Always-provocative Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing proposes that publishers need to change their definition of news. Those Twitter and Facebook feeds that stream information about what your friends are having for lunch? That’s news, Outing says. Only most professional editors don’t consider it that. If information doesn’t have a wire-service imprimatur or at least the watermark of a professional writer, it doesn’t quality as news.

But guess what? Customers don’t care. To them, advice from friends is at least as valuable as advice from a news pro. The popularity of social networks and Twitter attests to that. Professional publishers need to tap in to this phenomenon, but they’re too addicted to conventional definitions of news to make that happen, Outing suggests. They’re missing the boat and the market is passing them by.

Outing nails it. For a great perspective on the popularity of social networking read this piece on “ambient intimacy” from the International Herald-Tribune. Clive Thompson explains the value of sustaining relationships through casual awareness of what others are doing.

Twitter and the Facebook News Feed bring new breadth to this concept, enabling people to glimpse others’ lives through occasional insights into their everyday activities. This intimacy becomes addictive. People who initially reject the News Feed as too intrusive or the constant stream of Twitter chatter as too overwhelming often find themselves drawn in to the point that monitoring the stream becomes engrossing. It’s an experience that appeals to basic human instincts.

The 18-year-olds who log on to Facebook 15 times a day are telling us something. Their friends network is their news stream. As we all know by now, they are rejecting packaged media in favor of a jumbled, unpredictable gush of information from all kinds of sources. They choose who to listen to. If publishers aren’t in the news stream, they’re irrelevant. Outing is proposing that publishers could be the source of the news stream, mixing packaged content from professional sources with ambient chatter from individuals. Of course, Facebook is already pretty well entrenched, but it’s not very localized. Publishers could still transform their websites into something more than a print archive with a few blogs wrapped around it.

Miscellany

More layoffs at the Boston Globe. This time, 42 people in the advertising, circulation, marketing and production departments lost their jobs, or a little less than 2% of the 2,450-person workforce. That’s a bloodbath, says the hyperbolic headline in rival Boston Herald, which should know about bloodbaths. No newsroom jobs were cut. The ranks of the idled reportedly include several senior managers, although no one named names. The Boston Phoenix has the memo from Globe publisher Steve Aimsley. The Globe‘s website is now also reporting to the Globe instead of to The New York Times, which kind of makes sense. And in unrelated news, the newspaper’s truck driver’s union rejected an offer of a 5% pay cut and less vacation. The Globe reported the fourth-worst percentage circulation decline among the top 25 US newspapers in the most recent numbers from the Audit Bureau of Control.

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The Redding (Calif.) Record Searchlight is laying of 12 people, or about 6% of its workforce. No newsroom jobs were affected and the publisher says the paper’s financial position is strong. Read the delightfully random comments from readers, who attribute the layoffs to everything from the Bush administration to yellow journalism, although not to the 85-lb. salmon carcass that is the paper’s most e-mailed story of the day.

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Reuters says the outlook is worsening for Canadian newspapers. Ad revenue at the Toronto Star fell 8.5% in the most recent quarter on top of an 18% jump in newsprint prices. Canwest, which is Canada’s biggest publisher of daily newspapers, can cut back print runs of the National Post daily in western provinces. The Canadian dollar is off more than 20% in the past year, which can’t help.

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There are rumors that the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger is planning more layoffs in early December, even as it invests in a new lifestyle website that will show pictures of all the bars in town. Jackson Free Press Editor Donna Ladd sums up: “So there’s money for drunk pictures, but not for news coverage.”  Well, what the heck is wrong with that, Donna? Commenters pile on. Ladd says the C-L Scroogishly cancelled the $50 holiday bonus and is asking staffers to pay for coffee while hardwood floors are installed in the publisher’s office.

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Did you know US News & World Report is going to go monthly? We didn’t even know it was still around.

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News After Newspapers says what we’ve been saying for two years about the outlook for the newspaper industry, but the author sees hope in a new class of product.

And Finally…

This isn’t news, at least as professional editors define it, but the Top 10 Strangest Coincidences on 2Spare.com is worth the waste of time. In fact, the whole site is a time sink. You can get lost for hours. We don’t know how much of the information is true, but this is the Internet and you shouldn’t believe what you read, anyway.

