Here’s the redesigned home page of the Orlando Sentinel. This will apparently serve as a model for redesigns of several other Tribune Co. properties. What do you think? Ping us in the comments area below.

Tribune Co.’s Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams has already weighed in and HE LOVES IT! The Wall Street Journal explains the background of the ambitious company-wide effort and says the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Baltimore Sun are next on the redesign list, followed by the Chicago Tribune. Whether a visual makeover can repair the problems all these papers are suffering in their core markets is a matter of speculation, but there’s no doubt Zell & Co. are trying some new tactics.

A Modest Proposal for Miami

Could Miami become a one-newspaper town? Alan Mutter thinks so, and he puts forth a persuasive argument for restructuring the Herald and the Sun-Sentinel under a joint operating agreement (JOA). JOAs were a 1970s gift from the government to the newspaper industry that enabled competing newspapers to consolidate operations and do business as a legal duopoly. For the last 30 years, it’s been a license to print money. Today, it may be a lifeline to publishers whose only alternative is closure. Unfortunately, JOAs have also historically been a license for publishers to become fat and complacent as competition is removed from the landscape. They’re one of the reasons the industry is in so much trouble today.

Editors Debate Newspaper Survival

A group of Chicago journalists got together last week to discuss the topic of “Will Newspapers Survive?” The panelists were all working reporters and editors who are realistic about the future and their attitudes were strikingly sanguine, as reported by Chicago Reader. Tom McNamee, editorial page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times, offered the most dispassionate perspective: “We may not all be making fortunes. Our 30 percent profit days are over. We may not survive. But you know what — that’s our problem. Not to say that the world’s in crisis because newspapers may not survive in the form that we recognize now.” Other panelists blamed the business side for not innovating quickly enough. The editors are psyched to change, they said, but the sales and management suits are too stuck on their historic profit margins. (via Editors Weblog )

Miscellany

• Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downier, who led the newsroom to 25 Pulitzer Prizes, will step down after 17 years in the position and 44 years with the newspaper. Downie, 66, said new blood is needed to accommodate rapid changes in the business. “So much further change now needs to take place at the newspaper and Web site, and someone else should be tackling that,” he said. He is a true class act.
• The Georgetown (Kentucky) News-Graphic will switch from afternoon to morning delivery, saying that the cost benefits are compelling in this day of stratospheric gas prices. Publisher Mike Scogin notes “In the outer parts of the county…carriers sometimes travel several miles to deliver just a couple of newspapers.” (via Fade to Black )
• As the Daytona Beach News-Journal waits to be sold, its publisher talks straight to the staff. Gone are 99 positions and a whole slew of tasks are being transferred to other departments or outsourced entirely. Bureaus will close, stock tables will be cut and business sections will be consolidated. It all adds up to one big morale hemorrhage, but the News-Journal publisher’s message is realistic: “Despite the unavoidable disruptions and distractions this week, we still have jobs to do, and it is in everybody’s best interest that we do them professionally and well.”
• If your newspaper is considering a 10% staff cut, be glad you aren’t in Taiwan. The China Times will lay off almost half its staff due to the weak economy.
• It seems like you could spend all day just reading gossip and analysis blog (like this one) about the newspaper industry. Danny Sanchez has gone and assembled a pretty fine directory of them.

And Finally…

The editors of the Washington Post have recently been quoted as saying that the paper could do with fewer copy editors. The Post‘s Gene Weingarten has some fun with that idea. Thanks for reminding us that the wizards of grammar and spelling do play a vital role. (via Mark Hamilton)

Continuing fallout from McClatchy’s 1,400-person layoff last week: PaidContent.org’s Joseph Weisenthal remarks on all the attention to CEO Gary Pruitt’s pay, noting that you have to offer a competitive salary to get a good executive these days. He’s right. Tempers also flared at the Raleigh News & Observer over an executive’s decision to stay at a $210-per-night hotel on a recent visit to the paper just before the layoffs. The Raleigh Chronicle has the dirt, including links to executive blog postings on the topic. The Chronicle also claims that, in blaming the Internet for the company’s fortunates, McClatchy execs failed to note the impact of a strong alternative publishing market on the N&O‘s business. Editor & Publisher‘s Mark Fitzgerald analyzes McClatchy’s $4 billion debt, which seemed worth taking on at the time but which, in retrospect, was horribly timed. Still, McClatchy may be better positioned than most publishers to survive the industry’s collapse, he concludes. Analysts say it’s one of the better managed companies in the business.

Meanwhile, McClatchy editors and columnists weighed in on what comes next. Dave Zeeck at the Tacoma News quotes Mark Twain reasoning that there’ll always be jobs for reporters. Sacramento Bee Editor Melanie Sill is defiant. She points out all the good work the paper is still doing and says the loss of seven editors will just force everyone to be a little more innovative. Meanwhile, Miami Herald ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos takes the novel approach of asking readers to tell him what choices they think the paper should make. And Bob Ray Sanders of the Fort Worth Star Telegram compares the whole thing to a funeral in a dour, backward-looking essay.

