Courtesy of our friends at the Christian Science Monitor, here’s an image of the final front page of the daily newspaper. Beginning this week, the Monitor moves most of its news operations online with a weekly wrap-up in print. The Monitor was the first major daily to shift the bulk of its operations from print to the Web, and its success will be watched closely. Click the image to download a PDF.

Asserting that the collapse of mainstream media demands the same urgency as “the threat of terrorism, pandemic, financial collapse or climate change,” two authors of a forthcoming book called Saving Journalism propose massive government intervention in the journalism crisis. Writing in the liberal journal The Nation, John Nichols and Robert McChesney say the recent debates over micro-payments and nonprofit funding is all well-intentioned, but these rescue scenarios don’t address the serious structural problems the US media faces. In essence, the public watchdog function is vanishing with nothing to replace it.

Media Post chart

This trend isn’t new; cost-cutting in the newsroom began in the 1970s when media tycoons began to form quasi-monopolies under the umbrella of government protection. Today, the media is a pathetic shadow of its former self, doing “almost no investigation into where the trillions of public dollars being spent by the Federal Reserve and Treasury are going but spar[ing] not a moment to update us on the ‘Octomom,'” the authors write.

Government already subsidizes media to the tune of tens of billions of dollars annually through mailing discounts, government advertising, monopoly broadcast, cable and satellite licenses and copyright protection. However, private interests have taken advantage of those subsidies to create wealth, and in the process are destroying the services they provide the public, Nichols and McChesney assert.

And they get specific about what needs to be done:

• Eliminate postage for periodicals that get less than 20% of their revenues from advertising;
• Give all Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers or online sources that meet certain quality criteria;
• Allocate funds to enable every middle school, high school and college to have a well-funded student newspaper, a low-power FM radio station and accompanying substantial websites.

Face it: The old system is collapsing and won’t be resurrected, they say. We are entering a world in which government abuse and corporate greed will run rampant because no one is watching over the abusers. The business media completely misled the public about what was happening in Iraq and completely missed signs of financial disaster. And that was before 20,000 more journalists lost their jobs.

Although you need to take the left-wing source into account, this article is a pretty compelling argument for government intervention.  It is particularly chilling in its description of the impact that media cutbacks have already had on the public’s ability to understand the financial crisis and its own legislators’ actions.  The authors maintain that the estimated $20 billion cost of their proposal is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount being spent on the financial bailout.  The stretch may be in equating the urgency of the two problems.

Uphill Climb

Stewart: Millennials' Cronkite?

The Nation will have a battle convincing a skeptical American public that government support is the answer. Recent data from Rasmussen Reports paints a picture of a public that is largely disengaged from traditional media institutions while increasingly deriving its news from entertainment. A telephone survey of 1,000 Americans early this month found that 30% overall read a daily newspaper, but among respondents under 40, that percentage was only half as large. The survey also showed that newspaper websites have less “stickiness” than a product that arrives at the front door each day. Only 8% of US adults say they read their local paper’s website every day.

Meanwhile, one-third of Americans under 40 say Comedy Central’s Daily Show and Colbert Report are replacing traditional news outlets, which is slightly more than the 24% of Americans overall who think this is true. And there’s a popular opinion that this is a  good thing. “Thirty-nine percent of adults say programs of this nature are making Americans more informed about news events, while 21% believe they make people less informed,” the report says. Interestingly, Democrats are much more inclined to share this positive view than Republicans, by a margin of 48% to 28%.

Miscellany

The New York Times Co. imposed temporary 5% pay cuts for most employees in hopes of avoiding cuts to the newsroom staff.  Nevertheless, the Times also laid off 100 people in its business operations and said it would reduce freelancer spending and possibly consolidate some sections.  The pay cuts are subject to union agreement. Times management threatened to lay off 60 to 70 people out of its 1,300-person news staff if the union doesn’t concur.  The Times Co. cited an overall drop in advertising revenue of 13.1% in 2008 and 17.6% in the fourth quarter.  The pay reductions were described as temporary.  Salaries will revert to their previous level next year unless economic conditions improve fail to improve.  The company has already laid off more than 500 people this year.

