We sorted through our 147 entries of 2008 to come up with the stories that surprised us, delighted us or made us shake our heads in disbelief. We’re presenting them as a series of posts entries over four days. Tomorrow we’ll conclude with our favorite quotes of the year.

Creative Solutions

A group of Ohio newspapers got together to share stories and even reporting assignments in a novel response to cost pressure. 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 tactic has now been tested in several other parts of the US.

Pasadena Now, a small weekly, fired its entire editorial staff and farmed out coverage to a staff of Indian writers recruited on Craigslist. Publisher James McPherson pays the virtual staff about $7.50 per 1,000 words, compared to the $30,000 to $40,000 he was paying each reporter annually. The Indian writers “report” via telephones, web harvesting and webcams, with support and guidance from McPherson and his wife.

Neighborsgo.com, a spinoff of the Dallas Morning News, uses a social network to anchor a community journalism initiative. Local residents create profiles and post information about their interests, and some celebrities are emerging, like the Helpless Housewife (right). Every week, editors dig through content submitted by citizens and produce 18 local print editions.

Research and Markets released a report entitled “Offshoring By US Newspaper Publishers” that sees big growth in the newspaper outsourcing industry, particularly in India. About 2,300 people were employed offshore to serve US and UK newspaper companies in July, 2008, the report said. However, “The total offshore opportunity from newspaper publishers is estimated to be approximately $3.5 billion,” in the long run.

A team of enterprising publishers in the UK produced a four-page newspaper created entirely by hand. “Every word and every image and every mark of any kind in The Manual was drawn by a team of volunteers – mostly illustrators,” the website says. The group foresees a day when “handmade qualities can transform newspapers from ‘junk’ to collectable.

The Politico, a Washington-based boutique news service that specializes in Capitol Hill coverage, signed up more than 100 newspapers for its news service, including the Arizona Republic, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Philadelphia Inquirer. Launched in early 2007, the specialized print/online/broadcast hybrid focuses exclusively on politics, is reportedly profitable and has become a must-read for political junkies.

CNN announced plans to challenge the Associated Press with its own wire service. The AP suffered subscriber flight in 2008 as several large newspapers have canceled their subscriptions, claiming the price is too high.

The Chicago Sun-Times offered 44 copies of its Nov. 5 front page on eBay as a “museum wrap fine art giclée print on canvas.” Nov. 5 was a rare bright spot in an otherwise disastrous year. The historic election created a brief surge of demand and many publishers sold out that day’s issue.

The Sun-Times had another idea to attract readers: It brought back dead columnists. “Vintage” columns written by Chicago institution Mike Royko began appearing in August, some 11 years after Royko died. The first one was about a Windy City citizen who was also dead.

Brave New World

Huffington Post employee Mayhill Fowler captured a three-minute rant by Bill Clinton about a Vanity Fair report that questioned the propriety of his post-presidential behavior. Fowler didn’t identify herself as a reporter but said she had the video camera in plain view while Clinton was talking. The LA Times account describes the recorder as “candy bar-sized” and Clinton claims to have not known he was being recorded.

CNN reported on a Yahoo employee who Twittered his layoff in February and gained an eager following. Ryan Kuder eventually took a job from the hundreds of leads contributed by his followers . His story was covered on prominent blogs and in mainstream media.

Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for its coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys. The New York Times account pointed to the difference between the new breed of online reporting and traditional print journalism. Chief among them is the involvement of readers in the process. Editor Joshua Micah Marshall has even been known to give “assignments” to his readers, asking them to comb through official documents.

Gutsy Moves

Monitor Editor John Yemma

Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing cancelled his newspaper subscription and wrote about it at length, invoking a deluge of scorn from newspaper vets. Outing stuck to his guns.

Tampa Tribune intern Jessica DaSilva documented a contentious meeting about the need for change at the newspaper and posted the editor-in-chief’s comments on her blog. The young woman endured a torrent of abuse from veteran journalists, including many personal insults, as more than 200 comments piled up on her blog. The incident dramatized the industry’s difficulty in dealing with change.

Land of the Rising Seniors

Newspaper sales in Japan are 2.5 times those of the US as a percentage of the population and journalist layoffs are all but unheard of. The reason: the population is declining. The percentage of children 14 and younger is the lowest it’s been in 100 years and the overall population of Japan is expected to decline by a third over the next 50 years. The lack of a new generation of Web-savvy upstarts means papers have less pressure to move online and figure out how to serve a new audience.

Just Plain Fun

The Onion offered a tutorial in how to write a provocative magazine cover line (right).

A tongue-in-cheek investigation by IowaHawk rounded up recent incidents of criminal activity by journalists and concluded that newsrooms are at risk of becoming a “killing field.” Of course, the reporters could have conducted the exercise for lawyers, accountants or plumbers and come to the same conclusion. The best line was from Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit: “I think it’s unfair to single out journalists as thieves, or violent, or drunks, or child abusers. Sometimes they’re all of the above.” The chart is amusing, too.

