If the new owners of the San Diego Union-Tribune are planning to reinvent the news operation, they made a surprising choice in appointing Ed Moss (right), a 32-year newspaper veteran, to lead the charge. Moss was most recently president and CEO of the Los Angeles Newspaper Group and publisher of the Daily News of Los Angeles, as well as eight other titles. He’s is known for his ability to focus on local communities, so it could be that owner Platinum Equity is taking “hyper-local” to heart.

“I’m all about local, local, local – local news, local advertising,” Moss told the U-T. “That’s our niche. The way to differentiate ourselves is to be as local across the company as we can.”

Moss is an advertising guy. He’s been a publisher at papers in California, Ohio, Michigan and Louisiana and also held several advertising sales positions. He told the U-T that there is an unlocked opportunity in sales to local advertisers and that he would move aggressively to capture that business.

“I like to move very, very quickly,” he said. “And I like to build a culture that believes you have to move quickly.”The piece quotes past colleagues saying Moss is a nice guy, a visionary and a great leader. One of his prior bosses is David Black, who’s advising Platinum on the U-T’‘s makeover.

Lessons From the NY Newspaper Strike

If the past is any clue to the future, then the New York newspaper strike of 1962-63 may offer a glimpse of what a nation without daily newspapers would look like. Slate’s Jack Shafer has a wonderful account of what a news-starved city did when the strike crippled all of its newspapers for nearly four months.

In short: it improvised. Non-unionized dailies in the boroughs saw circulation explode. The Philadelphia Inquirer imported thousands of daily copies. Radio and TV stations began reporting real news instead of just parroting what the dailies said. The Village Voice exploded out of anonymity to become the flagship of alternative weeklies. Tom Wolfe sought freelance income by writing an article for Esquire that would launch his book-writing career. Shafer cites example after example of what a population that had been accustomed to consuming 5.7 million newspapers a day did when it suddenly had none. They made do. And the world went on.

Which is what will happen when major metro dailies begin to close or scale back: Alternatives will rush in to fill the void. People will get their news elsewhere, and what they can’t get will be delivered by entrepreneurs who figure out a way to deliver it at a profit. Destruction is an ugly thing, but it’s usually a necessary precursor to reinvention. Shafer shrewdly notes, “The least reliable source for what the end of newspapers means is usually the newspaper men, who are too stuck in their roles to reimagine the world.” Once you shed assumptions, then possibilities open up.

Miscellany

With 39 more layoffs last week, the San Francisco Chronicle has brought its staff reduction total to 151 since March, or about where ownership said it had to be to achieve short-term equilibrium. The cost-cutting is unlikely to end there, though. According to the San Francisco Business Times, “the Chronicle will rely increasingly on freelancers and non-staff unpaid or poorly paid bloggers to fill the paper, in many cases using former staffers.” With so many laid-off journos on the street, what’s happening to the per-word rate you’ve been able to get? Comment below.

Online strategist Matt Maggard posts a lengthy proscription for change at the Los Angeles Times. He’s even redesigned the home page of the website for them. Maggard calls his essay “an open proposal. This includes a summary of value in the digital marketplace, how the Times can improve its product and how journalism should evolve its practices and business models to survive. I’m sending this around as an open proposal to help jump-start the discussion on what can be done to save the industry.” We didn’t find a lot of revolutionary thinking in the proposal, but its recommendations seem sound enough.

The state of Washington is shifting some of the burden of propping up a dying industry onto the taxpayers, approving a 40 percent cut in the state’s main business tax for publishers and printers. What’s next, rebates for the recording industry? The Seattle Times‘ 95-word news bite on the subject inspires more than 220 comments, indicating that the recession-plagued populace might feel just a wee bit strongly about this lobbyist-inspired giveback.

For newspaper publishers who whine that Google is an Internet parasite, Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker offers a brief tutorial in the workings of the robots.txt file, which enables publishers to easily block the company’s search spider whenever they want.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has published a 56-page report called “Outlook for newspaper publishing in the digital age.” Our day job hasn’t permitted us to consume the entire document yet, but based upon this PWC summary, we probably won’t bother. The bottom line appears to be conventional wisdom that the print model is troubled, the future is in multiple media and the revenue mix has to shift away from a sole reliance on advertising. We suspect PriceWaterhouseCoopers will be more than happy to help publishers make the shift.

