Downturn Hits Ethnic Press

New York’s ethnic press, which has been mostly insulated from the downturn affecting the newspaper industry, is beginning to suffer. A Spanish-language daily and a Chinese weekly have already closed this year and now the Ming Pao Daily News, which is considered the most intellectual of New York’s four Chinese newspapers, is reportedly slated for closure by its Hong Kong parent. The New York Times notes that ethnic newspapers enjoy an intimacy with their readers and advertisers that big-city dailies traditionally don’t and that this has bought them some security in the past. But the lousy economy is threatening the already thin margins of these small-circulation properties, and many don’t have websites to fall back on. Ming Pao will continue to publish a free daily, which has been the sole bright spot in the market. New York had 10 Chinese daily newspapers just 20 years ago.

Extra! Extra! Blog All About It!

Blogging has come full circle in San Francisco, where a software entrepreneur-turned-publisher has launched a weekly newspaper composed entirely of blog entries. Joshua Karp has big plans for the chain he calls The Printed Blog. If his idea reaches its full potential, he’ll have hyper-local twice-daily editions in thousands of communities around the US. Chicago alone could support 50 localized Printed Blogs. Karp’s editorial model is very Web 2.0-like: bloggers give him their stuff in exchange for a slice of the profits. More than 300 have already signed on. Profits aren’t an issue right now, but Karp believes that local businesses will appreciate the tight control they’ll have over their ad messages as well as the low cost of $15 to $25 to reach 1,000 readers. The New York Times account quotes one advertiser exulting in his new ability to tailor his ads to specific neighborhoods. Printing is outsourced to local distribution points. Naturally, there’s a website.

Layoff Log

• Voice of San Diego is reporting that another 50 employees will be laid off at the Union-Tribune. The paper has been a prominent victim of the area’s cratering economy, having already laid off 15% of its employees a year ago and staging another buyout since then. The U-T has also been for sale for the past six months. While several local investors have expressed interest, no one has written a check yet.
• The Mason City (Ia.) Globe Gazette has laid off nine full-time employees and will leave six open positions vacant. No word on how large the total staff is.
• Lee Enterprises-owned River Valley Newspaper Group, which includes two dailies and eight weeklies in Wisconsin, has cut 10 positions across the company.
• The Traverse City (Mich.) Record-Eagle has cut the equivalent of eight positions from a staff of unspecified size.
• The Peoria Journal Star is laying off an unspecified number of employees part of a plan to reposition the paper. Asked for a quote, publisher Ken Mauser delivers one of the most vapid comments of this new year: “Like many companies operating in today’s business environment, change will be inevitable and necessary to position our business for the future.” A blogger at Illinoize says 11 people lost their jobs.

Miscellany

The sour economy has spurred the San Jose Newspaper Guild and two newspapers to come to terms after 23 months of negotiations. The 25 Guild members get a year of job security and pay raises through 2012, but give up the right to block management from outsourcing some of their jobs.

The right-wing Tulsa Beacon takes the publisher of the Tulsa World to task for joining the most exclusive country club in the city while simultaneously laying off 28 people at the newspaper. Hypocrisy, the Beacon reports, is exclusively the domain of the liberal media.

Good obituary writers have their research done well before the subject is laid to rest. In that spirit, Newsosaur Alan Mutter begins the process of writing an obit for the Chicago Sun-Times, a newspaper that he clearly believes is destined for our R.I.P. column in the not-too-distant future. Mutter, who used to work at the Sun-Times, begins his tale in 1984 and tells the story of the first 10 years of ownership changes that “turned our thoughtful, respected and reasonably prosperous tabloid into a scandal sheet.” It’s a personal, poignant and sometimes funny account that will be told in installments.

Congratulations to Martin Langeveld, whose thoughtful News After Newspapers blog has been scooped up by the Nieman Foundation as part of its journalism lab.  He’s joined there by Tim Windsor and Matthew Ingram. In an introductory entry tellingly tagged “audience, doom, newspapers, and print,” Langeveld describes the reasons why the industry has entered into an inescapable vortex and how the thinking at daily papers must change if there is to be any hope of survival. He will continue to serve up the provocative ideas he started at NAN and the industry will be better for it.