And in Non-McClatchy News…

Add Hearst Corp. to the list of publishers struggling with the shifting winds of the industry. The publisher of 15 dailies and more than 200 magazines lost its CEO of 15 years last week over an apparent policy dispute with the board. Hearst has managed to make some smart bets online over the last decade, buying it a degree of insulation from the industry’s troubles, but with its San Francisco Chronicle serving as the poster child for newspaper collapse, it perhaps can’t change strategy quickly enough. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds speculates about what’s been going on in the Hearst board room and remarks upon Hearst’s unusual management trust, which expires upon the death of the last family member who was living at the time of William Randolph’s death in 1951.

By the way, where’s Belo Corp. in all the recent layoff activity? Jeff Siegel notes that last week’s bloodbath at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram should be putting pressure on the Dallas Morning News to cut back, but owner Belo has been strangely silent. So the stock market is speaking, knocking Belo shares about 6% lower last week. If the Star-Telegram can cut a sixth of its editorial staff with impunity, can the Morning News afford not to notice?

Forecasts of the impending death of the Sun-Times Media Group are greatly exaggerated, at least according to company executives. The struggling company, which has been saddled by the misdeeds of former executives, has $120 million in the bank and is ready for the worst, top managers told shareholders last week. In fact, CEO Cyrus Freidheim actually believes newspapers will rebound when the economy does in a year or two. His optimism is striking in light of the company’s recent announcement that it is “exploring strategic alternatives,” which is a euphemism for finding a buyer.

Tribune Exec’s Memos Invite Staff Derision

When chief scientists from Google speak, the technology media hang on their every word. Contrast that to Tribune Co., whose executives increasingly look like the village idiots of the newspaper world. The company’s chief innovation officer, Lee Abrams, is fond of sending memos about how the industry can reinvent itself. They’re a rambling brain dump from someone whose lack of insight is almost painful to read. Now parodies are springing up, and P.J. Gladnick excerpts a few from the Poynter discussion forums. Read one of Abrams’ original works on LA Observed before looking at the knock-offs. This is some great satirical writing which is unfortunately being shared amongst only a few insiders. Steve Outing comments that Abrams probably disenfranchised his audience at the outset by admitting that he had “NO idea that reporters were around the globe reporting the news.” Outing titles his blog post bluntly: “Are we watching a Tribune train wreck in progress?”

Layoff Log

• The Eugene Register-Guard will cut its work force by 30 employees, or 12 percent of its 260-person full-time workforce. The paper will try to achieve the reductions through a combination of buyouts and unfilled vacancies, although the publisher wouldn’t rule out layoffs.
• The Cleveland Plain Dealer isn’t laying off – yet. Although two news outlets have reported that dozens of jobs have been cut, Publisher Terrance Egger issued a denial, saying the reports are “100% not accurate.” However, the debate may be a matter of semantics. “Given the current economic conditions and trends, we cannot maintain the current expense base and stay viable,” Egger told Editor & Publisher. A local alternative reporter wrote on his blog last week that executives have told staff that they plan “to cut 35 pages a week from its news pages and 20 percent of its workforce.” The paper employs 304 newsroom staffers.

Miscellany

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts shows why the people who run newspapers now are not the ones who will reinvent the industry. In a column that is striking in its lack of insight into the troubles facing his own industry, Pitts announces that he’s changed his thinking and now believes that maybe online should come first, that newspaper websites should be the principal online destination for local residents and that people should pay for that service. This was conventional industry wisdom circa 2001. Then Pitts notes that he’s come to this view reluctantly and mainly because he’s afraid of losing his job. Unfortunately, folks like Leonard will lose their jobs anyway because they’re being dragged kicking and screaming into the future. Cynical attempts at defining a solution only make them look more clueless. And solutions like those he proposes are what got the industry in trouble in the first place.

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One of the week’s more convoluted exercises in deductive reasoning comes from the Mercury News‘ Dale Bryant. In an unusual inversion of the rules of supply and demand, she blames the surging price of newsprint on the lack of demand: “With less construction, there is less wood waste that would have found its way to pulp mills and eventually to newsprint. In response to rising costs, newspapers have cut back on the use of newsprint, trimming the size of papers as well as turning to the Internet. That has caused prices to go even higher,” she writes. The result is that the Merc is cutting back on some of its print sections, but that’s actually in the readers’ interests. “[T]he choices we’ve made are based on our belief that what’s most important to our readers is that we continue providing news about your local community,” Bryant concludes, bringing new meaning to the concept of “less is more.”

