’t tweet what he had for breakfast. (via Mark Hamilton)

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End of an era: In a nod to the realities of advertiser pressure and a weakening print market,  Rolling Stone will ditch is unique, awkward trim size and switch to a standard format effective with the Oct. 30 issue. The magazine’s size will be reduced from 10″ x 11 3/4″ to 8″ x 10 7/8″.

And Finally…

People always celebrate success, but they don’t give enough credit to really creative failure. Thank goodness, then, for The Fail Blog, a photographic tribute to failures big and small. Don’t look at this site in the office. Your colleagues will wonder why you’re laughing so hard. And don’t, under any circumstances, view it while you’re drinking milk, if you know what we mean.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose company has played a critical role in the destruction of the US newspaper industry, bemoaned the decline of investigative journalism, a discipline he called “fundamental to how our democracy works,” in remarks at the the recent Ad Age Madison & Vine conference in New York. The executive said a fundamental challenge to the industry is that readers are spending less time on content and thus less time being monetized. The idea that new advertising models will emerge to support quality journalism after the newspaper industry collapses is misguided. “The evidence does not support that view,” he said.Schmidt observed that newspapers are being challenged by the triple whammy of advertising competition, high newsprint prices and a decline of non-targeted advertising. “These guys are in a world of hurt and we as a community need to find economic models that will fund really great content,” he said. He noted ruefully that sketchy coverage of the war in Iraq is a particularly compelling example of the loss of investigative resources.

Redesigns Called “Reinventions”

That’s the South Florida Sun-Sentinel before (left) and after its forthcoming redesign. Or should be say the SunSentinel? That’s right. As Charles Apple wryly notes, amid the cutbacks at Tribune Co., the new SunSentinel has laid off a hyphen.
Apple quotes SunSentinel design director Paul Wallen saying, “Although our median reader is in the mid to late 50s, our target audience is almost a generation younger. We’re after occasional readers, people who don’t feel they have the time or enough interest to read our paper on a regular basis…We want the paper to feel vibrant and alive, much like the community it serves.” The new design formally launches on Sunday. To get a larger (and different) example, click on the image at left.
Another Tribune Co. property, the Baltimore Sun, will debut a new design on Aug. 24. No prototypes are being floated yet, but Editor & Publisher quotes Sun publisher Tim Ryan saying the overhaul is a “reinvention.” There’ll be three sections: news, sports and features. The features section will be called “You” in a nod to the complete USATodayification of the American newspaper industry. Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams called the Sun redesign “a tour de force package that’s going to help re-write the Tribune Co. — and newspapers.” We’ve already shared our opinion on the business value of redesigns.

Milwaukee Feels the Pain

The Milwaukee Business Journal writes of forthcoming layoffs at the Journal Sentinel as the paper struggles to meet its goal of a 10% staff cut. The piece illustrates the scope of the industry’s pain. Milwaukee should be a good newspaper town. It’s got a solid blue-collar middle class, people who don’t change their habits very quickly. The Journal Sentinel has a near-monopoly position, with 70 percent readership among Milwaukee adults on Sundays and about 50 percent on weekdays. Yet ad revenue is down 13 percent so far this year on top of an 8 percent decline in 2007 and 4 percent in 2006. Sunday circulation is down 16% from a decade ago.
The story has the obligatory Newspaper Association of America quote about combined print/online audiences being larger than ever, but the nut graph is a quote from a Morningstar analyst: “For every dollar daily newspapers have lost in print revenue, they’ve been able to replace it with only 15 cents in revenue from their Web sites.” The only way newspapers can survive the online shift is to get smaller, the analyst says. It’s just that no one knows how small they have to get.

---

A Journal Sentinel columnist is taking a buyout package and looking ahead. In this wistful, but ultimately uplifting farewell column he reminisces on the joys and frustrations of journalism and looks forward to taking a chance and spending some time with his family.

Miscellany

Former New York Times editor John Darnton recently retired from the paper. But instead of writing a tell-all memoir, he’s aired some dirty laundry in the form of a murder mystery called Black and White and Dead All Over (order it on Amazon). Reviewer Seth Faison knows many of the people who appear in Darnton’s fiction, including Publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Executive Editor Bill Keller. Faison praises the book for offering candid insight on the politics, chaos and juvenile behavior that characterizes a city newsroom. Darnton may lose friends as a result of this bitingly satirical work, but he’s made for darned good summer reading.