More papers are dropping the Associated Press. The Columbus Dispatch becomes the latest media entity to just say no to the wire service, following by just days Tribune Co.’s blockbuster announcement that it would exit the consortium. The AP’s costs are a sore spot with budget-challenged publishers, as are its tendency to compete with them online.  Editors are frustrated by new rules that require them to insert tags on stories they contribute to the wire service, which the AP then publishes through its numerous Internet channels.  The editors complain that revenue-generating traffic is thus diverted to the AP from their own web sites.

The AP claims new pricing will cut newspapers costs by about 10% beginning next year and that it will share ad revenues with members.  Publishers, though, say the lower prices aren’t enough. The AP’s fees can exceed $1 million annually at some newsrooms, which is about the same cost as 12 to 15 salaries.  In light of the need to cut costs, newspapers are coming up with creative alternatives, including regional consortia and citizen contributions. The New York Times account says defectors will also turn to less expensive newswires to cover the void left by the AP.

Pundits Disagree on Media’s Future

The director of digital at the UK’s Guardian Media Group forecast two years of “carnage” in the traditional media industry.  Emily Bell said she could see five national newspapers in Britain going under during the next two years as well as “the regional press heading for complete market failure.”  Even successful media companies will have to prepare for a long period of losses, she said.  The culprit is undifferentiated content driven by the traditional role of media as representatives of their customers, rather than participants in a conversation.  The only way to avoid irrelevance is to change this mindset, Bell believes.

However, the global leader for entertainment and media practice at PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Hong Kong begs to differ. “Traditional media isn’t dead yet and won’t be for the next five years, ” Marcel Fenez told the World Association of Newspapers readership conference, Despite its rapid growth, digital advertising will represent just 10 per cent of total advertising for newspapers by 2012, he said. He forecast that global newspaper advertising (including digital) will grow 2.9 percent to $136.8 billion during that time.  Part of traditional media’s advantage is its willingness to collaborate, he noted.  By not trying to “gouge the other guy’s eyes out,” media companies can come up with the kind of creative partnerships that stymie other industries.

Another speaker at the same conference danced on the hyper-local theme. Randy Bennett, vice president for business development at the Newspaper Association of America, said newspapers need to fight back against stagnant readership growth by becoming the destination of choice for local activity. “We must be a trusted source for all relevant content created by us, or others – professionals or amateurs,” Bennett said. “We must give users a tool for extracting the content they need and create a platform for interactive conversation.” Is there a business model in all this?  Bennett admitted he was unaware of one but expected that large sites would come up with something

When Bad News is Good News

Publishers know that bad news sells, and new data from Nielsen Online proves that point. The service’s tally of unique visitors at the nation’s top newspaper Web sites in September showed that all but one (the Village Voice) were up by double- or even triple- digit percentages. The big winner was the Anchorage Daily News, which enjoyed a 928% spike in unique visitors, presumably due to interest in native daughter and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

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The irony of the financial crisis is that it has also been good for some segments of the publishing business. Reuters says business media are enjoying a short-term lift in readership and ad dollars, thanks to all the attention being drawn by Wall Street’s financial crisis. The question is what happens after reader interest cools? The long-term slowdown in advertising in conventional media is likely to continue and perhaps worsen beginning in the first quarter of 2009, experts predict.

Miscellany

News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch says the unprecedented global financial crisis presents a buying opportunity for his company. Speaking at the company’s annual meeting on Friday, Murdoch said News Corp. just turned in its sixth straight year of record earnings and is sitting on $5 billion in cash, making it well prepared for further downturns in credit markets. The company has also renegotiated its credit lines to allow for longer payback periods.

No one, including News Corp. has been left untouched by the mess on Wall St., Murdoch said.  ”It has weakened advertising markets and beaten down our share price,” the 77-year-old CEO said. “We have prepared ourself well for this day.” With next year presenting “unprecedented challenges,”  News Corp. will look for acquisitions in growth businesses. India, eastern Europe and Asia have the most promise, Murdoch said. He also expressed “great confidence in our future,” apparently referring to News Corp.’s future, not necessarily everybody else’s.