And Finally…

Ryan Pagelowis a reporter at the Lake County News-Sun in Waukegan, Ill. a contributor to Mad magazine (talk about a venerable print title) and a recipient of the Charles Schulz National College Cartoonist Award. He also pens a clever daily comic called Pressed, which he describes as “a behind-the-scenes look at a newsroom that’s trying to survive in an online world of tweeting blogospheres. It features a frazzled editor, reporters, a blogger and an assortment of politicians, weasels and snitches.” Check this out. It’s good.

Exuberance over the new Amazon Kindle as a potential salve for the news industry’s pain is beginning to fade as analysts dissect the financial realities. Amazon created a stir last week by introducing a large-screen version of the electronic book that does a decent job of rendering the familiar look and feel of a printed newspaper. It also announced that The New York Times, the Washington Post and others have signed up to deliver their content for a real live subscription fee. Hallelujah! Readers paying for the news!

Buried in the excitement were the terms that Amazon is demanding its news partners accept in order to join the parade: Amazon gets to keep 70% of the subscription fees. This is a huge strategic mistake that Amazon should address toute de suite.

Critics are already taking apart the strategy. Writing on Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum runs the numbers. “So of the $14 a month a reader pays for a The New York Times, say, the Times itself actually gets about $4.20. The rest goes to Amazon and to the wireless carrier that transmits the data.” He figures that if every one of the Times‘ subscribers signed up for a Kindle stream at $14/month, the revenue would barely cover the cost of the paper’s newsroom operations. And that’s assuming the Times kept all the money; in reality, it keeps only 30%

Amazon has a historic opportunity. Lacking serious competition, Kindle could own the market for electronic newspaper delivery over the next couple of years. Amazon should be making it a no-brainer for every news organization in the world to deliver content over its device. Instead of taking 70% of the subscription fees, it should be giving 90% of those fees to the publishers in a land-grab bid for market share. Alas, it’s trying to make a few quick bucks up front on a group that can’t afford to pay, and it’s mortgaging its long-term franchise in the process. It’s very un-Amazon-like to think so tactically. There’s still time to undo the damage and let’s hope it does so.

Writer Stephen Silver says the Kindle suffers from a more basic problem: it’s newspaper interface sucks “It’s slow, hard to navigate and in no way preferable to the newspaper interfaces on any smart phone, much less the Web,” he writes on North Star Writers Group. “Hell, the Times application on the BlackBerry my dad had five years ago was better-looking and easier to use than the Kindle’s version is now.”

Manifesto for Reinvention

As he does so often, Mark Potts hits the nail on the head with an essay on the lack of a magic bullet for suffering publishers. Kicking off with a short swipe at the Kindle-as-messiah craze, Potts digs in to the real problems publishers have to address: they’re too broad, too inwardly focused, and too addicted to traditional advertising models.

Potts runs down a list of changes publishers need to make in order to survive in an atomized information world. There’s nothing on his list that hasn’t been suggested before, but the summary brings a common-sense rationality to the debate. This is like a checklist for survival.

We are swimming in information, he notes. So why not aggregate what’s already out there instead of spending money on reporters to generate more information? Sounds good to us. The market for local advertising is estimated to be $25 billion annually. No one has figured out how to unlock it. Metro daily newspapers are in the best position to do that. So why are they still chasing national display advertising accounts?  This piece is like a short manifesto for reinvention that publishers should frame and hang on their walls.

Miscellany

The publisher of the Utica Observer-Dispatch was probably just trying to be folksy in devoting her column to the most common complaints readers have about their newspapers, but she inadvertently ends up make an argument for why print is dying so quickly. Five days to get a letter to the editor published is actually pretty good, says Donna Donovan. “If there’s a lag in your letter getting in, it might be because we couldn’t reach you to verify it, or we have a backlog.” Five days??

Now that it has a monopoly in Denver, MediaNews Group is going to start charging readers for some content. Readers won’t pay by the article, but will get a vague set of bundled services that includes fees for content. Exactly what those services will be hasn’t been specified. The whole plan sounds pretty vague at this point.

Someone has bid $13,000 for a non-paying internship at Huffington Post, the website often cited as a next-generation news publication. And the bidding doesn’t end for another two weeks. Proceeds go to charity. Believe us, it’s a lot cheaper to start a blog.

Gawker’s Ryan Tate takes issue with the conventional wisdom that bloggers can’t be depended upon to cover local government.  Keying off of David Simon’s testimony before Congress this week, Tate tells of his experience as a reporter in Oakland, Calif. pounding a local beat. “I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as ‘gadflies’ – deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived,” he writes.

