Mark Potts sums up and points to analyses by Alan Mutter, Ken Doctor and Mike Simonton suggesting even worse news ahead for the newspaper industry. Revenues continue to fall faster than cost cuts can make up the difference, suggesting that ongoing cuts are likely for the forseeable future. Potts suggests the unthinkable, which we joined him in predicting two years ago: “We’re going to lose a big newspaper (several, actually). And it’s going to happen sooner than anybody thinks.”

One of Potts’ sources is Alan Mutter,  whose number crunching constantly turns up interesting insights about the state of the business. Mutter says newspaper companies are still turning in blue-chip profit margins. That’s good, right? Not if your business is collapsing. It means that newspaper companies are hacking away at the product in order to sustain profits. One wonders why. It’s not as if anyone is buying newspaper stocks. When businesses are forced to reinvent themselves, it usually means swallowing the bitter pill of accepting losses while the old business is discarded and a new one developed.

By propping up their profits, newspaper companies are only setting themselves up for a harder fall. Troubled companies can choose to either invest in product development and try to build new businesses or manage their cash cows down into the ground. Mutter’s analysis suggests that publishing executives have already made that choice. That’s with the possible exception of Sam Zell, whose  deep costs cuts at least appear to have a strategy behind them.

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Is The New York Times worth just $750 million? That’s its actual value, according to an analysis by a BusinessWeek intern.  Jay Yarow walks us through the math and then quotes an  analyst saying, “”Valuations have fallen to unprecedented levels that have no relationship to reality.” True, but no one is stepping up to the plate yet, suggesting that Wall Street  still believes we’re nowhere near the bottom. In the meantime, the Times‘ investment in its new Manhattan headquarters building is reportedly worth $750, which means that for that price you could buy the paper and get the building for free. Or vice versa.

And Finally

It used to take a team of writers and designers to create a newspaper spoof. Now it just takes Roy Rivenburg. The writer has dreamed up Not the Los Angeles Times,  a very funny takeoff in the finest tradition of the Onion and a raft of newspaper parodies that came out in the 70s and 80s (our favorite was Off The Wall Street Journal). Selected headlines:

• State sells San Diego to erase budget deficit
• Wal-Mart unveils $29 defibrillato
• Galleria escalator stalls, dozens of riders trapped

The site is only one page deep, but clicking on the links provides further amusement.

The newspaper industry needs to make radical changes, but neither the management nor the culture in a typical newsroom is conducive to much change at all, according to an organizational behavior specialist.

Mark Glaser interviews Vickey Williams, director of the Digital Workforce Initiative in the Media Management Center at Northwestern University and author of All Eyes Forward, a report about the challenges in changing newsroom culture.

Bottom line: Williams believes most newsrooms are still forcing young journalists into the mold that existed 20 years ago: a top-down structure in which decisions are made at the top and underlings are expected to execute them without question. Characterizing many newsrooms as “aggressive-defensive workplaces,” she finds structural impediments to the adoption of digital tools, suspicion of online media and organizational resistance to any ideas that don’t come from the top.

What’s most troubling about this behavior is that it’s sending young journalists for the doors, Williams says. They don’t believe their ideas are getting a fair hearing and they don’t want to work for organizations that are so insular.

Glaser has a transcipt of his interview with Williams. A few quotes:

• “Resistance [to change] is going down. I am not at all convinced that we know how to replace that with something constructive. So in short, we don’t fight it as hard and as loudly” the fact that we have to change” but we don’t know what to do instead.”
• “Journalists need to get more business savvy” and they will get more business savvy one way or the other. If they become a victim of the cutbacks, then they will be looking at making their own living and be worried about income and attracting advertisers to their website. So getting more business savvy is only a plus.”
• “We asked people what they thought about the data [showing that young people wanted to leave], and the veterans even wanted to argue down that the data was correct. And if it was correct and young people were leaving, it was because they were wimps, and good riddance.”
• On creating a change-oriented culture: “For years, we have been an industry with our panels and task forces and we’ve generated lots of reports that have gathered dust on the corners of bosses’ desks, and people don’t have the energy for that anymore.”
• “I agree with Jeff Jarvis that it would be a very good gamble to allow Millennials to start up companies or products. But I can’t think of a single media company where that would be allowed to happen on a broad scale.”

Williams’ conclusions are sobering. There’s a lot of talk about change and what newspapers need to do to save themselves these days .There are many great ideas for reinvention, although there is no avoiding a lot of pain in the process. Ideas are just one part of the picture, though. There needs to be a culture in place that’s willing to accept change. Newspapers don’t have a lot going for them in this area.

