By paulgillin | March 3, 2009 - 9:00 pm - Posted in Facebook, Fake News, Hyper-local, Solutions

The Associated Press wraps up the debate over public and non-profit funding for newspapers, concluding that the economics could work for a few large players but not for most metro dailies. The New York Times would need an endowment of about $5 billion to sustain its current newsgathering operation, for example. The more promising and popular approach is a targeted for-profit model like MinnPost.com and investigative journalism foundry GlobalPost.

The latter example is particularly interesting because GlobalPost was founded as a nonprofit but switched to a for-profit model after potential donors demanded too much accountability. The venture later raised $8 million from individual investors.

Steven Coll, former managing editor of the Washington Post and now president of the New America Foundation think tank says some big paper is going to go the endowment route eventually and “is going to have an advantage.” However, the piece also points out that the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, has had to lay off 30% of its staff, just like everybody else.


”Why a once-profitable industry suddenly seems as outmoded as America’s automakers is a tale that involves arrogance, mistakes, eroding trust and the rise of a digital world in which newspapers feel compelled to give away their content,” writes the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, in a tight summary of the last 50,000 or so words posted to this blog.


Final day at the Rocky Mountain News

Final day at the Rocky Mountain News

Kurtz uses last week’s closing of the Rocky Mountain News as a jumping-off point to tap into the industry’s angst over What Went Wrong. The story sheds little new light on the problem or the solutions but sums up the issues and possible solutions so much more succinctly than self-important opuses like the one last week in the New Republic. And it has a striking quote from Joshua Micah Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo (TPM) is often held up as an example of the focused model that may replace sprawling daily newsrooms. “If all the big papers disappeared right now and we replaced them with 50 TPMs, it wouldn’t come close to doing the job,” says Marshall, who employs just six people. “But we’re in a broader transformation where models like ours and others are going to evolve that can fill the void.”


TechDirt’s Mike Masnick rants about what he sees as the absurdity of newspapers’ plans to charge for content. He’s especially put out that Newsday, which has poor audience affinity to begin with, should lead the way. Charging for access to news websites isn’t just dumb, it’s arrogant, he says. Newspapers “always made their money selling the attention of their community to advertisers. But when they treat that community with contempt at the very same time that the community has many other options, it should be no surprise that the community goes away.” Masnick sees no chance for pay walls to work out. If anything, it will only accelerate the emergence of free alternatives.

Layoff Log

  • Two large upstate New York publishers are taking the ax to their payrolls. The Albany Times Union needs to cut its costs by 20% in order to stay viable, said Publisher George Hearst III. Employing blunt language, Hearst said the cuts were needed or the paper would be at risk. “The very survival of our enterprise hinges upon cost-cutting that must include the departures of people who are part of this company,” he said. While no numbers were mentioned, the paper’s total employment of 453 indicates a forthcoming reduction of about 90 jobs. Hearst called the advertising slowdown unprecedented. “I’ve been here two decades and I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
  • The Buffalo News plans to lay off 52 employees if union negotiations fail to achieve a breakthrough, says WKBW-TV. The station got hold of a memo publisher Stan Lipsey that lists 33 layoffs in circulation, eight each in editorial and classified advertising, two in accounting and one in marketing. The paper also extended a buyout offer that so far has had only lukewarm acceptance. While Guild negotiations continue, the paper has taken other cost-cutting measures, including a wage freeze for non-union employees and closing the Niagara County bureau. The newsstand price was also increased to 75 cents.
  • The Columbus Dispatch will lay off 45 people by April 3, citing an advertising slowdown. “We avoided staff reductions as long as possible long after many other news organizations took such action,” Publisher John Wolfe said, adding that readership is holding up pretty well but advertising is way down.
  • The Sacramento Bee will lay off 25 to 27 employees, but only if the Newspaper Guild agrees to a set of cost reductions that include pay cuts of up to 6 percent, limitations on vacation time and other sacrifices. If the union doesn’t agree, 11 additional newsroom jobs could be cut. The union represents 268 of the Bee’s 1,126 full- and part-time workers.
  • The Wilmington (N.C.) Star News says it will outsource the printing of the newspaper to a company that has not yet been named. Nearly 40 full-time workers in the mail room and press room could be laid off as a result.
  • The Bellingham (Wash.) Heraldis cutting 10 staff positions and reducing remaining workers’ salaries by up to 5%. A similar tack is being taken by the Myrtle Beach Sun News, which will cut 20 jobs, reduce the length of the work week and cut pay for all salaried employees.

Miscellany

The Salt Lake Tribune has so far managed to avoid layoffs, but its decision to cut a half page of op-ed material nevertheless drew cries of outrage from readers. Columnist Vern Anderson asks readers to keep it all in perspective. Circulation has held steady, but the situation in the industry is “somewhere between grim and dire.” Everyone is cutting back, he says.


Last Friday’s final edition of the Rocky Mountain News sold like wildfire,” according to an article in India’s Sify News. “Some buyers who succeeded in getting a copy wasted no time reselling them on eBay. Multiple copies of the paper were posted to the online auction house, with prices ranging from a penny to $14.99.”

And Finally…

bronsteinFormer San Franciso Examiner Editor Phil Bronstein identifies the one person who deserves the blame for the newspaper industry’s troubles: It’s him. Bronstein contributes a wry, Web-savvy and ultimately engaging insider’s perspective on the sequence of events that began in 1992 when he saw his first Web page and culminated last week with a colleague slumped in his chair muttering, “I thought I had this job till I retired.” Having read what sometimes feels like hundreds of angry screeds by resentful editors over the last two years, we were refreshed to find a refugee who’s managed to keep some perspective on it all and even find some humor. We guess we live on what Bronstein calls the “scold side” of the business.

By paulgillin | February 27, 2009 - 11:14 am - Posted in Facebook, Solutions

newsday_front_pageSomeone was going to have to step up and reverse the tide of free content, but Newsday?. Owner Cablevision Systems Corp. announced that it’s going to start charging for access to the newspaper’s website and transform it into a “locally focused cable service,” whatever that means. There were few details, but comments from Cablevision executives imply that the revamped Newsday.com will be packaged as a value-added service for cable customers. Ken Doctor thinks the idea is daffy in light of the fact that the average visitor to Newsday.com spends just four-and-a-half minutes there every month.