Tate makes an important point that’s been largely missing from the debate over the value of bloggers.  The conventional wisdom is that these newfangled Internet publishers like to lounge in their pajamas all day and spout off about the news reported by the hard-working journalists who get paid to sit in boring local government meetings and pore over boring documents.  No one in their right mind would do this kind of work without pay, the wisdom goes, so the decline of newspapers is the loss of an essential public service.

The flaw in this argument is that it assumes that no one cares about local government or will bother to waste time learning how it works.  But our experience is somewhat different.

Engaged Citizens

Drop by any meeting of your local town government and you’ll find concerned citizens sitting in the cheap seats, watching intently what’s going on.  What motivates these people?  Usually, it’s passion for the topics  being discussed.  Whether it’s an increase in property taxes, a school bond, a new sewer project or a prohibition against walking dogs on the town common, citizens do come out to learn about issues that matter to them.

All of these people are, broadly defined, potential bloggers.  Maybe their tools of choice don’t look like this one, but their desire to communicate is no less powerful than anybody else’s.  Some may choose to use a listserv or e-mail list.  They may tweet their opinions or share them on talk radio.  But they have opinions to share and facts to convey.

Check out a list of bloggers in the borough of Brooklyn as noted in the blog rolls on Brooklyn Heights Blog and A Brooklyn Life.  These people write about all sorts of things: local arts, events, politics, schools and community organizations. They’re not journalists, but they have a lot to contribute to a public discussion and they observe things at a level of granularity that few newspapers could ever match.

The twist is that every one of them has an opinion.  Their “coverage” is filtered through the lens of their biases, which is uncomfortable for people who are accustomed to just-the-facts reporting.  The flipside is that these people collectively gather far more information than news organizations ever could.  With dozens of bloggers covering the borough of Brooklyn, can you really make the argument that citizens have less news available about the their community today than they did five years ago?

The challenge for news organizations is to develop new ways to synthesize and make sense of this deluge of information.  Instead of assigning a reporter to cover city council meetings, it might be easier to set up a webcam and let citizens watch the proceedings themselves.  Local bloggers can be co-opted to contribute to a news aggregation site in exchange for traffic.  Journalists can be retrained to filter and interpret information and validate it against the video captured by the webcam. Coverage of events can be surrounded by opinion about what actually happened.

News organizations were created to serve a public that was starved for information.  Today, the equation has flipped.  We are drowning in information.  The new role of journalists will be to simplify and contextualize.  They’ll be serving a different need, but a need that’s no less pronounced than the one they served previously.

Kindle to the Rescue

The newest port in a storm for the embattled newspaper industry is Amazon’s Kindle, a $500 handheld device that can store thousands of books and periodicals while retaining some of the look and feel of traditional print.

The reason publishers are swarming the Kindle is because of evidence that consumers will do something with it that they don’t do with their desktop computers: pay subscription fees.  It’s not surprising that leading publishers like The New York Times and the Washington Post are syndicating their content through Amazon at fees of up to $14 per month. Both papers have announced programs to offer discounted Kindles to paying subscribers. The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News are investigating ways to deliver devices from Plastic Logic of Mountain View, Calif. that offer a similar experience.

Is the Kindle the salvation for the industry?  Not at $500, it isn’t. As long as Amazon premium-prices the device, the market will be limited to no more than about 5 million US users, according to Forrester Research. Most people aren’t ready to pony up that kind of money for a device that can easily be left in the back pocket of an airline seat, as happened to Sara Nelson, editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly last year.

But don’t expect these prices to hold.  At this point, Kindle has the market mostly to itself, but a slew of competitors are on the horizon. As Moore’s Law kicks in, expect prices to drop to the sub-$100 range within two to three years.  Big publishers are doing the right thing to prepare themselves for mass-market digital reading devices, which could replace laptop computers over time.  By not making the mistake of giving away their content for free on the Kindle, they can avoid the mess that has devalued their current online content.

Miscellany

If anyone thought the purchase of the San Diego Union-Tribune by an equity investment firm would save the company from major layoffs, their hopes have been dashed by news that Platinum Equity plans to lay off 192 employees — or about 19% of the U-T‘s workforce — over the next couple of months. The announcement came just three days after Platinum Equity completed its purchase of the paper from the Copley Press.  Once the new owners, who are self-described turnaround specialists, dig into the property they just acquired, more layoffs will probably follow.