We sorted through our 147 entries of 2008 to come up with the stories that surprised us, delighted us or made us shake our heads in disbelief. We’ll present them as a series of posts over the next few days in hopes that you’ll find them to be as memorable as we did. Happy New Year!

Management Ineptitude

The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote a case history for the how not to handle a layoff. Staff were told not to come in to work until after 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 2. Laid-off employees were notified by phone. Those who didn’t get a call were expected to promptly come to the office. Management then arranged for laid-off employees to clean out their desks on a Saturday morning and to enter the building from the back where they wouldn’t attract the attention.

 
In March, Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell was caught on video telling one of his reporter employees, “F**k you.” He muttered the comment under his breath at the end of a response to an Orlando Sentinel’s reporter’s pointed question about how newspapers can thrive by giving readers what they want when all readers want is stories about puppy dogs.
 

The Chinese Daily News had to pay $5.2 million for allegedly forcing reporters to file five stories a day and to rush between news conferences and interviews. Ad quotas were unreasonably high and production workers were forced to labor nonstop. Reporters testified that they had to work six days a week, 12 hours a day, but weren’t able to complain because of pressure and the culture of intimidation.

Several publishers chose Valentine’s Day to announce major layoffs.

The Denver alternative weekly Westword reported that staff members of the Longmont, Colo. Times-Call newspaper were invited to the publisher’s holiday party – as parking valets. Staffers reportedly earned what they got for their day jobs, only they spent their time parking the cars of rich people in attendance.

Los Angeles Times publisher David Hiller hatched a plan to move the paper’s monthly magazine completely under the control of the advertising department without telling the newspaper’s editor. Hiller reportedly hired a new editor and planned to replace the magazine’s entire nine-person editorial staff without telling anyone on the editorial side. Hiller resigned a few weeks later.

In June, Tribune Co. launched a campaign to measure journalist productivity by the number of column inches of copy they produced. Noting that Los Angeles Times reporters turn out about one-sixth as many column inches as their counterparts in Hartford or Baltimore, Tribune COO Randy Michaels issued a warning to writers and editors. “When you get into the individuals, you find out that you can eliminate a fair number of people while eliminating not very much content,” he said.

Slate’s Jack Shafer analyzed the 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 found that that the anonymous quotes were either obvious, self-serving or contributed nothing to the story.

Killing the Host

The Newspaper Guild in Honolulu printed up 100,000 cards for readers can send in to cancel their subscriptions in event of a strike. The thinking was that it was better to take down the Advertiser and cause a whole lot more people to lose their jobs than to have 54 employees treated unfairly.

The union at the Los Angeles Times mounted a campaign to drive out of existence the dwindling number of businesses that advertised in the paper because it said the Times wouldn’t negotiate in good faith.

Oh-Oh

A Google search bot triggered a 75% plunge in shares of United Airlines over the weekend when it assigned a Sept. 6, 2008 date to a six-year-old story about United Airlines’ bankruptcy filing.

Editors at the Wine Spectator bestowed a coveted Award of Excellence on a non-existent restaurant. The prank was dreamed up by Robin Goldstein, who concocted a fake website with recipes from an Italian cookbook and a reserve wine list “largely chosen from among some of the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past few decades.”

The Tampa Bay Tribune quickly backtracked on a series of design changes as some 300 readers canceled subscriptions and more than 3,000 called or wrote e-mails of protest. “Turns out, we had really disrupted the way people communicate with each other in the morning,” said executive editor Janet Coats.

The San Francisco Examiner caught a delivery man for the Palo Alto Daily Post apparently stealing copies of the Examiner as he delivered his own newspaper. When confronted and asked to open his trunk, the man had more than 1,000 copies of the rival newspaper stashed there.

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a contest for the best reader-submitted video opposing Sam Zell’s proposal to sell naming rights to the Chicago Cubs. The winner was a college student who interns at the rival Tribune. The Trib had some fun with winning its rival’s contest in this clip, which also includes the winning video.

It looks like 2009 will be a make-or-break year for many media companies, thanks to an advertising climate the some forecasters are predicting will the worst in generations.

Media economist Jack Myers is predicting an “advertising depression,” says Dow Jones. “Myers, a longtime industry consultant who runs JackMyers.com, is now forecasting an unprecedented three straight years of declines in advertising and marketing spending in the U.S. starting this year,” the wire service says. “To put that in perspective, the industry hasn’t suffered even a two-year spending decline in advertising since the 1930s.” The result will be a “massive shakeout” in industries that depend on advertising for their livelihood. Myers expects advertising spending in the U.S. to call 2.4% this year, 6.7% next year and 2.3% in 2010. His forecast roughly agrees with estimates by Publicis Groupe. The downturn will make it more difficult for media companions to effect the transformations that are necessary to survive in the customer-driven marketing environment of the future.

