The devastating earthquake in China this week was the latest in a string of incidents that cast the spotlight on the Twitter microblogging service and its value to news organizations. Jeff Jarvis has called Twitter “an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging,” but it’s really more than that. Twitter redefines the time value of news and is a critical tool in the development of citizen journalism. Individuals with cell phones can now be the eyes and ears of the world if they happen to be on the spot for a news event. Editors Weblog outlines the value of Twitter’s simplicity and open interface, which encourages people to experiment with new applications.

Writing on Global Voices, Mong Palatino notes that Twitter became a primary source of information about the recent cyclone disaster in Myanmar. We noted earlier a UK paper’s use Twitter to beat the BBC in local election coverage.

News organizations should see Twitter as an opportunity. Which paper will be the first to create a hyperlocal portal around a network of Twitter feeds provided by readers? If the mission of newspapers is to report the news quickly, shouldn’t they be outfitting reporters with Twitter accounts and streaming those feeds on their websites? Why haven’t any U.S. newspapers embraced this valuable tool yet?

CBS’s Daring CNET Play

Is CBS’s purchase of CNET a stroke of genius or a desperate play for relevance in the digital age? It does appear that CBS is serious about the Internet. In addition to laying off 160 employees recently, the network reportedly initiated talks with CNN about outsourcing some of its reporting work. Collectively, this could indicate that CBS is giving up the ghost on TV news and turning it attention to being an important player online. Alan Mutter questions the high price CBS paid for an online network that no one else appeared to want, but sees strategic value to CBS. The company certainly deserves credit for making some bold recent moves to reshuffle its cost structure and focus on the future instead of chasing a dying TV news model into the ground.

Hyperlocal Innovation Emerges Offshore

If the future of newspapers is hyperlocal, as many people think, then organizations outside the U.S. may lead the charge. Editors Weblog reports on lessons from a Finnish newspaper that is evolving an activist model that taps into issues that matter to the community. The editor-in-chief says the secret is to focus on soft stories that strike an emotional chord in readers and to pay attention to community issues that matter, such as the cleanup of a local park.

The Liverpool Daily Post is opening up its newsroom to observation and comment from its readers. People can see how decisions are made and contribute their ideas and comments to the process. What a concept. Newspapers demand transparency from the organizations they cover, yet the decision-making process in most newsrooms is as opaque as smoked glass.

Editor & Publisher reports on experiments in Latin America in which citizens do most or all of the reporting. The concept of citizen involvement is central to the Latin American newsgathering process, says Mark Fitzgerald. Many of the standard rules of journalism are suspended. “Irreverence is valued.”

Bloomberg Expands Editorial Footprint

Can a maker of computer terminals become an online media giant? We may be about to find out. Bloomberg LP has hired the former top editor of Time Inc. and The Wall Street Journal, to the new position of chief content officer. Bloomberg makes most of its money selling data terminals used by stockbrokers and other financial professionals, but there have been rumblings that the company, which was founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, wants to burnish its newsgathering capabilities.

Pearlstine has spent the last year and a half in the private equity world, but it sounds like news is in his blood. Bloomberg has been growing its footprint in that area. It now has 2,300 employees , nearly double its 2001 size, and it has been growing its financial news service, television and radio operations. With Michael Bloomberg’s term in office set to end next year, there’s been considerable speculation about what would happen when he returns to business. It looks like we’re about to find out.

And Finally…

• Newspapers may soon face another threat, according to Alan Mutter: the huge ecological burden of print publishing. “A prototypical publisher selling 250,000 newspapers on each of the 365 days of the year adds nearly 28,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,” the Newsosaur says. “That’s roughly equivalent to the CO2 spewed by almost 3,700 Ford Explorers being driven 10,000 miles apiece per year.”
• Journal Register Co., which is on life support pending payment of a $625 million debt this summer, has been offered a $25 million cash infusion from a current investor, who is demanding “a number of concessions” in return. Those concessions weren’t specified.
• Two Washington Post icons are accepting the newspaper’s buyout offer: David Broder and Tony Kornheiser. Broder will continue as a contract columnist. Kornheiser’s future with the Post is less certain.
• McClatchy Co. Chairman, President, and CEO Gary Pruitt said the company is open to selling the 49.5% share of the Seattle Times Co. it acquired as part of the purchase of Knight Ridder Inc. in 2006.