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A team of enterprising publishers in the UK has 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,” a blog entry says. “Each copy of the paper has been numbered in a limited edition of around 100.” The experiment foresees a day when “handmade qualities can transform newspapers from ‘junk’ to collectable.” Sounds like a neat idea.

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Just two months after Puerto Rico lost its only daily English-language newspaper, a new suitor has stepped in. The Puerto Rico Daily Sun will be available starting this Wednesday by subscription and at newsstands. The paper will be staffed largely by members of the now-defunct San Juan Star. Few details were released. The publisher said an upcoming press conference would reveal more.

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The Seattle Times Co. may be close to selling its newspapers in Maine, but that probably won’t save it from having to make deep cuts early in the new year.  Al Diamon, Maine’s most widely-read media critic, reports that “two informed sources in the newspaper industry” says a company called Maine Media Investments could buy the Blethen Maine Newspapers by the end of the month. The chain has been an albatross for the Seattle Times, which has enough of its own problems on the opposite coast. Diamon quotes sources as saying more deep cuts are expected in January.

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The new executive editor of the Merced Sun-Star in California’s heartland mixes metaphors and crows about his performance at the free throw line in one of the more delightfully clueless homespun essays we’ve seen by a scribe in a while. Our favorite line is this drug reference (emphasis added): “The newsroom…is down to seeds and stems in terms of numbers of reporters, photographers, copy editors and sports writers.” Someone should put Mike Tharp in touch with the Merced County Sheriff’s department, which destroyed about six tons of marijuana plants the previous day.

Journalism junkies have been closely watching the example of Digg.com to see if the wisdom of crowds really is better than the judgment of editors. According to David Chen, it isn’t. Writing on Mashable, Chen offers a detailed deconstruction of Digg’s recent decision to jettison some of its top users, apparently for trying to manipulate the system.  The weeding-out process was positioned as a routine cleanup intended to eliminate abusers of the community adjudication process, but it was actually an acknowledgment that decision-making by the masses has serious flaws, Chen concludes.

It’s been common knowledge for a couple of years that the Digg model lent itself to manipulation by a small number of people. In fact, there’s evidence that up to half the stories on Digg’s enormously influential home page were contributed by just 100 users.  By taking draconian action to ban members who had, in some cases, contributed hundreds of hours of effort to building the site, Digg is admitting that it has been unable to figure out an algorithmic solution to the abuse.

The problem isn’t in programs, but in people.  Individuals can attain fame within the community by contributing stories that are ranked highly by other users.  Active members discovered early on that by forming “friend” relationships with many others, they could enhance their performance and popularity.  In other words, the more you voted for another member’s contributions, the more the other member voted for yours.  As time went on, an elite corps grew more powerful, to the point that their contributions can achieve high visibility regardless of merit.

“In the years following its creation, Digg became less a democracy and more a republic, with a select few users responsible for the majority of front page stories,” Chen writes. Digg has tinkered with its settings to try to mitigate this factor, but some members responded by writing scripts that routed around the problem.  It became a giant cat and mouse game that eventually forced Digg to insert human editors at some levels to arbitrate the process.  So much for the wisdom of crowds.

Chen contends that the blockade may irreparably damage Digg’s reputation, although the site will continue to be a huge source of traffic for publishers who are lucky enough to be listed there.  At the very least, the conundrum points out the limits of a purely democratic model of news judgment.  Even successful sites like Wikipedia rely up a small cadre of elite editors to make most of the important decisions. People with significant experience in online communities agree that a very tiny percentage of members contribute the vast majority of content.  It appears that editors, whether bubbled up from the community or appointed by management, are inevitably needed to maintain order

Should this be taken as a condemnation of the community journalism model and validation for the rule of editors?  Absolutely not.  As Wikipedia has demonstrated, armies of ordinary people can create a phenomenal information resource.  However, leaving all decision-making to a group without providing rules or oversight invariably results in the ascendance of an elite.  in the case of Wikipedia, that elite is self-regulating.  In the case of Digg’s more juvenile crowd, it’s a frat party.

We constantly hear about the angst that aspiring young journalists face as they wrestle with the decision of whether they made a huge mistake in choosing journalism as a career. Let us share a story that hopefully provides some encouragement. We can’t name all the names because we don’t have permission.