Meanwhile, Barclays Capital expects domestic ad spending to drop 10% next year, which is dramatically worse than performance during both the 1991 and 2001 recessions. The forecast is a substantial revision of Barclays’ prediction just two months ago that next year’s decline would be a less-drastic 5.5%. The investment bank sees trouble in the local advertising industry, which is often seen as the best hope for newspaper salvation. Local spending, which makes up some 39% of the $252.1 billion U.S. ad market, will fall 12.2% in 2009, while national spending will drop 8.4%. Barclays forecast that local ad spending would decline an additional 1.4% even when the broader market recovers in 2010. The one positive note: Internet advertising should increase 6.1% in 2009 and 12% in 2010, but that segment will still account for just 10% of ad spending next year.

Given those forecasts, it’s not surprising that asset values have tanked. “Some 30 US newspapers are up for sale…but few buyers have emerged in spite of rock bottom prices,” notes the Financial Times. Valuations have fallen by at least half compared to their highs and signs that the advertising environment is worsening aren’t helping, the paper says. To illustrate the degree of loss in asset values, the Boston Globe was valued at $650 million by a consortium of buyers just two years ago. Today, the value of the Globe and the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette combined is just $120 million. In fact, The New York Times Co.’s most valuable New England asset may be its equity stake in the Boston Red Sox. It was worth about $135 million before the financial crisis hit. And that’s without Mark Teixeira.

Some Good News, Too

While admitting that 2009 will be a mostly crummy year for the economy, Poynter Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds sees reasons to believe better days are ahead. For one thing, oil is comparatively cheap right now and the price of paper is coming down. While you shouldn’t get comfortable with short-term trends in these commodities, at least they are two fewer factors weighing on the industry. The buyouts and layoffs of 2008 will show also benefits in 2009 as newspapers remove those costs from their books. And there are promising signs in newspapers’ online activities that may broadly benefit the industry. Edmonds is careful to hedge his bets, but he wants to exit the year on a positive note.

Cuts Take Toll on Quality

Print editors are accustomed to getting letters from readers taking them to task for erroneously saying the California Gold Rush started in 1845 instead of 1848 and  concluding, “Shoddy fact-checking like this makes me skeptical of anything you report in your journal.” Editors usually laugh off these missives, but with readers enjoying a bounty of choice these days and freely publishing their own critiques, the gaffes caused by overworked news staffs potentially become more damaging. Detroit NASCAR Examiner Josh Lobdell points out three major errors in a Detroit News story and questions how a newspaper in the Motor City can do such a shoddy job of covering motoring. The Sunday Business Post of Ireland restates almost verbatim what we suggested 2 1/2 years ago: that the cycle of cutbacks will lead to inferior products that people won’t want to read, which will harm circulation and lead to more layoffs. You don’t cost-cut your way to leadership.

If errors are your thing, read Craig Silverman’s year-end column in the Toronto Star about the worst publishing gaffes of 2008. Our favorite is the AP’s reference to Joseph Lieberman as a “Democratic vice-presidential prick.” There are plenty more on Silverman’s awesome blog, Regret the Error. Be sure to read his annual celebration of the worst errors and corrections in the media, an award he calls the Crunks. One of the best has to be this front page of northern New England’s Valley News, which actually managed to misspell its own name on its front page one day.

Report: Newspaper Sites Embrace Web Tools

The Bivings Group examined the websites of the 100 top U.S. newspapers to see what they’re doing with the Internet. While a few activities have changed little over the last year (RSS, reporter blogs and video), there have been striking increases in the use of some features:

• Fifth-eight percent of newspaper websites post user-generated photos, 18% accept video and 15% publish user-generated articles.  That’s way up from the 24% that accepted such material in 2007.
• Seventy five percent now accept article comments in some form, compared to 33% in 2007.
• Facebook-like social networking tools are beginning to gain traction, with 10% of newspapers now using them, or double last year’s figure.
• Three-quarters list some kind of most-popular ranking, such as most e-mailed or most commented. Just 33% had that feature in 2006.
• You can now submit articles to social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us at 92% of newspaper sites, compared to only 7% in 2006.
• Only 11% of websites now require registration to view full articles, compared to 29% last year.
• Other stats: 57% have PDF editions, 20% have chat, and 40% offer SMS alerts.

Don’t strain your eyes: Click the image below for a larger version. More charts and data is in the summary report.

Miscellany

Journal-Register has reportedly closed a chain of Connecticut weeklies. The North Haven Courier reports, “On Dec. 18, members of [the Shore Line and Elm City Newspapers, a weekly newspaper chain in the shoreline and Greater New Haven area] were notified they had been laid off…The affected papers include the North Haven Post, the East Haven Advertiser, the Branford Review, the Shore Line Times of Guilford and Madison, the Clinton Recorder, and the Pictorial Gazette and Main Street News in Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Essex, Deep River, Chester, Lyme, and Old Lyme…Joyce Mletschnig, who until Thursday was the Pictorial Gazette’s associate editor, said that their newspapers would be shut down.”