After stating confidently last week that his deal to buy Newsday was as good as done, Rupert Murdoch abruptly pulled out of the bidding, ceding ownership to Cablevision. Thus ends a month of speculation about Murdoch’s supposedly devious strategy to corner the New York market and then spread is his publishing empire westward.

Maybe.

As Newsday points out in its own outstanding coverage of the saga, Murdoch walked away from the Dow Jones deal several times before eventually settling on the price he wanted. So the concession to Cablevision could be a ruse meant to force Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell to make a decision (Alan Mutter has a fine analysis of the dire circumstance at the Tribune, whose debt service obligations were an incredible 24% of revenues in the first quarter).

On the other hand, as Newsday points out, a sale to Murdoch could have raised significant antitrust and regulatory issues. With Zell under intense pressure to generate cash, a quick sale to the cash-rich Cablevision could be a more practical option.

For now, it appears that this story is over. Murdoch was reportedly having a grand old time at the Time 100 gala dinner in New York last week, while Mortimer Zuckerman sulked in a corner. Murdoch conceded to a reporter that he might have been a bit hasty in declaring victory in the bidding a day earlier. His demeanor didn’t indicate that he was tired or frustrated about the sudden collapse of the deal. Rather, his relaxed confidence may have been that of a skilled card player waiting to see if his bluff will be called.

Small Town News Outlet Writes New Rules

Columnist Jerry Large of the Seattle Times tells the story of a community newspaper that is thinking differently. The Orting News is an online service that’s filling a void left by the death of a local newspaper. It has ramped up to 14,000 subscribers with a model in which nearly all the reporting is done by members of the community. Anyone can submit an article, and the only fact-checking is an e-mail verification that the sender is who he or she says. Any disputes or corrections are sent directly to the writer. Paid writers cover the really important stuff.

An interesting comment Large’s column is this one: “The Orting News isn’t journalism.” Really? According to who?

Losses & Layoffs

• In what has become an all-too-common refrain of late, Gannett said it’s offering buyouts to about 160 workers at five of its six newspapers in New Jersey. If there aren’t enough takers, layoffs are likely.
• Editor & Publisher cites an SEC filing in which McClatchy estimates its 49.5% stake in the publisher of The Seattle Times has fallen more than a third since last December and 88% from its value at acquisition in late 2006.
• Community newspaper publisher GateHouse Media reported a first-quarter net loss of $28.8 million compared to a $6.1 million loss a year ago. Total revenues were up 78% but same-property revenues fell 4.2%. Gatehouse’s strategy is to buy up newspapers and then use free cash flow to pay out dividends that drive up it stock price. However, even that strategy doesn’t appear to be working these days.

As the story of Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Marcus Brauchli’s abrupt resignation last week continues to unfold, media critics are piling on with withering commentary about the Journal’s toothless “Special Committee” on editorial independence. At a time when commentators should be training their guns on Murdoch, they’re focusing instead on the group that’s supposed to protect the paper’s editorial integrity from Murdoch.
Jack Shafer’s column in Slate is snarky commentary at its best. Shafer says the committed was publicly humiliated by Murdoch, and isn’t it curious that no one has resigned in protest?

“The denutted Dow Jones Special Committee issued its wimpy statement yesterday…What they meant to say was, ‘We’re each paid $100,000 annually, a lot of money for very little work, so if Rupert wants to drive by and hose us down with a swift, hard piss again, just make sure the checks clear.'”

“Denutted?” Brilliant.

Shafer makes no effort to hide his contempt for Murdoch, but he gives the man his due: Murdoch owns the Journal and he’s entitled to do what he wants. The half million a year the owner pays the Special Committee is basically hush money and his recent actions have only demonstrated how little respect he has for the group.

Dean Starkman writes in Columbia Journalism Review that the saga is “getting awfully close to clown-car territory.” He calls out the committee for admitting that it was powerless to prevent Brauchli’s resignation. “It’s stunning to think that a 7,000-word agreement, crafted by some of the most expensive lawyers in the world, does not even contemplate the possibility that an editor might resign.” Of the committee’s admitted surprise at Brauchli’s departure, he adds, “The committee, remember, includes three crack newshounds, supposedly. Woof woof.”

Someone on the committee – most likely Chairman Thomas Bray – should resign in protest. The fact that no one has done so only makes the group look worse. The media’s increasing focus on the committee members’ lavish compensation is making this supposedly noble effort look more and more like a boondoggle for self-indulgent former journalists.

Gawker has more dirt on the internal politicking at the journalism world’s biggest ongoing soap opera. If you’re into that kind of thing.