The 15th World Editors Forum is going on in Göteborg, Sweden, and Editors Weblog is providing exhaustive coverage. A lot of the talk has been about the new, integrated newsroom and the reinvention of journalism. Here are some highlights.

• Two researchers discuss a study analyzing the five stages of news production and how journalism organizations are involving readers in each. Not surprisingly, most news outlets still don’t ask readers for much input until after the story is published, although a few are experimenting with early intervention. News editors still see their gatekeeper role as vital, the researchers say.
• Sweden’s Östersund Posten has launched a hyperlocal experiment involving 101 unpaid bloggers to write about community issues. Traffic is up 60% and so is advertiser interest, although no financial figures are cited.
• The CEO of Denmark’s Det Berlingske Officin, and editor-in-chief of Berlingske Tidende says journalists must give up their gatekeeper role and adapt to a new style of reporting that stresses reader participation and links. “The reader has broken the old circle of power,” says Lisbeth Knudsen.
• The managing editor of The Wall Street Journal’s wsj.com tells how an integrated approach to news reporting has helped double online traffic in the last year. Almar Latour says journalists are now encouraged to incorporate video, photos and informational graphics into their work. It hasn’t been easy to convince writers to put down the pen and pick up the camera, though. One tactic that’s helped has been the Most Popular List, a constantly updated report on the stories that are getting the most traffic. The list has generated healthy competition between reporters.
• The assistant managing editor of the UK’s Daily Telegraph tells how one-week training programs intended to help the newsroom adapt to multimedia have improved camaraderie and morale
• The editor-in-chief of Germany’s Tide sings the praises of citizen journalism as a cost-effective way to develop content, but warns that citizen “reporters” need to be trained that quality is as raw content. The paper has trained almost 200 ordinary folks, who now contribute an hour-and-a-half of video a day to the site, says Werner Eggert.
• The editor-in-chief of the national Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad tells how adding weekend editions and offering defecting readers the chance to switch to a smaller weekend-only package has doubled circulation. Erik Bjerager says the new editions are less newsy and more focused on Christian values.
• The Innovations International Media Consulting Group presents its annual survey and calls upon newspapers to be more innovative. It singles out several papers for praise, including The Spokesman Review of Spokane, WA, which has invited anyone in the community to attend its daily news meeting.
• The managing editor of India’s Mint business newspaper tells how his publication survived in a highly competitive market by making journalistic ethics a differentiator.
• The founder and editor-in-chief of Rue89.com tells of journalism without print and says that life is good. The French website combines professional journalism with blogger and reader input to create rich content at low cost. Many of the best stories have come from reader comments, says Pierre Haski.
• Svetlana Khoroshev, whose role at Russian business newspaper Delovoy Peterburg isn’t identified, says the print publication has managed to connect with the famously print-averse youth audience by incorporating content from a popular MySpace-like community and spreading word-of-mouth through entrepreneurs.
• The head of development at Norway’s VG Multimedia tells how the popular vg.no news website for adults was able to extend its appeal to the youth audience by launching a social network. Jo Christian Oterhals says Nettby.no now has 61% of the teen market, although the model hasn’t necessarily transplanted well to other countries.

Charles Layton of the American Journalism Review is the latest to run the numbers and see little hope for the major metro daily. It turns out that a simple forecast of revenue trends last fall by Recovering Journalist’s Mark Potts was probably too rosy in envisioning a straight annual decline of five percent in print revenues offset by a growth rate of 20% in online revenues. When you extrapolate the recent numbers reported by the Washington Post, you come up with uglier picture.

Revenues decline through 2014 before bottoming out and beginning a slow upward climb. However, by that point the Post is less than two-thirds its current size, and it doesn’t get back to its current size for many years. And the Post, by the way, is better positioned than most newspapers to survive the coming collapse of print advertising. Layton concludes what readers of NDW have long known: many major metro dailies will fail completely. Quoting Potts: “If a big newspaper in a metropolitan area dropped dead right now, nobody under 30 would care.” He stops short of agreeing with our forecast of five survivors in the US by 2025, but he believes many markets will be left without a newswpaper.

Layton quotes Miles Groves, formerly of the American Newspaper Association: “Newspapers had time to take control of the digital world and be the owner of that franchise and we didn’t do it.That opportunity has come and gone.” Groves expects free distribution newspapers to take up much of the slack in cities that can’t support a major metro daily. (via Romenesko).

Forecast of Mass Media Death Wasn’t Wrong, Only Premature

Slate’s Jack Shafer recalls Michael Crichton’s 1993 forecast of the death of mass media within a decade and says Crichton’s only mistake was timing. “Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false.”

 

In a follow-up interview with Shafer, Crichton confesses that he got a few other details wrong. He expected that customized services would emerge online to satisfy people’s information needs. However, that job seems to have fallen to people’s friends networks instead. “It may be that ‘media’ was never as important as we who work in it imagine it was,” Crichton says. He adds that newspapers and broadcast outlets continue to feed pabulum to readers, who no longer had to consume it. “The biggest change is that contemporary media has shifted from fact to opinion and speculation,” he tells Shafer. And he suggests some ideas for big stories that the media isn’t covering.

