We’ve been working our way through the social media and journalism sections at OurBlook, a Web venture that seeks to combine some of the best attributes of blogging and in-depth book writing. Editor Gerry Storch and Founder Paul Mongerson, who both have extensive media experience, have posted more than 50 interviews and first-person opinion pieces from people who care about the future of journalism. We haven’t read them all yet, but here are some excerpts we noted from the 35 or so we’ve completed so far. More will follow later.

OurBlook is inviting more people to contribute to the discussion by signing up on its website. What’s a blook? It’s a cross between a blog and a book.

From Robert Brown on Social Media

Brown is President of RDB Consulting

“Web analytics is the mechanism that will drive the proliferation of targeted messaging across the Web to users via the ever-growing array of social media tools…[Mike] Orren [founder of Dallas-based Pegasus News] calls this convergence of media into one vast network ‘Web 3.0.’ The idea of a single website as a source of content is quickly becoming archaic. As Orren says, …’With Web 3.0, it no longer matters where the information lives. Once you post something, it will be quickly disseminated via social networks to those users who care about the information.’”

From Joe Shea on the Future of Journalism

Shea is editor-in-chief of The American Reporter

“The biggest issue is the failed model. Journalists need to own their own news publications, not simply toil for the people who own them…[T]here’s really no point in supporting other people with our work when we can support ourselves with it. The American Reporter was founded to make that possible when journalists are ready for it. We don’t care how long it takes; we always knew they would be slow to get off the corporate teat and start walking on their own.  When that happens, and great news organizations owned and operated solely by journalists who are their own bosses exist all around the world – that’s when a newspaper war will erupt, and the world will find journalism anew. It won’t be so boring then.”

From Michael Saffran on the Future of Newspapers

Saffran is addjunct professor of communication at Rochester Institute of Technology

“Lifting the newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban could benefit both newspaper and radio industries; however, rather than serving as an open-ended gift to media conglomerates, repealing the ban should be tied to stricter radio ownership limits. According to an FCC study, newspaper/television station cross-ownership enhances the quantity and quality of TV news and public-affairs programming. Radio could similarly benefit from partnerships between broadcasters and publishers because most newspapers (with a few notable exceptions) are, much like radio, inherently local. Thus, the addition of print reporters to the small news staffs (if they exist at all) of cross-owned radio stations could enhance local-radio news … an area in which local radio is currently underperforming.”

From If Newspapers Fold, We’ll Adjust by Gerry Storch

Storch is the editor of OurBlook

“I think what will replace the newspaper in [my hometown of] Naples, [Fla.], and newspapers elsewhere, will be a pricy on-line newsletter. It will have a cheap, barebones staff to cover the basic business of the town – the city council, the school board, the police beat – and a couple veteran pros to provide an insider’s knowledge of what’s going on and make it worthwhile for readers to cough up $100 a month for a subscription, or whatever it costs to make a profit.  So people who want straight news will still be able to get it. The media will continue but in a much different form, and they won’t be the mass media any more.”

From Paul Conti on the Future of Newspapers

Conti is an instructor in communications at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y.

“Frankly, my students want and expect everything ‘on demand.’ They are not specifically loyal to media brands. They do not care what the source of their media content is as long as it entertains or informs them.  If I were running a newspaper’s city room, I’d be sprinting to create more ‘TV News Stories’ that people can watch on their websites.  A few newspaper companies are doing this, but the vast majority [of them] simply send one of their print reporters out into the field with a substandard consumer camera to record a news conference.  Yes, that’s content, but it isn’t good content and it won’t attract younger readers. They need to mimic the styles that TV reporters do with visualizing stories. Every story in the newspaper should have a companion video version available on demand.”

From Sean Dougherty on the Future of Journalism

Dougherty is vice president at Stern + Associates, a public relations firm

“I am one of those old timers and I love print newspapers, ink stains and all, but that is no reason to ignore reality: the value of the placement is the journalist’s brand and reach, not whether or not the information originally appeared on paper. Online articles get forwarded, increasing influence. Bloggers prefer to blog about topics where they can link through to what they are commenting on.  Online articles are more easily fed into your own distribution channels, whether it is a personal blog, e-mail distribution list or website.  While streamed video clips are usually associated with sketch comedy like ‘Saturday Night Live’ or ‘The Daily Show,’ it is unlikely that Harvard University Professor Michael Porter’s recent interview on ‘The Charlie Rose Show’ was seen live as often as it was viewed online based on the number of bloggers who linked to the segment.”

From Andrew Degenholtz on the Future of Journalism

Degenholtz is president of ValueMags, a magazine subscription marketing agency

“Many anticipate that the modern day journalist will morph into the ‘backpack journalist,’ where not only good writing and grammar skills will be valuable, but taking photographs and shooting video will almost become a necessity. As we’ve already seen, the ‘citizen journalist’ also plays a large role in this new media landscape. Bloggers getting press passes to news events once reserved for the traditional media will only help hungry consumers get even more specialized information. But one thing remains the same: good writing is still good writing. That won’t ever change.  If you have something to say, people will read, no matter how it’s packaged.”

From Nigel Eccles on Future of Papers

Eccles is co-founder and CEO of UK website hubdub.com, “a prediction market where people trade predictions on the outcome of running news stories or future events.”

“Blogging is not nearly as big in the UK as it is in the US. For example, there are only a handful of high quality political blogs [in the UK] compared with hundreds in the US. One of the reasons that blogging is so popular in the US is that it is written in an informal and familiar style and tends towards sensationalism. The UK press is much closer to that style than the US press (where every other article seems like it is written for the Pulitzer Prize committee).” (Telegraph.co.uk photo)

From Paul Swider on Papers’ Future

Swider was a reporter with the St. Petersburg Times until he was laid off in May, 2008

“The larger issue, and the one that makes me so ‘popular’ with my erstwhile journalism colleagues, is humility, or its lack in the newsroom. Most reporters are well-meaning and believe they are doing a public service, but that is a legacy from an era when there wasn’t that much information available to the general public. Now that there is, to persist in the attitude that the newspaper is the source of all information is kind of silly. Most government meetings are televised, many documents are publicly available, dissatisfied workers that were the source for many an exposé can now publish directly themselves to the Web, so a journalist isn’t as indispensable as before, and may be superfluous in some contexts.”