Murdoch Moves in on Newsday

Murdoch has a clear path to buy Newsday, says the paper itself, even though threats of an FCC penalty loom. Technically, the Newsday purchase would endanger Murdoch’s licenses for his two regional TV stations, WNYW and WWOR. However, any action by the FCC would probably be tied up in court for years, during which time Murdoch could act with impunity and wait for turnover at the FCC and in Congress to change the regulatory scene.

Maybe we’re missing something, but all this talk of Murdoch’s waiting strategy seems to overlook one essential point: the man is 77 years old. Unless Murdoch has discovered a fountain of youth, his “long term” is probably eight to 10 years at most. Whatever legacy he intends to leave in the U.S. media market will have to be played out by then or handed over to a clone. None seems to be standing by.

Newspaper Stocks May be a Bargain

Max Zeledon makes a wordy case for why Gannett, News Corp. and New York Times Co. are three newspaper stocks to buy. He has confidence in the industry’s ability to survive, pointing out that newspapers adapted to the coming of TV, radio and cable and emerged stronger for the experience. Zeledon says his three picks are fundamentally sound companies with diversified holdings and the opportunity to gain share as the industry emerges from its troubles. They appear to be the best of the bunch. However, we’d argue with the comparison of the Internet to radio or cable TV. Neither of those technologies devalued newspapers’ core product the way online competition does.

Edward R. Murrow Rolls Over

The New York Times says CBS is talking with CNN about outsourcing some of its reporting operations to the cable network. The talks are apparently a consequence of the abysmal ratings for CBS’s news programs, which are mired in last place despite the $15 million the network is paying Katie Couric each year to drag the ratings even lower. CBS reportedly laid off 160 employees in 13 cities early last month.

And Finally…

If you aren’t using Twitter, you should be. It’s the most disruptive online technology since YouTube, despite its seeming simplicity, and its technology will change journalism. Last month it saved a man from an Egyptian prison. The guy is a UC Berkeley grad student and he was arrested and imprisoned without charges for photographing a demonstration, TechCrunch reports. He twittered “Arrested” to his 48 followers, who acted quickly to spring him.

Monday was all about the Audit Bureau of Circulation report, and the news was as hideous as expected. Rather than repeat the numbers, we’ll point you to Editor & Publisher‘s overview story, the list of the largest 25 dailies, the largest 25 Sunday papers and the papers that actually grew circulation.

Big markets fared the worst. The Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Dallas Morning News all reported sickening daily circulation declines of 8.5% or more. Some of the contraction is no doubt due to publishers’ efforts to rein in free and heavily discounted circulation, but the overall trend is clear: The top 10 metropolitan daily newspapers in the U.S. (note that this excludes the nationally cirulated USA Today and Wall Street Journal) collectively lost more than 235,000 daily readers. The Sunday numbers are even more staggering: more than 635,000 readers lost in the top 10 markets in just one year.

There were no clear patterns among the daily figures. On Sunday, it was a case of the bigger they were, the harder they fell. The five biggest markets averaged a 6.6% drop, while the 21^st through 25^th largest papers averaged a 4.2% decline. Patterns were harder to find in the daily numbers. There were a few bright spots: 12 dailies did manage to show gains. But their circulation averages about 100,000, while the 10 largest papers average north of 630,000. And they were all down.

Alan Mutter does a flash analysis and notes that daily circulation in the U.S. is at its lowest level since 1946. Considering that population has more than doubled since then, that adds up to a 50% decline in readership. Sadly, the demographic trends offer little relief. The post-war era was the beginning of a surge in population and in readership. But as we’ve noted repeatedly, today’s kids and young adults don’t read newspapers and aren’t likely to start. The readership pig in the newspaper python is the over-55 crowd, which isn’t desirable to advertisers and which won’t be much of a factor in 15 or 20 years.

Layoff log

The Orange County Register, whose 11.9% daily circulation decline was the largest among the top 25 dailies, will lay off 80 to 90 people, or about five percent of its workforce. This is the third round of layoffs in a year for Orange County Register Communications, which is the Register’s parent. That’s either a sign of poor management or a completely unpredictable market. The worst way to cut expenses is by dribs and drabs. It saps morale and spreads fear among the survivors.

The Raleigh News and Observer downplayed the news that it will offer buyouts to about a quarter of its staff. No more than 1% to 2% of the employees are expected to take the deal.