The recession has clearly taken hold in the advertising business and the result is likely to be “the closing of more big regional daily newspapers and bankruptcy declarations from even more big publishers,” according to Media Post. Fourth-quarter 2008 results were a disaster, and that’s coming on top of two years of declines that seemed to get worse with each quarter. Newspaper classified advertising fell 39.2% overall in the quarter, with job-recruitment advertising plunging nearly 52%. Perhaps more ominous is that online revenue at newspaper sites was off  8% in the quarter, although online advertising is weak across the board right now.

The Rockingham News of southern New Hampshire has just published its final edition, and the weekly that has served the region for more than 40 years offers quite a lesson in its own history. Aubrey Bracco must have interviewed a couple of dozen local residents to get their recollections of what the paper meant to them, and he pens a loving and informative farewell.

Mike Hughes, president and creative director at the Martin Agency, pens an impassioned plea to his colleagues to support newspapers with their advertising dollars. “Our industry needs newspapers — but just as important, so does humankind,” he writes.  So stop following the latest trend and putting your advertising in the trendiest places.  “How many agencies aren’t selling newspaper advertising to their clients as hard as they should? It’s time for a wake-up call.” It’s an invigorating argument until you read the bio and see that Hughes’ employer is the “agency of record for the Newspaper Association of America.”

Writing on Mashable, Woody Lewis lists five ways newspapers can embrace social media more effectively. He notes that The New York Times now has an application programming interface that third parties can use to access its content from their programs. This is a cool idea. He also says partnerships with strong technology partners are a good idea.

Jay Rosen lists a dozen articles about journalism that he really thinks you should read, although we can’t fathom his top pick: Paul Starr’s laborious New Republic epic. Many of the others are excellent, though, and a few we hadn’t seen before.

And Finally…

We were thrilled to be included among the “Death of Newspapers” bloggers cited by Paul Dailing in Huffington Post. We agree with him that our self-absorbed, righteously indignant, told-you-so attitude is crap and that we have no answers to the problems facing the industry. We encourage you to boycott our book (available in fine bookstores everywhere) in support of his position. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

The Houston Chronicle joins the long string of newspapers that assert their commitment to “strong watchdog journalism” while covering news of their own troubles with e.e. cummings-like simplicity. The newspaper devotes just 208 words to news that it is laying off 12% of its staff, or nearly 200 people. That’s about one word per victim. In fact, the Chronicle doesn’t even mention a body count. You have to read The Wall Street Journal account to find that number. Even the AP devotes more space to the story than the Chronicle.

We have to wonder if this is some kind of Enron hangover. Are Houston media so tired of covering bad news that they just pass along the press release without comment or question? To be fair, the Chronicle does invite reader comments on a blog and posts a single response to the many questions people submit about who exactly was let go. Still, one response from one ombudsman to news of the loss of 90 newsroom employees hardly satisfies the public’s right to know. Nor will that information be passed along to the paper’s 448,271 print readers. How do we know there are 448,271 print readers? We read the AP story. That information wasn’t in the Chronicle.

We don’t know what went on inside the walls of the newspaper yesterday, but an entry on Houston Press Blogs makes it sound positively eerie. Without citing sources, Steve Olafson reports that no upper managers were laid off but the only two women on the editorial board were. So going forward, the editorial charter of the leading newspaper serving the great and diverse city of Houston will be directed by five white guys. The paper now has practically no suburban news coverage and it laid off the reporter who’s covered NASA since the 1986 Challenger disaster.

Olafson’s most damning anecdote: “Chronicle Vice-President and Editor Jeff Cohen never came out of his office to address the staff during the day-long process of buttonholing employees to deliver the bad news. Instead, he issued a memo.”

Boston Globe Battles Rival Herald for Irrelevance

How long will the Boston Globe be around? Bloomberg says layoffs will be needed to meet the goal of a 12% newsroom staff reduction. But it’s more than that. The Globe has become an anchor around the neck of New York Times Co., which paid $1.1 billion for it and its Worcester, Mass. sister paper in 1993. Circulation and revenue losses at the Globe have far outstripped those of the Times and the only bright spot in the business is the Boston.com website. Barclay’s recently valued the Globe at just $20 million, or more than 98% less than what the Times paid for it. And it’s clear that resistance to change is a powerful force in the newsroom. We attended a meeting of the Social Media Club in Cambridge, Mass. this week at which a young Globe reporter talked about the news staff’s focus on scooping the rival Boston Herald, a newspaper that has fallen so far that a lot of people outside of downtown Boston don’t even know it’s still around. The Globe‘s issues aren’t beating the Herald, but rather staying relevant to readers who could care less about either of them.