Newspapers have done business more or less the same way for about 150 years.Few industries on earth can say that. The newspaper business has been historically stable, profitable and predictable. It’s boring, but it makes a lot of money. In the 1970s and 80s, some titles enjoyed renewal rates of 90%. In addition, consolidation during the last 50 years has left most cities with only one or two newspapers. Monopolies and duopolies usually suck at innovation. When was the last time your electric company did something clever?

Williams is right that newsroom culture rewards obedience. After all, you need structure and process to produce a fresh product every 24 hours. The hierarchical organization of most newsrooms is appropriate for what they’ve been asked to do for many years. Now you’ve got a situation in which authority needs to be openly questioned. Do you suppose a 30-year veteran city editor is going to cozy up to that idea? Cultures don’t change until people change, and organizations that are run by old guys who have worked their way up through the ranks are the least change-oriented of all.

This is why it’s so hard to be optimistic about the future of newspapers. Ideas can’t flourish without a nurturing culture. Newspapers exist in a culture that is so change-averse that adding color to the front page is considered a breakthrough. When your value is defined by process rather than agility, it’s tough to suddenly be agile.

Maybe I’m being too cynical. Please share your views. Is there a way for this industry to reinvent itself without blowing itself up first?

Miscellany

• Perhaps the savior will be cell phones. The New York Times reports that Verve wireless has signed up 4,000 papers and 140 publishers to deliver news via its wireless service. Research says 40 million people use their phones to go online, and Verve’s service can push news alerts, local stories and geotargeted advertising at those customers, most of whom are probably driving at the time. The CEO of Verve is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, by the way.
• The Santa Fe New Mexican is cutting 16.5 jobs, or about 7% of its workforce. Ten of those lost jobs are in the newsroom. The biggest culprit is real estate advertising, which has all but disappeared.
• E.W. Scripps may write down the value of its newspaper and local broadcast holdings in the third quarter, the CEO said on the company’s earnings call. Scripps carved out the troubled businesses into their own company earlier this year so they wouldn’t drag on the more lucrative TV and online businesses.
• Speaking of Scripps, columnist Jay Ambrose scolds readers for not appreciating all the great things newspapers deliver. “Perhaps the Internet and innovative editors will come up with ways to preserve the distinguishing value of newspapers,” he writes. “It would help if more citizens understood this value themselves.” Good going, Jay. Blame those customers.

The New York Times Co. shows signs of managing through the crisis, although its regional properties continue to drag down overall performance. The company’s earnings fell by almost 50% in the quarter just reported, but when you factor out the cost of layoffs and buyouts, profits were off only about 12%, from 29 to 26 cents per share. That beat analyst expectations. Circulation revenues were up as the company implemented a price increase at its flagship. The company’s regional holdings continue to drag on performance. Combined revenues at The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune were off 9.5%, which is better than recent industry averages. But the New England Media Group, which includes the Boston Globe, fell 15.1%. The Times continues to look like it can survive and even thrive in the post-metro-daily world because of the power of its brand. The Globe is a different matter, though.

And credit the Times for originality on this one. The paper has linked its web site with popular business networking destination LinkedIn.com. Beginning this week, LinkedIn members who read an article in the business or technology section of NYTimes.com will see a box pointing them to five stories selected for them on the basis of their LinkedIn profiles. There will also be ads, of course. This kind of profiling is a squishy area for Internet companies, which constantly walk the line between delivering value and treading on privacy. The advantage for the Times is that it’s trusted brand is less likely to incur outrage than some dot-com start

Zell on a Skewer

Brooklyn College professor Eric Alterman, who penned a best article so far this year about the newspaper industry’s travails, brings his sardonic wit to a short piece in the ultra-liberal political journal The Nation, which we somehow managed to overlook until today. Summing up the desperate cuts, price increases and rationalizations that we and others have been documenting for months, Alterman ultimately turns his canons on everybody’s favorite whipping post: Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell.

Admittedly, making fun of Tribune’s “chief innovation officer,” Lee Abrams, is a little bit like beating up your grandmother. But Alterman can’t resist. Noting, among other things, that Abrams was surprised to learn that reports datelined “Baghdad” are actually written by reporters in Baghdad, he concludes, “The more one listens to the men and women at the top of the industry, the more it becomes obvious that the survival of the newspaper is going to have to come from somewhere else.” Unfortunately, Altman concludes that he has no great ideas for saving daily newspapers. He’s just quite certain that the people charged with doing it currently aren’t up to the task.