Rupert Murdoch wants to start charging for access to the newspapers owned News Corp., apparently in the belief that subscribers to the New York Post are just like subscribers to The Wall Street Journal. Good luck with all that.  The Boston Globe is also looking into micropayments as a way to extract revenue from readers of its popular Boston.com website, reveals Globe publisher P. Steven Ainsley in an interview that is otherwise unremarkable.

Murdoch, who has been pessimistic about the economy for months, now says things are getting better. This week he declared that “it is increasingly clear that the worst is over,” and that “revenues are beginning to look healthier.” You wouldn’t know that from quarterly earnings just reported by Gannett, McClatchy and Lee Enterprises, but in all fairness, those are backward-looking indicators.

The Columbia Journalism Review explores the changes at The Wall Street Journal that have made it an enigma among US newspapers. In an atmosphere of decline and panic, the Journal is growing both print and online subscriptions. While its advertising revenue has suffered along with the rest of the industry’s, there is a sense that this paper is doing something right. It’s “moving the needle,” as journalist Liz Featherstone notes at the outset of her 3,300-word analysis.

Moving the needle is apparently a sore spot at the Journal. Some people see the phrase as a euphemism for dumbing down the content, and their opinion has some merit. A 3,300-word analysis like Featherstone’s would have a tough time getting in the paper these days. Featherstone counted a dozen stories of over 2,000 words in the front section during a one-week period in 2007. In a more recent comparison, that total had dwindled to three. Instead, the Journal has got reporters chasing news in general and The New York Times in particular. Stories are shorter, reporters are running from press conference to press conference and the Journal no longer seems to regard its mission as being to explain capitalism. Instead, it’s becoming a hard news-driven international wire service with a specialty in business topics.

Reader Focus

Under new editor Robert Thomson (left, WSJ photo), the paper has become more focused on giving his readers what they want, even if that isn’t what the journalists like.  Featherstone snagged an interview with Thomson, who refers disdainfully to some newspapers as being written more for journalists than for their readers.  The reference is clearly to the Journal itself.

Thomson sees today’s constantly distracted, media-agnostic reader as needing quick information delivered in plain language.  Some see this approach as a heretical rejection of the principles of legendary editor Barney Kilgore, who guided the paper for 27 years and who oversaw its meteoric growth.  But others believe Thomson is simply staying true to Kilgore’s principles of giving readers what they want, rather than what journalists think they need.

The Journal story isn’t a simple one.  While Rupert Murdoch has clearly put his stamp on the organization he acquired for more than $5 billion nearly two years ago, fears that he would meddle with the paper’s editorial voice haven’t materialized.  Murdoch has also proven to be strikingly eager to support editorial quality, such as when he personally stepped in to prevent the government of China from denying a visa to a Journal Beijing reporter.

Many journalists have found themselves at odds with the new direction of the paper and have left with thinly disguised disgust.  But others are fully on board with management’s efforts to make the Journal more relevant to its audience in an effort to insure its long-term vitality.  This story is a balanced account of a journalistic institution in the midst of a transition that has torn at the fabric of its organizational values but that is clearly succeeding in the marketplace. For better or for worse.

Miscellany

There are limitations to how far one should go in giving readers what they want, of course.  The Chicago Tribune apparently stepped over that line recently with an experimental project initiated by the marketing department to seek feedback on stories that hadn’t yet been published or even fully reported. A group of reporters didn’t like this idea one bit, and 55 of them signed an angry e-mail in protest. Editor Gerould Kern quickly backtracked, issuing a statement calling the experiment “a brief market research project that tested reader reaction to working story ideas.”

The Trib went too far, says Newsosaur Alan Mutter, but the fundamental idea has merit.  Mutter sees nothing with using a little market research to shape content, even if it’s only keeping an eye on the most e-mailed stories. He relates the practice of one South American newspaper that posts stories to a website as soon after they clear editing but before they appear in print.  Editors then monitor online activity through the evening and take reader interest into account in laying out pages.