The Register-Pajaronian of the Santa Cruz valley area will cut back its publication schedule to three days a week from six. The 141-year-old paper blamed its financial troubles on the collapse of major advertisers Mervyns and Circuit City. Unspecified layoffs accompanied the move.

If you’re still wondering “Who the hell is Carlos Slim?” Fortune has some background for you. A brilliant investor who specializes in buying distressed firms, Slim is now bailing out The New York Times Co. and may end up controlling the company as a result. For journalists, the nut graph is near the end: ‘Slim seems to neither covet the attention nor access that comes with being a media baron, nor to share the controlling Sulzbergers’ view that their ownership is a trust that puts the company’s journalistic mission ahead of commercial imperative.” If it’s a bio you want, get thee to Wikipedia.

And Finally…

The Boston Globe held out longer against front-page advertising than The New York Times – about two weeks longer. The Globe‘s first page-one ad ran on Wednesday, timed to coincide with the production of an additional 100,000 inauguration issues. The ad was for the movie “Defiance” (see below).

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been one of the most vocal supporters of newspaper among the ranks of the digerati, so it must hurt him to pull the plug on Google Print Ads. When it launched the program two years ago, Google hoped Print Ads would not only be a revenue stream but also a sincere effort to bridge the print/online gap and inject new life into newspapers’ traditional business. Unfortunately, “It is clear that the current Print Ads product is not the right solution,” wrote Spencer Spinnell, Director of Google Print Ads, in a blog entry, “so we are freeing up those resources to try to come up with new and innovative online solutions that will have a meaningful impact for users, advertisers and publishers.”

Print Ads was a variation of Google’s ad brokering system that enabled advertisers to bid on space in member newspapers. Google eventually amassed over 800 newspaper partners. The program differed from a bigger initiative by Yahoo because Google targeted print advertising directly. Yahoo’s newspaper partnerships are strictly online. Spinnell’s announcement was tinged with regret. “We believe fair and accurate journalism and timely news are critical ingredients to a healthy democracy,” he wrote. “We remain dedicated to working with publishers to develop new ways for them to earn money.”

Will Slim Bid for Times Co.?

Now that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has loaned The New York Times Co. $250 million to meet its debt obligations, speculation is focusing on his motivations.  With a personal fortune estimated at more than $60 billion, Slim is one of the world’s richest men. Buying the Times Co. would add a new chapter in his storied career investing in telecommunications, retailing, construction, banking, insurance, railroads and mining. Unlike Sam Zell, Slim could finance the Times Co. with pocket change, meaning he could own one of the world’s greatest media brands without the overhead of having to meet onerous financial terms. Alan Mutter suggests that Slim could parlay his investment into an outright takeover, something no other investor has been able to attempt because of the Ochs Sulzberger family’s tight control of the company. He notes that the comparatively shallow-pocketed Rupert Murdoch bought Dow Jones for a much higher price. “If Murdoch could swing $5 billion for Dow Jones with only $8 billion in personal net worth, then imagine how much Slim could afford to pay for a trophy like NYT,” Mutter writes.

Journalism’s Distant Mirror

Writing in The New Yorker, Jill Lepore reminds us that newspapers have been declared dead before. Her historical account begins in 1765 and takes us through the crucial role that newspapers played in colonial America by fanning public outrage against British – and later American – rule. The Stamp Act, passed by Parliament that year, was widely thought to be the death of newspapers, since it affixed a tax to every page printers produced. But resourceful publishers persevered, even moving their presses by boat under the cloak of night to evade government enforcers.

Lepore notes that the concept of an impartial press is a relatively recent invention. “Because early newspapers tended to take aim at people in power, they were sometimes called ‘paper bullets,'” she writes. “Standards of journalistic objectivity date to the nineteenth century. Before then, the whole point was to have a point of view.” In fact, Benjamin Franklin, who could be considered the father of the American newspaper, didn’t see his role as being “to find out facts. It was to publish a sufficient range of opinion.” In that form, “Early American newspapers tend to look like one long and uninterrupted invective.”