 

Murdoch Sees Plenty of Headroom for WSJ

Rupert Murdoch sees a brighter future for print. “Print will be there for at least 20 years, and outlive me,” he tells The Wall Street Journal‘s Walt Mossberg in an interview at the D conference. Note that he didn’t say “newspapers.” Murdoch does think the Journal will do fine. “New York Times charges $500 a year for subscription…now we charge about $150 a year. We still have a long way to go.” But he adds that the Journal has too much management overhead. “Every piece of story in WSJ has on average about 8.3 editors involved…that is ridiculous. You have to get all of the facts in half the space.” (via Romenesko).

Layoff Log

• The Seattle Times Co. is reportedly laying off workers at its Maine newspapers. The Newspaper Guild in Portland, Maine, says the Portland newspapers would lay off up to 35 employees. However, the parent company hasn’t confirmed the report. The Seattle Times has been besieged by the weak business climate in its area and has been scrambling to unload its Maine properties, which are a legacy of the owner Blethen family.
• Cablevision Systems Corp. hasn’t yet taken ownership of Newsday from Tribune Co., but heads are rolling nonetheless. Newsday reported on Friday it had laid off 32 employees, half in operations management and half from Star Community Publishing. The paper already cut 120 positions in March.
• The Commercial Appeal newspaper in Memphis is cutting 55 jobs from its 700-person staff because of slow advertising sales. Cuts will be completed by July 1. The Scripps-owned daily has a circulation of about 150,000.

Let’s look at some recent stories about publishers who are reinventing traditional news operations and creating innovative new models. This is inspiring stuff.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on how startup 8020 Publishing is producing two beautiful magazines consisting almost entirely of reader-contributed content. Everywhere is a travel magazine and JPG is for photo enthusiasts. People vote on the work that others submit and the best stuff goes into print. Photographers get a check for $100 and a year’s subscription. Big money apparently isn’t needed: the contents of the April/May issue of JPG was culled from photos uploaded by 16,278 submitters.

What’s especially remarkable about the model is its efficiency. The two magazines are produced by a staff of just 19 people. Both titles are expected to be profitable within a year and the company is looking to expand into other markets. “Any human interest can become a magazine,” says Halsey Minor, the CNet founder whose VC firm owns 8020.

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The Hartford Courant has set up an online gathering place for citizens and is reverse-publishing in print. iTOWNS invites readers to submit news briefs, events, photos and videos to a website, with guidance from a local staff member. Every Sunday, selected content is published in six regional print editions. All the content comes from the community. “We reached over 3/4 of our ad goal before the first print edition was published. Amazingly we did all of this without a single new hire,” the Courant‘s designer tells Charles Apple.

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The UK’s Press Gazette reports on ambitious plans at Guardian News & Media to overhaul its editorial operations. The company is merging the news staffs of The Guardian, The Observer and Guardian.co.uk in a platform-agnostic structure in which journalists working in specialty “pods” and feed stories to the appropriate department editors for publication in a variety of media. One radical concept: journalists will have the freedom to publish directly to their audiences on timely stories, without the intercession of an editor. Editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger says, “In the newspaper world, if a bomb goes off in Burma or there’s a flood in the Philippines, suddenly your story is taken down to two paragraphs. In this world the reporter isn’t going to have to hop around on foot to speak to [national news editor] Nick Hopkins – he can just publish it.”

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Writing on Publishing 2.0, Scott Karp praises a New York Times blogger for practicing good link journalism. The online story he cites is one on oil prices in Mike Nizza’s The Lede. Nizza effectively consolidates information from more than a dozen sources into a summary piece and then links to the source material like crazy. “The value for the reader here is enormous…not only do they get Times blogger Mike Nizza’s framing and perspective, they get links to all of this original reporting and analysis on this issue,” Karp writes. The link journalism model is an emerging form of reporting that makes the journalist as much filter as a reporter. As newspapers can get over their not-invented-here syndromes, they’ll come to understand the reader value this provides.

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The Society of Professional Journalists has embraced citizen media. The venerable organization recently launched three regional seminars to teach anyone who’s interested how to report the news. “There are quite a few bloggers, particularly in larger cities, who do work on a par with any journalist,” SPJ President Clint Brewer told Steve Johnson of the Chicago Tribune. Attendance at the $25-a-day sessions was underwhelming, Johnson reports, but the motivations of the attendees were an interesting mix of civic pride, activism and curiosity.