A friend of ours has a son attending a Boston area university.  In his sophomore year, this young man found himself interning at the Boston Globe, where he worked the overnight shift on the rewrite desk.  This past summer, the Globe offered him the opportunity to write a daily blog about activities in the New England area.  Last month, the young man headed back to school and a paid internship at a major newspaper, where he is spearheading an initiative to build a new online community.  This young man is 21 years old.

There’s a lesson in this anecdote.  The decline of traditional media creates huge opportunities for those who have the stomach to take a chance. Back in the 1970s, the conventional wisdom was that the path to a journalism career involved slaving away at a small daily paper, working for food and rent and hoping to catch the eye of a big-city editor.  Today, so few young people want to go into journalism that the opportunity for those who do is virtually limitless.

Savvy investors know that the people who make the biggest killing in any market are those who are willing to buy when everyone else is selling.  The field of journalism right now is a buyers market for the few who buck the conventional wisdom.  Newspapers may not survive much longer in their print form, but most people agree that the core skills of journalism will be needed in one way or another long into the future.  Risk-takers like our young journalist are capitalizing on this trend to gain experience and visibility that a decade or two ago would have taken many years of hard and anonymous work.

That’s why it’s a great time to get into a journalism career.  The current malaise about media will eventually give way to optimism about new models.  The people who have gained the core skills that are necessary to succeed in a reinvigorated industry will rocket ahead in their careers.  Sure, there’s plenty of uncertainty about what media institutions will look like in the future, but if you’re willing to take a chance, you stand to reap huge rewards.  Newspapers are hungry for new ideas, and the best ideas are coming from the generation of young people who aren’t burdened by a romantic attachment to the past.  There’s never a better time to take risks than when you’re in your 20s.  My friend’s young son knows that, and we predict he will be one of the big winners when the trend inevitably reverses itself.

Redesigning Newsrooms

The Tampa Tribune will introduce a new design on Monday, and it’s keeping the details secret. The St. Petersburg Times has some inside dope, though. An interesting sidelight is that the merged Tribune/WFLA/TampaBayOnline.com newsroom is also being redesigned around these subject areas: data, deadline, watchdog journalism, personal journalism and grassroots. We wouldn’t have thought of those ourselves. Give credit to Executive Editor Janet Coats, who’s communicating some urgency: “For most of us, it’s only been in the last year to 18 months that we’ve started getting away from the idea that the Web site is the newspaper on a computer screen . . . I’m worried that if we don’t change how we think about this further it won’t matter what falls through the cracks because we’ll have no readers.”

Speaking of redesigning the process, editors at the UK’s Birmingham Post, Sunday Mercury and Birmingham Mail are also turning the newsroom on its head. Editors Weblog reports that the three papers now share a physical space and some resources. The process of publishing news story has been condensed from five steps to three, with online leading the way. News editing and production have been merged into a single stage. Reporters carry laptops and video cameras and can file from anywhere. There’s been tension, of course; 65 jobs were eliminated in the redesign and staffers were made to re-apply for available positions. However, these three paper are envisioning a future and doing something about it, which is what we call leadership.

Editor Quits, Speaks

Yesterday, we noted the resignation of Steven A. Smith as editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review in protest of job cuts that he said were cheapening the product. Knight Digital Media Center caught up with Smith for an interview and provides interesting background. If you think this guy is some old-line curmudgeon who won’t face up to new realities, think again. Smith has actually be an outspoken proponent of the need to change calcified newsroom thinking and to reinvent newspapers around digital platforms. He conceived of an innovative idea to invite readers to observe and participate in daily news meetings. There’s more detail in the Knight story. We think Steven Smith won’t have trouble finding a job. Vision like that is still rare in this business.

Miscellany

Calamity and politics are good for online traffic. The Washington Post’s Web site, washingtonpost.com, scored a 42% jump in year-over-year traffic. The trend was driven, not surprisingly, by political and business stories.

Google says it’s figured out a way to tell when bloggers are writing news. A new feature of Google Blog Search shows categories of blog entries in a left sidebar. In some cases, the popularity of topics is displayed in chart form on the right. Here’s an example.

And Finally…

When you can’t beat ’em, steal ’em. Fading to Black has a short item about a newspaper war in the San Francisco Peninsula area that heated up this week when 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 away. Maybe he just had a lot of birdcages to line.