But Mark Cuban thinks this is a great idea. The Web 1.0 entrepreneur, who made billions on Broadcast.com, says newspapers should package up their website offerings as a subscription and sell it to cable owners, who will build it into their service fees right next to the Golf Channel. Who’s going to notice an extra 25-cent monthly fee for The New York Times after all? Probably no one, but we question whether a quarter a month from even 100 million subscribers is going to fund the Times’ sprawling news operation. Smaller dailies would see a tiny fraction of that bounty.

Cablevision is no doubt regretting that it ever even heard of Newsday. It paid what is now considered to be a vastly inflated $650 million for Newsday last year. Yesterday, it wrote down $402 million of that cost, pushing itself into the red for the quarter.

Bay Area Agonizes Over Chronicle Woes

chronicle_in_crisisNew American Media samples the opinions of editors from the ethnic press from around the Bay Area about the impact of the possible closure of the San Francisco Chronicle. The consensus is that it’s very bad news. Many community papers look to the Chron to provide basic city news coverage while their journals pick up the local and ethnic angle. With no major daily in town, editors also wonder how the Bay Area media that’s left is going to keep informed. TV and radio stations, in particular, rely on the daily newspaper to feed them local stories. Most of them are hurting too much to have any hope of filling in the gap that will be left if the newspaper disappears.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle‘s unions are meeting with management about how to achieve the $50 million in cost savings needed to keep the paper afloat. But even massive layoffs don’t solve this structural problem: It costs $10 to produce and deliver a $2 Sunday paper, according to Mother Jones.

By the way, Mark Potts has a great post about the lamentable state of the Chron‘s website as well as the uninspiring condition of newspaper websites in general. He hits the nail on the head in observing that newspaper owners believed from the very beginning that their websites should mimic their newspapers. This completely overlooked the fact that people using browsers have a lot more options than people using newspapers. So why include international news in a local website? He also notes that newspaper home pages are a cacophony of information that confuse and even alienate readers who can easily go somewhere else. Since most people arrive at them via Google anyway, wouldn’t it make more sense to focus the experience on a simplified and more focused individual article page?

Layoff Log

  • With the loss of 100 more jobs, including 30 in the newsroom, the Hartford Courant will have effectively cut its news staff by over 40% over the past year. The latest round of layoffs includes shutting down the Courant‘s Washington bureau and reducing the size of its state capitol reporting team by half. The newsroom will be trimmed to 135 people, down from 235 just a year ago.
  • Layoffs of 18 more people at the Memphis Commericial Appeal bring to 130 the number of jobs cut since last June, or at least we think it does. We told you that the paper announced 27 layoffs in November, but this Employment Spectator story says the actual number was 57. We agree that 55 people were furloughed last summer, only we reported the news in June while the Employment Spectator says July. The Commercial Appeal definitely employed 700 people before all this cutting began.
  • The Augusta (Me.) Chronicle is laying off across “a variety of departments,” according to a statement so devoid of detail that it could have been written in haiku.
  • The Buffalo News is considering layoffs because not enough people have taken up management on a buyout offer that includes a lump sum payment of at least $60,000. Go figure.

Miscellany

As part of its exit from the Rocky Mountain area, E.W. Scripps will transfer its 50% stake in the Boulder Camera to MediaNews Group, owner of the Denver Post. The move further consolidates MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton’s hold on the Denver-area news market. Singleton said nothing will change for now, but the company will share some content between the Post and the Camera and will also seek to “create new synergies.” In other words, expect layoffs.


Peter Chianca, a managing editor at GateHouse Media New England, writes a touching elegy for his hometown weekly newspaper, the Putnam County Courier. It was one of scores of local weeklies shuttered by the dying Journal Register Co. two weeks ago. While few people outside of Carmel, N.Y. probably even noticed the loss, Chianca tells of the vital role community weeklies play in doing a thankless task: “keep[ing] people informed about the things that are important to them when they get home at night.”

By paulgillin | February 19, 2009 - 7:49 am - Posted in Facebook, Hyper-local, Solutions

Five New York newspapers have banded together to exchange content in the largest such arrangement since the share-nicely craze began last year. The new group includes The Record of Hackensack, New Jersey, The Star-Ledger of Newark, the Times Union of Albany, the Buffalo News, and New York Daily News, which apparently organized the party.

Members will “assist each other in gathering news, sports and features materials, giving our readers access to more and expanded content from the top newspapers in each of the respective markets,” said Marc Kramer, CEO of the New York Daily News, in a very prepared statement.

No details were forthcoming, but the group issued a press release quoting top editors at all the participating papers making head-slapping “Why didn’t we think of this earlier?” statements.

The regional consortium trend was kicked off last April, when a group of five Ohio newspapers began posting all their daily stories on a private website where editors could pick and choose whatever they wanted. The Baltimore Sun and Washington Post are among other newspapers that have banded together in this way.

There was immediate speculation that the New York consortium was an excuse to lay off more newsroom employees. However, announced cutbacks at the Ohio Five haven’t been any greater than at other newspaper companies. The handshake deal is more likely aimed at setting members free from the Associated Press, which has been an industry whipping boy for the past year because of its license fees.

We’re interested in what you are seeing. If you subscribe to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, Toledo Blade, Cincinnati Enquirer and/or Akron Beacon Journal, please leave a omment and tell us if you’ve seen any noticeable difference in quality since those papers began sharing stories nearly a year ago.

State Aid and a Posthumous Polk

Blethen - hanging on

Blethen - hanging on

Publishers from the state of Washington pleaded with legislators for a special tax break yesterday, saying the severe recession has dealt a body blow to their already shaky business model. “Some of us, like The Seattle Times, are literally holding on by our fingertips today,” said Times publisher Frank Blethen, who presumably was not literally holding in by his fingertips at that very moment.

Publishers appeared before the state senate Ways and Means Committee to support a bill that would give them a tax break through 2015. While the measure would cost the state about $8 billion, lawmakers appear willing to help. The bill has bipartisan support.

In an ironic demonstration of the seriousness of the problems in Seattle, the Times covered the story with AP wire copy. 

Speaking of Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer may become the first newspaper to win a major journalism award posthumously. Mark Fitzgerald reports that Eric Nalder, the P-I‘s chief investigative reporter, has won a George Polk Award for his two-part series “Demoted to Private,” about waste by government military contractors. The P-I is due to close March 15 if a buyer can’t be found, meaning that at the April 15 ceremony, the award may be bestowed on a newspaper that no longer exists.

P.S. The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild will hold a meeting next week to see if it can rustle up enough enthusiasm to initiate an employee buyout of the P-I. In more robust economic times this idea might stand a chance, but it’s hard to believe employees are going to dig into their depleted savings to buy a money-losing operation.