---

Tucson Citizen assistant city editor Mark B. Evans has some kind words for political bloggers who are, in some cases, outclassing the area’s newspapers in political coverage. We ignore these new voices at our peril, he says. Newspapers are falling further behind, so why not welcome these emerging opinion leaders into our fold and benefit from the readership and revenue they can bring?

---

The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader is trying to further reduce staff through buyouts. Kentucky’s largest newspaper already cut its workforce from 417 to 382 in June, but that wasn’t enough. Executives didn’t set a target figure for this round of cuts.

---

The Christian Science Monitor‘s Jan Worth-Nelson has quietly, subtly replaced her morning newspaper with a MacBook and an RSS feed, but she still remembers the days when reading the Sunday paper was a treasured ritual. Sadly, cutbacks at the LA Times have made the paper less relevant to her Sunday mornings and she misses the thrill that came with snapping open that first issue of the day to drink in the fresh news that it promised.

---

Howard Rheingold has an interesting essay on how to get more out of Twitter. Best advice: keep the list of people you’re following short and engage in meaningful interactions with them. He also doesn’t tweet what he had for breakfast. (via Mark Hamilton)

---

End of an era: In a nod to the realities of advertiser pressure and a weakening print market,  Rolling Stone will ditch is unique, awkward trim size and switch to a standard format effective with the Oct. 30 issue. The magazine’s size will be reduced from 10″ x 11 3/4″ to 8″ x 10 7/8″.

And Finally…

People always celebrate success, but they don’t give enough credit to really creative failure. Thank goodness, then, for The Fail Blog, a photographic tribute to failures big and small. Don’t look at this site in the office. Your colleagues will wonder why you’re laughing so hard. And don’t, under any circumstances, view it while you’re drinking milk, if you know what we mean.

We’ve been thinking hard about how to defend of the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s decision to suppress most of its non-breaking news until after it has appeared in print. It is so easy just to dismiss the policy as bone-headed and retrograde, as Jeff Jarvis, Steve Outing and Steve Boriss quickly did. Perhaps there is some counter-intuitive brilliance here, we reasoned. After all, the Inquirer hasn’t much to lose. Its owners are nearly in default on their debt and newsroom staffing has been slashed as badly as any paper in the country. Perhaps there’s merit in challenging the conventional wisdom that all news has to be free. Perhaps, by bucking the conventional wisdom, the Inquirer can motivate Philadelphians to get excited about their hometown paper again. Perhaps people will actually want to subscribe to the Inquirer because they can’t afford to miss the great journalism that’s there. Perhaps the print-first philosophy is so retro that it’s actually on the leading edge.

Naaah. It’s just a dumb policy. Here’s the basic misconception in Inquirer ME Mike Leary’s thinking: people are hungry for information and they’ll go to where the good information is. The Inquirer staff produces great features and investigative reports that Philadelphians just have to read. If those reports are denied to them online, they’ll have to get the newspaper, because they just can’t afford to be without that information.

Here’s the reality: people are swimming in information. They have so much information at their fingertips that they can no longer tell where it comes from. RSS readers, iGoogle and MyYahoo pay little attention to brand or news source. Americans’ biggest problem is keeping their heads above the water as the deluge of information increases. There is little in the Inquirer or any other major newspaper that is so relevant to people’s daily lives that they must have the information the minute it’s available. If they don’t get it from the print edition, they’ll hear it on the radio or read it in an e-mail newsletter or catch it on their FriendFeed if other people think it’s important.

The Inquirer policy is rooted in the outmoded conceptions that information is scarce and media brands are important. The reality is that information is plentiful and media brands are becoming irrelevant. Maybe the Times or the Journal could pull off a policy like this, but they aren’t dumb enough to try. The Inquirer apparently is.

Media Arrogance on Parade

A couple of media watchers are taking the press to task for ignoring seemingly important stories. Mark Potts excoriates mainstream media for ignoring the John Edwards affair. Much of their indifference was apparently due to the fact that the National Enquirer broke the story. Media snootiness about the supermarket tabloids is legend, but in this case, the Enquirer‘s reporting was about 95% accurate. Plus they had photos, for goodness sake. This is classic media arrogance. If the story wasn’t reported by a ‘real journalist’ (there’s that term again), then it isn’t to be trusted. But there are fewer and fewer real journalists out there, so where are you going to get your news? Perhaps it’s time to redefine your definition of credible source.