From Louis Sarmiento on Social Media

The interviewer comments, “Big-name athletes and entertainment celebrities seem to have taken to Twitter because 1) they can control their message, 2) the message is short and non-taxing, 3) they bypass reporters, 4) they can have ‘contact’ with fans that really isn’t contact and 5) fans end up thinking they have contact though they really don’t.”

Following up on last week’s excellent report on the subtle disruptions caused by newspaper frequency changes, Editor & Publisher looks at the link between reduced frequency and online traffic. Its findings, while preliminary, indicate that newspapers that have backed off from a daily schedule are seeing encouraging reader migration to their websites. At Seattlepi.com, the online successor to the shuttered Post-Intelligencer, unique visitors have grown steadily since the paper went online-only in March, according to executive producer Michelle Nicolosi. “We haven’t lost readers,” she tells Jennifer Saba.

In Detroit, the first major city to lose home-delivered daily newspapers, readers have flocked to websites for the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, with April traffic at the Freep shooting up 74%. Also notable is that downloads of the e-editions – or electronic newsprint equivalents — of the two papers increased sevenfold when daily home delivery ended. Executives at other, smaller papers that have trimmed frequency also report encouraging trends online. Although it’s still too early to tell, initial indications are that print readers retain loyalty to their local brands.

St. Pete Times Shows How It’s Done

The St. Petersburg Times has a 15,000 word exposé on the Church of Scientology that serves as an example of how news organizations can transcend the traditional walls between words and other media.  The package includes a mini video documentary on the home page that looks like it was done by a television crew.  In addition, video interviews with church defectors are aired out for those who want more detail. There’s also a short narrative about how the package was reported, an audio clip of a church spokesman denying the allegations and even an indignant letter from church leader David Miscavige, who is the bad boy in the whole affair.  There’s also a rather self-serving list of references from other media outlets to the work done by the Times.

Online Journalism Blog critiques the package, giving a generally favorable remarks.  It compliments the paper’s use of links to other sources as a way of providing background rather than rewriting everything in its own words.  The blog points out some shortcomings, including spotty use of social media tools to promote and brand the story as its own.  Online Journalism Blog should not throw stones, however.  Its links to the source material on Tampa Bay.com are mostly dead because of a improper use of a referral URL.

Regrettable Error

Would you fire a reporter over this story? the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal did.  Journalism student and intern Matt McCann was canned for “errors of fact and judgment [that] don’t constitute acceptable journalism at the Telegraph-Journal,” according to a statement by the newspapers editor.  McCann’s transgressions included misspelling a name, getting a title wrong and incorrectly identifying the college major of New Brunswick Premier Shawn Graham. That’s sloppy reporting, but the penalty seems a bit out of proportion, especially considering that Maureen Dowd and Chris Anderson have both recently admitted to plagiarism.

Writing in Columbia Journalism Review, Craig Silverman is clearly sympathetic to McCann, going so far as to quote McCann’s own professor saying that he never would have lasted in journalism if such punishments had been meted out in his day.  He also quotes a former Telegraph-Journal editor saying that the decision was more likely a political one intended to curry favor with the University than a punishment for sloppy journalism.

Miscellany

The New York Times Co. will throw in the Worcester Telegram as a pot sweetener for anyone willing to take the Boston Globe off its hands, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times. The offer might increase the Globe’s appeal, since the Telegram is reportedly losing money at a far slower rate than its neighbor to the east and effectively has no competition in its local area.

The UK’s Guardian newspaper assembled a gallery of 25 front pages from around the world covering the death of Michael Jackson.  The Wall Street Journal also weighs in with the three
different stippling images of Jackson it has run over the past 29 years.

Management at the Boston Globe finally wore down union leadership last night and won tentative agreement on a revised contract that is substantially similar to the one the union rejected a little over two weeks ago.  The new contract slightly reduces the pay cut management had originally sought, although it includes additional benefit reductions.  More importantly, the Globe and its parent New York Times Co. emerged victorious on the biggest issue: the right to end lifetime job guarantees for 170 employees.

Union members still have to ratify the proposed contract in a vote set for July 20, but approval seems likely now that union leadership has endorsed the deal.  The end of the last bitter labor dispute between Globe management and employees also positions the paper for sale to one or more of several interested suitors, which include investor and Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca,; Partners HealthCare chairman Jack Connors and former Globe executive Stephen Taylor.

Schedule Cutbacks Have Unforeseen Effects

More than 100 daily newspapers in 32 states have cut at least one daily edition in an effort to reduce costs and avoid layoffs.  But if you think that changing frequency is a matter of just shuttling around the work schedule, read this excellent piece in Editor & Publisher on the ripple effects of becoming somewhat-less-than-daily. Joe Strupp talked to editors around the country and found that cutting as little as one day’s worth of print news can force significant changes in the way a newspaper approaches its mission. “We try to cover Saturday through Monday on Tuesday. But we don’t staff Sunday night so we can staff more the rest of the week. There is more breaking news that goes up on Monday,” says Dan Liggett of the Wilmington (Ohio) News Journal in a quote that typifies the kind of calendar soup that these editors must contend with.

Some papers have had to add pages on days following gaps in the production schedule because print diehards still want local news and won’t go online for it.  Big news stories tend to lose momentum when they occur just before a break in the production schedule.  This forces editors to alter subsequent coverage to keep reader interest from waning. The Detroit News and Detroit Free Press, which are the most prominent dailies to cut back on print, have moved more enterprise reporting stories into the Thursday, Friday and Sunday editions that land on subscribers’ doorsteps.