Miscellany

Having already laid of 12% of its staff if 2008, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is now freezing wages and may impose a one-week furlough. Print revenue was down 10.4% in the fourth quarter and “We’ve seen that deterioration accelerate in the first weeks of 2009,”said publisher Betsy Brenner.


Journal Register Co.’s mass execution of scores of weekly newspapers got little media coverage because not that many people will miss the Millbrook Round Table. But an unsigned editorial in the Odessa American delivers a poignant message about the impact a local weekly’s closure has on a community. 


A blog called Brazosport News has word that the Houston Chronicle is about to cut 10% of its staff. It even has a memo from the publisher saying so. We can find no coverage of this story anywhere else.

And Finally…

tmid_babyYes we can. We just found it on Twitter. And if you came here looking for breaking news about the latest layoffs and cutbacks, you’re wasting your time. This is a daily blog, which is so last year. Instead, subscribe to The Media is Dying on Twitter. This anonymous microblogger is so speedy at documenting gloom and doom that he/she puts Romenesko to shame.  Fortunately for Romenesko, he gets more than 140 characters.

By paulgillin | February 18, 2009 - 7:41 am - Posted in Fake News, Google, Hyper-local, Solutions

alan-d-mutter-hed-shot-22608Many visitors to this website also frequent Reflections of a Newsosaur, a blog written by Alan Mutter, who is “perhaps the only CEO in Silicon Valley who knows how to set type one letter at a time.”

Mutter was a reporter and editor at major metro dailies for 20 years before transitioning to a successful career as a technology CEO in Silicon Valley. His blog combines an executive’s financial acumen with a journalist’s inquisitiveness. Newsosaur offers insight on the media industry’s financial condition that you just can’t get anywhere else. Not surprisingly, it is one of the top 10,000 blogs worldwide, according to Technorati.

Mutter particularly enjoys challenging conventional wisdom with mathematical fact. Early this week he poked holes in the recent excitement over micropayments by creating a likely revenue scenario. Using The New York Times as a subject, he concluded that micropayments would bring in less than $4 million a year, or enough to pay about 2% of its staff.  For small papers, they would amount to beer money. Pundits have come to rely on Mutter for reality checks like that.

Knack for Numbers

His financial analyses are his signature item. Mutter sounded the alarm about the newspaper industry’s growing debt load more than four years ago, and he has methodically documented the damaging role that debt has played in limiting the industry’s options. His Default-O-Matic documents the financial viability of major players, giving early warning of who’s likely to be next off the cliff.

A complete financial restructuring of the industry is likely, Mutter says. Debt has painted publishers into a corner and many will have no choice but to walk away from their obligations and let the banks and investors sort it out. It’s not that the core business model is so bad, he says. It’s that their financials stink.

Having reader Newsosaur for a couple of years, we thought it would be interesting to find out more about the person behind it. So we called up Alan Mutter and spent an hour on the phone with him. Our complete, lightly edited interview is below for you to stream or download.

Show Notes

:40 His day job; how Newsosaur got started
2:45 His background in newspapers and transition to high-tech executive
9:40 The same problems he was writing about in 2004 are still apparent today. “It’s been the same story for the four years. The difference is that publishers are running out of options.”
12:30 How the industry has responded to his warnings: “A lot of denial.”
15:00 How this mess could have been avoided: “Giving away all this content for free was the original sin.”

How newspapers failed to adapt their products to the unique environment of the Web.

22:00 The Coca-Cola analogy: A company adapts to continually changing market conditions
25:00 Newspaper companies have enjoyed “a phenomenal number of unfair advantages” that could have been exploited but executives failed to innovate. How rampant layoffs are destroying newspapers’ core strength.
28:00 Most broadcast outlets have almost no reporting staff; what happens when the local newspaper disappears?
30:30 “What will American democracy be in like in the absence of a vigorous press? We’ve never seen that. Ever.”
33:30 The dubious possibility that citizen journalists and bloggers will fill the vacuum.
37:40 The outlook for 2009: “It’s not that the underlying business is so bad but that these companies are heavily laden with debt.” Large-scale revaluations will be needed.
43:00 Threat to the core business: “When we come out of this, people will still buy cars but I’m not sure they’ll buy newspapers.”
45:00 Why micropayments and endowment solutions won’t work.
48:00 Who’s doing it right: innovation at the local level.
51:00 The Chicago Tribune‘s play for young readers.
53:15 How the Newsosaur blog has changed his world; the industry’s reaction.
56:00 Even at this late date, there are things that could be done. Have media companies called him for advice? “A few, but there’s room for more.”
57:30 How business models can successfully be blown up.

Download the interview (right-click and save)

Stream the interview:[audio:Alan_Mutter_NDW_Interview.mp3]

By paulgillin | February 11, 2009 - 8:44 am - Posted in Facebook, Fake News, Google, Hyper-local, Solutions

Over the last few weeks, the mood in the news industry has shifted from a kind of morbid resignation to one of fiery indignation over the forces that are tearing apart a once-mighty business. The promising development is that media supporters have stopped trying to resurrect a dying print industry and are now focused on saving the essence of quality journalism. They’re getting creative in their approaches. Below are a few recent opinions.

Lean, Mean Media Machine

Writing in the Dallas Morning News, John Chachas says the time has come for the US government to jettison old cross-ownership rules and grant media companies broad license to prosecute people who steal their content.

Chacas, who co-heads the media practice at Lazard, proposes granting news organization “a finite (36-month) anti-trust law exemption to permit deployment of an industry-wide system to track and charge for re-use of their content.” Today’s bloggers thumb their noses at the organizations whose content they steal, and newspapers’ unwillingness to defend their value is their undoing, he says.

Chacas also calls on the government to repeal laws that prohibit media cross-ownership in regional markets. Information no longer knows geographic boundaries, he says, and laws that make it easier for the Los Angeles Daily News to merge with The New York Times than with the Orange County Register are a set of handcuffs on media businesses. Conversely, it’s no longer relevant for the government to try to preserve multiple voices in a market when readers and advertisers no longer believe they’re needed. His four-point proscription is an intelligent call for legal and legislative change.

Reinvent the Model; Save What’s Best

The New York Times rounds up opinions from thought leaders around the industry. The consensus: stop trying to revive the traditional model and focus on finding places to add value.

MinnPost.com CEO Joel Kramer says news organizations will need to derive more revenue from readers in the future, even if that means shrinking circulation: “A newspaper that sold 400,000 copies at 50 cents daily and $1.25 on Sunday might sell only 100,000 at four times the price. But there would be a business incentive to keep quality high, because each extra copy sold should increase profit, not subtract from it.”