Publisher Fights Back at Newspaper Critics

Remember Time magazine’s list of the 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America from earlier this month?  It’s a load of hooey, says Randy Siegel, president of Parade Publications in a biting commentary in Editor & Publisher. Siegel assumes that most people didn’t notice the byline on the list, which was not a Time reporter but rather Douglas McIntyre. He’s an editor at 24/7 Wall St., a website whose parent also runs a site called Volume Spike Investor, which recommends stocks that are undergoing extreme short-term volume fluctuations. “It’s a sad day when Time magazine…runs an unsubstantiated article on its website, without a single disclaimer, from Wall Street speculators who make their living peddling tips to…day-traders,” writes Siegel, who is co-founder of the Newspaper Project, a booster site for mainstream media.

Siegel doesn’t stop there when naming names.  His next target is Jeff Jarvis, the ubiquitous blogger who has long been a vocal critic of the conventional media.  Siegel credits Jarvis for being smart, but wishes the NYU professor and consultant would disclose more openly his advisory activities on behalf of companies that benefit from the destruction of the institutions he criticizes. Siegel also has some harsh words for CNN.com, which he says has covered the newspaper industry’s troubles with surprising zeal. CNN “probably would like nothing better than to see newspapers and newspaper websites fail, so their biggest competitors for audience and ad revenue would go by the wayside,” he speculates.

Miscellany

The Christian Science Monitor wraps up its 100-year run as a daily newspaper this weekend. Going forward, the thoughtful but lightly circulated journal will focus its efforts online, choosing to rely on journalism rather than video and infographics, according to editor John Yemma. He tells Media News International that the Monitor “intends to increase its page view five-fold by 2013, end its reliance on a Christian Science Church subsidy that now provides 40 percent to 50 percent of its revenues, and achieve financial sustainability by 2015.”The monitor was the first major newspaper to largely abandon the print market in favor of the Web and we wish it well.

We haven’t read any criticism of the hare-brained Newspaper Revitalization Act that’s briefer and more biting than that by Tim Windsor on the Nieman blogs. “I am immediately suspicious of any effort that has as its starting point that newspapers are precious things to be preserved, forever, like some kind of ubiquitous, everlasting Williamsburg of media,” he writes. “The worst thing that could happen would be for newspaper companies to find the means to suddenly become comfortable again.” We couldn’t have said it better and have nothing to add.

Allvoices, the community journalism project that we covered here last July, has added a feature to its website to rate the credibility of contributors. The feature is intended to address the widespread criticism that community journalism has weak quality control. The credibility meter evaluates both the content of a report and the reputation of the author on an ongoing basis as stories move through the Allvoices systems. Criteria include community ratings of the author and content, duplication with other stories and level of supporting content in mainstream media.

The Bakersfield Californian cut 12% of its staff and shook up its management ranks. The 26 positions that were eliminated include 14 in the newsroom and come on top of a 10% workforce cut in December. Management cited a 30% drop in year-over-year revenues as the culprit. The Californian, which has won some attention for its efforts to inspire reader contributions, is also establishing a high-level editorial job called vice president/content. Olivia Garcia, publisher of subsidiary Mercado Nuevo, assumes that role with Californian editor Mike Jenner reporting to her.

Gannett is telling employees to take another unpaid week off in the second quarter on top of the one they had to take off in the first quarter. The company is also temporarily cutting salaries of some high-paid employees.

And Finally…

Nineteen-year-old Dutch college student Marco Kuiper has assembled a collection of weird and wild photos from around the web going back to the middle of last year. He calls it “imagedump,” and the selections range from hysterical to disturbing to borderline obscene. They all have one thing in common: They’re fascinating to look at. Is this citizen journalism?  Who cares?  It’s funny as hell.