Miscellany

Tribune Co. executives are trying to reassure shell-shocked staffers that the worst may be over. In an interview on the company’s intranet on Tuesday, Zell and COO Randy Michaels said the company’s recent job cuts were intended to be swift and deep in order to avoid the “death by 1,000 cuts” scenario that is afflicting many of their competitors. Zell wouldn’t predict an end to the earnings free-fall, nor would he be held accountable for earlier promises that he wouldn’t cut his way to profitability. Michaels outlined some aggressive initiatives at member papers aimed at attracting new business.

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Erica Smith, whose Paper Cuts Google Maps mashup vividly documents the industry’s slashing and burning, says Tribune Co.’s Florida properties have been keeping mum on recent job cuts. The Orlando Sentinel eliminated 16 jobs a week ago but didn’t fess up till Friday, she says. She also cites, as we did earlier this week, the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel‘s self-demeaning decision to hide news of its own layoffs because of the editor’s concern that the news will get “butchered in the media.”

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A group of Chicago Tribune staffers has published a list of their 50 favorite consumer magazines. While predictable candidates like Rolling Stone and The New Yorker are there, the list has some unexpected delights, including Modern Drunkard and Firehouse, which is, believe it or not, for people who love to chase fire engines. If only these print-biased editors had thought to hyperlink some of the titles they recommend. Incredible.

As editors and bloggers have combed through the “Changing Newsroom” study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism over the last couple of days, they’ve increasingly focused on the study’s findings that editors are, on the whole, positive about the future.

“Newspaper editors optimistic despite downs” was UPI’s headline. Writing on Conde Nast, Jeff Bercovici focuses on all the good news in the study and observes that newspapers are “very sensibly shifting their resources away from areas where their efforts can easily be duplicated and into the sorts of coverage where they can best distinguish themselves from competitors in all media.”

How can crusty old news editors remain positive amid the drumbeat of dreadful news that’s afflicting the industry? We can only speculate, but that’s what blogs do.

For one thing, perhaps there aren’t as many crusty old news editors any more. Layoffs have washed out a lot of the old guard. Some of them now content themselves blogging about the good old days, although a few still run editorial departments. Mostly, though, the editors who are left are the fighters, and fighters tend to think positively.

There’s also a silver lining to any crisis: the opportunity to focus and rethink the business. In that spirit, the most remarkable section of the Pew study is the chapter about the future. Read it to see quotes from veteran editors who believe the downsizing has required them to become more resourceful, creative and open-minded. In the words of Miami Herald Managing Editor David Wilson, – Through all that- ™s happened over the last few years, the quality of our work is among the best I- ™ve seen- ”and I- ™ve been here 31 years.- 

The study also reports that editors are more involved than ever in trying to identify new revenue streams, even offering an investigative reporting project for sale on Amazon in one case. What’s more, editors don’t think this breach of the traditional ad/edit wall is such a terrible thing. Some are actually invigorated by the idea of becoming more involved in the success of the business.

“They are working hard, innovating, making changes,” says the report. “They may have fewer reporters and less space to work with, [but] they are certain that what they are producing today is better than what they produced a few years ago.”

We’ve noted before the importance of discarding assumptions. It’s hard to do, but it’s the essential first step toward envisioning the future. The inspiring message from the Pew research is that the editors who are working through the ritual destruction of their industry are discarding assumptions en masse and finding that there really are better ways to do their jobs.

Curmudgeons persist but, as Jeff Jarvis notes, they are being marginalized. Times of crisis are also times to rethink everything. That appears to be the bright spot in the industry right now.

Layoff Log

The Tribune Co.-owned Allentown Morning Call will cut 35 to 40 newsroom positions, according to a memo from the publisher posted on Tell Zell. The Morning Call did a small buyout in March, but this appears to be much more sweeping, amounting to more than a quarter of the news staff, according the blog.

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Also in stealth mode is the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune Co. property which is cutting its 290-person news staff by 20% but choosing not to report it. Commenting on the paper’s decision not to tell its customers about significant changes to the product they pay for, Editor Earl Maucker comments, ironically, “It serves nobody’s interest to put it out ahead of time. As I’ve found, it gets butchered in the media.”

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There are bad times all over the Sunshine State. The Fort Myers News-Press is laying off 36 people, eliminating some unfilled positions and killing a weekly supplement targeted at Hispanic readers. We hope Publisher Carol Hudler is wrong in calling the region’s economic climate “the worst local economy since perhaps the crash of 1929.” In fact, the economy did pretty well in 1929. The worst years of the Great Depression were from 1933-1937.