Steven Brill mostly agrees. He says the key is to find the crevices where local information needs aren’t being served: “Local newspapers are the best brands, and people will pay a small amount online to get information – whether it be a zoning board meeting or a Little League game – that they can’t get anywhere else.”

Geneva Overholser of the Annenberg School of Journalism is in the same camp. She sees value in a hybrid of community journalists and professional publishers. “These changes will be difficult for newspapers which have considered themselves the primary newsgathers, but they may lead to the next chapter of American journalism,” she writes.

Craig Newmark, whose Craigslist.org is often seen as the Great Satan by the newspaper industry, says media companies need to involve their readers in the process of determining what they do. Quoting David Weinberger, Newmark says, “a paper should be perceived as ‘ours’ (the public) not ‘theirs’ (the owners).” Perhaps the Great Satan is really the newspaper owners.

Author Andrew Keen picks up the thread, suggesting that the future is in a layered model in which community members contribute information that’s then organized by staffs of professional editors. “Rather than slithering into the democratic swamp of crowd-generated content, smart local publishers should focus on their core expertise – the organization and curation of information by professionals,” he writes.

Edward Fouhy of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism tells the story of three small operations that are proud of providing balanced, accurate coverage of local news. “Citizens are inventing a new form of locally based and financed journalism while preserving the values of accuracy, objectivity and independence,” he writes, hopefully.

There are more than 180 comments as of this morning. Thankfully, they are mostly free of the partisan politican ranting that seems to plague this discussion.


BTW, Jack D. Lai thinks micropayments are stupid and he’s got a long list of links to people who agree. It’s an impressive archive and we really hope to get around to reading it all.

Micropayments with a Twist

Steve Outing opens his Editor & Publisher column by dissing micropayments (“that model will only hasten newspapers’ death spiral”) and then goes on to make a passionate case for…micropayments! Okay, we’re oversimplifying. What Outing doesn’t like is the idea that each publisher would have its own system for charging people a few cents to consume its content, sort of like running a PayPal button in the sidebar. He’s right: That’s a dumb idea. The solution may be in a service like Kachingle, a system that distributes payments to website owners based upon their readership.

Kachingle users only have to set up and fund one account. Whenever they visit a site that’s part of the network, Kachingle allocates a portion of their account to that provider. If Newspaper Death Watch gets 20% of your monthly visits, then the owners get 20% of the payment you set aside. Thanks! Readers decide how much they want to pay and Kachingle takes care of the accounting. In theory, the value of the network grows as membership expands. The New York Times may be helping Newspaper Death Watch by joining the network, but the equation also works in reverse. Somehow, we think we’d get the better of that deal.

Steve Outing is nothing if not thought-provoking. Although this column is a tad more enthusiastic than his usual fare, he’s found an interesting model to promote. Hopefully, the column will still be available at SteveOuting.com after E&P inevitably pulls it off its website. You can also comment at SteveOuting.com, but not at E&P.

Miscellany

Last month we told you about The Printed Blog (“Extra! Extra! Blog All About It!”) a startup that’s proposing to reinvigorate print publishing by harvesting content from local bloggers. Simon Owens called up founder Joshua Karp and found an Internet entrepreneur who’s serious about print.

“The print newspaper doesn’t need to go away simply because it’s on paper,” Karp told him. The problem is that publishers haven’t revisited the way they produce their printed products to include the work of the community. The Printed Blog is on thin financial footing unless more funding can be found, Karp said. He’s funding the first issues himself and needs to find venture capital “over the next few weeks.”


They dribble out the news about cuts at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in this story. The paper will lay off 17 people but wait, there will probably be more. The neighbor island bureaus will be shut down. Oh, and there’ll be a redesign from a broadsheet to a tabloid. Praent Oahu Publications is also discontinuing its Friday edition of the MidWeek tabloid. You have to stick with this story to the end in order to learn everything.


The Charleston Post and Courier has laid off 25 employees after a buyout failed to achieve cost reduction goals. When the company announced its buyout offer in July, the newspaper reported that it had 513 full-time and part-time employees. It will employ 460 people after the latest cuts.

By paulgillin | February 6, 2009 - 3:42 pm - Posted in Facebook, Solutions

cloudYesterday was black Thursday in newspaper land as four media companies reported dismal earnings, seven small newspapers shut down and publishers braced the public for more layoffs.

Yet there were some glimmers of hope in the bad news, including signs that deterioration in the advertising business may be slowing and online sales are picking up. We’ll start with the earnings news.

Rupert Murdoch’s $5.5 billion acquisition of Dow Jones & Co. in 2007 drew criticism on Wall Street because of the steep 65% premium the newspaper magnate paid for a flagship title in a declining market. It looks like the critics were right. Citing “the worst global economic crisis since News Corp was formed 50 years ago,” Murdoch’s company posted its largest quarterly loss ever and wrote down $8.4 billion in assets yesterday.

While News Corp. didn’t specify the size of the Dow Jones write-down, analysts speculated that it was responsible for much of the $3.6 billion goodwill charge. The company’s net loss was $6.41 billion, compared with a profit of $832 million a year earlier. Of course, write-downs make such comparisons meaningless. Revenues fell 8% to $7.88 billion. Adjusting for the write-downs, News Corp. still badly missed analyst estimates. Its quarterly operating profit was 12 cents per share, well below the consensus of 19 cents.

Murdoch has often been mentioned as a possible suitor for The New York Times, but in an analysts call yesterday, he dismissed speculation that he’s looking to make acquisitions. Ever the optimist, though, Murdoch found a silver lining in the dense clouds overhanging the media industry. “There has never been a greater appetite for news in the community,” he said. ” I have great faith in the newspapers, and if we continue the way we’re going, we may even get lucky and not have so much competition.”

Coincidentally, The shoe finally dropped at News Corp’s Wall Street Journal, which avoided layoffs in 2008. Twenty-five newsroom positions were eliminated, 11 by attrition and 14 by layoff. The Journal‘s New York-based fashion and retail group will be closed and the Los Angeles and Boston bureaus will each lose a job. The editorial staff numbers about 760 people.

Ugly Numbers, But With a Few Bright Spots

If you’re looking for silver linings, you can find a couple of them in otherwise dismal earnings news from McClatchy Co., Belo Corp. and Scripps Networks Interactive. The companies all reported predictably horrible earnings on Thursday, but there are signs that the revenue free-fall is abating. Belo, which has been slashing and burning payroll recently, actually beat Wall Street estimates by a couple of cents on revenues that fell 9%, in line with estimates. Scripps also beat the street on operating earnings of 55 cents a share, compared to forecasts of 51 cents.