We really like Sen. Ben Cardin’s idea that newspapers should be allowed to operate as nonprofits. We like it so much, in fact, that we’re going to be the first news organization to take the Senator up on the idea. So effective today, we are a nonprofit. Our $87.13 in monthly advertising revenue is tax-exempt and we welcome donations. We agree not to make any political endorsements, which is fine because we don’t like any of the candidates anyway. We do fear, however, that some newspaper companies may find it a tad more difficult to accept the Senator’s plan. They have this tiny problem of a couple or three billion dollars worth of debt to take care of. Maybe Sen. Cardin should attach a rider making the nonprofit option part of the bankruptcy code. That’s an idea we could really support. But for now, heck, keep those donations coming. PayPal preferred.

A Queensland University professor surveyed 200 first-year journalism students and four that few of them read newspapers. “More than 60 per cent read a printed newspaper once a week or less often. Yet 95 per cent said they enjoyed keeping up with news,” said Alan Knight. Their preferred sources are broadcast TV and the Internet. The survey was conducted online, which means it’s statistically invalid by default, and the brief press release doesn’t say how Prof. Knight limited response to first-year students. Still, it’s interesting and the prof plans parallel studies in other countries.

The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof last week touched off a debate over the value of personalized news. Kristof asserts that the trend toward filtered and personalized news creates “the reassuring womb of an echo chamber” in which people only listen to the opinions of others who agree with them. 

Eduardo Hauser, CEO and founder of DailyMe.com, begs to differ. His service, which has been around since 2005, co-mingles news filtered by professional editors with headlines self-selected by the reader. In this brief audio interview, he describes why personalized news creates a more informed consumer and creates a base for delivering a well-rounded mix of “need to know” with “want to know.”

Who’s going to provide this information? “It’ still going to be journalists,” says Hauser, who admits to being a “fanatic” about newspapers. But the medium of print is losing its appeal. “The news will still be created by journalists. They will have the ability to create their own audiences. I have faith in the profession of journalism; I have less faith in the traditional media of journalism.”

[audio:http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/daily_me.mp3] Length: 14:53

The week started depressingly with the demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and then brightened with the emergence of a rescue plan for the San Diego Union-Tribune. We’d like to close it out with an inspiring view of the future by Steven Berlin Johnson, founder of the hyperlocal community site, outside.in.

Speaking at the South by Southwest conference last week, Johnson delivered one of the most cogent and optimistic perspectives on the future of journalism that we’ve ever read. His essay builds upon Clay Shirky’s excellent discussion last week of why revolutions are messy but necessary. Johnson does it by pointing to two of the most mature information ecosystems of the online world – technology and politics – and contrasting the state of media today to that of 20 years ago.

There is no comparison. As an Apple Mac fan from the early days, Johnson used to wait at the local newsstand for each issue of Macworld magazine to arrive. In the late 1980s, “It might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt.” Even Macworld, which used to dispense news only once a month, “published twenty-six different articles on Apple-related topics yesterday.”

24X7 Politics

The political sphere is also booming with information. Barack Obama’s controversial race speech in Philadelphia was seen in its entirety by 8 million people online. In 1992, “It would have been reduced to a minute-long soundbite on the evening news. CNN probably would have aired it live, which might have meant that 500,000 people caught it.” Not only was the entire presidential campaign live-blogged, but it was covered by a swarm of interested Web publishers who dissected every event and issue. And by the way, Web users all had access to a bounty of information directly from both candidates. Two decades ago, such details were hard to get and they were mostly summarized and passed through the filter of the local newspaper.

Johnson asserts that the transformation that has already taken place in technology and political news will spread into other domains as well. While praising The New York Times, he notes that a big paper can’t be all things to all people. “Every week in my [Brooklyn] neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong.”

Johnson says he gets that local news from blogs like Brownstoner, which is one of nearly 2,000 blogs focused on Brooklyn.

Future in Aggregation

Is there a future for professional news organizations in all this? Absolutely, Johnson asserts. “If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.” And this will open the door for new organizations to step in with the international coverage that is unquestionably threatened as traditional newspapers decline.

Johnson’s use of the mature new-media markets of technology and politics is an innovative approach to envisioning a future for professional news gathering, one in which aggregation and interpretation trump original reporting. With millions of enthusiasts now providing front-lines coverage, the new role of professional journalists will be to organize and make sense of it all. This doesn’t make them any less important than they are today. They’ll just deliver a different kind of value.