Mark Hamilton comments on the indifference of the Canadian press to the outbreak of fighting between Georgia and Russia. Even though the conflict has taken more than 1,000 lives, the local media – and newspapers in particular – have been more focused on the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics. Here’s the herd at work: send your limited reportorial resources on a two-week junket to Beijing for an event that’s being covered by thousands of other reporters. What’s the point of that? What insight are your reporters going to mine from a press conference with some gold medal winner than the other 75 reporters in attendance have missed?

These two cases are emblematic of newspapers’ inability to reinvent themselves. Facing a near total collapse of their business model and unprecedented pressure to do more with less, major news organizations are responding by doing more of what they’ve always done. Maybe it’s human nature, but it’s not the kind of behavior that will pull them out of the death spiral.

Business News

Gatehouse Media, whose stock price has dwindled from $22 a share to 69 cents, reported a $430 million quarterly loss, reflecting a huge writedown in goodwill. The company owns a portfolio of small-town papers that are outperforming industry averages, but it is burdened by $1.2 billion in debt and could default soon.

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Hearst Corp. bought the Connecticut Post and seven other non-daily newspapers from MediaNews Group. While this might appear to be the early rustlings of a consolidation trend brought about by plummeting values, Mark Potts thinks it’s actually a harbinger of a Hearst plan to sell the San Francisco Chronicle to MediaNews. The question is why anyone would want it.

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Lee Enteprises is shutting down the South Idaho Press of Burley, its second-largest Idaho daily, along with two weekly papers in the area. The Press has a circulation of 4,000. It will become a section in the Times News, which is Lee’s Idaho flagship. Lee said 14 people will lose their jobs.

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Sun-Times Media Group Inc. lost $37.8 million in the second quarter, and CEO Cyrus Freidheim said he’s planning new cost cuts to help cope with steeper-than-expected declines in revenue. Some of the cost-saving methods under consideration at the Sun-Times include outsourcing classified ad sales and some financial and administrative activities; cutting corporate costs through possible privatization or de-registering of stock, and changing the size and format of its papers. The company also said it plans to explore real estate sales to generate cash.

And Finally…

Editors Weblog reports on The Guardian‘s plans to deliver its product on e-ink. That’s a thin, flexible computer display that can be rolled up and stashed in a shirt pocket. When combined with an Internet connection, e-ink could make it possible for a constantly updated newspaper to be delivered electronically in a format that readers could conveniently carry around. E*Ink Corp. has been working on this stuff for a decade. The Guardian estimates it’ll be eight years before the technology is commercially practical.

Nine summers ago, I left a job running a 75-person newsroom to become the sixth employee at an Internet startup. That was the thing to do in the late 90s, when stock options were plentiful and the Internet promised boundless reward. By 2002, that had all changed, and many dot-com entrepreneurs were slinking back to their old employers, asking if they could have their jobs back.

That didn’t happen to me, though. The media startup I joined, TechTarget, actually grew through the technology nuclear winter. It went public last year (although the stock has recently been sucked down by the media stock malaise) and now employs about 600 people.

One thing we did early on that challenged conventional wisdom was to tear down walls between advertising and editorial. At previous employers, it was accepted that sales people and editors not only never talked, they were often openly hostile toward each other. My new organization didn’t have cultural barriers like that, so we experimented with a more collegial process.

Ad sales and editorial people sat together in biweekly meetings to discuss story budgets and the sales climate. Things got pretty testy sometimes, but the debate was open and honest. Instead of calling people names behind their backs, each side shared stories about its successes and challenges. Over time, the relationships grew to be, if not chummy, at least respectful.

Once people respected each other, they began to work collaboratively. Management urged along the process by putting in place a bonus plan that rewarded everyone for a business unit’s financial success. Sales reps and editors openly batted around ideas for products that would have both advertiser and reader appeal. They came up with a lot of innovations. It turned out that collaborating didn’t mean infringing. Boundaries were still respected, but conversation wasn’t prohibited. Imagine that.