Belo said first-quarter ad sales were about the same as the fourth quarter of 2008, indicating that some stability just possibly has taken hold. However, keep in mind that fourth-quarter sales were down 26% from a year earlier. McClatchy, which reported a $21.7 million quarterly loss, said overall sales continued to decline, but online revenues grew a reasonably healthy 10%. Both Belo and McClatchy made some progress toward paying down their debt, though they still owe over $1 billion and $2 billion, respectively. Scripps actually grew revenue in the quarter, although it slightly missed analyst estimates.

McClatchy is getting ready to swallow more bitter medicine. With classified revenues down 36%  and retail advertising off 10% in 2008, the company will cut at least another $100 million in expenses on top of staff reductions that have already trimmed its workforce by a third. Plans include continuing a freeze on executive salaries, eliminating executive bonuses, freezing pension plans and suspensing matching contributions to 401(k) plans. The company didn’t mention layoffs, but you can figure that one out. The Lexington (Ky.) Newspaper Guild doesn’t think McClatchy is going far enough in “declining undeserved bonuses or freezing bloated pay.” It appears to favor a public flogging, too.

Miscellany

The Daily Reporter of the Wichita, Kan. suburb of Derby is shutting down after 47 years. The last issue will be published Feb. 17. The closure puts six people out of work.


The Columbia county (N.Y.) Independent published its last issue today. The twice-weekly paper is owned by beleaguered Journal-Register Co.


The Provo Daily Herald of Utah will stop publishing five weekly newspapers it owns in American Fork, Pleasant Grove, Lehi, Lone Peak and Orem but won’t lay off any employees. Instead, coverage will be folded into a larger Daily Herald, a move intended to “strengthen the company’s core daily product.” The newspaper replaced the lost weeklies with a collection of localized websites that “will present news from all local schools, community groups, churches and local governments, and will feature a social marketplace.”


The Rexburg, Idaho Standard Journal will trim publication from five to three days a week. Starting March 3, the paper will be printed only on Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday instead of Tuesday through Saturday. No layoffs are planned, since the publisher expects to beef up its online coverage. The move is interesting in light of the fact that most publishers that are cutting production schedules start with the low-margin Tuesday and Saturday editions. The 5,300-circulation Standard Journal is choosing to keep them.


The publisher of the Anchorage Daily News is preparing his staff for more layoffs. In a memo to employees, J. Patrick Doyle said the “unprecedented and deepening financial crisis” will necessitate staffing cuts, but “we will work quickly to notify employees who may be affected. As we have just begun work on these plans now, you may not hear more from us for at least a few weeks.” Which should make for great morale in the newsroom.


For want of $1 million, Hearst Corp. has given up the right of first refusal for the Seattle Times for the next 74 years. In a development that is more confusing than illuminating, Hearst missed a regular $1 million payment that it has made for nearly a decade to Times owner Blethen Corp. in order to ensure that Hearst will get the first chance to buy the paper if Blethen ever puts it up for sale. What’s confusing is that Hearst is already bailing out of the Seattle market by putting the Post-Intelligencer up for sale, so why would it want to buy the Times? The two papers work under a joint operating agreement that shares some expenses and profits (losses) between them. There’s now a debate under way over whether the P-I will continue as an online-only entity and whether the terms of the JOA even permit that. Hearst is reportedly trying to wriggle out of the JOA, which neither company likes very much, anyway. Ironically, the existence of a legal agreement that was intended to keep two newspapers in Seattle may now prevent the P-I from continuing to publish. If you really want to untangle this, read the story.


The Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune Media Group laid off 48 people and eliminated home delivery to Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda. The newspaper has cut its full-time staff to 350 people, which is 40% lower than its peak at the height of the Florida real estate boom. We were in central Florida last week and saw entire office parks with tumbleweeds rolling through them.


Ellen Mrja has a Nov. 17, 2008 memo from Minneapolis Star Tribune publisher Chris Harte outlining 10 steps the newspaper must take to make it through the industry downturn. The goals are laudable but some are contradictory, in particular  “1. We must maintain products that our readers and advertisers will find useful enough to buy” and “2. We must reduce every cost we can.” We’re not sure why this memo hadn’t turned up before before.


The National Labor Relations Board dismissed an appeal of a local board ruling that found that Bay Area News Group didn’t discriminate against employees because of their union organizing activities.  The union had claimed that three of 29 employees laid off last June were unfairly targeted because they were trying to unionize the workforce.

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By paulgillin | February 4, 2009 - 2:10 pm - Posted in Facebook, Fake News, Google, Hyper-local, Solutions

Newspaper Project adNewspaper companies went on the offensive this week, launching a public relations campaign to rebut forecasts of their impending death and boasting that more people read a newspaper the day after the Super Bowl than watched The Big Game.

The group was conceived by executives from Parade magazine, which wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for its weekly insertion in Sunday newspapers, and people from three other companies: Community Newspaper Holdings, Philadelphia Media Holdings and Cox Newspapers. Philadelphia Media Holdings, which owns the Philadelphia Inquirer, is teetering on the brink of insolvency and Cox has put 29 of its newspapers up for sale. In other words, the group hardly represents the pinnacle of management excellence in a troubled industry.

Nevertheless, the Newspaper Project launched with a website and ads that appeared in 300 newspapers on Monday. Here’s a PDF, if you’re interested. So far, the website appears to be mainly a linklog of material that’s appeared elsewhere, but the slate of authors is impressive. “Future ads will highlight the civic value of news content and how well print advertising continues to work for many businesses,” says Poynter’s Rick Edmonds.

It’s good to see the industry standing up for itself, but it’s depressing to see this initiative so focused on print. We agree with Ken Doctor, who was quoted applauding the project by the AP but who pointed out correctly that a name like “Newspaper Project” demonstrates a backward-looking perspective at a time when the industry really needs to talk about the future. Running kickoff adds in 300 newspapers strikes us as a recursive exercise to promote the industry to its existing audience, although the decision was no doubt heavily influenced by the availability of free ad space. Perhaps the group will focus future messages on the essential role newspapers play as sources of online news. That message is more likely to resonate with the disconnected under-40 audience.

