Buyouts offered to Free Press employees-memo – Reuters.com

“The Detroit Media Partnership, a joint operating agreement between Free Press owner Gannett Co Inc. and MediaNews Group, which owns The Detroit News, aims to cut 110 positions, it said in a memo to employees on Friday. ‘If the voluntary offer doesn’t result in a sufficient number of volunteers, or if in the future, economic conditions worsen, it may be necessary to consider layoffs,’ the memo said.”

Saving investigative journalism – Steve Outing

“A new non-profit group called Pro Publica is being formed to fund and produce investigative journalism projects, which it will pitch to newspapers and magazines. One of the founders is Paul Steiger, who was top editor of the Wall Street Journal for 16 years.”

Black day for hockey coverage in the Bay Area, SF Chronicle and SJ Mercury News buy out and lay off Sharks beat reporters – Julia Dominic

“The San Francisco Chronicle bought out the contract of Sharks beat writer Ross McKeon, who has been covering the team since 1991. Also, Sharks beat writer Victor Chi is on the list of 31 San Jose Mercury News employees who were laid off on Monday. Fifteen others, including soccer and boxing reporter Dylan Hernandez and photographer Meri Simon, voluntarily resigned.”

[Maybe it’s a good thing that Bay Area sports fans don’t have much to cheer about these days – Ed.]

Bear Stearns Predicts Ripple Effect of Real Estate Decline – Editor & Publisher

”Retail is going to be the most vulnerable category, since consumers will probably spend less. Florida, predicts Bear Stearns, will feel these affects more acutely. It’s expected that retail sales will drop in Q3 and as a result retailers will cut back dramatically on advertising. In Bear Stearns coverage universe, Tribune and E.W. Scripps have the most exposure to Florida and California in terms of revenue at 37% and 14%, respectively.”

[It’s beginning to look like a perfect storm for newspapers, at least in some areas of the country. Demographic shifts and online competition are combining with a softening economy to accelerate declines in advertising. This leads to layoffs, a weaker product and more reader flight. – Ed.]

Chronicle colleagues who care

[Former San Jose Mercury News staffers have set up a blog to commiserate, keep in touch and share job leads. The paper has reportedly cut its reporting staff by half from its peak. – Ed.]

Alan Mutter offers a letter from a former newspaper owner who explains why he no longer reads the newspaper he once published. The essay tugs at your heartstrings just a little. This guy loved newspapering, but years of union intransigence, executive stubbornness and relentless competition from new media sapped his energy. Recently, his old paper called to offer a year’s subscription for $15.99. Sounds like desperation.

Note his comments about the early days of the Web, and how newspaper owners blew off online publishing as being, at best, a value add. Successful institutions rarely see the competitors that displace them until it’s too late. They’re far too wrapped up in their own success. The comments offer another interesting anecdote on that topic.

“Newsosaur” Alan Mutter writes of an interesting phenomenon that takes place in the blogosphere and which may be indicative of how little newspapers understand the culture that exists there.

He notes how a single link from a blog called Small Dead Animals drove more than 1,000 visitors to his blog in a single day. Meanwhile, mentions of his blog in several major newspapers and magazines over the previous week drew hardly any visitors at all.

Mutter suggests that this is because Small Dead Animals is a creature of the Web, which it very much is, while the mainstream media sites are trying to transplant their standards of professional publishing to a medium that doesn’t care much about them. Essentially, newspapers are republishing columnists and op-ed contributors as bloggers, but aren’t changing the style or tone of what they say, and that’s going to fail in the blogosphere.

I think it’s an excellent point. I’m still amazed that, more than a decade into the Internet revolution, many newspapers still don’t include hyperlinks in the stories that they post online. Not only is this a disservice to the reader, but it makes them look aloof and clueless, which is not something newspapers can afford to be any more.

Robert Scoble told me last year that a tech company had relayed to him that a single mention on his blog had driven more than 1,400 visitors to the company’s site. In comparison, a much longer article in an industry trade publication had delivered no traffic at all. I suspect that the cult of personality around Scoble has a lot to do with that. Walt Mossberg could probably wield that much influence in the blogosphere, but precious few other journalists could.

Is this a problem for newspapers? I think so. If all your growth is going to come online and if the community you’re trying to engage perceives you as an outsider, I don’t see how that serves your interests. The American public already sees the news media as biased, inaccurate and uncaring. So why take that unpopular formula and transplant it online?

Two published items caught my attention today because they focus on issues that are so microscopic in the context of the newspaper industry’s accelerating collapse that they barely seem to merit attention. Both appear in Editor & Publisher.

Letter writers Leo J. Shapiro, Erik Shapiro, and Steve Yahn argue that “There ‘Auto’ Be A Change for Newspaper Ads” because of changing demographic trends. People are keeping their cars longer, which will lead to declining auto sales in the long term and fewer auto ads, they say. But there’s good news: more people are riding bikes and taking public transportation! So get out there and sell those bike ads. And you circ directors, start marketing more aggressively to commuter rail stations!

Auto advertising, a profitable staple of newspaper income statements, was off a disastrous 13% last year. The overall decline in US auto sales will only worsen that very bad situation. I don’t see bicycle ads picking up much of the slack. As far as public transportation goes, the authors’ characterization of the increase in mass transit ridership from 2% to 2.8% of the US population over the past decade as a “sharp” rise needs no comment.

Also in E&P, editor Joe Strup asks “Will Consolidation at MediaNews Group Kill Guild?”. This issue is over the consolidation of two northern California newspapers, a business decision that will almost certainly lead to layoffs.