WSJ’s Mystery Man Demystified

The New York Times profiles Robert Thomson, the de factor editor of The Wall Street Journal in the wake of Marcus Brauchli’s abrupt resignation last week. The generous profile portrays Thomson as a talented journalist with loads of people skills. In previous assignments, his staff reportedly loved him. His reluctance to cut headcount would make him an unlikely choice to initiate mass layoffs at the Journal. He’s also got Rupert Murdoch’s ear.

One Reason Why the FT is Ascendant

Editors Weblog is running a series of interviews about the future of journalism, and the latest one is with Dan Bogler, Managing Editor of Robert Thomson’s old employer, the Financial Times. If you want to hear the perspective of an editor who gets it, read this interview. Bogler has no illusions about what’s happening to his industry. We’ve gone from zero videos on our website to over 100 per month in the last 18 months. That’s part of the continuum: it’s us doing the same thing in different distribution channels,” he says.

Asked if the golden age of investigative reporting is over, he responds matter-of-factly, “The idea that journalists have to do long-term, deep, undercover investigations where they reveal something months later – I don’t think it works like that anymore. [J]ournalists working under cover, developing sources and breaking big scandals is less likely; but revealing news that people don’t want out there, on a short term basis, uncovering a scandal and having it come to light, that’s more likely.”

Bogler betrays no defensiveness, resentment or belligerence. He’s adapting to change. With editors like this at the helm, its no wonder the FT is coming on so strong in the U.S. market.

And Finally…

Is he a blogger? A journalist? A marketer? James Arndorfer is all three. His BrewBlog frequently breaks news or casts new light upon happenings in the beer industry. But Arndorfer is a full-time employee of Miller Brewing, which openly supports BrewBlog. Rival Anheuser-Busch is a favorite target for negative news or snarky analysis, but Arndorfer says he isn’t afraid to tweak the nose of his employer. It’s all very new media-ish. Read the WSJ profile.

Earnings Drumbeat Continues, but With Fewer Surprises

Gannett’s quarterly earnings continued the pattern established by the New York Times Co. and Media General last week, but at least they weren’t surprising. Earnings were down 9% on an 8% drop in revenue. The industry-wide slump in classified ad revenue pulled down the numbers, with real estate and recruitment ad sales both down more than 24%. Gannett continues to benefit from having USA Today, which saw actual growth in the entertainment, financial and advocacy (whatever that is) categories. However, total ad pages at the national newspaper were still off 14%.

There was nothing from Lee Enterprises or JH Belo to lift investors’ spirits. Lee hit a 52-week low after reporting a quarterly loss while Belo’s new pure-play newspaper company said its results would disappoint. Both got slammed on Wall Street. However, investors rewarded NYT Co. and Media General for making progress in their shareholder battles.

Tacoda founder Dave Morgan writes in Media Post that a lot of big media companies are going to collapse, victims of declining revenues and high fixed costs. We agree, and we said as much nearly two years ago. Morgan sees opportunity in decline. The collapse of many metro newspapers will create a vacuum for distribution channels that can deliver sponsorship messages to local communities. He speculates on those opportunities.

The Associated Press is doing its part to throw them a lifeline, however. It’s cutting its fees in response to protests from newspapers. The move will save members about $14 million in total, or more than double the savings of the original AP proposal. Attendees at the recent American Society of Newspaper Editors convention were reportedly still grousing about the charges, though.

Would Founding Fathers Have Defended Behavioral Targeting?

The Newspaper Association of America has weighed in on the Federal Trade Commission’s debate about privacy standards over behavioral targeting, taking the unusual stance that this is a First Amendment issue. According to the group, publishers should not be infringer in any way from delivering ads, even if that means collecting information about people’s onliine activities that could potentially reveal their identities. Apparently the NAA feels that since the Constitution doesn’t guarantee a right to privacy but does guarantee a right to free speech, behavioral tracking is legally protected.

The Changing Ad World

Louis Hau writes in Forbes about the increasing chuminess between editors and ad sales people. This is a new fact of life, he suggests. Newspaper ad sales people haven’t historically been oriented toward developing new lines of business, so they need all the help they can get. Editors need to cooperate on business opportunities in order to keep their jobs. This new reality challenges the traditional church-state separation of mainstream journalism, but we’d better get used to it because this is the way media is evolving.