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The beleaguered staffs at Maine’s Portland Press-Herald and Sunday Maine Telegram are bracing for the fourth set of layoffs in 12 months. The problem is that owner Seattle Times Co. can’t find a buyer for its Maine Newspaper Death Watch – º Edit – ” WordPressholdings, so it keeps cutting and cutting in an effort to prop up the finances. This layoff will take out 10% of the remaining 85 news staffers. Crosscut Seattle has exhaustive background. There’s also a depressing blog devoted to this situation.

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Laid-off newspaper employees and their colleagues are increasingly taking to the street to publicize their plight. Baltimore Sun employees staged a rally last week, complete with 100 empty chairs to symbolize lost jobs. Alan Mutter asks if this is really an appropriate response, or if the protests might actually backfire and cause subscriber flight. What do you think? Is all the publicity about the death of newspapers actually worsening the industry’s decline? Maybe they’re on to something at the Sun-Sentinel.

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Tell Zell reprints some of the farewell memos that went out last Friday as laid-of LA Times staffers packed their bags. Journalists write some of their best stuff at times like these.

And Finally

Our WordPress template chokes when we try to embed video, so we’ll have to settle for a link. If you want to understand the macroeconomic and demographic shifts that are disrupting this and so many other industries, spend eight minutes watching this video. You will be riveted.

It’s the dog days of summer, so even unsurprising research is good enough to draw lots of attention. This time the subject is a new Pew Research study that finds – “ surprise! – that newspapers are getting smaller, more local and more focused.

The New York Times chooses to focus on the obvious in its coverage. – “Almost two-thirds of American newspapers publish less foreign news than they did just three years ago, nearly as many print less national news, and despite new demands on newsrooms like blogs and video, most of them have smaller news staffs,” reads its lead.

We were actually more intrigued by Editor & Publisher‘s take, which zooms in on the paradox of staff cuts: – Editors by big numbers think their papers are actually improving their coverage, even as they lament that their staffs have lost their most veteran journalists in waves of buyouts and layoffs,-  reads the nut graph. E&P also pulls out other nuggets like the fact that copy editor positions are being cut more than any other and that editors feel conflicted about the move to the Web. Quoting from the research: “A plurality of editors (48%), for instance, say they are conflicted by the tradeoffs between the speed, depth and interactivity of the web and what those benefits are costing in terms of accuracy and journalistic standards.”

The study does highlight the angst that’s being caused by an epic platform shift and the departure of many veteran journalists. The good news is that more than half the editors say the quality of their product has improved over the last three years. The unsettling news: – Only 5% of those responding to the survey said they were very confident of their ability to predict what their newsrooms would look like five years from now.- 

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Perhaps the gloom that pervades the industry is misplaced. Media Mark Research & Intelligence (MRI) reports that total readship is up in the top 100 markets. A survey commisioned by the Newspaper National Network (NNN) found a 2.1% increase in audience size to 80.6 million between spring 2007 and spring 2008. However, media outlets were somewhat ambiguous in their interpretation of the results. Editor & Publisher interprets the data as indicating that print readership is up
while MediaPost refers to unduplicated audience, which includes online readers. Both outlets cite newspapers’ recent clampdowns on free bonus circ as improving audience quality.If the research (which isn’t mentioned on either sponsor’s site, as far as we could tell) is about online audience, then the results aren’t that encouraging. Most newspapers have been reporting increases of 10% or more in online audience, which about mirrors the growth of the Internet overall. If the numbers refer to print readership, then they are indeed surprising, given that the Audit Bureau of Control has reported a steady downward trend in that area. Perhaps more details will emerge when the NNN actually says something about the research.

Layoff Log

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is spending $30 million on new printing presses and cutting its staff by 8%. The loss of 189 jobs includes 85 newsroom employees and 104 people in the advertising group. The paper is also discontinuing all its regional editions, including the Gwinnett County regional, where its main printing press is located. In an open letter, the publisher explains that the AJC drives 80,000 miles a day to deliver its product and that spiraling fuel costs have hit hard. The paper has also had to absorb a 35% increase in the cost of newsprint.

In light of all those factors, the decision to invest so heavily in new presses seems a bit bizarre. We’re sure there are good business reasons, but if all the growth is online, why invest in a print product that already has a near-monopoly position in its market? We suspect there are nearly 200 soon-to-be-ex-employees of the AJC who are asking the same thing right now.

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More than 3,500 newspaper jobs have vanished this summer, according to Media Post. You’ve read about most of them here, but the media publisher’s roll-up demonstrates how widespread and entrenched the industry’s problems are.