The Seattle Times is asking about 500 non-unionized employees to take a week’s unpaid vacation in order to avoid more layoffs. Employees can take the seven days off at any time over the next two months. Management at the Times, which has cut 22% of its staff this year, may believe that further layoffs will undermine quality to too great a degree, so it’s getting creative with strategy.

Russ Smith has some good quotes in a piece on Splice Today about what he believes is the inevitable demise of print newspapers. Smith, 53, is an unabashed newspaper fan but he’s noticed that even his contemporaries are dropping their print subscriptions or not noticing when the paper no longer arrives on the doorstep. He also notices that his kids and their friends are just as well-informed about current events as he, a counter to the conventional wisdom that young people don’t read. Smith boldly predicts that The New York Times will be sold by the end of 2009, with Rupert Murdoch on the short list of likely buyers. On the other hand, Murdoch may be content simply to let his nemesis fade away.

Raleigh News & Observer Staff Writer Mark Schultz writes with passion about why he got into newspapers and why they’re still relevant. His best line comes in an account about interviewing a woman in her trailer home in Mexico: “We enter people’s lives for an hour and ask for instant intimacy.”

The Knoxville News Sentinel has apparently managed to avoid the carnage that has devastated many of its brethren. In an upbeat column plainly titled “News Sentinel is NOT going out of business,” Editor Jack McElroy pays homage to owner E.W. Scripps Co. for shrewdly diversifying its revenue stream and not loading up on debt. He also says the News Sentinel wisely diversified into TV and specialty publishing to insulate itself from the newspaper advertising downturn. Critics naturally accuse the paper of selling out to political interests.

The New York Times will launch “Instant Op-Ed” next month in a bid to compete with instant cable television analysis. The Web feature will post immediate expert viewpoints on breaking news, according to Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal.

And Finally…

The Baltimore Sun’s John McIntyre asked readers to contribute the best line heard in the workplace. They come through with some winners. Our favorite: “Yeah, he thinks he’s God’s gift to sliced bread.”

Don’t forget to take our poll: Will the Detroit Experiment Succeed?

Writing in Fortune, Richard Siklos has the most perceptive analysis of the Tribune Co. ownership picture we’ve seen. Siklos scores Sam Zell for his hubris and for characterizing his company as employee-owned when the only votes that counted were his and those of the former shareholders who approved the transfer of Tribune shares to a toothless employee stock option plan. What happens to those employee-owners now, Siklos asks? Barring an unlikely market turn, they’ll lost most or all of their investment, leaving them just with their 401(k) holdings. In all fairness, Sam Zell also stands to lose his investment, Siklos points out, although we doubt they’re stocking up on the macaroni & cheese at the Zell mansion. This brief, insight-packed piece ends by speculating that Tribune Co. will emerge from bankruptcy with about a $4 billion valuation. At that price, Zell may actually be tempted to put in some more money. Eeek!

2009 Forecasts Offer Little To Smile About

Researchers quit using euphemisms to describe the industry’s troubles some time ago. Now they vie to see who can come up with the strongest adjectives. “Terrible” is how Kubas Consultants describes the newspaper ad revenue outlook for 2009 after surveying 400 newspaper executives. The report offers a “very negative outlook” because a “disaster area” is looming in employment classifieds. Seemingly at a loss for more superlatives, the report summarizes: “the severity of expected declines is remarkable.” All this for a forecast of a 9.1% decline in revenues in 2009, which would actually be less than the 2008 wreckage to date. It’s the cumulative effect that invokes shock and awe, though. “If Kubas’ predictions for 2009 come to pass, by the end of next year, newspapers will have lost about 30% of their total revenues in four years,” says MediaPost. This story has no hope in it. If you’re hoping for a nice weekend, read something else.

Scribes Sum Up Industry Woes In Painful Detail

“Across the U.S., more than 30 papers are up for sale, but there are no buyers,” sums up a long piece from Britain’s Independent that’s kind of a Wikipedia entry for newspaper industry turmoil. Regular readers of this blog and others like it won’t find a lot of new information in Stephen Foley’s 1,900-word opus, but the piece is a nice digest of the events of 2008.

Particularly notable is its description of the travesty that was Sam Zell’s purchase of Tribune Co. just 19 months ago. Foley dug up some choice Zell boasts about how his deal didn’t require the stars to line up perfectly in order to succeed, while Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal acquisition did. Fast forward to today and look who’s laughing. The Journal‘s circ is holding steady and Murdoch is actually investing in the paper while Tribune Co. is in court receivership. “Sam Zell is a demonstration of the proposition that a group of people that knows nothing about the newspaper business going in, is unlikely to be successful,” says Poynter’s Rick Edmonds in the story’s best quote.