In communities with active high school sports schedules, the loss of a Saturday edition has prompted website editors to boost the priority of local sports in Saturday online coverage and to add Sunday pages to handle the demand. Other publishers have found that weekly columns and features that appeared on certain days have had to be moved to other days because readers didn’t want to give them up.

The good news is that “editors are becoming more convinced that print-devoted readers will stick around even when fewer editions are available and stories get published days after a news event,”  Strupp concludes.

R.I.P. Ann Arbor News

The Ann Arbor News, which announced plans in March to scale back from daily to twice weekly frequency, is apparently going a little further than that.  Writing on Poynter.org, Rick Edmonds reports that the 174-year-old daily is effectively shutting down.  The “unspecified number of layoffs” the paper announced in March is in fact the entire staff, Edmonds says. The headquarters building (right) will be sold and an entirely new online operation launched with a twice-weekly print edition that looks pretty lightweight. Staffers will have the opportunity to apply for jobs at a much lower pay scale than what most of them are currently earning.  Edmonds suggests that Ann Arbor’s young, hip college-age crowd is more attuned to online media and extrapolates the same scenario playing out in cities like San Francisco, Boston, Minneapolis, Seattle and San Jose, where a young, upwardly mobile populace creates a hostile environment for a daily newspaper.

Miscellany

Editor & Publisher continues to try to find insight in the increasingly meaningless “time-spent-on-sight” statistics for major newspapers.  We pointed out some of the weaknesses of this metric in our analysis of last month’s figures, including the paradoxical fact that big spikes in traffic can actually drive down time-spent figures.  Did the Washington Post really do anything to deserve a one-third drop in reader time commitment from May 2008 (16:04) to May 2009 (10:58)? If you look at the snapshot for those two months, things look pretty negative for the Post, but the April 2008 time-spent number was 12:55, which hints that the figure from May of last year was a fluke.  We wish Nielsen would stop flouting these monthly snapshots and concentrate instead on six month moving averages, which would filter out the short-term spikes that make year-to-year comparisons practically useless.

Fans of Jim Hopkins’ hugely popular Gannett Blog can breathe a sigh of relief.  The crusade to be the world’s most reliable source about what’s going on inside the company will continue at Gannettoid after the blog shuts down on July 19. Gannettoid is “a Web site that serves as a collection of stories, links and other Web sites about Gannett Company.” While it isn’t formally affiliated with Gannett Blog, Gannettoid is welcoming devotees to continue their conversations in the forum section.  No word on whether Hopkins will pop in for a visit now and then.

The new owners of the San Diego Union-Tribune are already selling off property acquired in the purchase of the newspaper last month. Two properties have gone on the market at a combined sale price of $9.1 million, which is nearly 40% higher than what Platinum Equity paid for them. The move would tend to confirm Ken Doctor’s theory that Platinum Equity acquired the U-T primarily for its real estate value and got the newspaper thrown in for free. (via Gary Scott)

Sun Newspapers will eliminate 115 full- and part-time positions in mid-August as part of a sweeping reorganization plan that will reduce the company’s portfolio of weekly newspapers by half and outsource accounting, payroll and home delivery to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Both organizations are owned by New Jersey-based Advance Publications.

The Columbia Journalism Review profiles Alan Mutter, whose Reflections of a Newsosaur blog has stirred up the industry and created a launch pad for Mutter’s ideas about reinventing news organizations. It’s a good companion to our Feb. 18 audio interview with Mutter that includes details about his new ViewPass venture, which seeks to give publishers a viable subscription model.

Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth addressed graduates of the Medill School Of Journalism at Northwestern University over the weekend, urging them to continue to fight the good fight and declaring that “the need for great journalism is stronger than ever.” You can read the full text of her address here. Dan Gillmor tweeted that it was a “defensive commencement speech by WashPost publisher; she plainly has no strategy for future.”  However, Weymouth’s remarks indicate that she understands that the old model is collapsing and that publishers must adapt to a new world in which they are no longer “a toll booth over a bridge” to their readers.  Read the text and draw your own conclusions.

Last week we noted that MySpace is struggling against Facebook and other adult-oriented social networks, calling into question the effectiveness of Rupert Murdoch’s management strategy.  Now MySpace is laying off two-thirds of its international workforce, or 300 people, on top of the 400 laid off in the US last week.  Altogether, the company has cut its total workforce by nearly 40%.  Which only goes to show, we suppose, that media dislocation isn’t limited strictly to old media.

And Finally…

There is hope for veteran journalists.  Oyster Hotel Reviews is a fledgling online venture that employs 13 journalists to conduct extensive reviews of lodgings for business and leisure travelers.  The site, which is funded by Bain Capital Ventures, bucks the current trend toward wisdom-of-crowds reviews by employing professionals to visit hotels under cover and write about their experiences. “Oyster.com is a great opportunity for these journalists as they provide full benefits, competitive salary and a job that includes travel to various hotels around the world fully paid for—who wouldn’t want that as a job?” a publicist wrote us.  We’re wondering where to apply.

David Healey lost his job at a small Maryland daily recently thanks to downsizing. He didn’t like being cut off from his community, so he started The Cecil Observer. “The response has been positive and the hits are growing,” he writes, but he adds, “The experience quickly brought me to the realization that print journalism was over except as a niche or boutique business.”

Here is a post David wrote about starting a blog and the role that blogs may come to play in the media world where information is published almost instantaneously. You can find the original entry here.

ONE of the things I’ve learned very quickly about blogging is that it truly moves at the speed of wi-fi, or at least as fast as one’s fingers can type on the keyboard.

Case in point: On Sunday evening I was thinking about posting something about the candidates who had filed for the Chesapeake City election. Because I live here in our little waterfront town, I’m always interested in who’s running. The deadline was noon Friday, and I had second-hand information about the list of names. However, my journalistic instincts were to wait and go right to the source Monday morning and call town hall before posting something for all the world to read. A good reporter would never base a news item for a print newspaper on hearsay; why should the blogosphere be any different?