It was my job as chief editor to insure that the quality and integrity of the editorial product weren’t compromised. In five years in that role, I never once felt that my principles were violated. If ever there was a challenge, I appealed to the CEO, who always came down on the side of editorial quality.

Incidentally, a handful of people switched groups over these five years, including a few editors who realized their true calling was in sales.

This experience came to mind today reading Chris O’Brien’s Five Steps to Foster Innovation in the Newsroom. Among them: “Find new ways to get people from different areas to work together. This includes editorial and business side (Sorry, but it’s long past time to kill this sacred cow).”

Amen to that. Stick a fork in that well-done bovine. Building moats between the revenue side and the product side was excusable when profits were healthy, but now is the time to discard assumptions. Ad sales people aren’t contagious and talking with them won’t make you compromise your principles. If it does, then you have bigger problems.

Traditionalists are still resistant. Over at the San Francisco Chronicle, whose future is probably less secure than any major metro daily’s, “real journalists” are appalled about the decision to give former mayor Willie Brown a column because of Brown’s history of alleged self-dealing. People who aren’t disgusted by Brown’s column “are people who don’t put journalism first,” says one insider.

Puh-leeze. Giving a popular ex-mayor a column sounds like a pretty interesting way to spur circulation. And if the purists have a problem with that, have it out in public. Let the Chron columnists and bloggers debate the issue in front of everyone instead of grousing in the men’s room. Too many editors continue to use the shield of journalistic integrity to duck new ideas and then complain to each other instead of airing their opinions in public.

Newspapers need strong chief editors who support collaboration. They also need publishers who will rally to the side of quality journalism when a dispute occurs. Reporters and editors need to get over the old biases that never made much sense to begin with. I can’t think of another industry in which the people who sell the product are at such odds with the people who make the product. If you can make a persuasive case for maintaining this rigid separation, please contribute to the comments section. I just don’t see it.

The Futility of Corporate Secrecy

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at the Gannett Blog. On Wednesday, Editor Jim Hopkins picked up on an item in one of the Gannett titles that said corporate finance and accounting operations were being consolidated and moved to Indianapolis. He suggested that recent cutbacks at other Gannett holdings point to layoffs of as many as 2,300 people, or about 5% of Gannett’s workforce.

Blogs are a petrie dish for speculation, so when Hopkins asked reader for input, they responded. Gannett folk from Asheville, Detroit, Louisville and elsewhere are jumping in with their local version of layoff rumors. It sounds like something’s coming, and it isn’t good. Absent from the discussion is Gannett, which certainly should be aware of this popular site. If the rumors are false, why isn’t someone from corporate stepping in and correcting them? Perhaps it’s because the rumors are true. Absent Gannett’s voice, people will tend to believe that silence is confirmation.

Go East, Young Journo

Media markets in India are booming, thanks to the surging economy and the growing middle class, and some discouraged US journalists are picking up and moving east. New dailies and magazines are popping up every week and they’re hiring. Some TV stations are paying ex-print reporters up to $180,000 to go on-air, and that kind of money goes a long way in India. Five recent graduates of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism recently joined the Hindustan Times and say the experience has been great and the opportunity is greater. One expat says he turns down two or three assignments a month. “I’d like to see more freelancers move to India. There are too many stories to cover and just not enough time to get to them all.’

Miscellany

San Diegans may have reason for cautious optimism. The owner of a local TV station says he may make a bid for the distressed Union-Tribune. Michael D. McKinnon was a print publisher back in the 50s and 60s and he doesn’t want to see a local institution in the hands of an outsider.

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Just because it’s user-generated, doesn’t mean it’s profitable. In May, we told you about Everywhere and JPG, two new magazines from 8020 Media that break the mold by deriving most of their content from readers. Well, it turns out that Everywhere wasn’t everywhere with advertisers, so 8020 has shuttered it after only four issues in order to focus on JPG. Management prefers to use the term “on hold” and said it’s still committed to the model. Interesting side note: only two editors lost their jobs.

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While owner Blethen Maine Newspapers continues to seek a buyer, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram bleeds. An unspecified number of people have been laid off in the fourth round of cuts in a year. The publisher is also adjusting trim size and consolidating some sections to save money on paper. Employee solidarity helped mitigate the pain; workers volunteered to take time off so that jobs wouldn’t be eliminated.