Solutions? Sadly, the piece turns up nothing new, other than the idea of putting some papers into a not-for-profit trust, as the St. Petersburg Times has done. The nonprofit ideas may have some merit, since profits won’t be an issue before long, anyway. Why not call a spade a spade?

Maybe it’s because the new year’s drawing close, but this is certainly the week for epic analyses of the state of the industry. The Toledo Free Press kicks in a rambling 1,700-word essay with lots of facts but little new perspective. And the headline, “Changing media landscape causing problems, new opportunities in Toledo and nationwide,” appears to have been written by a search engine.

The story has one great quote, though, from FOX Toledo’s President/General Manager Ray Maselli in response to a question about recent layoffs: “We are adjusting to the needs of our environment and re-engineering the way we do business. WUPW’s ongoing investments in operational efficiency as well as our commitment to serving viewers and advertisers with optimal products and services are effectively positioning us as a more diversified, multi-media news organization.” We think “investments in operational efficiency” is the best euphemism for “layoff” we’ve seen all year.

Plain Dealer Kicks Laid Off Employees When Down

The 2008 Conflict Avoidance Trophy goes to the Cleveland Plain Dealer for the surreal way in which it handled the layoffs of a dozen people. Management turned an already unpleasant task into a humiliating water torture for the entire staff and then kicked the sacked employees when they were down.

Cleveland Scene has the details. As we noted earlier, the Plain Dealer staff was told not to come in to work until after 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 2. Laid-off employees were notified by phone. So if someone didn’t call to say you were out of a job, you were expected to come in to the office. And smile, dammit! As if that wasn’t bad enough, management arranged for laid-off employees to clean out their desks on a Saturday morning and to enter the building from the back where they would attract the least attention. “For some, decades of service ended like a protected, shameful secret,” writer D.X. Ferris sums up.

Ferris showed up in the P D parking to try to interview the sacked employees but they told him to bug off. That’s not surprising under the circumstances: People with some of the most well-recognized names in Cleveland being hustled out the back door so no one would have to witness their shame. It doesn’t get much more humiliating than that.

Miscellany

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has laid off 39 employees at the newspaper and affiliated community publishing group as part of an ongoing plan to cut staff by 10% before the end of the year.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is offering a buyout package to all 200 of its Guild employees. Management said the offer is being made to avoid layoffs, which is management shorthand for saying there are probably going to be more layoffs.

We were interviewed by freelancer Michelle Rafter for her blog WordCount – Freelancing in the Digital Age (freelancers need all the support they can get these days). The focus was on community news, which is a mixed bag of an industry these days. While it seems that big publishers like Gannett and Journal Register can’t be bothered with community newspapers at the moment, some of the most innovative work is actually going on there.

Faced with devastating cuts to their arts coverage, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have teamed up to share reporting resources, according to a local blog called Art&Seek. The deal means that some local music and theatre will continue to get newspaper coverage that would have otherwise been lost, but some members of the arts community also fear that the loss of competing perspectives will put too much influence in the hands of too few critics.

An expected write-down at Lee Enterprises could force the troubled owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other newspapers into default on $306 million in debt, the St. Louis Business Journal reports.

Last month we told you about Helium, a citizen journalism site that’s seeking to partner with newspapers to provide what is essentially high-quality blog content. Now the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune has become Helium’s second customer. The paper will use Helium’s writer’s marketplace to find and contract with local stringers “who are compensated for contributing articles on a variety of topics ranging from wedding planning tips to great day trips with your kids, to seasonal gardening advice and concert reviews.” While this isn’t exactly hard-hitting journalism, it is going to cost the Eagle-Tribune a lot less than paying professional writers.

And Finally…

If the rapidly developing world of social media has you feeling dazed and confused, you’re not alone. There are so many new websites and so little time to drink them all in. Boston interactive agency Overdrive Interactive is trying to help with Social Media Map, a visual guide to the most essential social media resources that resembles a really dense version of the New York City subway system. You can download the clickable PDF here.

As the newspaper industry winds down its worst year in history, some observers are finding hope amid the rubble.

Jonathan Zittrain points out that Twitter and Mahalo were powerful tools for documenting the crisis in Mumbai nearly two weeks ago. For many Americans, foreign news services and the BBC were all that was available to track the terrorist attacks. Few US newspapers even have stringers in Mumbai any more. Into that vacuum sprang citizen journalists with their cell phones and self-built news sites. Zittrain says he’s seen the future of news in these services. Check out the Mumbai hash on Twitter, the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks page on Mahalo and the Wikipedia entry on the Mumbai attacks.  Can you read these accounts and not believe that a new kind of journalism is being created before our eyes?