Within minutes of musing on a post about the Chesapeake City candidates, my news feed indicated that someone had beat me to it. Our friends over at the Chesapeake City Mirror had posted the names of Rebecca Mann, Lee Collins, Rich Taylor and Harry Sampson as candidates for three seats on town council. (A tip of the hat to the Mirror for getting the information out there quickly and accurately.)

With so many people blogging, it’s hard to see how the print media can ever compete in terms of timely delivery of the news. However, the main challenge for citizen journalists is to make sure their posts are correct if the intent is to provide real news content. Then again, I wish I could say we never got anything wrong in the newspaper!

In the newspaper business, a “scoop” was a matter of being ahead of the competition by hours or maybe even days. In the blogosphere, a “scoop” comes down to minutes or even seconds. That’s an intensely competitive environment. Ping! That’s the sound of someone beating you to reporting the news.

Something else I learned back when I was a reporter and then acting editor at the weekly South County Courier newspaper in Middletown, Del., was that a weekly can’t compete against a daily (such as the News Journal) in delivering the really big news. But there were always important local stories that the dailies missed because the big guys didn’t go deep enough into the community. These issues made for front-page news in the Courier.

It seems to me that over time, local blogs will fill that same void — there will always be something to report on that the big guys missed. And local readers will be interested because they care about their communities.

We’re back from filing an 80,000-word manuscript for a book about using billions of dollars worth of high-tech satellite equipment to find Tupperware in the woods. Really. And not much has changed in the last 10 days.

Murdoch Now Struggles Online

Rupert Murdoch was hailed as a visionary when he paid the then-bargain price of $580 million for MySpace in 2005, but now it appears that the newspaper mogul may not know that much about running an Internet community after all. MySpace just laid off 400 employees in the US and could cut another 100 internationally. That would amount to more than 15% of the company’s 3,000-employee workforce.

Crain’s New York quotes eMarketer forecasting a 15% drop in MySpace ad revenue this year, while Facebook is expected to gain 10%. MySpace is still bigger, but it’s headed in the wrong direction, with a 2% decline in visitors in April, compared to an 89% gain at Facebook. Murdoch has fired some executives and promised to rejuvenate MySpace, but the site has lost its utility to the older audience, which is flocking to Facebook. MySpace is still the preferred destination for rock bands and entertainment companies, but that doesn’t give it much cachet with the wealthier audience that Facebook is attracting.

Post Publisher Just an Ordinary Mom

Vogue has a feature on Katharine Weymouth, publisher of the Washington Post and granddaughter of the revered Katharine Graham. Nancy Hass portrays Weymouth as an unpretentious, down to earth mother of three who just happens to run one of the world’s most prominent media properties.  “She’s a mother first,” says her friend Molly Elkin, a labor lawyer.

The Post‘s new managing editor, Marcus Brauchli, calls Weymouth “an amazing listener” who isn’t afraid of criticism and who seems more at home with her people that the glitterati. She moved her office off the Post‘s executive floor and down into the advertising department, where she easily banters with her employees. Her home is a modest four-bedroom affair in Chevy Chase, where she greets visitors amid the barely controlled chaos of a living room full of toys.

Although she faces a huge task in reinvigorating a paper whose circulation has dropped 20% since its heyday, she says she has no grand plan. In fact, the piece makes out Weymouth to be a smart (Harvard magna cum laud and Stanford Law) achiever who makes it up as she goes along. Her attitude toward the Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, which both use Post content without paying: “Good for them. All’s fair, you know.”

Miscellany

The Associated Press is struggling to change its business model in light of the collapsing fortunes of the newspaper industry. The cooperative is trying to negotiate more lucrative licensing deals from major Internet news sites while cutting prices to newspapers in an effort to prop them up. The AP will reduce fees by $45 million for newspapers and broadcasters next year, or about $10 million more than the rate cut it announced in April, CEO Tom Curley said earlier this week. But that won’t stop the decline in revenue, which is expected to continue through at least next year. Curley said the AP aims to reduce its 4,100-person workforce by 10% through attrition, but that layoffs may be necessary.

After 18 months on the market, the Portland (Me.) Press Herald finally has a new owner who has promised to reinvigorate the troubled paper and restore it to profitability by the end of the year. Bangor native Richard Connor officially took the helm this week and said readers will immediately notice a thicker paper and better integration with the website. But there will be pain, with layoffs of up to 100 employees likely.  Remaining employees will get a percentage of the operation and two seats on the board. A conciliatory Guild executive said the layoffs will prevent much bigger job losses that would have occurred if the Press Herald had gone under.

The Knight Foundation is funding nine new-media projects to the tune of $5.1 million. The biggest winner is DocumentCloud, a project conceived by journalists from The New York Times and ProPublica to create a set of open standards for sharing documents. Other projects receiving support include one to help citizens use cell phones to report and distribute news, an effort to develop a media toolkit for developing mobile applications and an online space where the people can report and track errors in the media.

Yahoo’s Newspaper Consortium continues to be a bright spot for the industry. Yahoo reported that five new members just joined the ad-sharing cooperative: the Orange County Register, Colorado Springs Gazette, North Jersey’s Record and Herald News and the San Diego Union-Tribune. The group’s 814 newspaper members account for 51 percent of all Sunday circulation in the US.

Newspaper Guild members at the Albany Times Union have rejected a management proposal that would have eliminated seniority considerations in layoffs and permitted outsourcing of Guild jobs. The vote was 125 to 35. No word on whether the parties will return to the bargaining table, where they have been deadlocked for nine months.

Dan Gillmor has a short, pointed piece on MediaShift pleading for an end to caterwauling over the future of journalism and praising the “messy” process that is going on.  “I’ve grown more and more certain that we will not lack for a supply of quality news and information,” provided that risk-takers are permitted to experiment and that the supply of people who want to practice quality journalism doesn’t dry up, he writes. Like Clay Shirky, Gillmor believes experimentation will ultimately lead to many smaller news operations replacing a few big ones, and that that’s not a bad thing.