The Christian Science Monitor marks its 100th anniversary this fall, and the publisher is celebrating by re-emphasizing its commitment to thoughtful journalism. The Monitor has long been a maverick of the American newspaper field. It’s based in Boston, but that’s almost irrelevant to its role as an international observer. In the tradition of The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, the Monitor sees itself as a newspaper of record for citizens of the global community, but without the financial bias. The Monitor provides sober analysis of world events for an educated audience. Its 100 writers and editors emphasize explanation over immediacy. This approach is sometimes at odds with a market that increasingly values form over substance, but it is a badly needed service in a world of decimated reporting staffs and shrinking bureaus.

The nonprofit Monitor enjoys a healthy subsidy from the Church of Christ, Scientist, but the goal is to make it financially self-sustaining by leveraging new-media tools and targeted advertising. In July, the Monitor recruited Boston Globe veteran John Yemma as its new editor. Yemma clearly understands the dynamics of the changing newspaper field. Although a veteran of print, he spent his last three years at the Globe overseeing the newspaper’s multimedia operations and campaigning to pull its ink-stained editors into the online world. A soft-spoken and thoughtful man, he sat down with Newspaper Death Watch to discuss the realities of the new reader-driven world and how he hopes the Monitor can serve as a model for other publishers.

The one-hour interview is available as an audio file by clicking on the link below. The following time-stamped show notes direct you to important points in the conversation. Time stamps appear on the left with corresponding comments on the right.

[audio:http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/audio/Yemma.mp3]
Listen to the interview (1:00)

2:00	The challenge of preserving the core value of newspapers as the business model becomes unworkable. The Monitor supports eight international bureaus and several US bureaus. The means of delivery aren’t important and have already gone through several stages of maturation. “There’s a different expectation on the Web. You can’t just do newspaper.com online; you have to learn multimedia story-telling. I want to get our assets directed much more strongly toward the Web. But the idea that the new paradigm is just the Web is also false.”
6:45	“The role of a local newspaper – one with the city in the nameplate – is to emphasize local coverage…Our mandate was to be internationally oriented from the beginning…The old model of getting one to five newspapers a day, the Monitor could fit into that. The phenomenon of consuming a lot of different news sources is amplified on the Web… We see our role as humanizing global events. It’s not just understanding other cultures but understanding what motivates them.“
10:00	How cutbacks at national and international bureaus among major dailies is increasing the need for the Monitor‘s perspective.
10:45	The Monitor‘s business model. While the paper is heavily subsidized by the church, the goal is to make it self-sustaining while continuing its tradition of delivering thoughtful coverage.
12:40	The process of figuring out a new business model for the Monitor. “over three to five years we’re hoping to develop a sustainable model.”
14:30	“If you look at the success of Huffington Post or Slate, there is a model that works. While we’re going to do everything we can to grow on the print side, the quickest growth is on the Web. While there will always be a commitment to Monitor journalism on the print side, the idea is to do it more energetically on the Web.”…Search engines like Monitor stories because they explain events.
17:20	The website needs to be more of a destination. “You want people to experience your product as a whole and not just in its pieces as articles. It’s difficult to convert people from a search to actually exploring a website.”
19:00	Stickiness to Web brands is unfortunately low. The allegiance is increasingly to the content. “You read in a promiscuous fashion. You don’t go to a site because you love it. You go because it repays you with content you really care about. The atomization of holistic content is happening at a rapid pace, not just in newspapers but in broadcast…You can’t change user behavior. You have to accommodate it.”
22:00	There is a role for publishers to be portals to the world, to be a jumping-off point…That’s a journalistic function, a broad aggregation, an outbound strategy.
23:45	Four years ago, a lot of journalists were resisting online media. There was a sea change around that time. Some people trace it to Rupert Murdoch’s fire-and-brimstone speech to ASNE. “Around that time, the thinking changed in newsrooms…Around the time I became the multimedia editor of the Globe, there were plenty of veteran journalists who saw the writing on the wall. Journalists are nothing if not tuned in to cultural trends.”
26:30	“I see [newspaper] people clamoring for training in the new tools. There’s a lot more how-do-I-get-in-the-game conversations going on.” The buyouts have meant that the generation that doesn’t want to get in on the game is leaving. But there is a question about whether everyone who is left is going to fit in the lifeboat.
29:30	The startups have the advantage of having no embedded costs, but they don’t have the advantage of brand that we have.
30:30	On the decline of investigative and public-service journalism: “From a public information perspective, the breaking of the business model of old-school print journalism is a disaster…Ultimately, someone has to be out there looking at things dispassionately, trying to understand what happened at a city council meeting…citizen journalists are wonderful, but they’re not dedicated to being out there day to day covering the details…Who’s keeping watch on the county commissioners, keeping them honest? I hope it’s citizen journalists, but I’m not sure I can count on that.”
37:40	The weakness of an outsourced content model: “You need the relationships. You need to be able to call a guy and say not only that we need that story but that you’ve got to do that story…Every newsroom is getting smaller. I just hope that there will be room for more newsrooms to fill in.”
40:15	New services are emerging that outsource traditional newspaper functions. They’re needed but they’re not as accountable as captive staff.
41:20	The Monitor‘s staffing model: Full-time staff, contractors and freelancers. “If you really care about covering the world, seven to nine foreign correspondents is the least you need.”
44:15	Would you advise a young person today to go into journalism? “I would, but I’d say keep your eyes wide open. Learn to tell stories and learn flexibility. Also learn multimedia story-telling skills. Telling a story with video is very different from telling a story in print and it’s not TV either. With Web video, people are ready to hit that button. You have to be able to tell the story the right way. But what a great thing to be able to tell stories in different media.”
45:30	The analogy between the early days of TV journalism and the early days of Web journalism. “It took 10 or 15 years for TV to tell stories as TV should. I think we’re in the infancy of Web story-telling.”
47:30	Two examples of outstanding software news applications that Boston.com developed to make news more interactive. (link to these) “It’s not a reporter telling you that we ran these scenarios. It’s saying you can plunge in yourself and find out.”
50:30	There’ll always be a need for journalists, particularly those who know the tools. “If you just have a passion for the Middle East, that’s a great thing. If you know Arabic, that’s a great thing. If you take those two things and you have a multimedia skill set, there’s probably going to be a place for you in the job market.”
52:15	Why he took the Monitor job: “The nimbleness of the Monitor appealed to me. If it can act in any way as a model to others, then that’s good.”
56:00	How media consumption habits are changing. “We’re in the broadcast business, it’s just that we’re not doing it over the airwaves or over cable.”
1:00:00	“It’s the end of the captive audience as we’ve known it.”