European editor Frédéric Filloux and former Apple honcho Jean-Louis Gassée meander a bit before getting to the point, but finally zero in on what’s going right in the news world. They point to The New York Times’ introduction of Times Extra as an example of how the link economy is transforming the news business. Times Extra integrates news from outside sources – including competitors – into the Times’ home page. This is a bitter pill for hyper-competitive editors to swallow, but a necessary one in the new model of news.

They also point to two other recent announcements – the success of The Politico’s new wire service and Huffington Post’s $25 million capital infusion – as evidence that there’s plenty of life in the news business, just not in the old news business. “The Internet economy is moving in the right direction,” Filous writes. These stories, “provide evidence of…progress. Similar news organizations are bound to find sustainable business models.”

If you run a newspaper, you might consider hiring Gordon Borrell for your next team-building event. Check out these quotes and paraphrases attributed to the founder of research firm Borrell Associates in Investor’s Business Daily (lightly edited):

• “We’re confident it’s near a bottom, and there will be a rebound.”
• Newspaper companies have plenty of growth ahead for their Internet businesses — albeit with hard work… Newspapers are planning for exponential growth from the Web — in some
• Local advertising, which newspapers are best positioned to capture, will grow 47% this year to $12.9 billion.

These optimistics comments come on top of recent news that advertising on newspaper websites declined 3% in the third quarter of 2008, indicating that the one business that should be growing is actually shrinking. They are also rather oddly juxtaposed with the chart at right. We hope Borrell is correct, but his comments shouldn’t be cause for complacency.

Miscellany

Disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich allegedly pressured the Chicago Tribune to fire Deputy Editorial Page Editor John McCormick and other unnamed editorial board members in exchange for getting state funding that would grease the wheels for Tribune Co. to sell the Chicago Cubs. We suspect this story might have something to do with it. We also marvel that the great state of Illinois could elect a marvel of leadership like our President elect and a scumbag like Rod Blagojevich to office at the same time.

The Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch is laying off 18 employees while the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News will collectively cut 35 jobs, reports Editor & Publisher. No word on what percentage of their respective workforces the cuts represent. The Philadelphia layoffs will concentrate in the newsroom, however.

Self-described troglodyte Ted Venetoulis is still interested in buying the Baltimore Sun. Or maybe the 72-year-old investor is just looking to get his name in the paper. See for yourself. The Baltimore Business Journal reports that Venetoulis and a group of anonymous investors are still looking at possible acquisition of the Sun from its troubled Tribune Co. parent, but a lot has to be worked out first, including assessing the future of the newspaper industry itself. Venetoulis admits that he hasn’t looked at the Sun’s financials, that he wouldn’t want to pay too much and that he’s going to watch Tribune Co.’s bankruptcy closely. It’s too early to tell. Which makes us wonder why the BBJ committed 500 words to this meaningless story.

The Christian Science Monitor sums up the troubles plaguing the industry. This story doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but we couldn’t resist mentioning it because we’re quoted there.

And Finally…

The Daily Show analyzes the decline of newspapers in its own inimitable style.

And from Rob Tornoe, cartoonist at The Politicker:

Hot on the heels of the newspaper industry’s record-breaking 18.1% quarterly revenue decline, analysts are weighing in with dire forecasts and advice.

“A newspaper that cannot sell enough advertising or cut enough expenses to sustain profitable operations is not likely to make it to the other side of 2009,” writes Alan Mutter in a depressing outlook on the industry’s immediate future. While the rest of Mutter’s post isn’t as provocative as that closing statement, it provides a detailed analysis of which markets are mostly likely to see mergers or closures (Minneapolis, San Francisco, Southern California, Southern Florida) as well as markets like Chicago and Boston, where two competitors are locked in battles of mutual destruction. The most likely scenario for 2009 is that publishers will have to choose from a palette of equally distasteful cost-cutting options, and that the measures they have to take will be more drastic than the 10%-20% workforce cuts of the past year. Mutter lists voluntary pay cuts, massive outsourcing, frequency reduction and asset sales as being on the table.

Fitch Ratings might agree. Its report says several major daily papers could shut down by 2010. Speaking in that odd third-person-singular that investment companies like to use, the agency sa

ys “Fitch expects newspaper industry revenue growth will be negative for the foreseeable future,” and that credit ratings are likely to decline further. Unlike the 2001 advertising crash, this one is affecting both national and regional advertisers, the credit rating agency says. “And unlike the easy credit and lower interest rates during the 2001 ad recession, this time advertisers and consumers face a credit freeze.” The outlook for 2009? Don’t ask. Fitch expects real US GDP to drop 1.2% while inflation hovers at 2.7%.