Questioning the impact of a move like this on the power of the Newspaper Guild is like worrying about a dent in the fender of your car that was just stolen. Of course the Guild will lose influence. Newspaper publishers are fighting just to stay alive. Who cares about the Guild’s bargaining power when the publisher has nothing to bargain with? We don’t hear much from the once-obstreperous United Auto Workers any more, do we?

You have to wonder what service E&P believes it’s providing by focusing on minutiae like this when much weightier problems face its readers.

A journalism professor suggests that newspapers should reach out to younger readers, noting that most columnists are in their 40s and 50s. A few papers have tried this with dedicated pages or sections authored by teens, but the efforts have appeared half-hearted. My own hometown paper, The Boston Globe, has had a teens page for years, but it always struck me as looking like something designed by someone in their 40s for a teen audience. That doesn’t work.

One approach that does work was to give papers away to schools as required reading in social studies classes. For the last year, my teenage son read the Boston Herald every day because the school got the paper for free. Perhaps this is a good use for the all copies newspapers are no longer printing because of circulation declines. The marginal cost of printing extra issues and adding them to existing delivery routes is nominal. At least it gets the product in the hands of people who may be long-term readers in the future.

What’s different about the two scenarios described in these articles in BtoB Online today?

New York Times Co. earnings fall in second quarter

McGraw-Hill Q2 earnings soar.

I’d suggest that the big difference is in McGraw-Hill’s strength in vertical publishing. If you read these brief articles, you’ll see that both the Times and BusinessWeek suffered declines in print advertising. However, McGraw-Hill’s earnings were boosted by revenues in Aviation Week and other vertical publications.

This goes to the contrast between what’s happening in the newspaper world and everywhere else. Big, broad general-interest publications like newspapers — and including magazines like Time and Newsweek — are suffering from a profusion of alternative information sources. However, certain vertical industries aren’t feeling the pinch at all and are, in fact, growing.

If you pick up an issue of Cigar Aficionado or Brides magazine, you’ll see what I mean. These publications are as fat with advertising as they ever have been. In both cases, readers enjoy sitting down with an elegant print publication and leafing through it, looking at the beautiful pictures. Newspapers, with their awkward format, grainy texture and ink that rubs off on your hands, are a much less enjoyable reading experience.

Just one more reason why it’s not good to be in the newspaper business these days.

Highlights from today’s e-mail newsletter:
Report: Young Adults Avoiding Newspapers — and Other News Outlets – E&P’s take on the Shorenstein study referenced earlier on this blog adds the interesting stat that only 9% of teenagers say they read a daily paper. Among people over 30, that figure is four times as high.
Scripps Makes It Official: ‘Cincy Post’ Folding With End Of JOA – No surprise apparently, as circulation had dropped a stunning 85% since the JOA was signed 30 years ago.
Pioneer Press Editor Won’t Rule Out More Cuts in ’07 – A Minnesota fixture for decades, the paper has cut nearly 20% of news staff in a little more than a year and may cut further. Quoting E&P: “If the predicted 15 newsroom employees leave through this buyout, that will mean the news staff had shrunk from 202 before the 2006 buyout down to 165 at the end of the latest one. When asked if a third buyout is more or less likely before the end of 2007, Fladung said, ‘I am not into predicting the future. I sure hope it is less likely.'”

In a post that’s curiously date-stamped 10 days in the future, BusinessWeek’s, Jon Fine asks if the San Francisco Chronicle will be the first major metro daily to give up the print ghost. I suggested much the same thing a few weeks ago, noting that the Chron’s decision to eviscerate its news staff amounted to committing suicide.

I’m not a media critic, but I’ve always been surprised at how awful the SF Chronicle is. It seems to me that a great city like San Francisco deserves a better paper, but the two dailies in that area seem to have ceded that title to the Mercury News down the peninsula. I can’t speak to the quality of the Chron’s website, but if, as Fine suggests, it’s a better product than the print edition, you have to wonder how much longer the Hearst Corp. will commit to producing an inferior product on paper when its audience is one of the most digitally hip and wired in the world. Why not pull the plug and invest in an online franchise that has the potential to dominate a lucrative market?

Alan Mutter gathers up the dismal earnings reports of the major newspaper companies and asks the tough question: how long can these businesses survive?

He writes:

“While everyone in the newspaper business acknowledges that the good old days are gone, few people viscerally understand how rapidly the industry is coming to the point that it cannot sustain itself without farther-reaching – and likely more wrenching – structural changes than such relatively modest efforts to date as scrapping stock tables, outsourcing telephone ad-takers or even down-sizing newsrooms by 50%.

“Absent plans to pare entrenched bureaucracy, eliminate archaic work rules and speedily implement bold strategic initiatives to build significant and sustainable new revenue streams, the industry could find itself on a hopelessly irreversible trajectory. If it isn’t there already.”

I asked much the same question in my essay, “How the Coming Newspaper Industry Collapse Will Reinvent Journalism” earlier this year. The point is that the economics of newspapering – with its high fixed cost – doesn’t scale down very well. At some point, it becomes impossible to meet operating expenses, and when that happens, the whole model collapses very quickly. We will barely know what hit us.

The publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette argues passionately in the WSJ that newspapers are sealing their own doom by giving news away for free. He notes that the American newspaper industry collectively spends $7 billion a year on editorial operations.

He has some good points and great statistics, but the horse has already left the barn. Once you start giving something away, it’s very hard to reverse course and charge for it again. With a few notable exceptions, the paid content model is pretty much dead in the area of general news. Special-interest publications, of course, will still be able to charge fees.