And Then There’s Also Denial, Distrust and Sneakiness

• USA Today publisher Al Neuharth whistles past the graveyard, trumpeting miniscule circulation gains by his paper and The Wall Street Journal as evidence of the health of the industry. “That’s why newspaper-oriented media companies have a bright future,” he says. For another take on the same circ figures, see our post from that day. Gannett closed yesterday at $29.25, nearly 70% off its five-year high. (via Editors Weblog)
• The UK’s Guardian asks ordinary citizens “How much do you trust the following [new organizations] to tell the truth?” and finds that faith in media has fallen sharply. Broadcast journalists from the country’s ITV commercial network have fallen the farthest, from 82% to 51% in five years. Trust in broadsheet papers is down 22% to 43%, and local outlets are trusted by just 18% of the population. Even the BBC is down. (via Editors Weblog)
• Meanwhile, Editor & Publisher reports on the Audit Bureau of Circulation’s decision to reclassify copies given away in exchange for advertising consideration as part of its new “verified” circulation class. The concern is that some publishers are using free or almost-free copies to plug holes in their circulation reports. The big newsweekly magazines are especially fond of this tactic.

And Finally…

Alan Mutter reports on a free-paper war breaking out in the most unlikely place: filthy-rich Palo Alto, CA. The new entrant is the Palo Alto Daily Post, launched by two founders of the Palo Alto Daily News, a freebie that they sold to Media News Group in 2005. Mutter notes that free newspapers tend to target urban commuters, which makes this leafy San Francisco bedroom community a strange place for a showdown of this kind. Palo Alto residents are more likely to be seen reading pecking at their BlackBerries while driving 70 mph than reading a newspaper, he says.

The New York Times has added an automated news feed to its technology page called Technology Headlines From Around the Web. Saul Hansell writes with no small amount of pride about how this robo-feed actually includes content that the Times doesn’t control. Thus the Times moves confidently, even arrogantly, into the 21^st century.

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McClatchy’s April revenue fell 14.6%. That’s revenue, not profit. The newspaper chain’s exposure to the weak Florida and California markets has hit it harder than most publishers. Revenue from its California newspapers was off 22.8%. Real estate and recruitment advertising sales were both off more than 35%.

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The Sumter, S.C. Item will stop publishing on Monday. More newspapers are likely to follow this model as business continues to decline. Monday is the least profitable day of the week for most newspapers, while Sunday is the cash cow, of course.

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Strange bedfellows: The Record of Hackensack, N.J., and the Herald News of West Paterson, N.J. will combine their copy desks and photo departments. The consolidation of six separate operations into two is expected to save $800,000 annually and cut staff by 23%. The papers are longtime rivals, but with different audiences. They say this is the least disruptive cost-saving idea they could come up with.

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European thirtysomethings like news sites, says Jupiter Research. Its survey finds that 42% of online Europeans regularly visit online news sites, which is nearly three times the number who hang out in social networks. Keep in mind that Jupiter is the research firm that predicted that 35% of large companies would have blogs by the end of 2006. Two years later, that number is hovering around 12%.

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The Associated Press is refining a new model for reporting breaking news it calls “1-2-3 filing.” Editors Weblog describes the process in an interview with AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll. Step one is a 50-character headline. Step two is 130-word summary and step three is something more that she didn’t specify. It sounds a lot like the way the AP has worked for a century. “”It doesn’t sound radical when you say it out loud, but it is if you inject it into your daily news decisions,” Carroll says. We’ll have to take her word for that.

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YouTube has launched a citizen journalism channel called Citizen News. It’ll aggregate videos from self-described video journalists. The vid service has hired a person with the title of News Manager, and she asks the community for ideas and suggestions in this post on the YouTube blog. David Chartier at Ars Technica is skeptical. He notes that credibility has been hard to come by in fledgling citizen efforts like CNN’s iReport. YouTube’s choice of a young person in her 20s to head the effort does raise questions about its commitment. While Olivia no doubt reflects YouTube’s core demographic profile, she doesn’t exactly exude journalism experience. (via Romenesko)

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Here’s a good podcast on the future of news. The topic is “Navigating Media Upheaval” and the panelists are an assortment of long-time journalists who are now navigating change with new companies. Best line is from former Wall Street Journal Publisher Gordon Crovitz. Asked what mainstream news organizations need to do to remain relevant in the new world, he suggests, “The role of the media is to mediate.” He then goes into the possible mediation opportunities between different groups, including advertisers. Bottom line: newspapers’ opportunities are to tap into very specific geographically defined groups, but most aren’t doing a very good job. Other panelists are Neil Chase, VP of author services at Federated Media, Ken Doctor, affiliate analyst at Outsell; and Jeanette Gibson, editor-in-chief of News@Cisco. The session is ably moderated by Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey.

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And finally, more morbid but priceless humor from The Onion.