Steve Outing has some advice for newspaper executives struggling with the reinvention question. While his E&P column isn’t as edgy as usual, his prescriptions are practical. The most counter-intuitive in our opinion: stop chasing young people. Millennials aren’t going to read newspapers, so your redesigns intended to make your print edition more appealing are going to fail. Reach out to them through their mobile devices and services that aggregate their social networks with news (he isn’t more specific about this; Facebook is a pretty big obstacle to this goal). Focus your print editions on the readers who want to read print. Yeah, they’re older, but they’re still viable. You’re going to be

managing print down for the next 15-20 years, so get used to it. And while you’re at it, start pushing those older print readers online. Make your newspaper a gateway to enhanced services on the Web. And for God’s sake, stop wasting your time on fluffy lifestyle pieces. Print loyalists want serious journalism.

Outing has some investment advice, too: hire someone to maximize online visibility through social media channels, bring in a mobility specialist and give your staff time to come up with novel ideas for reinvention. The problem, of course, is who’s got the time or money for all this? Outing doesn’t address the budget issue but then again, he’s a pundit, not an accountant.

Profiling the Provocateur

The New York Observer has a long profile of local media guru Jeff Jarvis, who perhaps vexes the mainstream media industry more than any other contrarian. That’s because Jarvis, who now teaches journalism at NYU and agitates with his popular Buzz Machine blog, is one of them. He worked at the San Francisco Examiner, New York Daily News, People and TV Guide, among other outlets, and was founding editor of Entertainment Weekly. Jarvis may understand traditional media’s pain, but he doesn’t cut the industry much slack.

He is passionate about citizen journalism and the need for media institutions to remake themselves as hubs of news, commentary and conversation among a community of people with similar interests. He has little tolerance for the go-slow mentality that pervades American newsrooms. As Jarvis sees it, the quicker we blow up the old, the quicker we can get on with the new. And he makes his points in blunt, sometimes profane language.

This has made Jarvis a hot potato for a tribe of senior editorialists who are trying to balance their respect for the man with their distaste for his revolutionary ideas. The piece quotes several of these top editors, including New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who clearly finds some of Jarvis’ ideas persuasive but is uncomfortable with his extremism. Gawker’s Nick Denton sums it up: “Of all the Internet supremacists, he is the one who has betrayed his origins in print. Of all the people who grew up in newspapers and magazines, he is the one who has most clearly abandoned them.”

Jeff Jarvis is required reading at the Death Watch and we commend him to you.

Poignant Tales From the Front Lines

Pam Podger and her husband moved from Virginia to Montana because they loved the natural beauty and the lifestyle. They took at job at the Missoulian. Nine months later, they were both laid off on the same day. More than 50 years of journalism experience was thus thrust out on the street, with two kids to care for. Podger writes in American Journalism Review of her anxiety, her fears about the future of journalism and her determination to stick it out in her new home.

Cost-cutting is robbing the public of an American institution – the editorial cartoonist. “In the past three years, around three dozen artists have been laid off, forced to take buyouts or to retire, according to the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists,” says an Associated Press piece. The story spotlights Eric Devericks, whose work is pictured above. Devericks has known nothing but success since his work was recognized with a national award while he was still in college. But rewards don’t amount to a hill of beans in an industry that’s cutting bone, so the Seattle Times laid him off effective next Friday. Next month, Devericks, his wife and three kids are “heading to southern California, where two buddies have offered Devericks a job as a business development specialist for their new industrial design company,” says the AP account. The curtain is quickly coming down on a generation of journalists who proved that the brush, as well the pen, can be mightier than the sword.

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

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

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

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

Small is Beautiful…Or At Least Cheap

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

Do They Still Not Get It?

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

Miscellany

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

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

The Chulchavox blog relates two items we missed:   

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

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

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

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

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

And Finally…

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

Lee Abrams and friend

Conde Nast Portfolio takes a look at Tribune Co.’s much ballyhooed redesigns and finds that nothing much has changed. New looks-and-feels in Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale have barely budged circulation, which continues to fall. “We can’t find any impact from the redesign,” Norbert Ortiz, the Orlando Sentinel‘s vice president for circulation and consumer marketing, tells Portfolio.

This doesn’t bode well for recent makeovers in Los Angeles and Chicago. Experts debate whether the new designs are radical or just a new coat of paint, with the painters holding the edge: “a distraction,” says Ken Doctor; “seat of the pants” adds Alan Mutter. The story focuses on Tribune chief innovation officer Lee Abrams, who is inexplicably pictured with the cast of Blue Man Group. Abrams invented the album format that revolutionized FM radio back in the 80s, but his innovations in print have been less dramatic. “I wouldn’t call it redesign. I would call it redecoration,” says Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design.

Abrams is quoted asserting that “we really had to work on reclaiming things that newspapers had traditionally owned,” from investigative reporting to election and crime coverage. Oddly, Tribune Co. has slashed editorial staff at most of its papers this year, drastically undercutting their ability to sustain provide such information.

We’ve previously shared our opinion of redesigns (“A Useless Exercise at the Wrong Time”) and see no further need to comment.