Ohio Papers Try Sharing

A group of Ohio newspapers has gotten together to share stories and even reporting assignments in a novel response to the cost-cutting pressure that all newspapers are feeling. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, Toledo Blade, Cincinnati Enquirer and Akron Beacon Journal now post all their daily stories on a private website where editors can pick whatever they want and publish it in their own pages. The idea goes against reporters’ natural competitive spirit, but it’s probably delivering better news to the readers. The outlets are even teaming on some joint reporting projects. So instead of having five different papers covering the same state house story, they’re actually spreading around their resources and minimizing duplication of effort.

Debating Old vs. New Media

The New York Times’s Sunday blockbuster story about the Pentagon’s secret media manipulation campaign is generating some understandable chest-thumping by newspaper editors. Crosscut Seattle comments that a story like that took shoe leather, not laptops, and praises its local journals for being willing to go to court to get access to secret documents. No blogger is going to go that extra step, says editor Chuck Taylor.

CBS has launched a citizen journalism website where people can upload news by cell phone, Editors Weblog reports. What will be really cool is when news organizations don’t relegate citizen journalism to an online ghetto and actually start integrating readers’ comments with staff reports on their main sites. This short article points to a couple of examples of that.

Glenn Frankel, Hearst Professional in Residence at Stanford University and former Washington Post reporter, writes Romenesko a tongue-in-cheek commentary on Slate columnist Jack Shafer’s recent counter-intuitive sermon in praise of buyouts. Frankel comments on a recent visit to the SJ Merc: “The spaciousness and the blessed silence reminded me of the peace and tranquility I found in abandoned villages in Kurdistan in 1991 after the Iraqi army had passed through during its own special buy-out program.”

Advice for the Digitally Challenged

Steve Buttry uses a call for help from a digitally challenged newspaper editor to outline his prioirities for journalists who are struggling with online change. Among them: start liveblogging, hyperlink aggressively in your stories and learn to Twitter. He links to this Palm Beach Post liveblogged trial coverage as an example of where reporting could go. He also recommends journalists pick a couple of technologoy areas outside of their comfort zone and set out to master them – fast.  “Come down off the ledge. We have a lot to learn and it’s going to be fun,” he concludes. There’s no doubt about the first part of that statement, but we suspect that many ink-stained wretches may disagree with the second.

Hope in “Hyperlocal”

EMarketer has an interview with the CEO of hyper-local news services Topix.net. He sees big opportunity in local markets for everyone, including newspaper. EMarketer supports that view with the chart at left.

A new entrant in the “hyperlocal” news market is OurTown, an aggregation of small websites run by local editors, who apparently will also sell ads and keep most of the local revenue. OurTown sites are intended to serve very concentrated audiences, with spheres of coverage limited to just a few miles.

Let’s Close With Some Good News

Starbucks, which has shunned advertising in general, not to mention newspaper advertising, is changing his tune.  The coffee retailer is launching a national promotion that uses newspapers as its centerpiece, according to Editor & Publisher. The full-page ads show a chalk outline of the familiar Starbucks paper cup, with the only text being a date: 04 08 08. The campaign is part of a broader Starbucks effort to get back to its roots, the result of criticism that its rapid growth has tarnished the comfortable ambiance that made it such an appealing place to hang out.

Further indication that the woes afflicting U.S. newspapers haven’t yet spread north of the border. E&P says: “Total revenues for Canadian newspapers barely dipped in 2007, as accelerating online ad sales offset a dip in print, according to data released Thursday by the Canadian Newspaper Association…Print ad revenues that dipped 2.4% in 2007 were offset by online revenues growth of 29%.”

“How many newspapers do you read?” a reporter recently asked me. I told him I read dozens of newspapers, more than I’ve ever read in my life. That should be good news to the newspaper industry, but it’s actually a problem and here’s why.

I dropped my Boston Globe subscription four years ago after more than 25 years as a subscriber. Google Reader is now my daily newspaper. Into it stream dozens of feeds from trusted sources. Each morning I sort through a couple of hundred headlines and pick and choose the ones I want to read, bookmark or share with others.  These feeds include an assortment of blog posts, newspaper articles and even search results.  Google Reader makes no distinction by source.  The content is what dictates my reading habits.

This is the new reality of the wired consumer.  Although my reading habits are no doubt atypical, they’re an example of where news consumption is going. People increasingly use aggregators to deliver the news that interests them, regardless of its source.  Newspaper editors have a big problem with this.  They argue that filters shield readers from the most important stories of the day, the stories that the editors think they should read.