P.S. Speaking of Philadelphia Media Holdings, owner Brian Tierney has reportedly asked the governor of Pennsylvania for state aid to keep the Inquirer and Daily News afloat. State aid may be the only option, since the company already missed a debt payment last September and survives at the benevolence of its creditors.

P.P.S. Monday was “National Buy a Newspaper Day.” The grass-roots effort was conceived by reporter Chris Freiberg of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, who set up a Facebook group and recruited 20,000 people to pledge to do their part for at least one day. We did by picking up a copy of the Orlando Sentinel. Another Facebook group has now formed targeting Feb. 13 for a similar action.

Gillmor Weighs in On Nonprofit Debate

Last week’s New York Times op-ed promoting the idea of funding newspapers as non-profit ventures continues to draw the ire of new-media advocates. Dan Gillmor, who practically fathered the citizen journalism movement, bluntly dismisses the proposal by two Yale financial analysts as “shallow thinking” and says that plenty of innovative for-profit business models are emerging. Expanding on comments we reported earlier (see “Voice of Reason in Nonprofit Debate”) Gillmor argues that the flaw in current save-the-industry thinking is that the industry as we know it deserves to be saved. Newspapers “have been systematically looted over the years, to send money to far-off corporate headquarters to pay fat executive salaries and boost stock prices. Preserve them? Why would we want to do that?” he asks.

The role of non-profits is to preserve worthwhile markets that can’t support profitable ventures, notes Gillmor, a veteran newspaperman. There are certainly some unprofitable newspaper functions that deserve to be supported, such as covering city council meetings, but “a great deal of the community information we’ll get in a few years will come from for-profit sources… We’re seeing an explosion of innovation now.”

Gillmor is right on the money. Endowments, public trusts and government funding shouldn’t be dismissed as a means to fund journalism in the public interest, but to use charitable contributions to fund a badly broken business model is, you know, paving the cowpaths.

Blaming Google

Recovering Journalist Mark Potts takes a machete to a recent column by former Washington Post editor Peter Osnos in which Osnos blames Google for profiting from links to newspaper content. Google has replaced Craigslist as the industry bogeyman in recent months, despite the fact that it has tried harder than any other successful Internet company to find ways to shore up the print business. Complaints that Google is harvesting the hard work of newspapers through links from Google News ring hollow, Potts says, when you consider that Google News doesn’t carry any advertising. Newspapers fail to appreciate the fact that Google sends them 20% to 30% of their online volume, he notes, and they ignore the fact that many do a lousy job of optimizing their pages for Google Adsense, the result being that the search giant ends up serving generic ads with poor click-through performance to stories that deserve better.

In a comments exchange, Potts piles on further, noting that the newspaper industry is uncomfortable with the notion of real competition. “Google and Yahoo control more than half of local online advertising spending,” he notes. “That’s disgraceful–and the shame lies entirely at the feet of newspapers, for failing to adequately pursue local online ad opportunities.”

Murdoch has NYT Envy

Rupert Murdoch “sits around all day and thinks about buying The New York Times,” said Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff in a Tuesday session at the Harvard Business School Club of New York. Murdoch also thinks the Times‘ financial saga will play out soon and there’s a fair chance Murdoch will end up with his trophy, Wolff said. That won’t necessarily be a bad thing for the Old Gray Lady, since Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has managed to avoid layoffs until now.

Wolff had few kind words for Carlos Slim, the Mexican billionaire who recently invested $250 million in the New York Times Co. at generous financial terms. “He’s our national embarrassment. He’s a crook,” the author said, quoting a source in the Mexican media. In contrast, Murdoch is a pure newspaperman, he said. And despite Murdoch’s reputation for exploiting sex and violence to sell newspapers, he hasn’t messed with the Journal’s editorial quality.

That argument isn’t satisfying Pali Research analyst Rich Greenfield, a vocal critical of newspapers who has neverthelss been a staunch supporter of Rupert Murdoch. Not any more. Greenfield has cut his guidance on News Corp. a rare two levels from “buy” to “sell,” citing lack of strategy. “While we have long viewed Rupert Murdoch as the most visionary CEO in the media sector…we are increasingly surprised/frustrated with his lack of strategic direction related to News Corp’s television station, newspaper and book publishing assets.”

Meanwhile, Portfolio magazine says two sources say there will be 50 layoffs at the Journal next wek.

Miscellany

Two Canadian newspapers – including the giant Globe and Mail of Toronto – announced layoffs. The deepest cuts come at the 110,000-circulation Halifax Chronicle Herald, which is idling 24 of its 103 staff members, or almost a quarter of the workforce. “The numbers just kept getting worse and worse and worse and we just don’t know where they’re going to end,” said Dan Leger, the Chronicle Herald‘s director of news content, in a dour summary. The Globe and Mail laid off 30 people on top of the 60 who had taken an earlier buyout offer. That’s about 11% of the total workforce.

More newspapers are trimming publishing schedules to cope with the advertising downturn. In Ohio, the Troy Daily News, Piqua Daily Call and Sidney Daily News all announced plans to cut out Tuesday editions. The publisher said the reduced frequency will help avoid layoffs, adding that about 10% of the combined staffs at the three dailies had been cut in recent months. Group Publisher Frank Beeson has details on how the transition will be handled on one of the more hideous-looking newspaper websites we’ve ever seen (via Martin Langeveld).

By paulgillin | January 30, 2009 - 10:00 am - Posted in Facebook, Fake News, Solutions

baltimore_examinerThe Baltimore Examiner will close on Feb. 15, ending its three-year-run as the city’s second newspaper. Launched by a company controlled by Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz, the free daily had been troubled since the beginning. Parent company Clarity Media Group had cut newsroom staff by half since launch and reduced home delivery from six to two days per week last summer. A spokesman blamed the closure on a lack of national advertising. The AP report said the newsroom was shocked by the news, a surprising reaction considering that the Examiner had been on the market for months. About 90 people will lose their jobs.

The Examiner is part of a small chain that includes siblings in Washington and San Francisco. Those papers are unaffected by the closure. It seems odd that Clarity would have chosen to launch two of its three newspapers just 40 miles from each other. However, MediaPost says the company hoped to achieve advertising synergies between the two.

Campus Paradox: College Students Prefer Print

College newspapers continue to defy overall demographic trends by enjoying greater success with their printed products than their websites. In fact, writes Brian Murley, the challenge for campus publishers is to get more students to visit them online. Murley, who is assistant professor of new and emerging media at Eastern Illinois University, director for innovation at the Center for Innovation in College Media, and the college media correspondent for MediaShift, writes at length about the growing financial problems at college newspapers. National advertising has been tough to come by, and local advertisers still prefer to run in print. College publications have been hurt by the global recession, as has everybody else. Some of them are now also seeing their university funding dry up. In response, many are toying with supplements on topics like housing and entertainment, and they continue to push local sports as a key differentiator.