New/Old Journalism Clash in Washington Park

Mediashift tell of a new online publication at New York University that’s challenging the school’s 36-year-old campus fixture, Washington Square News (WSN). The venture was launched by three non-journalism majors who were frustrated with what they call WSN’s bland tone and faux objectivity. NYU Local, which is currently configured as a blog, takes a fundamentally different view of impartiality. “Most people who want to be objective tend to disguise their opinions,” says co-editor Lily Quateman says. “Being objective treats readers like idiots and makes them guess.”

WSN Editor-in-Chief, Adam Playford begs to differ, saying his journal will continue to report just the facts and label opinions accordingly. He also says online isn’t a major focus at WSN, which updates its website just once a day. In contract, NYU Local encourages anyone to contribute and makes it possible to do so by any means possible, including cell phone. The staff hopes to move to a social networking platform in order to further encourage community journalism. “The idea of citizen journalism is a massive misnomer,” says 20-year-old co-editor Cody Brown. “Everyone is a citizen and anyone can be a reporter. The term is patronizing.”

The piece, which is written by an NYU junior, highlights the push-pull taking place between old- and new-media models, even within the context of a college-age audience. The fundamental debate is over the question of whether professional reporters are better equipped to tell a story versus thousands of unknown citizens. The fact that the battle is taking place in an institution that’s training the next generation of journalists indicates that this issue will be debated for some time to come.

Layoff Log

• More layoffs are days away at the Baltimore Sun, according to the newspaper’s union. If true, the action would follow by just five months a 100-person downsizing this summer, a cutback that hit the newsroom particularly hard. No word on numbers, but the cuts are expected to be layoffs, not buyouts. The Sun employed 1,400 people before the 100-person cutback last June.
• With five more newsroom layoffs at the New Haven Register, the size of the newsroom staff will have shrunk from 110 to 65 in a decade. The five editors are part of a larger cutback of 20 people announced yesterday. The daily will also shutter Play, an entertainment-oriented weekly. More layoffs are possible in mid-January, when parent Journal Register may fall into default if it can’t make its debt payments. Earlier this week, Journal Register said it would probably close two small Connecticut dailies – the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press – along with 11 weeklies in the state.
• As expected, the ax has fallen in Tribune Co.’s Washington bureaus. LA Observed reports that Chicago Tribune staffers John Crewdson, Bay Fang, Stephen Hedges, and Aamer Madhani were let go. Earlier eight Los Angeles Times staffers were laid off and acting Tribune acting bureau chief Naftali Bendavid left to join The Wall Street Journal.
• Newhouse is cutting deeply in Michigan. Staff at eight newspapers have been told that massive buyouts are planned and some operations will be consolidated in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. There’s no word on numbers, but the Ann Arbor Chronicle account says nearly everyone in the newsroom has been offered a buyout. Production staff has been told that if they don’t take the buyout, they’ll have to work from the Grand Rapids office, which is 130 miles away. Papers in the group include the Grand Rapids Press, Ann Arbor News, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Flint Journal, Bay City Times, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News and the Michigan Business Review. The Ann Arbor paper early announced plans to close its Ypsilanti bureau and to slash pages and sections in an effort to control costs.

Miscellany

Outsell’s Ken Doctor has some encouraging news for newspapers. “It’s a shrinking business that only looks like it is dying,” he tells Media Life. “The U.S. newspaper business will still take in some $40 billion in revenues in 2008.” Doctor believes some papers will close and many may scale back frequency in coming years in order to align expenses with smaller revenues. However, he expects the business to come back, even the devastated classified advertising business. “Forty percent of the newspaper industry is partnering with Yahoo, and we should see a good Yahoo bump in online display ads,” Doctor says. A lot of retraining will be needed, though.

Preliminary research by Middleberg & Associates and the Society of New Communications Research shows that 100% of reporters under 30 agree that new media and communication tools are valuable journalism tools. But only 40% of journalists over 50 year agree with that statement. There is no more change-averse animal than an old newsman. You can still take the survey here.

The Daily Triplicate of Crescent City, Calif. celebrates awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association by trashing the slipshod tactics most awards programs use to select winners. Its tone might sound a bit snarky, but our experience is that the point is valid.

In case you didn’t see this comment from last week, journalism professor Robert Hodierne at the University of Richmond has been commissioned by American Journalism Review “to survey folks who left the newspaper business under circumstances other than voluntary — laid off, bought out, etc. I’m spreading the word about this survey in every way I can and if you guys could help me spread the word I’d be grateful. Take the survey here.

Newspaper Death Watch editor Paul Gillin is interviewed on The Radio Ecoshock Show about what’s ailing newspapers and what will fill the gap. You can skip the description and listen to the short interview here.

Michael Rosenblum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

Looks Like a Newspaper, Smells Like a Newspaper

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

And Finally…

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