Layoff Log

In the meantime, though, the transformation takes its toll:

• The Minneapolis Star Tribune, already languishing in bankruptcy, is laboriously negotiation cost cuts with its unions in an effort to save $20 million in annual expenses. Its 116-employee pressmen’s union just approved contract revisions that will result in wage reductions, 24 layoffs and reduced staffing on the presses. Next up are negotiations with delivery and newsroom unions.
• The Memphis Commercial Appeal is cutting 19 newsroom jobs. No word on whether additional reductions are hitting other departments.
• McClatchy papers continue to cut jobs, working toward a corporate goal of 1,600 reductions, but McClatchy Watch says it isn’t going to happen. “Unless it plans to shut down a couple of its papers, McClatchy will not come anywhere near laying off 1,600 employees,” the site says, and it has title-by-title numbers to prove it. However, commenters don’t entirely agree. A lively debate over the blog’s estimates ensues, along with a side argument over stylistic issues, which seems to crop up frequently when journalists disagree. Meanwhile, the site reports on recent layoffs: 47 in Anchorage, 20 in Columbus, 14 in Lexington and 10 in Modesto. The Idaho Statesman is also laying off 25 people and imposing salary cuts.
• Three staffers are gone at the Las Cruces Sun-News. One of them is “the typist who transcribes calls to Sound Off!” We hope that’s not a full-time job.
• Morris Communications has managed to avoid layoffs so far, but it’s is cutting staff salaries 5% to 10% at all its properties, including the Amarillo Globe-News.

And Finally…

In times of trouble, people now have a new way to commiserate and cooperate: Facebook. A new group called Newspaper Escape Plan has been hatched to enable laid-off journalists to pull together and share job-hunting tips and gossip about the business. You can go there to learn about services like Publish2, which is a social bookmarking service for journalists.  Follow it on Twitter.

The AP posted this sobering photo of discarded newspaper racks languishing in a San Francisco junkyard.

Representatives from a Who’s Who of major newspapers will gather on Saturday for a daylong event in Washington focused on finding new revenue solutions to the newspaper crisis.

Calling itself Revenue Two Point Zero, the group says it’s fed up with all the talk and  is going to focus on solutions.  “We reject the belief that media companies should pursue models based on pay-for-content plans or philanthropy,” the group’s manifesto says.  “Instead, we believe the best hope for media companies to make money is the old-fashioned way — by earning it from advertising.”

The group has several examples of how it hopes to do this, including mobile advertising, better classifieds and a stronger appeal to small businesses.  About 20 representatives of major publications will be there, and the Society for News Design has joined the parade. A post on the society’s blog asks people to volunteer criticism, comments and inspiration in the spirit that “everyone in the industry agrees that radical changes needed.”  You can follow the action via tweets from Logan Molen, VP of Interactive Media at the Bakersfield Californian. He’s at rev2oh.

New Ideas

Speaking of Bakersfield, the Californian is the lead in a BusinessWeek story about how newspapers are trying to develop new revenue streams.  In an industry where nearly everyone is sinking, the Californian is actually growing.  One of the secrets is Baktopia.com, an online social network aimed at young people that publishes the best of the Web in print.  “Advertisers pay full rate,” says the company’s digital products manager.

The story further talks about the Californian‘s launch of Printcasting.com, a Web venture that lets anybody create a digital magazine.  The best stuff is turned into a print publication supported by advertising. Money in print? It’s true.

The rest of the BusinessWeek article mainly covers companies and technologies we’ve written about here before, including blog aggregator Outside.in, micro-payments start up Kachingle and community content provider Helium.  Almost no one quoted in the article is actually making much money with these ventures, but at least they’re thinking differently. That counts for a lot these days.

Seattle Times Still In Deep Weeds

You’d think the closure of its largest rival would be a boost to the Seattle Times, but Seattle’s other paper is still struggling to make ends meet. That news comes from Doug Henderson, an economist with the Joint Council of Teamsters No. 28, who was allowed to have a look at the paper’s financial data available as part of the owner’s request to slash 12% of its workforce. Henderson said that despite having already laid off 25% of its employees, the Times‘ “financial status is still serious” and it “needs to consider either selling off some operations or shutter some. However, with the economic climate being in utter chaos, the opportunity to sell any type of operation is very slim.”