There is merit to this argument, although I seem to have no problem keeping up with the top stories of the day.  It’s true, however, that some people may choose to use aggregators to screen out the information that doesn’t interest them, even if it’s important.  That is their right, and in this new world, their choice.  We are in the very early stages of a new pattern of news consumption and no one knows how it will play out.  If newspapers are to survive, they must learn to adapt to it, as distasteful as it may seem.

Alan Mutter digs into this issue. He looks at recently published numbers on traffic to newspaper websites and sees a troubling trend: visitors are increasingly drive-by viewers. They stop to read one story and then move on. Mutter wonders whether advertisers will pay to reach these visitors, who have little brand loyalty. Quoting: “The decline in the average duration of sessions at newspaper web pages suggests that visitors are not utilizing the industry’s sites as primary destinations, but, rather, as places to episodically view individual articles highlighted by Google News, Drudge, Digg, blogs or any of the thousands of other places they might be.”

Jeff Jarvis elucidates this new model in a series of simple charts that demonstrate how news coverage is being driven by the needs of the reader rather than the publisher. He calls it the “Me-sphere.” It’s a place where the reader defines what he or she is interested in and then chooses what to consume from an assortment of information sources of his or her own choosing. in traditional media, the publication of a news story is an endpoint.  In the new media model, it is just the beginning.  See Wikipedia for an example of how news evolves over time.

Advertising Age, which ironically hides its stories behind a paid wall after a few days of public viewing, has an insightful piece by Matthew Creamer about this same trend. Creamer sees the future of news as aggregation and the business of news as selling ads against other people’s content. No one can own the content any more, so the new publishers will combine some form of dedicated reporting with clever integration of other stuff. Today’s newspapers could potentially lead this trend, but there a lot of cultural and political factors argue against it.  I agree with sources quoted in this story that the successful aggregators will emerge as new entrepreneurial entities because they don’t have the baggage of history. Nevertheless, there is still a chance for some newspapers to jump on this trend and reinvent themselves. Whether they do so is another matter.

 

 

Meet Ben Popken. Attention, newspaper executives: this guy is going to mess you up.

Ben is 26 years old and sits atop the editorial pyramid at the blog Consumerist.com. In conventional media terms, that pyramid isn’t very big – only seven people – but Consumerist’s reach far outweighs its small staff. The site gets 15 million unique visitors per month. Maybe more importantly, it’s closely watched by mainstream media outlets, which frequently pick up on its best stuff and broadcast it to a global audience.

For example, The New York Times has referenced Consumerist 381 times, The Wall Street Journal 114 times and BusinessWeek 37 times. Consumerist stuff gets picked up on Digg.com constantly – 34,000 citations and counting. Popken was recently featured in a cover story in BusinessWeek and wrote a 2,300-word article for Reader’s Digest. All without a day of formal journalism training.

Ben Popken isn’t a professional journalist, at least not as that role is traditionally defined. In fact, prior to joining Consumerist two years ago, he had never worked at a newspaper, TV station or in radio. His career during and after college consisted of a variety of entrepreneurial sales ventures and odd jobs. He worked as a delivery man not long before joining Consumerist. He only got the job because the previous editor’s mother read his blog.

Consumerist gets about 100 e-mails a day from consumers talking about their horrible encounters with businesses of all kinds. Big box retailers, banks, cell phone providers, cable companies and airlines are popular targets. Consumerist editors read and respond to each and every e-mail (how many of you editors at major metropolitan dailies have a policy like that?) and write up about 30 of those submissions a day for the site.

New Style of Journalism

They don’t fact-check what they post and they don’t call the companies in question for comment. The mission of the site is “to empower consumers by informing and entertaining them about the top consumer issues of the day,” Popken says. “We give them a voice by directly publishing their tips and e-mails and then following up on them as warranted.”

A lot of journalists shudder when they read words like these. “Directly publishing their tips and e-mails?” With no editorial oversight? It sounds like an invitation to disaster. But it works. If the story is wrong, the editors take it down. So far, the lack of fact-checking hasn’t been a problem. Consumerist gets the occasional legal threat, but it’s never amounted to much. The cease-and-desist letters have almost stopped, Popken told me.

What is changing is that consumer-facing companies are beginning to revisit their customer service operations and remove the walls that have separated them from the public, walls that are relentlessly beaten upon by consumer advocacy sites. Like this one A few have even asked Consumerist for advice, although not as many as you might think.

With no formal journalism training, no years spent covering city council meetings for a small daily and no editorial oversight, Ben Popken is becoming one of the most powerful voices in consumer journalism. And what’s funny is that if you ask him about the secret of Consumerist’s success, he’ll use the same words that any good editor would use: “The secret is to be reader-centric in a fundamental way. The content is driven by the readers and reacted to by the readers. We’re really just a curator of consumer-generated content.”