The devastating earthquake in China this week was the latest in a string of incidents that cast the spotlight on the Twitter microblogging service and its value to news organizations. Jeff Jarvis has called Twitter “an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging,” but it’s really more than that. Twitter redefines the time value of news and is a critical tool in the development of citizen journalism. Individuals with cell phones can now be the eyes and ears of the world if they happen to be on the spot for a news event. Editors Weblog outlines the value of Twitter’s simplicity and open interface, which encourages people to experiment with new applications.

Writing on Global Voices, Mong Palatino notes that Twitter became a primary source of information about the recent cyclone disaster in Myanmar. We noted earlier a UK paper’s use Twitter to beat the BBC in local election coverage.

News organizations should see Twitter as an opportunity. Which paper will be the first to create a hyperlocal portal around a network of Twitter feeds provided by readers? If the mission of newspapers is to report the news quickly, shouldn’t they be outfitting reporters with Twitter accounts and streaming those feeds on their websites? Why haven’t any U.S. newspapers embraced this valuable tool yet?

CBS’s Daring CNET Play

Is CBS’s purchase of CNET a stroke of genius or a desperate play for relevance in the digital age? It does appear that CBS is serious about the Internet. In addition to laying off 160 employees recently, the network reportedly initiated talks with CNN about outsourcing some of its reporting work. Collectively, this could indicate that CBS is giving up the ghost on TV news and turning it attention to being an important player online. Alan Mutter questions the high price CBS paid for an online network that no one else appeared to want, but sees strategic value to CBS. The company certainly deserves credit for making some bold recent moves to reshuffle its cost structure and focus on the future instead of chasing a dying TV news model into the ground.

Hyperlocal Innovation Emerges Offshore

If the future of newspapers is hyperlocal, as many people think, then organizations outside the U.S. may lead the charge. Editors Weblog reports on lessons from a Finnish newspaper that is evolving an activist model that taps into issues that matter to the community. The editor-in-chief says the secret is to focus on soft stories that strike an emotional chord in readers and to pay attention to community issues that matter, such as the cleanup of a local park.

The Liverpool Daily Post is opening up its newsroom to observation and comment from its readers. People can see how decisions are made and contribute their ideas and comments to the process. What a concept. Newspapers demand transparency from the organizations they cover, yet the decision-making process in most newsrooms is as opaque as smoked glass.

Editor & Publisher reports on experiments in Latin America in which citizens do most or all of the reporting. The concept of citizen involvement is central to the Latin American newsgathering process, says Mark Fitzgerald. Many of the standard rules of journalism are suspended. “Irreverence is valued.”

Bloomberg Expands Editorial Footprint

Can a maker of computer terminals become an online media giant? We may be about to find out. Bloomberg LP has hired the former top editor of Time Inc. and The Wall Street Journal, to the new position of chief content officer. Bloomberg makes most of its money selling data terminals used by stockbrokers and other financial professionals, but there have been rumblings that the company, which was founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, wants to burnish its newsgathering capabilities.

Pearlstine has spent the last year and a half in the private equity world, but it sounds like news is in his blood. Bloomberg has been growing its footprint in that area. It now has 2,300 employees , nearly double its 2001 size, and it has been growing its financial news service, television and radio operations. With Michael Bloomberg’s term in office set to end next year, there’s been considerable speculation about what would happen when he returns to business. It looks like we’re about to find out.

And Finally…

• Newspapers may soon face another threat, according to Alan Mutter: the huge ecological burden of print publishing. “A prototypical publisher selling 250,000 newspapers on each of the 365 days of the year adds nearly 28,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,” the Newsosaur says. “That’s roughly equivalent to the CO2 spewed by almost 3,700 Ford Explorers being driven 10,000 miles apiece per year.”
• Journal Register Co., which is on life support pending payment of a $625 million debt this summer, has been offered a $25 million cash infusion from a current investor, who is demanding “a number of concessions” in return. Those concessions weren’t specified.
• Two Washington Post icons are accepting the newspaper’s buyout offer: David Broder and Tony Kornheiser. Broder will continue as a contract columnist. Kornheiser’s future with the Post is less certain.
• McClatchy Co. Chairman, President, and CEO Gary Pruitt said the company is open to selling the 49.5% share of the Seattle Times Co. it acquired as part of the purchase of Knight Ridder Inc. in 2006.

After stating confidently last week that his deal to buy Newsday was as good as done, Rupert Murdoch abruptly pulled out of the bidding, ceding ownership to Cablevision. Thus ends a month of speculation about Murdoch’s supposedly devious strategy to corner the New York market and then spread is his publishing empire westward.

Maybe.

As Newsday points out in its own outstanding coverage of the saga, Murdoch walked away from the Dow Jones deal several times before eventually settling on the price he wanted. So the concession to Cablevision could be a ruse meant to force Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell to make a decision (Alan Mutter has a fine analysis of the dire circumstance at the Tribune, whose debt service obligations were an incredible 24% of revenues in the first quarter).