The news should come as no surprise to surveyors of the Seattle scene. The Times‘ financial position is so perilous that many people were surprised when it was the Post-Intelligencer that  pulled the plug. The Blethen family, which owns the Times, has been unable to sell a money-losing chain of newspapers in Maine. Less than three months ago, Senior Vice President Alayne Fardella admitted that the company’s situation is “dire,” and added that “It has been and continues to be a long and difficult fight for our survival.”

Miscellany

News & Observer Publishing Co. said it will lay off 27 people in the Raleigh News & Observer newsroom, reduce wages and implement unpaid furloughs as part of an overall reduction of  11 percent of its work force, or 78 people. Management added that the N&O will also “increase cooperation with the Charlotte [Observer] newspaper and will speed its transition to a narrower format to save on production costs.” Both the Raleigh and Charlotte papers are owned by McClatchy. The local ABC affiliate has a news story about the N&O’s problems bluntly titled “N&O struggles to survive.”  Says reporter Larry Stogner: “No one wants to talk about when the ax will fall again – and on whose neck.” Managing Editor John Drescher says a subscription model to the paper’s website is under consideration.

Former Flint Journal reporter Jim Smith said last week that publishers at the Flint Journal, Bay City Times and Saginaw News were are expected to call together their staffs this week to announce:

• They’ll reduce the publishing schedule to three days a week: Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday;
• They won’t honor a “lifetime” employment pledge of parent companies Newhouse Newspapers and Booth Newspapers;
• An unspecified number of layoffs;
• Reduced pay and benefits for remaining employees;
• Consolidation of printing and copy desk functions and content-sharing among the three titles.

No word yet on whether Smith is right.

And Finally…

We don’t know who’s behind Criggo.com – the owner’s name is disguised and the site is registered to a fax number in Los Angeles – but we hope he or she never stops tending the site. Even as classified advertising has shriveled, newspaper ads continue to deliver a seemingly unending stream of entertaining and bizarre humor. Very often, what’s funny isn’t the double entendres or typos; it’s in the fascinating stories that must underly these truncated missives to the world. Aren’t you just dying to know what’s going on behind closed doors at the house that placed this ad?

This is the final front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which published its last issue this morning after 145 years of daily operation.

Here’s a slide show of the final day. About 150 of the paper’s 170 employees will lose their jobs.

The P-I says it will be the first daily to shutter its print operations and go fully online, although technically the Capital Times did this last year. Reporter Joe Tartakoff writes about how Seattlepi.com will work very differently from its print predecessor.

At Seattlepi.com, “We don’t have reporters, editors or producers—everyone will do and be everything. Everyone will write, edit, take photos and shoot video, produce multimedia and curate the home page,” says assistant-managing-editor-turned-executive-producer Michelle Nicolosi. And that’s not all. This is going to be a pure Web news operation in every sense, she says.

Can a venerable print newspaper create a brand, a business and a future for itself on the Web? The news world will be watching.

Clay Shirky takes us back 500 years to reflect on the revolution that’s going on right now. Everyone who wonders “What will become of journalism when newspapers are gone?” should read this superbly voiced essay by the author of Here Comes Everybody. The piece has racked up 225 comments and trackbacks just over the weekend, and there will be many more.

To sum up Shirky’s case:  The game is over for newspapers. Nothing can save the business, so it’s pointless to try. We’re in the middle of a revolution and revolutions are uncomfortable things because “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

His distant mirror is 16^th century Europe, when the printing press was beginning to lift the world out of the Dark Ages. As translations of the Bible into languages other than English began to threaten the church-dominated world order, everyone frantically searched for assurance that the old institutions would be preserved. This applied even to disrupters like Martin Luther,  who insisted he wasn’t creating a schism in the church even as he was inventing Protestantism.

“And so it is today,” says Shirky, fast-forwarding. “When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution…They are demanding to be lied to.”

Revolutions are messy things because old institutions have to be destroyed before new ones are put in place. We’re witnessing the destruction now but we have no idea what will grow out of the rubble. And that’s scary.  “The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case,” Shirky writes. The only certainty is that the newcomers will be more specialized, distributed and democratized than the old, vertically integrated institutions.

We won’t say Clay Shirky puts our minds at ease, but he at least points out that we have come this way before and that everything turned out pretty well in the long run. All we have at this point is faith and optimism.  The sooner we can turn our attention from salvaging the unsalvageable to inventing the future, the sooner we can get on with the rebuilding.

Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard columnist Bob Welch should read Shirky’s essay. So should Mark Willes, former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and now head of Deseret Management Corp., who’s quoted in this Salt Lake Tribune story remarking “[I]f we’re going  to have all the things I think are central to having a civilized society and a successful society, [newspapers] must grow.”

Union Grants Broad Concessions to San Francisco Chronicle Management

Their collective backs against the wall, members of the Northern California Media Workers Guild voted 10-1 to give the San Francisco Chronicle broad authority to lay off employees without regards to seniority as well as to cut vacation time and extend working hours. The union, which represents 483 employees at the Chron, had little choice. Owner Hearst Corp. has threatened to close the entire operation without major concessions. Even so, Hearst is still likely to lay off 150 Guild workers.

Union members took consolation in the fact that that figure is one-third less than the 225 jobs Hearst originally threatened to eliminate. The Guild was also able to secure a decent severance package for laid-off employees. However, members will pay more for health benefits, lose 25% of their vacation and work longer hours. The Mercury News story notes that Hearst had threatened to make “most” of the 225 threatened job cuts in the Chron‘s 260-person newsroom. This seems incredible, since a cutback of that magnitude would leave less than 200 reporters covering the entire Bay Area. That may still be the case after the anticipated layoffs happen. Hearst is also eliminating 100 unionized pressroom jobs after it outsources printing to a Canadian contractor in June.

How to Save the Classified Advertising Business

Christopher Ryan and Steve Outing propose some head-slappingly simple ideas in their “Classifieds Manifesto.” So why aren’t more newspaper companies following them?

Newspapers can still have important and profitable classified advertising businesses, the authors say, but first they have to stop thinking about classifieds as agate type on a page. Craigslist has won that battle, so newspapers have to change the rules of the game.

Why not open a used-car lot for your auto clients? Or create a division that helps realtors sell homes? And while you’re at it, reinvent the way you present information. Craigslist is butt-ugly, man. Use tables and icons and easily navigable ways to get readers to the stuff they want to buy. And while you’re at it, get a video camera out to those properties that realtors are trying to sell and give them a hand.

There are a bunch of other smart and simple ideas in this essay. Send the URL to the head of your classified advertising group.

Miscellany

Mark Potts totes up the market capitalizations of the publicly held newspaper companies in the US and comes to a striking conclusion: Their combined value is just $1.3 billion, or a little more than what The New York Times Co. paid for the Boston Globe alone ($1.1 billion ) in 1993. This same group of companies was worth over $7 billion just six months ago. And speaking of the Globe, Potts says Barclays recently valued the paper at just $20 million.

McClatchy Watch is reporting that the Kansas City Star could announce a layoff early this week that’s larger than the newspaper’s last three layoffs combined. This rumor is a little confusing, however, since the Star announced plans to cut 15% of its workforce just last week.

Owners of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and its pressmen’s union have reached agreement on a set of union concessions involving layoffs, wage cuts, health care premium increases and staffing reductions. No details were released pending a vote by members on the agreement this week.

McClatchy Watch is reporting that the Kansas City Star could announce a layoff early this week that’s larger than the newspaper’s last three layoffs combined. This rumor is a little confusing, however, since the Star announced plans to cut 15% of its workforce just last week.

Spain’s El Mundo newspaper has an article about the Death Watch that has received some notice in the Spanish speaking world, including Cuba and Argentina. We wish our Spanish was better, but we think they’re mostly saying the same thing.

We thought you might like to see the text of the e-mail interview with El Mundo correspondent Carlos Fresneda that formed the basis of this story. As always, your comments are welcome.

How do you feel when you read about events such as the end of the Rocky Moutain News? Which newspapers will survive in the US?

The closure of the Rocky Mountain News left me feeling sick because we are seeing institutions of knowledge collapse before our eyes. The vital public service that these newspapers provide is being lost and, for the moment, there is nothing to replace them.

I believe a few national dailies will survive, among them The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. These papers made the transition to national distribution a decade ago and that will serve them will. The need for newspapers will not disappear, but the economic model of regional dailies is no longer sustainable. Papers that do not count their national circulations in the one million range will not be able to command the advertising fees to keep them alive. However, there will be a place for some print properties and a few will remain to fulfill that need.