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An already tense labor-management standoff at the Honolulu Advertiser wasn’t helped by last week’s announcement that the paper must cut 54 positions, or about 10% of its workforce, for the same reasons everybody else is laying off. It took all of one day for the union to authorize a strike. Workers said they had no idea the layoffs were coming and that the Advertiser claims to be profitable.

Being profitable, of course, is not a guarantee against layoffs, especially when parent Gannett Corp. just announced a 36% drop in earnings. Advertiser management is actually pressing the issue by proposing that the union be abolished so that it can have the flexibility assign reporters to take photos, for example. The union says no. In an age when competitive websites leverage content contributed by local citizens for little or no money, it makes sense to send both a reporter and a photographer to cover a story at union scale. This is a business model that the Advertiser can ride comfortably into oblivion.

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The Gleaner of Henderson, KY, will eliminate nine pressroom positions and four other unspecified jobs as it moves printing to the Evansville Courier & Press. The item didn’t say how many people work at the paper.

Miscellany

The owner of Pacific Coast Business Times, a weekly business journal in Southern California, says business is great. The closure of business sections in some big dailies has helped, says Henry Dubroff. Business weeklies have lower costs and just as much credibility as the dailies they’re challenging he says. If you read between the lines of this piece, though, you’ll also see that business weeklies are more attuned to playing nicely with the businesses they cover: – The culture of a business journal is more like a small business than a traditional newspaper,” Dubroff says. “Other departments are close at hand, not on another floor. A mix of high standards and cooperation are keys to success.-  Translation: business journals are more likely to write nicely about the companies they cover.

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The editor and publisher of American Thinker, Thomas Lifson, writes somewhat mockingly about the decline of The New York Times under publisher Pinch Sulzberger. Repeatedly referring to the publisher by his preppy nickname, Lifson ticks off a list of questionable business judgments at the Old Gray Lady, including the decision to increase the dividend while the stock was tanking and the Ochs/Sulzberger family’s refusal to consider selling the operation. Noting Rupert Murdoch’s designs on the Times, Lifson references recent reports that Murdoch and Daily News publisher Mortimer Zuckerman are discussing ways to combine some operations in order to reduce costs. – With the financial muscle to cut prices and steal advertisers away from the Times national and metropolitan editions, Murdoch can force the Times to cut its own prices for the advertisers and readers who remain with it, further pressuring circulation revenue and readership,-  he says. In other words, a death spiral.

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The Asheville, NC Citizen-Times has started making reporters punch a time clock. Actually, it’s a thumbprint reader, and you have to punch in and out even if you’re going down the block to the bank. With that kind of management penny-pinching, it’s unlikely that C-T reporters are going to be burning the midnight oil on a big story any time soon.

And Finally…

Conspiracy theory? Tell Zell reveals internal communications from Tribune Co.’s IT organization telling how computer systems are being centralized at the company, making it possible for a reporter at the Baltimore Sun, for example, to file a story directly to the LA Times. Previously, the systems couldn’t talk to each other. Does this mean it will soon be possible for the Tribune papers to pool resources and send, say, four reporters to witness the same Presidential press conference instead of eight? If so, then we take back the mean things we’ve been saying about Sam Zell. Maybe the guy really does have a vision.

If you’re looking to brighten up your day, don’t bother reading Mark Potts’ latest blog entry. Riffing on a financial analysis by Alan Mutter, Potts speculates about what could happen to newspaper companies as the biggest titles enter penny-stock territory. It isn’t pretty.\

The scenarios are similar to those we’ve suggested before. At some point, newspaper companies become too cheap for investors to ignore and the vultures move in. The lucky companies will get picked up by buyers who have a vision and an interest in sustaining local journalism (help us, Rupert!). The unlucky ones will become the property of someone whose agenda is solely profit and asset value.

Most investors who would buy in under those circumstances are not Mudochs and Zells; they are speculators and gamblers. They’ll be looking for an opportunity to flip their holdings for a quick profit and they won’t particularly care how they reach their goal. In the worst case, Potts sees print editions being axed entirely and newspapers stripped down to delivery routes and printing presses for the sake of distributing advertising circulars. Impossible? Digital Equipment Corp. went from the second largest computer maker to a rounding error on H-P’s balance sheet in five years.

A more positive scenario is a new ownership that cuts costs deeply and tries to reinvent the organizations around the value of their brands. Neither option is very appealing to the employees of these organizations, however. Let’s hope there are still some publishing entrepreneurs out there who see newspapers has having more value than just the sum of their assets.