The rule of thumb with buyouts is to take them early because the terms get worse as time passes. Now we’re seeing news organizations do away with severance packages entirely. It happened at the Reading Eagle last week, where 52 staffers were shown the door with just two weeks of health insurance coverage to tide them over. One of the laid-off employees had been with the paper for 45 years.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal just laid off 19 newsroom people without any severance, according to one of the victims, who contacted us.  What they did get was instructions on how to tap into their Guild Retirement Income Plan at a penalty of 10% plus tax withholding at 20%.  Or laid-off employees could elect a lump sum payment from the plan, which would lead them with retirement annuities of less than $10 a month, in some cases. “Will that even pay for a prescription for ‘sugar diabetes’ medicine?” the former employee asks. “I’m in my 40s but everybody over 65 in my family has the ‘sugar diabetes,’ as we call it here in the South.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has been hemorrhaging readership, has got a clever new campaign to promote coziness within the newspaper. Called “Unplug. It’s Sunday,” the promotion positions “the old-school Sunday newspaper as a refuge from the constant buzzing and beeping of smart phones, instant messages and e-mail that marks the modern workweek,” according to a short article in AdWeek. We think it’s a great idea.

And Finally…

Does Lindsay Lohan really look like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings trilogy? You decide. TotallyLooksLike.com will help you make the decision. The site has scores of photo pairs contrasting well-known celebrities with other figures who bear a striking resemblance to them, although we’re sure the likeness wasn’t intentional. Does Mary Kate Olson Totally Look Like Ozzy Osbourne? We didn’t think so till we saw the two in their separated-at-birth photo. See for yourself. You’ll be sharing the images with your friends within minutes. We guarantee it. Use Facebook.

Al Zajeera English television is doing a feature on the future of investigative reporting and will be interviewing Newspaper Death Watch’s Paul Gillin on the 10 p.m. EDT news report this evening. Check local listings.

You could do a lot worse than spend the next 20 minutes reading Jason Pontin’s prescription for saving print media on MIT’s Technology Review.  Pontin, a veteran magazine editor and reporter, avoids the hysteria, hand-wringing and quick-fix thinking that has dominated arguments over newspapering’s future to argue that the process of “fixing” the print media model will be long and agonizing but ultimately worthwhile.

Keying off of Clay Shirky’s widely circulated essay that basically forecasts the death of print media as we know it, Pontin suggests that a backlash against media anarchy will occur. Internet purists who believe that millions of citizen publishers will upend mainstream media are overlooking the value of that journalism, he argues. The voice of the people can and should be heard, but there will also be a role for those who have the skills to pick through the details, weigh the evidence and offer an impartial perspective.

The problem isn’t that those people are needed; Pontin rightly points out that demand for news content has never been higher.  Rather, the business model must change to make professional news organizations viable. Nevertheless, print publishers will have to endure quite a bit of pain to get there.  Among other things, they must:

• Shrink circulations to profitable levels and don’t give away free the stuff that people pay for;
• Offer a wide range of subscription options, making it easy for people to receive information in whatever frequency, format and volume they choose;
• Don’t fixate on platforms. Deliver information through whatever media or channels readers choose;
• Get together and settle on some reliable and comparable audience metrics. Fifteen years into the Internet revolution, for example, we still can’t agree on what constitutes an online “reader.” This lack of standardized metrics frustrates advertisers and undermines the quality of the numbers that publishers do provide;
• Shrink editorial departments to levels that can be supported by revenue. Yes, it’s going to hurt and yes, you’ve got to do it.
• Give readers what they want, even if it isn’t what journalists think they should get. The days of force-feeding the audience what editors thought was good for them are over. Deal with it.

There’s lots more.  The piece starts off looking like it’s going to be a defense of the status quo but ultimately delivers a thoughtful and practical proscription for change.

Best line: “As I rose through the editorial ranks of various magazines, I was encouraged to cultivate a mild contempt for readers.”

As negotiations with the Boston Globe‘s unions continued past a midnight deadline, The New York Times Co. filed notice with the federal government today of its plans to shut down the paper in 60 days. Such notice is required under federal law, but the filing of a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification statement doesn’t require the Times Co. to go through with its threats. The Globe unions called the move a negotiating ploy. The Times Co. says it is ready to go ahead and file a binding plant-closing commitment with the state today.

Tense negotiations continued through the weekend, with the Guild saying its offer exceeds the goals set by the Times Co. and the Times Co. raising the stakes even further by admitting that it had made a $4 million accounting error that would require the union to dig even deeper for cuts. The Boston Herald quotes a union official alleging that most of that oversight is actually bad-faith bargaining. Whatever happens, union officials said, expect large layoffs at the Globe. No one seems to think the Times Co. intends to carry through on its threats to shutter the 137-year-old paper, but it’s virtually certain that whatever Globe survives this negotiation process will be far smaller and weaker than the one that has dominated New England for decades. We’ll keep an eye peeled today, but you’ll probably find out quicker from Romenesko.