The Newspaper Association of America made no attempt to draw attention to its release of the first quarter financial results for America’s newspapers — and with good reason.  Sales skidded an unprecedented 29.4%, driven by disasterous results in classified advertising amid the weakest economy in 60 years.  Alan Mutter notes that if this trend continues, the US newspaper industry could close out 2009 with total sales of less than $30 billion — a 40% drop in just four years.

The wreckage is across the board — even online sales were off more than 13% — but the worst-hit sectors were cyclical ones: Employment classified advertising down 67.4%; Real estate classifieds off 45.6% and automotive classifieds down 43.4%.  All in all, classified ad sales were down 42.3% for the quarter. “In records published by the NAA that date to 1950, there is no precedent for the sort of decline suffered in the first three months of this year,” Mutter writes.

Slate’s Jack Shafer has a historical review of the factors that got the newspaper industry into this fix.  Publishers knew by the 1970s that they were toast, he says.  Demographic factors were to blame.  The flight of professionals out of the cities and into the suburbs challenge the economic model of the big dailies, and their halfhearted attempts to regain momentum mostly failed.  Some executives took consolation in the fact that their circulation was growing despite the reality that the gains badly lack lagged overall population growth.  The game was really over long before the story began to show up in the financial results.

More Fodder for Pay-Wall Debate

In the continuing debate over whether newspapers should charge for content, Martin Langeveld contributes perspective from Albert Sun, a University of Pennsylvania math and economics student with an interest in journalism.

Speaking at a recent conference put on by the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute  at the Missouri School of Journalism, Sun suggested that newspapers shouldn’t be too monolithic in their approach to pricing.  Rather, they should take inspiration from the airline industry, which charges different prices for the same seats depending on traveler needs.

In the same manner, newspapers should look at their product as a collection of boutique services, each with different price tiers depending upon perceived value.  For example, a casual reader may pay nothing for a weather forecast, but a weather bug might part with $10 a month for detailed technical reports and historical records. Langeveld writes:

Establishing a single price point for online content…might work for a time but is not revenue-maximizing in the long run.  The right way entails the exploitation of a variety of niches all along the curve – and therein lies the problem, since the culture of newspapers is still mainly that of a monolithic, one-size-fits-all daily product, whether in print or online.

In another post, Langeveld flags a quote from Denver Post publisher and MediaNews Group CEO  Dean Singleton in an interview with the Colorado Statesman:

We will be moving away from giving away most of our content online. We will be redoing our online to appeal certainly to a younger audience than the print does, but we’ll have less and less newspaper-generated content and more and more information listings and user-generated content.

Devalued Journalists Fight Back

Two stories caught our eye this week about journalists attempting to skewer the current trend toward devaluing their profession.

Three Connecticut alternative publications – the Hartford Advocate, New Haven Advocate and Fairfield County Weekly – outsourced all of the editorial content for last week’s issue to freelance journalists in India. But instead of burying the move, the papers actively promoted debate with a provocative headline: “Sorry, we’ve Been Outsourced. This Issue Made In India.” And to drive home the absurdity of the whole affair, the editors assigned Indian journalists to principally cover local news, entertainment and culture.

The move had elements of a publicity stunt playing off of American capitalism’s current love affair with all things Indian. However, editors made a sincere effort to see the project through, producing nine stories about local affairs written by reporters half a world away. They wrote about their experience:

If our owners want to replace us with Indians, all we can say is good luck! If they find locating, hiring and keeping after these writers half the challenge we did, they might think twice about replacing us. Far from giving us a week off, it took practically the entire editorial staff to assign, edit, manage and assemble this project.

The myth that Indian reporters work for peanuts was belied by one Indian veteran who asked for $1 a word, which is less than what the publishers pay in the US. The experiment also had its lighthearted moments such as when one overseas journalist shared a vindaloo recipe with the publicist for a mind-reading act.

Michelle Rafter writes about the questionable editorial oversight practices at content aggregators. These Web-based organizations, which principally republish material from contributors in exchange for a share of the revenue, have been labeled in some quarters as the future of journalism.  If so, then the experience of Los Angeles freelancer L. J. Williamson indicates that they have a long way to go.

Williamson wrote a series of articles for Examiner.com, a string of localized aggregation sites targeting major cities.  She noticed that her stories were passing through to the site with little or no editing.  Editors seemed far more interested in traffic-driving strategies.  So Williamson began concocting increasingly outrageous topics full of  “exaggerations and half-truths. I also wrote a series of preposterous articles on topics like why peanuts should be banned, why panic was a totally appropriate response to the swine flu outbreak, and why schoolchildren were likely to die if they were allowed to play dangerous games such as tag,” she wrote in an e-mail to Mediabistro.com’s Daily FishbowlLA. “And no one at Examiner noticed or cared what I said or did for quite some time.”

Williamson was finally outed by lawyers for one party that was victimized by her reports.  She was “fired” from a job that had never paid her and had to settle for the satisfaction of telling her story to the world.

Miscellany

The Wall Street Journal says a private equity firm, HM Capital, is close to a deal to acquire Blethen Maine Newspapers, which owns the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, and two smaller newspapers. The small chain has been on the block for more than a year, during which time it has become an albatross around the neck of the Seattle Times, which owns Blethen.

The Nieman Foundation has suspended its annual conference on narrative journalism, dealing another blow to the already dwindling support for long-form storytelling.

The long-form clearly isn’t dead at Denver-based 5280 magazine.  It has an Investigation Of The Circumstances Leading Up To The Closure Of The Rocky Mountain News that runs to nearly 10,000 words.  We haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but feel free to knock yourself out and send us a summary.

Writing on True/Slant, Ethan Porter says Matt Drudge’s popularity is waning. A Drudge Report story last week about a potentially incendiary quote from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went nowhere, he says.  Could Drudge’s conservative politics be losing favor in a recession wracked world? Dare we be so hopeful?