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Stockholders of E.W. Scripps Co. can’t be too pleased today after Standard & Poors downgraded the company’s debt rating five full notches from “A” investment grade to “BB+” junk bond status. The good news is that Scripps Network Interactive, which was split off from the newspaper-heavy E.W. Scripps just two weeks ago, got an “overweight” rating from J.P. Morgan, which set a 12-month price target of $55, about 35% above the current share price.

Anonymous Sources Alive and Well

Slate’s Jack Shafer has an interesting approach to analyzing the continuing use of anonymous sources by major newspapers. He created a few Google Alerts to look for words like “anonymity” and then looked at the stories to see if the secrecy was warranted. In most cases, he finds that that the anonymous quotes are  either obvious, self-serving or contribute nothing to the story. Shafer ranks the value of the quote on a 0-5 scale and maps the whole thing out on a Google spreadsheet. The result is a good argument for better editorial oversight at the Times, the Post and other big dailies.

In most cases, Shafer finds that anonymity is unnecessary on the part of the reporter, the source or both. In some cases, the anonymity is baffling or silly, such as anonymous sources speculating about things that any rational person would speculate about. The columnist reasons that this is an example of reporters citing a source for the sake of showing people that they talked to someone. Of course, the quote and the source could be made up, so it doesn’t really matter.

There’s no overarching point to the exercise other than to demonstrate how generously these “anonymice” are still used in the most respected publications in the US just five years after the Jayson Blair scandal called attention to the problems of that practice . Shafer notes that the paper reporters love to hate – USA Today – prohibits anonymous sourcing.

Miscellany

• The Bay Area Newspaper Group – East Bay, which has been the target of union organizing activity recently, laid off 29 people at the Contra Costa Times on Friday, saying the decision had nothing to do with union-organizing activites at paper. Laid-off employees disagree and plan to challenge the move.
• David Paulin comments cynically on a recent American Journalism Review piece about journalism schools sending their students on overseas reporting assginments. He notes that at a time when news organizations are cutting back sharply on foreign correspondents, students eagerly spend thousands of dollars to go to remote and even dangerous places to file stories in the hope that they might possibly get picked up by a major newspaper without compensation. We guess it’s not exploitative when those being exploited volunteer for the opportunity.
• We suppose we must reluctantly acknowledge one of the silliest publicity stunts in recent memory. That would be the Durham, NC reporter-turned-lawyer who is suing the Raleigh News & Observer for breaching his contract as a subscriber by laying off 70 people and cutting back on news pages. The lawyer says he’s not interested in the money and is trying to issue a wake-up call to the industry. The N&O‘s executive editor says the lawyer should pay the newspaper more for the great value he’s getting. We are amazed at the volume of coverage this dumb story has generated. And we suppose we are also now part of the problem.
• The Death Watch apparently stirred things up at the LA Times pressroom, which has banned employee tours, apparently out of safety concerns. As one of the last civilians who snuck in before the new rules went into place, we want to thank Edward Padgett and tell his supervisor that we were never in any danger.

 

Here’s a new ad campaign being run by the Newspaper Association of America. We have some questions:

• If the Internet is the best thing since the paperboy, what is the worst thing to happen?
• What on earth is this a picture of? And what is that thing doing?
• Did you know that “Internet” is a proper noun?

The ad links to an over-engineered Flash-animated landing page that has no apparent relevance to the message in the ad and that gave us a headache. Furthermore, Flash is invisible to search engines, which is why most websites ditched it as a home-page platform years ago. Update: Adobe is partnering with Google to solve this problem.

If the Internet is such a great thing for newspapers, we wonder by the organization that supposedly represents their interests is so clueless about using the Internet as a promotional medium.

What do you think? Is this campaign in your best interests?

I was a guest on a webcast about social software yesterday (you can watch it here; it’s free)  and the question came up about what publications can do to build community. I responded that they can’t do much and they shouldn’t even try because, with few exceptions, readers aren’t a community.

Then I checked my RSS reader this morning and noticed this item from Content Ninja that makes the very same point: “You cannot build a community around content.”

“Community” is a poorly understood term (just look at the variety of definitions in online reference sources) and, like many buzzwords, it is being overused right now. Publishers trying to escape their sinking  businesses are clinging to the community life raft, hoping that it offers hope for a future. For some it does, but that’s not a good prospect for most newspapers.

Newspapers have historically defined their communities geographically because that’s the business model that worked. While people who share a common space on the planet are technically  a community, they’re the least cohesive kind of community. Outside of a shared interest in certain issues like public safety or schools, residents of a city or town have little in common. They may occasionally form strong communities around common interests like a school bond or tax increase, but those groups invariably dissolve as the issue goes away.