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Management at the Los Angeles Daily News apparently thought that one way to boost sagging morale would be to implement a dress code. Employees didn’t agree. The idea has been scotched.

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The McPherson (Kan.) Sentinel becomes the latest daily to eliminate its Monday edition. It will publish five days a week. Mondays are notoriously poor for ad sales.

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James Cogan says it’s a great time to get into the newspaper business because chaos is a good time for innovation. We wish there were more people with his positive attitude.

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Charles Apple has a practical, whimsical and uplifting essay on advice for the recently laid-off. Our favorite: “Your editor didn’t want to lay you off. Seriously. Make him/her a reference. Even if you have to apologize for throwing that potted plant during your HR interview.”

Now it’s A.H. Belo’s turn. The Dallas-based publisher plans to cut $50 million in expenses over the next eight months by cutting staff at the Providence Journal, the Dallas Morning News and the Riverside, Calif., Press Enterprise. Belo said its hopes to reduce its workforce by about 500 people, or 14%, through voluntary severance packages, although layoffs are a possibility. Unlike some publishers, it’s targeting the cuts by property. The ProJo, for example, will offer buyouts to about a third of 700-person workforce but won’t accept more than 54 takers. Belo is also looking at selling some real estate it owns in downtown Providence and Dallas to boost the bottom line. Like many publishers, its dividend costs have skyrocketed and the company acknowledged that it may have to cut current $1/year dividend, which amounts to nearly 17% of the stock price.

The Morning News will lose about 10% of its 390 full-time newsroom staffers. It will also reduce frequency of Quick, a free newspaper for young adults, from five times a week to weekly. It’s continuing with plans to launch Briefing, a new free title for nonsubscribers who want a “quick-read” newspaper.

Belo has suffered more than most newspaper publishers in the last year. While its peers are mostly still profitable, Belo suffered a $3.2 million loss in the most recent quarter. As we’ve noted recently, losses can lead to a dangerous death spiral in which cuts lead to subscriber and advertiser flight, which leads to more layoffs.

The layoffs at the Providence Journal are particularly disheartening. The paper is under constant pressure from its neighbor Boston Globe to the north, but is generally acknowledged to have done an oustanding job of localizing its coverage and retaining reader loyaty. While the ProJo is getting off easy compared to the hits that many other papers around the country have seen, it’s clearly not impervious to industry trends.

BusinessWeek Gives ‘Em Zell

BusinessWeek visits Sam Zell in his plush Chicago office and comes to the conclusion that Zell’s $8.5 billion purchase of Tribune Co. is “one of the most disastrous the media world has ever seen.” Zell doesn’t mince words in the interview: “If current trends in advertising are permanent, we have a really serious problem.”

This profile is the best we’ve seen in the months since Tribune’s fortunes began to deteriorate. It notes Zell’s open disdain for the newspaper business as well as his distaste for baseball, which is a paradox since Zell owns one of the most storied franchises in the game. The piece also outlines clearly the financial sleight-of-hand that enabled Zell to acquire Tribune with just $315 million of his personal fortune. “When we first undertook this project, we viewed Tribune as 60 ways to get lucky,” he says. Zell doesn’t have to grow the business in order to reap a huge profit, the piece says. He just has to keep it afloat.

Which is a challenge in itself. The story quotes analysts as predicting that Tribune could default on its debt obligations as soon as December. Zell has put a number of innovative new practices into place, including consolidating some newspaper and broadcast operations in Florida and Chicago. However, the free-fall in newspaper advertising may just be too great. Meanwhile, Zell’s trash-talking about newspapers isn’t helping employee morale. “If you have a lemonade stand, you don’t try to sell the lemonade by saying it’s terrible,” says ex-LA Times reporter Myron Levin.

Things Get Stranger in Paradise

The State of Hawaii has stepped into the dispute between the Honolulu Advertiser and the 54 employees, many of them union members, the paper laid off earlier this month. The Newspaper Guild has problems with how the layoffs were handled, maintaining that seniority guidelines weren’t followed. Meanwhile, the union has printed up 100,000 cards that readers can send in to cancel their subscriptions in event of a strike. The thinking is that it’s better to take down the Advertiser and cause a whole lot more people to lose their jobs than to have 54 employees treated unfairly.