McClatchy Watch catches the Miami Herald in the act of promoting circulation with an offer of a free subscription to a magazine that hasn’t been published in two years.

Google said it would have a big announcement at its developer conference this week, and it didn’t disappoint.  Google Wave will be the buzz of the Internet in the months between its demonstration last week and its rollout at an undisclosed time later this year.  Wave has some important implications for the news industry, so it’s a good idea to become familiar with it. Here’s our early reaction.

Wikis are important metaphor for newsgathering.  They enable multiple authors to flexibly contribute information and edit each other’s entries to build a kind of living news account.  Wikipedia is, in many ways, a metaphor for the newspaper of the future.

Google has always liked wikis.  Its search engine results page is being slowly rejiggered to add wiki functionality and recent initiatives like Knol are a Google spin on Wikipedia.

Wave takes the wiki model to a new level with the addition of Twitter-like immediacy along with classic e-mail and discussion techniques like the inbox and threading. Wave also has the ability to handle just about any kind of file you can throw at it.  Adding documents, webpages and media to a Wave workspace is a drag-and-drop procedure, and once the content is there, everyone can edit it.

Open and Extendable

Google Wave has some cool bells and whistles, such as its real-time updates (you can actually see your friends typing, letter by letter), flexible conversation threading and embedded search.  But what’s more important is some of the underlying plumbing.

For starters, the application is open source, meaning that third-party software developers will quickly improve and build upon it.  Google learned its lessons from its Maps service: enabling people to easily extend the engine results in a much richer resource for everyone.  Maps is now the undisputed leader in its space, having displaced some entrenched competitors in just four years.

Second is Wave’s flexibility.  Wikis have always suffered from usability problems in this respect.  It’s fairly easy to edit basic text information, but incorporating multimedia can be a chore.  The Google demo shows people dragging and dropping photos and video files into a Wave workspace with ease, making them immediately available to everyone participating in a Wave.

Finally, Wave is shareable out of the box.  Any Wave can easily be turned into an “embed” and placed on another website.  Visitors can join a conversation from within the embed.  This is kind of like blog comments on steroids.  A real-time interaction can be going on between multiple users of a Wave with the results appearing on many other websites.

Work in Progress

Wave is still demoware, and its first public iteration will no doubt lack many features.  But this looks to be an important new development in the way groups process and build information repositories.  For news organizations, it could be an opportunity to really involve readers in an ongoing conversation that aggregates multiple perspectives and a workspace that is still managed by professional editors.  The real-time chat functionality could be a potent competitor to Twitter.

News organizations have a new problem to solve: information overload.  This is a complete reversal of their traditional service as information gatherers.  Today, the bigger problem is to parse and organize the deluge of information that comes at us.  Google Wave will no doubt add to that deluge, but it also has the capacity to help us organize and make sense of it.

Jeff Jarvis speculates on some possibilities.  Mashable has a comprehensive overview of the product and a first hands-on trial. Google Blogoscoped has the entire one-hour-plus demo from the Google Developer Conference.

It appears that some leading news titles are finally throwing in the towel on the circulation wars.  The New York Times just announced that it will hike its single copy price to $2 on June 1, a 33% increase. Outside of the New York area, the Sunday Times will now cost a whopping seven dollars for home delivery. Several other papers have also increased prices recently, including the Washington Post, Tampa Tribune and Dallas Morning News.  These papers have effectively doubled their newsstand prices in the last two years.  Newsweek just rolled out a new design and cut its circulation by half while increasing cover prices.

What’s going on?  We suspect the publishers are finally beginning a sunsetting strategy for their print editions.  By driving up circulation prices, they are effectively winnowing out their low-value customers.  Price increases will probably come fast and furious in the future. Each will cause circulation to fall until a new floor is reached. Expect circulation declines to quicken as more newspapers adopt the strategy.  Declines have been running in the 6% to 8% range per year for the last two years, but will probably increase if more papers follow the lead of the Times and Journal.

In effect, these newspapers are giving up on print. They are harvesting their most loyal readers and shifting their investments to new platforms.  With the average age of a daily newspaper reader now standing at over 55 years, publishers can expect to derive print circulation revenue for about another decade. Of course, it may not be economically viable to stick with a daily schedule that long, but that readership can be milked for some time to come.

The harvesting strategy makes sense economically, strategically and environmentally. It’s pointless to throw good money after bad chasing new readers with deeply discounted subscriptions that are canceled after three months.  Loyal readers are more attractive to advertisers than bulk circulation and can command higher CPMs. And this means fewer papers going in landfills.  Treating print as a cash cow enables publishers to plow whatever profits are left into new platforms.  Their companies will grow smaller over time, but at least they’re more likely to have a future.

Miscellany

Dan Froomkin begins a four-part series at Nieman Journalism Lab on a prescription for the news industry.  He argues that the bland, expressionless voice that journalism organizations have adopted for the past 40 years has undermined their appeal. “We stifle some of our best stories with a wet blanket of pseudo-neutrality. We edit out tone. We banish anything smacking of activism. We don’t telegraph our own enthusiasm for what it is we’re doing.” In part two, he argues for putting passion back in news reporting.

The Wall Street Journal is running an interactive map that shows “adverse events at the top 100 newspapers” since 2006.  You can mouse over the regions and see information on layoffs, circulation trends and business conditions.  It ‘s accompanied by a dense, ugly chart with detailed information and lots of unexplained columns.  It also doesn’t include recent information like the closure of the Tucson Citizen.

San Diego Valley Reader has an extensive profile of Tewfiq (Tom) Gores, the billionaire who runs Platinum Equity, the partnership that bought the San Diego Union-Tribune. The piece details the controversial background of Gores’ uncle, Tom Joubran, an Arab immigrant who prospered as a grocer in Flint, Michigan but whose background may involve some criminal activity.  It suggests that the Union-Tribune may adopt a strong pro-Palestinian editorial position, which would be quite a contrast from its traditional Republican leanings.