There are readership communities that work. Readers of a special interest magazine about needlepoint or scuba diving are a type of community. Those people have intense shared interests and they are much more likely to bond together in an online forum that serves those interests. Publishers of special-interest magazines have the best chance of turning their readership into self-sustaining online communities.

Newspapers, however, don’t. Their strength is creating content and their best chance of building community involves giving people a chance to discuss, comment upon and contribute to their content. USA Today does about the best of any major newspaper at encouraging this kind of reader participation. But USA Today isn’t trying to become a community. Its management knows better than that.

Miscellany

• Jeff Jarvis suggests that it’s crazy for newspapers to operate their own websites and they should just hand over the back-end work to Google.  Newspapers should focus on what they do best: journalism and local ad sales. All the staff time and money spent building technology infrastructures is basically reinventing the wheel. He’s got a point.
• The Daily Telegram of Superior, Wisconsin will cut back from six to two print issues a week beginning this fall. The 6,000-circulation afternoon daily has been publishing for 118 years. A BusinessWeek account notes that theDaily Telegram competes vigorously with the Duluth News Tribune, which is only about five miles away and which is owned by the same publisher. We’re wondering if combining, rather than competing, might be a more practical approach.
• Washington State’s The Columbian laid off 20 people – eight of them in the editorial group – in the second round of cutbacks this year. The paper cut 30 positions back in February. Editor Lou Brancaccio told the Portland Business Journal that early retirements could trim the current staff of 306 even further.
• The delightfully vicious Tell Zell site gives Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell a performance review using the company’s own performance management form.  The world is a better place because of anonymous blogs.
• Rev. Jesse Jackson’s stated desire to remove Barack Obama’s testicles apparently caused a minor uproar on copy desks around the country. In a bold bid to produce the most trivial news story of the week, the Columbia Journalism Review sends in a reporter to analyze how major titles dealt with the “nuts” crisis. Could anyone be less interested?

I was a guest on a webcast about social software yesterday (you can watch it here; it’s free)  and the question came up about what publications can do to build community. I responded that they can’t do much and they shouldn’t even try because, with few exceptions, readers aren’t a community.
Then I checked my RSS reader this morning and noticed this item from Content Ninja that makes the very same point: “You cannot build a community around content.”
“Community” is a poorly understood term (just look at the variety of definitions in online reference sources) and, like many buzzwords, it is being overused right now. Publishers trying to escape their sinking  businesses are clinging to the community life raft, hoping that it offers hope for a future. For some it does, but that’s not a good prospect for most newspapers.
Newspapers have historically defined their communities geographically because that’s the business model that worked. While people who share a common space on the planet are technically  a community, they’re the least cohesive kind of community. Outside of a shared interest in certain issues like public safety or schools, residents of a city or town have little in common. They may occasionally form strong communities around common interests like a school bond or tax increase, but those groups invariably dissolve as the issue goes away.
There are readership communities that work. Readers of a special interest magazine about needlepoint or scuba diving are a type of community. Those people have intense shared interests and they are much more likely to bond together in an online forum that serves those interests. Publishers of special-interest magazines have the best chance of turning their readership into self-sustaining online communities.
Newspapers, however, don’t. Their strength is creating content and their best chance of building community involves giving people a chance to discuss, comment upon and contribute to their content. USA Today does about the best of any major newspaper at encouraging this kind of reader participation. But USA Today isn’t trying to become a community. Its management knows better than that.

Miscellany

• Jeff Jarvis suggests that it’s crazy for newspapers to operate their own websites and they should just hand over the back-end work to Google.  Newspapers should focus on what they do best: journalism and local ad sales. All the staff time and money spent building technology infrastructures is basically reinventing the wheel. He’s got a point.
• The Daily Telegram of Superior, Wisconsin will cut back from six to two print issues a week beginning this fall. The 6,000-circulation afternoon daily has been publishing for 118 years. A BusinessWeek account notes that theDaily Telegram competes vigorously with the Duluth News Tribune, which is only about five miles away and which is owned by the same publisher. We’re wondering if combining, rather than competing, might be a more practical approach.
• Washington State’s The Columbian laid off 20 people – eight of them in the editorial group – in the second round of cutbacks this year. The paper cut 30 positions back in February. Editor Lou Brancaccio told the Portland Business Journal that early retirements could trim the current staff of 306 even further.
• The delightfully vicious Tell Zell site gives Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell a performance review using the company’s own performance management form.  The world is a better place because of anonymous blogs.
• Rev. Jesse Jackson’s stated desire to remove Barack Obama’s testicles apparently caused a minor uproar on copy desks around the country. In a bold bid to produce the most trivial news story of the week, the Columbia Journalism Review sends in a reporter to analyze how major titles dealt with the “nuts” crisis. Could anyone be less interested?