A lot of newspaper editors dismiss citizen journalism because they know that good journalism could never be done by an amateur. Could it be that journalism isn’t really all that mysterious? Or that the way we’ve done things for the last 100 years isn’t necessarily the only way to practice the craft? Ben Popken doesn’t care what the old rules are, and so far he’s doing just fine.

We have a stack of good news about the reinvention of journalism that we really, really will get to you ASAP. It’s just that this depressing stuff keeps coming up.

2007 Newspaper Ad Plunge Was Worst in a Half Century

You’ve got to admire John Sturm, the CEO of the Newspaper Association of America. Here’s his quote in Editor & Publisher, commenting on news that the newspaper industry experienced its worst one-year drop in advertising revenue in 50 years in 2007: “Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms.”

You get the sense that John is the kind of guy who could find a silver lining behind any cloud. In this case, it’s the news that online revenue now represents 7.5% of overall newspaper ad revenue, up from 5.7% the previous year. The “near-term challenges” are that print ad revenue plunged 9.4%. Run the numbers, and you can attribute at least half of the gains in online revenue to the fact that the whole pie is getting smaller.

Newsweek Cuts 111, Including Many Top Critics

Newsweek is buying out 111 staffers, reports Radar, and a lot of institutional memory is going out the door. Quoting: “Among those leaving are some of the magazine’s best-known, most-admired and longest-service critics, including David Gates, David Ansen and Cathleen McGuigan. Harold Shain…All of the chief researchers are also leaving, including Nancy Stadtman, Ray Sawhill and Ray Anello, and their positions may be eliminated.” The report doesn’t say what percentage of the total staff this represents, but the cuts were probably inevitable in light of the recent 16% decline in newsstand sales.

Cuts aren’t just in print

Online technology publisher CNet has laid off 120 people, or about 10% of its workforce. The cuts were announced suddenly and were immediate, with no grace period. International Business Times has the details and the corporatese memo from the CEO. CNet is suffering from an overall downturn in tech ad spending, the result of consolidation and lack of new startup activity in the IT market. It’s also being pecked to death by ducks, as bloggers steal traffic in dribs and drabs. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington remarks on this phenomenon, but suggests that bloggers will have to band together to form a significant media entity. He says it’s going to happen, though.

Malaise is apparently spreading into local broadcast media. U.S. New’ Liz Wolgemuth reports that TV stations in Miami, Denver and Sacramento have laid off staff. A commenter says it happened in Dallas, too.

Short Takes

One of the few newspaper chains to resist the recent write-down frenzy, Lee Enterprises, finally swallowed the bitter pill, taking $500 million to $700 million in lost goodwill charges for the first quarter. A defiant management statement said the current stock price undervalues the company.

LA Observed has assembled some of the parting e-mails sent by laid-off staffers at the LA Times. Several take shots at TribCo owner Sam Zell. “You want people to ‘Talk to Sam’ but not to ‘Talkback to Sam,'” says one.

As If You Didn’t Know, “The State of the News Media Is Troubled”

If you don’t have time to read the voluminous (180,000-word) State of the Media Report, J.D. Lasica gives a pretty fine overview here. Summarizing his summary: The old “destination” model is dead. The job of the news organization today is as much to direct people to information as to tell stories. The big-brand news organizations may have even more throw weight online than they do in print. The vast democratization of news that was expected isn’t occurring. In the age of search, every story is a home page (we liked this one). More reporting will consist of incremental updates, some even being simple e-mail or Twitter messages.

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of Newspaper Death Watch, a blog I started on a whim but which has built enough readership to merit several hours of my time each week. In posting more than 150 entries over the last year and reading many times that many articles, I’ve learned a few things that I thought I’d share on this anniversary.

The catalyst for this blog was an essay I wrote nearly two years ago in which I predicted that the newspaper industry was about to undergo a business implosion that would be stunning in its speed and scope. I wasn’t by any means the first person to predict the collapse of the industry, but I was probably one of the few to foresee how fast it would occur.

That’s because I’ve followed the high tech industry for more than 20 years and repeatedly seen successful, stable businesses come apart at the seams when their environment changed: Digital Equipment, Compaq, Novell, WordPerfect, Wang Laboratories, Cullinet Software, Lotus, Silicon Graphics, and many others. It wasn’t a stretch to see two years ago that the same pattern was occurring in the newspaper business. The environment for publishers was changing in ways that would make their value proposition irrelevant very quickly. Demographic trends all pointed in that direction.