USA Today has a cover story in its money section today that was reported entirely on Twitter. Reporter Del Jones asked CEOs to comment on whether the country is drifting toward a European style of capitalism.  Their responses are reproduced in the staccato shorthand that Twitter’s 140 character limitation imposes.  Absent from the discussion are the founders of Twitter – Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone – who failed to respond to numerous tweeted requests.  Of course, with more than 2 million followers between them, they’re probably busy.

Is Twitter a blessing or a curse for newsrooms?  Editors are struggling with that issue in light of a recent episode in which a New York Times reporter tweeted news of the company’s discussions with Google from a supposedly confidential meeting. The Times raised eyebrows yesterday by appointing Jennifer Preston, the former editor of its regional sections, as the paper’s first social media editor.  The job involves coordinating the newsroom’s use of social media, but it can also be seen as an effort to rein in reporters from sharing news before it’s been fully baked. Similar positions have recently been created by BusinessWeek, the Los Angeles Times and the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Journalism professor Edward Wasserman tells how Matt Drudge supposedly broke the story of President Clinton’s affair with a White House intern more than a decade ago.  In fact, Drudge didn’t break the story but rather related the fact that Newsweek was sitting on it.  The information had been leaked to Drudge by a disgruntled Newsweek staffer, making it possibly the first example of reporters using social media channels to take publishing into their own hands.

Wasserman says the real risk of Twitter is that it will incline journalists to spend more time in front of their computer screens and less time pounding their beats.  What the issue really comes down to is control.  Editors are struggling with the conflicting priorities.  On the one hand, they understand that tools like Twitter help satisfy readers’ needs for immediacy and transparency.  On the other, they have trouble accepting the idea that reporters can now take their stories directly to the public without an editor’s approval. The Wall Street Journal recently issued guidelines for appropriate uses of social media by its staff, including the requirement that reporters gain approval before “friending” confidential sources.

The Times says that Preston won’t be a Twitter cop, but the coordinating function can involve shutting down social media just as easily as enabling it.  In the end, editors will lose this battle.  Media organizations have to get used to the idea of writing their first draft of history without level of fact-checking and oversight to which they are accustomed. That’s because if they don’t do it, somebody else will.  This isn’t a comfortable idea, or even a good one, but it’s where the media world is headed.

Time-Spent-Reading Numbers Baffle

The latest Nielsen online reports about the amount of time people spend on newspaper websites has been released, and again the results are all over the map.  A sampling of the monthly time-spent-reading figures comparing April 2008 to April 2009 (percentages approximate):

• Wall Street Journal down 40%
• Chicago Tribune up 20%
• San Francisco Chronicle up 35%
• Atlanta Journal Constitution up 90%
• Seattle Times down 60%

And on and on.

Editor & Publisher tries to sort all this out.  It talks to the assistant managing editor for digital at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, whose readers spend an average of 40 minutes per month on the site. Terry Sauer tells E & P that the high numbers may be due to the placement of homepage links on individual articles, but he admits it lots of other papers do this as well.

Maybe the real issue is that time-spent-reading is a poor indicator of affinity.  With more and more people using tabbed browsers, it’s possible to leave a webpage open for hours without looking at it.  Also, heavy spikes of traffic prompted by local news events may actually drive down time-spent numbers because visitors come and leave so quickly.  Finally, a one-month snapshot in time is virtually meaningless.  Nielsen would do better to measure affinity in increments of at least six months.

Pressmen Feel the Pain

Newspaper cutbacks are falling apart on the shoulders of pressmen, the true ink-stained wretches of the industry.  Some big papers have cut back their pressroom staffs by 50% or more. Last year, the Boston Herald outsourced its print operations and cut 130 production jobs. The Boston Globe then said it would close its Billerica plant and lay off as many as 200 employees. The pressroom that printed the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and still print the Seattle Times has been whittled back from 62 to 27 employees.

Against that backdrop, unions representing mailers and printers at the Globe this morning agreed to concessions with the New York Times Company that chop more than $7 million in salaries and benefits.  The pressmen’s meeting was described as “angry.” Unions representing editorial staff and drivers are scheduled to vote on concessions next month.

The Joy of Bankruptcy

Editor & Publisher has an excellent piece on the wonders and dangers of bankruptcy.  The story is timely because many newspaper companies must face the music this year.  Some people think the newspaper business is losing money, but that’s actually not true.  Most major dailies still make an operating profit but their ownership is burdened with crushing debt acquired during the ill-conceived consolidation binge of a few years ago.

On the plus side, bankruptcy is a way to freeze debt payments, cancel long-term contracts and renegotiate debt, often to much lower levels.  The negatives: Less flexibility to invest in anything beyond keeping the lights on, difficulty finding suppliers and the possibility that a judge could decide that the company isn’t worth saving.

That last item is the most ominous one for the industry.  E & P notes that judges will permit a company to exit bankruptcy only if they believe that the company has a reasonable chance of surviving.  If the judge doesn’t buy that prospect, he or she can simply shut down the operation.  That hasn’t happened yet, but with organizations like Tribune Co., Sun-Times Media Group, Journal Register Co., Philadelphia Media Holdings and the Minneapolis Star Tribune already in bankruptcy and several other companies facing the prospect, the picture could take shape quickly.

Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services on Friday slashed its rating on McClatchy Co. deep into junk-bond territory after the company offered to buy back $1.15 billion in debt at just 20 cents on the dollar. McClatchy is now rated a CC borrower, which is just three steps away from a default rating.

Miscellany

Jim Hopkins, who started Gannett Blog nearly two years ago, will put it in hibernation at the end of September. Hopkins says he never intended to publish the blog longer than two or three years to begin with and that his decision was hastened by the increasingly negative tone of the roughly 4,000 comments he receives each month.  The news will no doubt come as a huge relief to Gannett executives, since the blog had become a major soapbox for disgruntled employees.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch moved circulation functions to two other newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises, cutting 39 jobs in the process.