In Iowa, a Blueprint for Change

They’re shaking up the traditional newspaper model in eastern Iowa. Mark Potts sums up a blueprint for reinvention by the designated change agent at the Cedar Rapids Gazette that outline a vision of the publisher as a center of information, commerce and community. It isn’t about publishing, Steve Buttry says. “We need to become the connection to everything people and businesses need to know and do to live and do business in Eastern Iowa.” He goes on to list the many ways in which the publisher can expand its franchise, from delivering up-to-the-minute Twitter feeds to enabling visitors to buy concert tickets directly from its event listings page.

The part that will rub traditionalists the wrong way is Buttry’s vision of a new approach to revenue in which journalists will be just as responsible for the financial well-being of the company as sales reps. The wall between advertising and editorial is considered no man’s land in most newspaper companies, but Potts praises Buttry for having the courage to envision an alternative. Publishers can position themselves as intermediaries between their audience and local merchants and extract a small fee for enabling transactions. There is nothing dirty about thinking about the financial health of one’s employer. In fact, this economy doesn’t permit the luxury of old silos. Read Potts’ synopsis of how one news organization is changing the way it perceives its business. Read the entire 38-page blueprint document here if you want details.

Conde’s Outlook: Nasty

How bad is it in the upscale lifestyle magazine market? “Wired magazine posted a 57% drop in ad pages in the first quarter, while ad pages at fashion magazines W and Lucky were down more than 40% and 35%, respectively, for the quarter. Architectural Digest‘s ad pages were down 47%,” reports The Wall Street Journal in an article about Conde Nast’s decision to pull the plug on Portfolio magazine after only two years. The numbers make it clear why the decision was necessary: despite its paid circulation of nearly 450,000, Portfolio‘s ad pages were down 61% in the first quarter. The highly visible publication was launched with fanfare and an all-star lineup of journalists two years ago, entering the market dominated by Forbes and Fortune. However, luxury advertising has fallen off the table during the recession and Portfolio was still working off its startup costs. Advertising revenues would have to increase significantly in 2010 to support the business plan, and that just wasn’t going to happen. Some observers think the flight of luxury advertising from upscale magazines could be permanent.

It’s going to get worse, says MarketWatch’s John Friedman. In a short video clip, he says the business publishing market is over-populated and under-advertised. Every business magazine, even the most venerable titles, is vulnerable in an ad downturn like this one.

The J-School Paradox

The Capital Times of Madison, Wisc. Writes about the astonishing surge in journalism school enrollments. “According to an annual enrollment survey done by the University of Georgia, there were 199,711 undergraduates enrolled nationwide in journalism and mass communication schools in
2007 — a jump of 41.6 percent from 1997,” reporter Todd Finkelmeyer writes. “Meanwhile, a recent article on Forbes.com noted that journalism schools at Columbia University, the University of Maryland and Stanford University saw significant spikes in applications this past fall — 30 percent, 25 percent and 20 percent, respectively.”

The story goes on to quote several bright-eyed J-school students who aren’t at all worried about the 15,000 or so journalism jobs that have disappeared over the last 18 months. They believe that a market for quality reporting will always exist and hope that by the time they graduate, the jobs will be there. Professors are quoted saying that journalism teaches critical thinking, an essential skill that can serve a young person well in any profession. It appears that the University of Wisconsin at Madison is ahead of the curve, having revamped its journalism program nearly a decade ago to accommodate multiple media. Ironically, the Capital Times itself exited the print business more than a year ago and has been publishing solely online since then.

Miscellany

The Baltimore Sun laid off 30% of its newsroom last week with the cuts hitting disproportionately hard on senior editorial staff. About one third of those laid off were editors and managers, Editor & Publisher reports. They included both top editorial page editors. Newspaper Guild officials said the moves appeared to be part of a realignment of the news operation toward “multi-platform content,” whatever that is. A reduction of that size could presage a reduction in print frequency along the lines of what the two Detroit dailies are doing. The Sun has the handicap of competing against the Washington Post and other smaller dailies just to the south.

Canada’s National Post will suspend Monday publication during the summer in a cost-cutting move. No layoffs are planned.

The Reading (Pa.) Eagle laid off 52 people, or about 12% of its workforce.

The company that publishes the Vancouver (Wash.) Columbian has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but the issues apparently revolve around real estate investments and not business losses at the newspaper. The Columbian will continue to publish during reorganization.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett reads five newspapers every day, but he wouldn’t buy one at any price. “They have the possibility of going to unending losses…I don’t see anything on the horizon that causes that erosion to end,” says Bullett, who owns the Buffalo News and a piece of the Washington Post Company. He doesn’t intend to sell those ownership stakes, but he isn’t expanding them, either.