Do you think that something like this could happen in Europe?

It depends on the location. Areas of Europe that are well wired for the Internet and have robust wireless infrastructures, like the Nordic region, will probably see the need for newspapers decline more quickly than those that charge high fees for Internet access or do not have affluent populations. Eastern Europe, in contrast, will probably be a fairly robust market for newspapers for some time. Some cultures are also more invested in the newspaper model, as is the case in the UK. In general, Europe will discard print newspapers more slowly than the US because traditions are more embedded and, in some cases, government subsidies will keep print publications afloat. France is an example of that.

Will more newspapers follow The Wall Street Journal model and charge for their content on the Web?

They will try but mostly they will fail. Readers aren’t accustomed to paying the costs of news, even in the print model, where the cost of a newspaper to a reader is trivial compared to the cost of producing it. Newspapers may be able to generate some revenue from subscription fees but not enough to support their operations at their current size.

Will “micropayments” be the solution for some of them?

The only way a micropayment model can flourish is if there is a broad-based campaign by journalists, public officials and celebrities to promote it. This is the model that is creating a viable paid-content model in the recording industry. There must be a public education campaign to convince the public that a vital information source is threatened and that it must be supported. Perhaps these organizations can steal a lesson from the music industry by giving away their content free on their website but charging for downloads to a Kindle. If readers perceive the value, they’ll pay. However, I think it’s unlikely that the news industry can muster enough support to make such a campaign successful.

The new generations of reader is used to getting information for free. Will these people be willing to pay for high quality journalism?

There will be public funding models like National Public Radio’s that will have some success applying public support to worthy news organizations. However, I doubt that individual readers will be willing to pay enough to cover more than a small amount of the operating costs of conventional newspapers. A few organizations may survive on public funding and philanthropy, but the vast majority of daily newspapers will not be able to sustain themselves under that model.

What will happen to investigative journalism?

In the short term, a lot of investigative journalism will disappear. However, I believe a new style will emerge over time that leverages increased public access to government documents and the work of individual “whistle blowers”  to fulfill many of the same objectives of investigative journalism. New-journalism organizations like Talking Points Memo actually recruit their readers to assist in the reporting process by scouring public documents and fact-checking information. In a world in which everyone is a publisher, some new models of investigative journalism will emerge that harness the work of individual citizens.

Will the new model of journalism using reader-generated content reach the same quality and level that “old school” journalism?

It won’t have the finish and polish of professional journalism and it won’t be nearly as well packaged, but the new model could be richer in many ways because so many people will be involved in the “reporting” process. There will also be new aggregators emerging online that gather the work of citizen journalists and package it professionally.

What is the future of the journalist? Will we be mostly self-employed and will the lack of funds eventually affect the quality of our work?

Journalists will need to think more about their personal brand than the brand of the publication they work for. Many more of them will be freelancers in the future, but they can still make a good living by selling their services to various outlets and by publishing in multiple media. They will need to be more specialized in focus but more generalized in terms of the media they use (text, audio, photo, video).

What is the future of weekly and monthly magazines?

That depends greatly on the audience. Computer displays can’t match the visual quality of a printed page and will never match the tactile quality. Magazines that deliver high visual quality to discerning audiences – high-end travel and lifestyle publications, for example – may do very well for a long time. Those that mainly deliver news will be under more pressure. Magazines with large newsstand circulations will probably do better than those that deliver principally through the mail because people are accustomed to reading them when out of the home. However, mobile news services may blunt much of this advantage over time. I think Brides magazine has a long life in print ahead of it. I’m not sure The Economist does.

Should we blame publishers for the current crisis in the same way US car makers are being blamed for not seeing their problem coming?

Journalists aren’t responsible for this crisis. The business executives who failed to understand changes in their audiences that were apparent a decade ago deserve most of the blame. They considered the Internet to be simply another distribution medium for their printed products and they failed to adapt their services for the unique characteristics of the Web. They also failed to adjust their sales models to target small and local businesses. They placed their bets on classified and department store advertising, and as those revenue sources were taken away or went out of business, they had nothing to fall back upon. Even more damaging was the consolidation spree of the last 10 years that plunged many publishers into heavy debt. Most of them will never recover. The burden of debt service handcuffs them from making meaningful change in their business.