Murley points to an Alloy Media + Marketing study last spring that found that 76% of college students had read their college newspaper in the past month. This behavior contradicts the conventional wisdom that young people don’t read newspapers, but perhaps reinforces the notion that hyper-local coverage can appeal even to the digital generation.

There’s Life After Newspapers, But Less Money

Veteran reporter Robert Hodierne posted an online survey asking the question: “Is there life after newspapers?” He got 595 responses and while the results aren’t scientific, they offer an interesting glimpse into experiences of people who have left or been forced to leave the daily grind.

You can read Hodierne’s 4,100-word essay on American Journalism Review here, but here are some bullet points we took away. More than half the layoff victims report finding full-time work within three months. More than 90% found jobs within a year. Only 6% found jobs at newspapers. Most of those who switched industries – media relations is a popular alternative, but Hodierne’s vignettes cover a broad range of new careers – say they’re happy in their new jobs. Even so, 85% said they miss working at a paper.

The news isn’t all good, though. Many are making less money. “The midpoint salary range for their old jobs was $50,000 to $59,000. Those who listed salaries for their new jobs were a full salary band lower – $40,000 to $49,000,” Hodierne writes. Worse is that the salary cuts appear to hit older workers harder. “The median age of those who made less than $20,000 at their old newspaper job was 24. The median age of those now making less than $20,000 is 48.”

Hodierne interviewed many respondents and found a wide range of experiences. Theresa Conroy opened a yoga studio and loves it. But Joseph Demma, who participated in three Pulitzer Prize-winning projects, found himself unemployed at 65 and considering a job as a Wal-Mart greeter. The piece is heavier on anecdotes than statistics, but it offers an interesting glimpse into the lives of many career journalists who have had to adapt to the realities of the new market.

Miscellany

Add Media News Group to the growing ranks of publishers asking employees to take a week of unpaid leave in order to avoid job cuts. This follows Gannett’s announcement of a similar plan earlier this month. Media News’ 3,300 employees at more than 50 newspapers in Northern California have to take a breather by the end of March. The union is negotiating the terms, which is what unions do. Lake County News has more details about cutbacks at Media News, including a report that the company had to loan its flagship Denver Post $13 million to make its December payroll, has cut its staff at the East Bay Newspaper Partnership by 60 percent and laid off the person at the Lake County Record-Bee who is largely responsible for laying out and proofing the paper. If the last item is true, then Craig Silverman at RegretTheError might want to keep a careful eye on future issues of the Record-Bee.


The Congressional Quarterly, which isn’t quarterly, is for sale. No, this isn’t another distressed publishing property being shopped for pennies on the dollar. CQ is actually a nicely profitable business with a subscription website, a weekly magazine and a daily paid newsletter, among other properties. It’s just that owner Times Publishing Co., which is wholly owned by the Poynter Institute, has other things to worry about, like how the south Florida advertising collapse is affecting the St. Petersburg Times. CQ has come under pressure from a slew of recent startups covering Capitol Hill and it needs some careful oversight in order to stay competitive. Plus, Times Publishing could use the money.


NPR’s Marketplace reports that there are plenty of working journalists on Capitol Hill; they just aren’t working for newspapers. Specialized newsletters continue to thrive amid the general industry carnage because they serve up valuable information to small audiences that are willing to pay for it. “Our readers get excited about things like section 112R of the Clean Air Act,” says Rick Weber, who oversees the Inside EPA newsletters. “We cover the minutiae of how policy is shaped and implemented.”

Specialty publications may be attractive options for laid-off journalists who don’t mind focusing on a single topic or government agency. They offer plenty of entrepreneurial opportunity and a lean management structure. The downside is their vulnerability to political shifts and economic uncertainty due to their reliance on a small number of paying subscribers.


The Death of Daily Newspapers Is a Step Forward” headlines an opinion piece by former newspaper reporter Jon Severson, who maps out a long list of publications that arrive continuously on his BlackBerry. Severson monitors about 30 news feeds on his handheld device and supplements that information with an assortment of weekly magazines, radio programs and personal contacts. “I don’t know a twenty – or thirtysomething young professional worth his or her salt who doesn’t own a Blackberry or similar smart phone,” he writes. “We’ve moved on to more efficient ways to get the information that suits our busy lifestyles.” And it’s eco-friendly.

And Finally…

This has nothing to do with newspapers, but it’s wicked fun. T-Mobile cashed in on the flash mob craze two weeks ago by staging a simultaneous dance by more than 200 people at Liverpool Street Station in London. The event had to be done in one take to maximize the element of surprise, and bystanders did exactly what the cell phone carrier hoped they would do: they recorded the dance on their cell phones.

By paulgillin | January 28, 2009 - 12:31 pm - Posted in Fake News, Hyper-local, Solutions

“The future of newspapers is rooted firmly in 1878. Some guy was doing … 130 years ago, exactly in a place like this … what I’m doing right now. Except he had a better heating system.”

The speaker is Ed Shamy, a 50-year-old former newspaper editor from Vermont who’s part of a growing number of laid-off publishing professionals who are starting their own local publications. Ed Shamy publishes the 130-year-old County Courier in Vermont. All by himself.

county_courier
Is this a trend? It could be. Yesterday, we told you about Melissa Marinan, a veteran ad sales rep who lost her job when her newspaper closed. So she’s starting her own local newspaper. Just last week, we pointed to a story about Joshua Karp, an entrepreneur who wants to start hundreds of hyper-local newspapers written by bloggers.

Amid all the hand-wringing about the perilous economics of major metro dailies, one fact has been buried: the cost of publishing a local newspaper is lower than it ever has been. Digital cameras have cut the time and cost of taking and publishing photos. Desktop software can be used to lay out pages quickly and cheaply. Editors can tap in to local blogs and websites for information that used to require phone calls and faxes. Many printers can now go direct from computer file to plate. Distribution can be done in an afternoon out of the back of one’s car.

It’s not a great way to make a living, but potentially it is a living. For the ranks of laid-off baby boomers who are no longer supporting kids and big mortgages, it may be a viable way to apply their skills. We believe local newspapers actually have a bright future.