[audio:http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/audio/Yemma.mp3]

Twitter and live blogging are beginning to raise interesting frictions between first amendment freedoms and people’s right to privacy. Rocky Mountain News reporter Berny Morson sparked outrage last week by Twittering the funeral of three-year-old Marten Kudlis, who died when a pickup truck slammed into an ice cream shop in Aurora, Colo. This week, there’s a lively debate on Mark Glaser’s Media Shift page over New York University journalism student Alana Taylor’s negative blog comments about one of her professors. After Taylor’s comments appeared, the professor instituted a ban on blogging about what went on in her classroom, although she later modified that to ban only live blogging.

Five years ago, these issues didn’t exist. Ordinary people couldn’t post to the Web very easily, so publishing was limited to an elite few. Today, anyone with a computer can be a publisher, which means that events and conversations that would have once been presumed private may now be considered on the record if one party chooses to make them public. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have both recently found this out the hard way.

In the case of tweeting a funeral, the issue is more one of bad taste than of privacy. The NYU incident is more complex because it involves a journalism professor trying to limit the speech of her own students. Is an NYU class considered restricted because the school is private? Or is a journalism class inherently open because it would be hypocritical to close it? What rules apply to other classes? How about conversations between two strangers on a street corner? Or bad behavior in public by a person who isn’t a public figure?  These interactions have been off-the-record in the past because it wasn’t worth anyone’s time and effort to report them. That’s not the case any more, and that opens up a whole can of worms that we’ll be unraveling for years.