And Finally…

The New York Times has two stories that illustrate the severity of the industry’s crisis. It tells of  Todd Smith, a reporter for the Suburban Journals chain of newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises, who was shot while on the job last year. That’s a pretty big sacrifice to make for one’s employers, so “On April 15 of this year, when Mr. Smith was called to a meeting at the Suburban Journals…he wondered if the staff had won an award for coverage of the massacre. Instead, he learned that he and several others were being laid off,” Richard Perez-Pena writes. The story also tells of Paul Giblin, a reporter for the East Vallely Tribune whose work won a Pulitzer Prize two weeks ago. Giblin was laid off last year and now works at a startup online news organization.

This afternoon I hosted a presentation in San Francisco on the topic of “World Without Media: What Will Fill The Void?” along with online journalism and social media expert JD Lasica at the New Communications Forum. Here are the slides from the talk. You can also read tweeted comments here.

Some of journalism’s most prestigious brands took it on the chin in the new round of circulation figures released this morning by the Audit Bureau of Control. Collectively, the 395 newspapers reporting numbers experienced a 7% year-over-year decline, with some of the worst declines occurred at big-city titles in the Northeast.

There was little good news, except for The Wall Street Journal‘s continued gravity-defiance. The paper squeaked out a .61% circulation gain and is now more than twice as large as The New York Times.  Some other troubled papers, like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, also showed only minor declines in the most recent six months.

USA Today, which has managed to maintain relative stability in previous reports, fell with a thud, dropping almost 7.5%.  Marriott Corp.’s recent decision to stop delivering the paper to hotel guest rooms won’t affect the numbers until the next reporting period

These figures shouldn’t be taken as a snapshot in time but rather as a trend. Newspaper circulation falls for all sorts of reasons, including voluntary cutbacks by publishers.  Trends become evident only over multiple reporting periods. With that in mind, the titles listed below have to be considered the most at risk, since they have shown average declines in the double digits over the last two reporting periods.

Miscellany

Jeff Jarvis asks journalists to focus on where they add value and to stop doing everything else. “If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it,” he writes. Jarvis cites the example of TV reporters dashing from place to place to tape standups in front of iconic institutions. They’re not reporting, they’re simply relating commodity information in a contextual setting. Why are TV stations spending money on this?  “When we cut out all the incredible waste – those standups and rewrites and frills and blather – and when we have an ecosystem that rewards unique value, as the internet does, then I think we could end up with more journalism, more reporting,” Jarvis says.

Robert Picard tweaks bankrupt newspaper companies for paying large executive bonuses, calling the argument that said such payments are necessary to retain good people “hollow.” Few people are leaving good jobs in a time when nobody’s hiring, Picard writes. Bankruptcy is a time to restructure, not just get out from under your obligations. The good news: Picard believes “Most newspapers… are surviving the downturn and will be serving their communities for many years.”

The Springdale (Ark.) Morning News has laid off nine newsroom workers and an unspecified number of employees in other groups, reports in its newsroom, in addition to cuts in other departments within the paper, reports KSFM television. The paper will also reduce its size and page count. The station’s spare report is typical of those we see on TV websites. If most of these stations didn’t have newspapers and wire services feeding them copy, they wouldn’t have any news at all.

The Los Angeles Daily News laid off at least four more newsroom employees, according to a blog maintained by its Newspaper Guild chapter.

Boston Globe unions staged a rally last Friday to save the paper, which faces a shutdown decision at the end of this week. Speeches by union members were reminiscent of the greatest Samuel Gompers oratory, only the problem is that the Globe‘s parent is flat on its back. Cutting executive pay isn’t going to close an $85 million profitability shortfall.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reached agreement with the union representing 300 newsroom workers that gives the publisher $1.7 million in cost relief. The deal includes a 3% cut in base wages, a 30% cut in merit pay, two days of unpaid furlough in each of the next two years, a freeze in some pensions and a reduction in severance.

The New York Times Co. is sticking by its May 1 deadline to gain $20 million in cost-saving concessions from Boston Globe unions or shutter the paper. That doesn’t mean the Globe would close next Friday, but owners would make the decision then. Expect this one to go down to the last minute.