Superior Economics

Why can local publishing flourish while major metros collapse? No unions, for one thing. No presses, no delivery trucks, no circulation departments, no call centers. In fact, local newspapers have almost no infrastructure costs at all. A skilled writer who works full-time and leverages contributions from the community can turn out enough copy and photos to fill a 16-page weekly issue. A second person can cover every prospective advertiser in the area.

The advertisers are there. In fact, local businesses are the great untapped revenue source. Major metros traditionally haven’t bothered with them because the dollars are too small. There are no online services that serve local communities effectively. Most small businesses advertise through a patchwork of channels that can include place mats and business card holders in the local hair salon. It’s a frustrating, time-consuming process that small business owners would rather not bother with. A newspaper that reaches a local audience has a chance to deliver a better return at a lower sales cost.

Print is not dead, only certain manifestations of print. A lot of skilled publishers are out of work right now, and at least some of them will follow the path of Ed Shamy and Melissa Marinan. We wish them well.

Layoff Log

By paulgillin | January 26, 2009 - 9:24 am - Posted in Facebook, Hyper-local, Solutions

micropaymentsYou can skip roughly the first 1,500 words of Jon Austin’s lengthy essay on The Rowdy Crowd and jump right to the nut graph about micropayments. This otherwise rambling opinion piece makes a persuasive case that the news business can create a viable economic model by charging small amounts for each item of content a reader consumes. We’re not talking 25 cents here; we’re talking ¼ of a cent. The technology actually exists to charge very small amounts for very focused transactions, Austin writes, and the newspaper industry could be the first with sufficient motivation to make the system work.

Micropayments were an idea that came out of the early Internet. The idea was that electronic networks removed so much cost from a transaction that it was theoretically possible to conduct profitable exchanges at prices of as little as a few cents. The cell phone companies have been doing this for years by debiting transactions against a buyer’s phone bill. Now Apple is selling iPhone software applications for as little as 99 cents. It’s not a big step from there to ask readers to pay a few pennies to get an article they can’t find anywhere else. People are already comfortable with carrying around their Starbucks and McDonald’s cards and charging small transactions against them. Why can’t the same thing work for information?

The Economist suggests a similar idea in a short column that suggests that consumers may be more willing to pay than one would think I they didn’t have a choice. “Few people would have guessed how much British viewers would be prepared to pay to watch televised football matches—which used to be on free-to-view channels—before Mr Murdoch’s satellite television bought up the rights and began charging,” says the unnamed editorialist. The piece also quotes Los Angeles Times editor Russ Stanton, saying that the paper’s online revenues now pay for the entire print and online editorial staff, a claim we hadn’t seen before. This makes print officially a loss leader at the LA Times.

It seems to us that micropayments are worth another look. If a consortium of publishers could agree to share the costs and to firewall some of their content this way, the technology just might have a chance to generate a meaningful revenue stream for publishers whose local content is truly exclusive.

Le Lockout

“Photographers and journalists at the paper make an average salary of $88,000 for a 30-hour week. Editors make an annual average salary of $125,000. Employees are entitled to four to six weeks of annual vacation paid at time-and-a-half.” Sound like paradise? Actually, the union is pretty unhappy with the state of affairs at Le Journal de Montreal and a contract dispute with management led to a lockout over the weekend. Management charges that the union refuses to negotiate a contract in good faith,  and this has frustrated modernization efforts. Union leaders charge that parent company Quebecor Media’s plans to merge Le Journal’s online presence with the media conglomerate’s other holdings will debase the quality of journalism. We can’t remember a newspaper union ever making that a bargaining issue before, particularly at a time of crisis.

Miscellany

Writing on the Knight Digital Media Center, David Westphal suggests that newspapers could tap into foundation grants to shore up their investigative journalism practices. Noting that the Knight Foundation recently gave $5 million to 21 civic foundations for projects that sounded strikingly like local news operations, Westphal suggests that public/private partnerships could enable newspapers to tap in to grants made to local civic organizations and fund projects that would be otherwise unsustainable. It turns out that philanthropies aren’t as resistant to the idea as you might think. Westphal quotes sources at the J-Lab at American University saying the lab has already funded 120 pilot projects with mainstream news organizations. He also quotes the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors saying the idea deserves discussion.


nyt_buildingA couple of big asset deals may be about to go down. PaidContent.org reports that The New York Times Co. is close to selling 19 of the 25 floors of its new headquarters building in Manhattan to an investment management firm. We weren’t even aware that there were any investment management firms left. The deal would reportedly have W.P. Carey & Co. buying the space and leasing them back to the Times. In a sign of how screwy the real estate business is, the Times Co. would retain ownership of the six floors it doesn’t occupy. PaidContent also says Tribune Co. is mulling a $900 million offer for the Chicago Cubs from the Ricketts family. The offer is the best of the three Tribune has received. Even if it’s successful, approvals and financing could take months.


Tim Windsor, who’s newly blogging at Nieman Journalism Lab, points us to a veteran journalist with the delightfully ethnic name of Gina Chen who’s got a terrific how-to blog called Save the Media. Gina exhorts journalists to dive in and start using tools like Facebook and Twitter. She also offers advice to make those tools a little less intimidating. Her plain-talk style is easy to read and she understands the journalist’s perspective. She joins our blog roll and we recommend you bookmark her site.


The Port of Belfast, Northern Ireland, is bullish on newspapers. Or at least bullish on newsprint. It will spend £4.5 million (about $6.1) expanding its paper and newsprint handling facilities. “From nothing just ten years ago, paper imports are now an important part of the port’s diversified trade base,” said the port’s chief executive.


Terence Walsh of the Frederick (Md.) News-Post gets caught up in Obamania, asserting that the new president “has inspired more people, especially young people, to pay attention to the world around them and serve their communities than any politician in recent memory.” He believes this is a rare opportunity for newspapers to reassert their value to young people who are newly energized to learn about the world around them. We hope he’s right, thought ungluing young people’s eyes from their Facebook news feed might be a bigger task than editors imagine.


Class act: The weekly Town Meeting of Elk Rapids (Mich.) shut down after more than 30 years last week. It announced its closure in a two-sentence ad on page 2 of its final edition: “Today marks the final issue of the Town Meeting. We appreciate your loyalty over the 30-plus years the Town Meeting has served your community.”

And Finally…

Chris Freiberg started a Facebook group asking people to buy a newspaper on Groundhog Day (Feb. 2) as a way of showing support for the industry. He invited 600 friends and word-of-mouth has since swelled acceptance to more than 14,000 people. It’s a nice endorsement for a beleaguered industry, but you do have to read some of the raw and funny wall posts.

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