Miscellany

New York Times Co. becomes the second media company in the past week to report that year-over-year sales declines in August weren’t as steep as in previous months. The company’s advertising revenue slipped 16% compared to August, 2007. That’s a bit better than the 18% declines reported in June and July. Online ad revenue was also up, reversing a recent trend. Analysts are cautioning against too much optimism, though. They say that one month doesn’t make a trend and the current chaos in the financial industry is likely to hit newspapers hard. That’s because so many newspapers are so highly leveraged. Outsell analyst Ken Doctor points out that the only hope for survival at some of these companies is to find new sources of cash. With financial institutions reining in their lending activities, that reality is going to hit highly leveraged companies like Tribune Co. hard, he notes.

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Will the Newark Star-Ledger be the next major newspaper to go under? That’s what the publisher  is threatening.  George Arwady sent a terse memo to employees early this week saying that if the company can’t eliminate 200 positions and gain several union concessions, it will close on Jan. 5, 2009. Editor & Publisher has the memo. The editor of the Star-Ledger isn’t saying much, but the newspaper is reportedly far short of its goal of eliminating 100 newsroom positions.

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Google considers itself a partner to publishers, but some who ponder this relationship are reminded of Woody Allen’s quote: “The lion shall lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep.”  The New York Times has a story about one such partner, Dan Savage, who built a nice business converting Google AdWords to paid links on his directory site.  His business collapsed when Google suddenly decided to increase his prices fifteenfold.  The Times presses Google for an explanation of its policy change and comes up frustrated.

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Alan Mutter sings the praises of bankruptcy protection as one cure for the ills afflicting distressed newspaper owners.  Bankruptcy has a poisonous connotation, but it’s actually an opportunity for businesses to renegotiate debt, discard union contracts and get the business back on its feet.  Sure, a company’s credit rating is destroyed in a bankruptcy action, but that’s happening already as newspaper owners fail to meet debt obligations.  Mutter focuses in particular on Philadelphia Media Holdings, which is teetering on the brink of insolvency, having already missed a key debt payment.  Mutter’s opinion isn’t universally shared. David Cay Johnston tells Romenesko that legal protection shouldn’t be a refuge for nepotism and lousy management. Both are the case with Philadelphia Holdings, he writes.

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News Corp. will boost subscription revenue from The Wall Street Journal, its Web site and Dow Jones by more than $300 million annually over the next two to three years, according to Bloomberg. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch is quoted as saying the subscription services are “grossly undersold.” How he’s going to improve them that dramatically at a time of declining circulation is anyone’s guess.

Layoff Log

• The Kansas City Star will lay off about 30 employees on top of the 24 who accepted the newspaper’s early-buyout offer. It will also look into outsourcing its financial functions to Indian firm Infosys. The cuts are in addition to the 120 layoffs announced three months ago.
• The Miami Herald is also laying off more employees on top of cuts previously announced. Eighty full- and part-time employees will be asked to leave and 40 vacant positions will be eliminated. The Herald cut 250 positions just three months ago.

The Sacramento and Fresno Bee newspapers offered buyouts to employees and held out the possibility of layoffs if unspecified cost-reduction goals aren’t met. Sacramento’s buyout offer covers 55 percent of its full-time employees and a smaller number of part-timers, including most editorial employees. The Fresno Bee‘s offer is open to most of its full-time workers. The publisher called the current situation, “some of the worst economic times we’ve faced.” Both papers cut staff just two months ago.

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The Gainesville Sun and Ocala Star-Banner will merge news operations, with the editor of the Sun running the show. News, copy desk, design, layout and pagination for both papers will move to Gainesville. Executives at both papers stressed their intent to remain committed to their local communities. However, they also said jobs will be cut at each newspaper, although specifics haven’t been determined. (via Romenesko).

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Management and union executives are cooperating in Philadelphia as the owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News seeks to cut staff amid a growing financial crisis. Responding to union concerns, the owners are targeting newsroom managers for cuts instead of unionized reporters. No numbers were specified. Standard & Poor’s recently reported, that owner Philadelphia Media Holdings (PMH) was trading at less than 50 cents on the dollar, meaning that the risk of bankruptcy is high. PMH missed a key interest payment in June, forcing it into a forbearance agreement with its creditors that lasts through September 10th.