On the other hand, as Newsday points out, a sale to Murdoch could have raised significant antitrust and regulatory issues. With Zell under intense pressure to generate cash, a quick sale to the cash-rich Cablevision could be a more practical option.

For now, it appears that this story is over. Murdoch was reportedly having a grand old time at the Time 100 gala dinner in New York last week, while Mortimer Zuckerman sulked in a corner. Murdoch conceded to a reporter that he might have been a bit hasty in declaring victory in the bidding a day earlier. His demeanor didn’t indicate that he was tired or frustrated about the sudden collapse of the deal. Rather, his relaxed confidence may have been that of a skilled card player waiting to see if his bluff will be called.

Small Town News Outlet Writes New Rules

Columnist Jerry Large of the Seattle Times tells the story of a community newspaper that is thinking differently. The Orting News is an online service that’s filling a void left by the death of a local newspaper. It has ramped up to 14,000 subscribers with a model in which nearly all the reporting is done by members of the community. Anyone can submit an article, and the only fact-checking is an e-mail verification that the sender is who he or she says. Any disputes or corrections are sent directly to the writer. Paid writers cover the really important stuff.

An interesting comment Large’s column is this one: “The Orting News isn’t journalism.” Really? According to who?

Losses & Layoffs

• In what has become an all-too-common refrain of late, Gannett said it’s offering buyouts to about 160 workers at five of its six newspapers in New Jersey. If there aren’t enough takers, layoffs are likely.
• Editor & Publisher cites an SEC filing in which McClatchy estimates its 49.5% stake in the publisher of The Seattle Times has fallen more than a third since last December and 88% from its value at acquisition in late 2006.
• Community newspaper publisher GateHouse Media reported a first-quarter net loss of $28.8 million compared to a $6.1 million loss a year ago. Total revenues were up 78% but same-property revenues fell 4.2%. Gatehouse’s strategy is to buy up newspapers and then use free cash flow to pay out dividends that drive up it stock price. However, even that strategy doesn’t appear to be working these days.

Nick Denton says the New York Times should abandon the news-opinion divide and let its reporters and editors insert commentary into their stories. They already do it by quoting sources sympathetic to their point of view, so why not stop pretending and inject a little color into a paper whose impartiality has become a liability? The arrival of blogs at the Times has effectively undermined any pretense of objectivity already and management’s efforts to clarify the wall between opinion and news look increasingly flimsy.

Denton is echoing points that Eric Alterman made a bit less pugnaciously in his New Yorker piece of two months ago. Newspapers started as vehicles for publishers to express their opinions. The concept of an impartial press is a recent phenomenon. Readers are smart enough to make up their own minds about what to believe. What’s wrong with opinion?

Jeff Jarvis agrees with Denton, noting that Times blogs have given him the opportunity to get the perspective of reporters whose work he’s read for years. These people know a lot about the subjects they cover. Why bottle up that perspective behind an artificial veil of neutrality.

Business Blues

Rupert Murdoch took an early victory lap, declaring that he’ll be the chosen owner of Newsday by next week, despite the existence of a richer bid from Cablevision and the likelihood that Mortimer Zuckerman will raise his offer. Murdoch pledged to continue Newsday’s commitment to strong local coverage and underlined his confidence by announcing a surprise doubling of the price of the New York Post to 50 cents. The E&P account also refers to Murdoch’s plans to build a single printing facility to publish Newsday, the Post and The Wall Street Journal. Zuckerman’s Daily News will have its hands full competing with those economies of scale.

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With the newspaper industry suffering from the flu, Sun Times Media Group (STMG) has lapsed into pneumonia. The publisher reported a $35.8 million loss in the first quarter, compared to a loss of $4.8 million a year ago. Advertising revenue fell 12.6%, which is considerably more than declines at most papers. We wrote earlier about speculation that the Chicago Sun-Times may be the next big metro daily to fold, in part because of factors that transcend the industry’s crisis. STMG said it’s on track to cut expenses by $50 million by June 30 and is exploring strategic alternatives.

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Tribune Co. posted an 8% drop in revenue, but the results were helped by growth in the broadcast sector. Newspaper revenue was off 11%. More worrisome is that cash flow shrank to $200 million from $239 million a year ago. That’s not good for a company that has a big debt payment looming at the end of the year.

And Finally…

• The Newark Star Ledger and hyperlocal website Baristanet.com are teaming up to launch a print product, a guide to Montclair, N.J. The magazine goes out to 70,000 readers next week. This is one example of how print/online partnerships can be win-win propositions.
• The San Diego Union-Tribune fired three top people who directed the company’s online products, but apparently didn’t do it very well. San Diego Weekly Reader says the trio positioned the online unit internally as competitive with the print news team, which didn’t do wonders for morale. There was also a disastrous radio venture.
• When all else fails, pray. That’s the mission of PrayingForPapers.com, a site that “is just asking that anyone who cares about their fellow journalists devote part of their prayer time to ‘Pray for Papers.'” The site’s tag line is an excerpt from Exodus that betrays the enormity of the industry’s task. (Via E&P)

The New York Times tells the story of International Data Group’s (IDG) successful transition from the print to the online model, proving that it can be done (full disclosure: I worked for IDG for 15 years). IDG still has a lot of print publications, but the print component of its publishing revenue model has dropped from 86% in 2002 to 48% online today. The Web has not only picked up the slack but is actually driving growth of 10% annually, according to CEO Pat McGovern.