What went wrong

The inevitability of the industry’s self-destruction seems clear now, so there’s no news in that. But how could a business that was so stable and profitable for 150 years go into such a rapid tailspin? Two stories from the past year offered great insight into that question: Outgoing Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger’s farewell piece from the end of 2007 and Eric Alterman’s thoughtful analysis from the March 31, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.

Steiger’s piece was memorable for the stories it told about the excesses of the post-Watergate period. He remembers, for example, how one top editor put the kibosh on a proposal to tighten the belt by eliminating first-class travel for reporters. “I like flying first class,” Steiger quotes the man as saying with a smile. “You’re setting a bad example.” He also recounts internal struggles that occurred when newspapers went online, struggles that no doubt held back these papers from making the bold moves they needed to insure their survival. Steiger’s piece makes it clear that newspapers fumbled the opportunity to get out front of the Internet by focusing too much on protecting their print franchises.

Alterman notes the changes that occurred around the time of Watergate, when papers began to shed their partisan past and reposition themselves as impartial (read: bland) recorders of history. The scramble to win Pulitzers and duplicate the Washington Post‘s Watergate success resulted in millions of dollars being flushed on large Washington bureaus and expensive overseas correspondents. Basically, newspapers lost touch with their local constituencies and began writing for other journalists more so than for their readers.

Alterman also documents another ominous trend that began in the 1970s: the rise of the “insider journalist.” As reporters gained celebrity, their access to the great and powerful became a status symbol amongst their peers. Powerful people knew this, and they learned to exploit their access to leading journalists for their own gain as well. Readers weren’t served by any of this, and as the journalism world became clubbier during the 1980s and 1990s, the reading public lost interest.

This culminated in embarrassments like the Jayson Blair scandal and subsequent fallout in which a number of high-profile columnists at newspapers around the country lost their jobs. It was the low point of modern journalism: the profession had sunk so far that facts no longer mattered; if a reporter said something was true, then it must be true. Who had time to fact-check, anyway? There were gala dinners to attend and golf dates with a CEO.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Meanwhile, newspaper executives knew full well what was going on around them. Circulation began sliding in the mid 1980s and demographic trends made it clear that young people didn’t read newspapers. A few papers saw catastrophe coming and made the leap to national circulation. They will survive the carnage.

The rest were addicted to the healthy and predictable profit margins of their business. Executives knew they were over-exposed to advertising from the shrinking department store industry and that their classified ad franchises were horribly vulnerable to online competitors. But why do anything? Their investors were fat and happy and there was no need to rock the boat.

This complacency is common in industries on the brink of collapse. IBM averaged $8 billion in annual profits during the decade before it lost $8 billion and nearly went out of business. Big companies often enjoy their most profitable years just before the undertow of market change sucks them under.

Watergate’s sad legacy

It’s too late for the newspaper industry to save itself. The average regular newspaper reader is 55 years old. Fewer than one in five people under the age of 25 ever reads a newspaper. They’re not going to start reading one now.

Reading accounts of the industry’s mistakes, I’ve become increasingly convinced that Watergate was the worst thing that ever happened to the newspaper industry. It transformed the role of the reporter from anonymous scribe to media celebrity. It distracted editors from the needs of their readers and diverted investment from productive local channels into wasteful global folly. For almost 30 years, the industry got away with these mistakes because it was the only game in town. Had executives acted a decade ago to dominate the online age, they might have saved themselves. But in this day of blogs, Wikipedia and Craigslist, newspapers don’t have a compelling value proposition.

Sure, online traffic is growing and online dollars are inching upward, but the top line is falling too fast. The union contracts negotiated two decades ago can’t be easily changed, the presses still need to be maintained and delivery truck drivers need to be paid. At some point during the next two years, the revenue and expense lines will cross, but there will be little left to cut without turning major metro dailies into expensive supermarket advertisers. There will be massive consolidation and a lot more layoffs.

I’ll continue to chronicle the sad decline of an American institution on this blog, but I’ll also write about some of the exciting experiments that are transforming journalism across multiple media. I firmly believe a new kind of journalism that embraces blogs, camera phones, Twitter, wikis, hyperlinks, search engines and millions of ordinary citizens will be far richer and more vibrant than the one that preceded it. We just have to clean up an ugly mess first.