The Huntington, W.Va. Herald-Dispatch cut 15% of its workforce, or 24 positions.

Talking Points Memo, the Web startup that has drawn attention as a possible model for new journalism, unveiled a new design that looks a lot more like a newspaper. Alexander Shaw talks about the thinking behind the new look, which moves more news “above the fold.”

And Finally…

British workers in the media, publishing and entertainment industries are the heaviest drinkers, according to the Department of Health. A survey of 1,400 people by YouGov found that media people consume an average of 44 units (presumably, 1.5-ounce drinks) a week, or almost twice the recommended maximum. The finance, insurance and real estate sectors came in second at 29 units per week.

David Geffen

Will The New York Times Co. go under?  Don’t bet on it, says Fortune magazine.  Sure, the Times has significant business challenges, and it’s actively looking for ideas to rescue its business, but there is no shortage of investor interest in the Old Gray Lady. Hollywood mogul David Geffen reportedly made an unsuccessful play to buy the 19% stake in the Times held by hedge fund Harbinger Capital Partners recently, Fortune says. Google also seriously considered investing in the Times before deciding against the move.  Meanwhile, the controlling Sulzberger family publicly says they’re not interested in selling.

The Times has a lot of problems on the business end, but its brand equity is the envy of the industry.  The problem is, at current run rates, the company will be insolvent in two years.  Rather than going under, it’s more likely that the Times will be picked up by one or more wealthy investors who are already knocking at the door or will radically change its business model.

Newsweek reports that Geffen’s overture was made with the intention of converting the Times to a nonprofit institution under a structure similar to that created by the late Nelson Poynter, whose nonprofit Poynter Institute runs the St. Petersburg Times.  That paper has suffered along with everyone else, but its nonprofit status gives it some wiggle room to absorb losses, and it’s increasingly attracting attention for the quality of its work, including two Pulitzer prizes last month.

Inside the Times, there’s a working group studying the options for radical transformation.  If all options are indeed on the table, then the Times could be looking at a much smaller and more focused editorial model. Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer got some attention last month by suggesting that the Times could get by with a staff of as few as 60 reporters by cutting back on nonessential coverage and partnering for the rest.  That idea isn’t likely to be popular at a paper known for its vast resources, but the Times could set a standard for the industry by reshaping its self around a partnership model.

Baltimore Sun: Retooling or Shutting Down?

The Politico writes of the “Dark Day at Baltimore Sun“ in a piece that reads like an epitaph. The Sun‘s newsroom staff has been cut back from a high of 420 people to just 140. The paper recently closed its bureau covering Annapolis, the state capitol. Two columnists recently sent to cover an Orioles game were laid off before the ninth inning. Coverage of Washington has been outsourced to pool reporters from parent Tribune Co.

Executives say it’s all part of the process of retooling the Sun into an Internet-ready machine. “”If you’re looking to transform yourself, you really better stop looking at yourself as a newspaper company rather than as a digital media company,” says Monty Cook, the paper’s new editor. He said the Sun continues to devote itself to “watchdog journalism,” but admits that “the days of the six-part series are gone.” That’s probably true. The investigative team at the paper, which once numbered four reporters, is down to one person.

Editors See Brighter Future

The Associated Press Managing Editors survey finds a wellspring of optimism about the likelihood that newspapers will return to profitability. Just 17% of the editors surveyed said they believed the industry would go extinct while 60% said they’ll be profitable again. However, respondents overwhelmingly said they are having a harder time delivering quality information to their readers, which is not surprising giving the nearly 20,000 job cuts in the industry over the last 18 months.

Editors continue to be caught in a cost-cutting cycle that limits their ability to think outside the box. Fifty-seven percent said they didn’t have enough money to innovate and 31% said their people don’t have the skills to change with the times. Nearly 40% said they are devoting more space to “hyper-local” news, which is surprisingly low given the trends in reader news consumption. Nearly three in four said they’re sticking it out because they believe in “the mission of journalism.”

Most chilling quote: “”Our newspaper’s biggest revenue source today is foreclosure notices,” said Clifford Buchan, editor of the Minnesota-based weekly Forest Lake Times.

Miscellany

Investor John W. Rogers Jr. says it’s time to buy Gannett Co. Yes, media stocks are beaten down, says Rogers, who’s chairman and CEO of Chicago-based Ariel Investments, but “when a company with strong franchises like Gannett sells for one times trailing earnings and three times expected 2010 earnings, I step up and swing.” Rogers says newspaper companies are highly vulnerable to trends in cyclical markets like automobiles and real estate.  Once those sectors recover, though, growth should return.

It isn’t over yet for the Tucson Citizen.  A federal judge is expected to rule today on whether the Citizen, which formally closed down on Saturday, must resume publication. Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard argued that Gannett Co. and Lee Enterprises violated antitrust laws by closing down the weaker of the two players in a joint operating agreement between the Citizen and the Arizona Daily Star in order to wring more money out of the surviving property.  A core shutdown staff of eight people remains at the Citizen, and it’s unclear how many staffers could be recalled to restart the paper if the judge so orders.

The Ann Arbor News will publish its last issue on July 23.  The paper announced plans to shut down back in March, but we didn’t know a precise date until now. An online version will continue to pump out news 24X7.

At least 14 news ombudsmen have lost their jobs in the past year, writes Andrew Alexander, who holds that title at the Washington Post.  Among the reasons: ombudsmen are considered less essential to the editorial function than reporters and a new crop of bloggers is now filling some of the watchdog role.  However, ombudsmen may be more important than ever, Alexander writes, noting that he is on track to receive more than 50,000 reader messages this year. “They want an informed judgment from a professional journalist who has been empowered by management to directly confront reporters and editors with unpleasant questions.” Kevin Klose, the new dean of the J-school at the University of Maryland, has suggested that a consortium approach could provide the same reader-advocacy function for less money.