This story focuses on Infoworld, which was once a top technology title in the U.S. Buffeted by the rapid shift of its techie readers from print to the Web, Infoworld shut down its print edition a year ago. Today, it’s bringing in just as much money online as it did in print, only lthe margins are much better.

The technology trade media market is unique in several ways, but publishers should take heart that an online business model really does exist and that you really can get there.

Stirring Story From the Heartland

When The Times of Liberal, Ks., cut back from daily to three days a week last fall, readers took it as a slap in the face. The proud town of 20,000 thought it deserved better. So the publisher of the Times packed up, took 70% of his staff with him and launched the High Plains Daily Leader, a new daily newspaper (yes, you read that right) that distributed its first 7,000 copies on Sunday. Key details are unclear; the paper has no website yet and the AP report says nothing about who’s funding the venture. But its kind of thrilling to see that entrepreneurial spirit and reader advocacy are alive and well amid the pervasive gloom in the industry.

Labor Struggle Amid the Palms

The Santa Barbara News-Press laid off 10 employees last week, including two newsroom managers, in part because of financial damage caused by a Teamsters boycott. The trouble started two years ago, when most of the top editors collectively quit over allegations that the owner was interfering with editorial coverage. The owner shot back that all she was doing was preventing the editors from injecting their opinions into their reporting. So the editors voted to organize, the owner resisted, the Teamsters urged readers to cancel their subscriptions and apparently a lot of them did. Now we supposed the next move is up to the union. It’s hard to imagine all this unrest in such a pretty Pacific coast town.

Update: Craig Smith offers a lengthy perspective on the  News-Press‘ problems, laying the blame squarely at the feet of owner Wendy McCaw. Smith says McCaw has run the paper like a personal blog, micro-managing the editors and using threats and intimidation to keep staff in line. The large number of recent stories about animals is a consequence of McCaw’s passion for animal rights, he claims. Staff members live in fear.

Veteran Editors Sound Off on Industry Woes

Doug Fisher does what a good columnist should and challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that the newspaper industry should stop panicking and starting finding out where the readers are. Reporters and editors are too inclined to make assumptions, says Fisher, and a lot of the headlong rush to online delivery is driven by their gut belief that readers prefer to get their news that way. In fact, Fisher believes a lot of readers would gladly start taking a daily newspaper again if publishers could figure out how to make the product more useful.

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Veteran editor Jerry Ceppos says it’s time for the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) organizations to merge. The existence of two groups with similar charters and declining memberships is weakening both, says Ceppos, who’s a past APME president. He describes attendance at the recent ASNE meeting as being the worst he’s seen in 25 years. In writing this Poynter opinion piece, Ceppos ran the merger idea by officials from both groups. The APME basically trashed it while the ASNE sounded interested. The best part of the article is excerpts from the groups’ mission statements, which read like they were written on the back of cocktail napkins.

Survey Reveals Editors Realistic About Industry’s Future

The results of the annual Newsroom Barometer survey of 700 editors from around the world was just released, and it’s worth a scan at Editors Weblog. We found few big surprises in the numbers. Most editors believe news will be free in the future, the Internet will be the preferred delivery platform and journalists will need to use every medium at their disposal to tell a story. Nearly 60% think the decline in young readership is the industry’s biggest threat. Almost two-thirds expect some editorial operations to be outsourced.

If anything is remarkable about this survey, it’s that a significant minority of editors continues to curse the darkness. Nearly a third still believe that print “will be the most common way of reading the news in your country” in a decade. One-third also believe that readers will pay for news (although the ambiguous wording of this question may have skewed the results). Sadly, only 45% believe the quality of journalism will improve over the next decade, down from 50% in 2006. The research was conducted by Zogby International and commissioned by the World Editors Forum and Reuters.

And Finally…

• Trading volume of McClatchy stock was seven times higher than normal on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday. Nobody knows why.
• The New York Post has cut its trim size by about an inch and a half over the last two weeks, making itself almost square. True to its mission of informing the public, the paper won’t comment about why it did this or how much it expects to save.
• The Charlotte Observer has eliminated its telemarketing operation and laid off 13 employees, or about five percent of the paper’s total workforce. The Observer statement didn’t say the operation was being outsourced, but rather eliminated entirely. It will be interesting to see the effect on circulation.