The Boston Globe has a story explaining its much-maligned lifetime job guarantees. The deals negotiated 15 years ago have become a hot potato as Times Co. has threatened to close the Globe unless $20 million can be cut from the expense line. The story has some interesting background on how guarantees grew out of management’s successful efforts to seize control from the unions more than 30 years ago.

Guarantees are almost unique to the newspaper industry, having first been negotiated in the 1960s when automation was threatening to put compositors and pressmen out of work. Publishers figured they could offer lifetime employment to people whose jobs were threatened and still make more money because the productivity benefits of automation were so great.

Another interesting motivation was the effect of automation on strikes. “The US newspaper industry averaged 30 to 40 strikes a year in the 1960s,” the Globe says, quoting industry analyst John Morton. “Now, they are rare. The last major newspaper strike occurred in Seattle in 2000.”

Of course, what seemed like a good deal at the time has become an anchor around some publishers’ necks as guarantees have limited their flexibility to manage expenses. In a similar move, the steel industry negotiated generous pension and health care benefits with its unions in the 1960s and 70s. Thirty years later, companies found themselves spending twice as much to pay retired employees as they paying productive workers.

Trouble in Paid Content Land

New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger vowed to stay the course during a shareholder meeting earlier this week.  He defended the Times Co.’s commitment to editorial quality and the validity of the advertising model, yet he hinted that other options were on the table. “”We continue to take a fresh, hard and deep look at various subscription, purchase and micropayment models,” he said.

Sulzberger may want to consider the experience of INDenver Times, a startup staffed mostly by members of the failed Rocky Mountain News. We told you about them on Monday, including their plans for an ambitious paid subscription model that includes “direct, real time conversations with our editors and writers…from 10 am to 5 pm every weekday.” Well, not so fast. INDenver Times just announced that it didn’t meet the 50,000-subscriber threshold it needed to pursue its novel business model and so won’t be going ahead with paid subscriptions.  The announcement was murky on whether INDenver Times will go ahead at all. Various spokespeople talked around the importance of journalism but didn’t say whether that would include an ongoing commitment to this venture.

Miscellany

The Wall Street Journal carried this front-page banner headline week: “Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project.” The Journal doesn’t run many banner headlines, so this must be a big deal, right?  Actually, apparently not.  As Slate’s Jack Shafer explains, the breach in question poses no significant threat to the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet program. It amounts to theft of a maintenance manual. “The Chinese now know how many miles the F-35 can fly before its timing belt must be replaced, its oil changed, and its tires rotated,” he explains. Shafer also documents the putdowns from by Journal rivals Washington Post and New York Times, which both gave the story barely passing mention in their own pages.  He also points to a recent piece in The Nation, intriguingly titled “Has the ‘Journal’ Lost Its Soul?” However, The Nation‘s servers appear to be down this morning, no doubt the victim of a Chinese hacker attack.

We’ll be watching with one sleepy eye next week as Sen. John F. Kerry holds hearings in Washington on the financial problems facing the newspaper industry. The fact that there is no support at any level of government for a bailout of the industry doesn’t faze Kerry, who appears to be more interested in appeasing the editors at the Boston Globe who have endorsed him for many years.

Forecasting Media’s Future

Also next week, we’ll be speaking in San Francisco on the topic of “World Without Media: What Will Fill The Void?” along with online journalism and social media expert JD Lasica at the New Communications Forum. This general session presentation begins Tuesday at 4:00.  Click on the logo at left for a discount. Get an even bigger discount by registering with code SNCR New Communications Forum is one of the best social media events of the year. whoIts organizer, the nonprofit Society For New Communications Research has assembled a faculty of leading new-media thinkers who reserve some of their best stuff for the biannual conferences.  Take a look at the agenda and see what we mean.

We’ll also be leading a panel on Wednesday on the topic of “Media in Transition: The Future of News in a Democratized World” at the co-located Inbound Marketing Summit. The three panelists are all newspaper industry veterans who have successfully made the jump to the digital world: Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher and Ken Doctor of Outsell. Click the image at right and use code VIPS50 to get half off the conference fee.

And Finally…

Nicholas Carr points us to a site maintained by one Timothy McSweeney, which is one of the funniest – and by that we mean “most droll” – online outposts we’ve encountered in some time – and by that we mean days.  Check out the syllabus for an “Internet-Age Writing” class. A snippet:

“Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t!”

And also: “Students will work to make their blogging more vivid using the fundamentals of the craft, such as imagery, foreshadowing, symbolism, and viral paparazzi photos of celebrity nip slips.”