The ax has fallen at Sam Zell’s hometown Chicago Tribune, although not as hard as it did at sister papers in Los Angeles, Baltimore and Hartford. The Trib will cut 80 of its 578 newsroom positions – that’s about 14% – but less than 60 people are actually expected to lose their jobs because some vacancies won’t be filled. The news hole will also shrink by up to 14%, which is in line with the cuts Tribune Co. is making elsewhere.

The story on chicagotribune.com also notes that Tribune Co. sold its stake in Shoplocal.com to Gannett for $22 million.  That values the 141st most popular site on the Web at about $50 million.  The expected sale of the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field should cover Tribune’s 2009 debt obligation, but after that, things get dicey.

Alan Mutter looks at the market for newspaper properties and finds it to be a wasteland.   Playing off of News Corp.’s abandoned plans to sell its Ottaway line of small newspapers and other frustrations at Landmark Communications and Sun-Times Media Group, he concludes that there simply aren’t any buyers at the moment. With so many publishers teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, there’s a possibility that scores of newspapers could hit the market within the next year selling for pennies on the dollar. It’ll be a buying opportunity for somebody, but the most likely buyers are frozen right now, either because they have debt issues of their own or they don’t know where the bottom is.

For highly leveraged giants like Tribune, this is a particularly worrisome trend. Zell got good money for Newsday, but there isn’t a Cablevision lurking in every market looking to buy up the hometown daily. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to want to do a big deal until revenues stabilize. This is a race against time. If the market bottoms out by the middle of next year, Zell can start selling off titles like the LA Times and Baltimore Sun to keep the company afloat. If the market is still in free-fall, it’s unlikely he’ll find anyone willing to put up the cash that Tribune needs to service its debt.

This is particularly tragic for the 21,000 employees of Tribune Co., since they own the company. If Tribune defaults and debtors step in to sell off assets, the actual value of the company will be set by the market. There’s no way to tell what the value will be, but the hard reality at the moment is that thousands of retirement plans are tied up in assets that, for the moment at least, no one seems to want to buy.

More on Editorial Outsourcing

Yesterday we noted a piece in the Hindustan Times about the emergence of a fledgling editorial outsourcing business in India. Now BusinessWeek has done a deeper dive on the issue, sending reporters to visit the modestly titled Mindworks Global Media near New Delhi, where 90 employees are doing jobs once done in U.S. newsrooms. The story notes that Mindworks stumbled into this line of business by accident. It began as a custom publisher for local companies, but then got an assignment to write a story for a British airline magazine. The editors found they could report the story from 6,000 miles away. That gave them the idea to take the operation global and a new business was born.

BusinessWeek reports that venture capital firm Helion Venture Partners  has pumped a staggering $350 million into Mindworks. Yes, you read that right – $350 million. The story quotes Helion’s managing director as saying media outsourcing could be a $2 billion industry. Mindworks is planning to grow from 100 to 1,500 employees over the next two years.

You can be certain that this will be a major growth business for India and an equally large source of angst for US journalists and publishers.  Forner newspaper editor David Stancliff kicks it off in this opinion piece in the Eureka Reporter, which reads like something steelworkers were saying in the early 1970s.

The migration of jobs offshore will happen if it makes economic sense. Patriotism, loyalty and tradition have nothing to do with it. Sadly, that’s a fact. Journalists need to look at the value they provide, determine whether their job can be done more cheaply by somebody else and adjust their skills accordingly. An industry that’s flush with cash can afford luxuries like loyalty, but in the do-or-die environment like most publishers face today, those options aren’t available. (via Romenesko)

Miscellany

The Charlottesville Daily Progress buries the lead in announcing that it will lay off its entire pressroom and move printing operations to neighboring Richmond. Its headlines the story “Daily Progress moves printing to Richmond facility” and mentions in the second paragraph that the move “affects 25 employees whose positions were eliminated.” Can you spell “layoff.” Apparently not at the Daily Progress.

The Washington Post has named ousted Wall Street Journal editor Marcus Brauchli executive editor. That’s a cultural shift for the Post, which has a tradition of promoting internally. Brauchli called the assignment “possibly the most challenging thing I have ever done.”