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Miscellany

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GateHouse Media Inc. and American Community Newspapers (ACN) could become the third and fourth newspaper companies to be delisted from a major stock exchange this year.  ACN disclosed on Friday that it has been warned that it may be delisted from the American Stock Exchange for failing to file a 10-Q report. ACN publishes more than 100 community papers and shoppers. The company has until Sept. 4 to file a report telling how it will come into compliance. GateHouse has been notified by the New York Stock Exchange that it could be delisted if it doesn’t get its stock price over $1 a share (it’s at 60 cents now) and maintain a market capitalization above $75 million.

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Yahoo Japan is experimenting with user-generated editorial content. The Japanese Yahoo News page now features large amounts of material suggested and edited by readers. It’s a variation on Wikipedia and Google’s Knol, which are two experiments in community journalism. Unlike those two examples, though, Yahoo requires user editors to apply and take a test before they can contribute. (via Editors Weblog)

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The Editor of the McDowell (N.C.) News remembers fondly the days when a good monkey story merited a trip to Tokyo and a phalanx of support staff. Now all people want to read about is presidential candidates and their love children. Sheesh.

And Finally…

Editors at the annoyingly elitist Wine Spectator must be red-faced after their magazine bestowed a coveted Award of Excellence on a non-existent restaurant named Osteria L’Intrepido. The prank was dreamed up by Robin Goldstein, author of The Wine Trials, as part of a research project. Goldstein concocted a website featuring a menu assembled from recipes found in an Italian cookbook and submitted it as an entry in the magazine’s contest, along with a $250 entry fee. To twist the knife a little, he put together a reserve wine list “largely chosen from among some of the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past few decades.” His blog entry lists some of the reviews Wine Spectator published of his choices:

“Sweet and cloying. Smells like bug spray.”

“Smells barnyardy and tastes decayed.”

“Turpentine. Medium-bodied, with hard, acidic character.”

These reviews apparently missed the fact-checkers at the magazine, which awarded it a top honor anyway. We suppose $250 will buy you a lot these days.

Gannett joins the long line of media companies taking layoff medicine. It will reduce headcount by about 1,000 people, or 3%, with about 600 of those cuts coming from layoffs. Nothing new to report here. Gannett is feeling the same pain as everybody else, although the 3% reduction is small compared to the 10% many of its competitors have recently taken. BTW, this story broke in the Gannett Blog, where Jim Hopkins had the first news on Wednesday. Hopkins continues to tap in to the observations and experiences of Gannett employees to create a principal information source about the company, which scrupulously ignores him. (See “The Futility of Corporate Secrecy“).

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The free weekly newspapers run by Philip Anschutz will now pay you to blog.  Well, not really to blog, so much but to examine. The newspaper chain is seeking people to become  “examiners,” writing about everything from Airedales to zoology, from what we can tell. Really successful examiners will be rewarded with a penny per page view. At that rate, the Death Watch editor can afford lunch at Friendly’s.

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Television network ABC has declared the week of Sept. 21 National Stay at Home Week. It so happens that’s the same week that all the new fall shows are launching. We suspect this promotion won’t go over very well in the airline industry and that those free first-class upgrades for ABC execs are going to be pretty hard to come by for a while.

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“Journal Register Reports Assets of $77 Million — And Liabilities of $719 Million”

—Editor & Publisher, 8/12/08

“News-Journal Corp. officially for sale”

—News Journal Online, 8/13/08

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The Chicago Sun-Times has got an interesting idea to attract readers: It’s bringing back dead columnists.  “Vintage” columns written by Chicago institution Mike Royko began appearing this week, which must be deja vu for some local residents because Royko died 11 years ago. “Whatever happened to the people, places and issues that columnist Mike Royko went after –  or championed – during his legendary run?” the Sun-Times asks in its debut column. It turns out they’re dead, too. The subject of the 1979 piece is a Polish immigrant who died in 2000.

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Still can’t figure out why Twitter is important? Play this video. (via Steve Outing)
Appeal for help: I’d use more video embeds but they corrupt the WordPress template. If anyone has any great ideas how to prevent that, I’d love to hear them. Can’t find any useful advice online.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media Organizations Pull Back on Convention Coverage

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Finally

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

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

Redesigns Called “Reinventions”

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

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

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

Milwaukee Feels the Pain

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Finally…

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