This oppositional role didn’t just roil the British authorities. John Adams signed into law the Sedition Act in 1798, making it a crime to defame his administration. “Adams had come to consider printers a scourge,” Lepore writes. Adams’ successor, Thomas Jefferson, was an ardent supporter of a free press, but by the beginning of his second term, even Jefferson admitted to having thought about prosecuting some publishers.

While not framing the point explicitly, Lepore makes the case that partisan journalism of the kind practiced by bloggers isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Truth may be the casualty of unbridled opinion, but that was also the case in the 18^th century, when even Sam Adams occasionally made up stories to dramatize British cruelty. The fact that some newspapers published untruths didn’t make them any less vital to the establishment of a fledgling democracy. “Without partisan and even scurrilous printers pushing the limits of a free press in the seventeen-nineties, [author] Marcus Daniel argues, the legitimacy of a loyal opposition never would have been established and the new nation, with its vigorous and democratizing political culture, might never have found its feet.”

We feel compelled to note again that Newspaper Death Watch is cited in the article’s opening paragraph, although we differ with the author’s characterization of our tone as gleeful. We prefer to think of it as bemused.

Miscellany

The LA Times is girding for more layoffs. Russ Newton, the Times‘ senior vice president of production, sent a letter to the Teamsters union, which shared it with its members. “The Los Angeles Times has decided to take steps to further reduce its cost including, but not limited to, layoffs,” Newton writes. “[T]he Company intends to implement the cutbacks no later than March 15^th, 2009.”

Romenesko reports that Gannett newspaper boss Bob Dickey’s decision to fly from Virginia to Arizona to announce plans to sell the Tucson Citizen wasn’t entirely altruistic. In fact, Arizona appears to have been just a waypoint on a trip further west. Dickey is in Palm Beach, Calif. this week for the Bob Hope Chrysler Classic golf tournament.

Editor & Publisher‘s Mark Fitzgerald reviews the redesigned Chicago Tribune and pronounces it a “home run.” With its clean look, lack of jumps and liberal use of info graphics, the “to-go” edition of the Trib, which will only be sold on newsstands, “eloquently makes the argument that it’s time America’s big-city dailies seriously consider converting to a compact format,” Fitzgerald writes. The question is when the Tribune will simplify things and make the tabloid edition available to home subscribers, too.

Lee Enterprises reported a 69.3% decline in first-quarter profits as revenues dropped 13%. The company said it is further cutting costs and will ask shareholders to authorize a reverse stock split to comply with the minimum bid price requirement of the New York Stock Exchange listing standards, if necessary. In an unrelated move, the publisher of the Lee-owned Wisconsin State Journal and Madison Capital Times said it will cut 12 positions, mostly in editorial.

The World Association of Newspapers will postpone its annual congress because of the global economic crisis. The meeting was set to take place in Hyderabad, India in March, but only 250 delegates have signed up so far. That’s well below the 1,500 who usually attend.

Last summer we told you about Neighborsgo.com, a spinoff of the Dallas Morning News that uses a social network to anchor a community journalism initiative. Apparently it’s working. Editor & Publisher reports that Neighborsgo is being expanded to cover 47 neighborhoods, with each section featuring headlines, local restaurants, gas prices, education resources and crime news.

Media malaise continues to spread beyond the newspaper industry. Warner Bros. Entertainment is cutting its global workforce by 10% by laying off 600 people and leaving 200 vacant positions unfilled. Clear Channel Communications, which is another diversified media company, announced plans to idle 1,850 workers last week.

Hearst Corp. has officially notified employees of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that they will all lose their jobs if no one buys the newspaper. This may have seemed obvious following last week’s announcement that the paper will be shuttered if a buyer isn’t found, but Hearst had to send a letter as a formality. A few people might be offered jobs at SeattlePI.com if the publisher elects to keep the website alive.

And Finally…

Here’s one to satisfy your inner voyeur. Nicholas White was trapped in an elevator in New York City’s McGraw-Hill building for 41 hours. It was a lonely ordeal, but White unknowingly had a security camera to keep him company. His plight is documented in a time-lapse video that condenses 41 hours to just a few minutes set to mournful music.

Last night I attended a dinner hosted by the Boston Globe for the stated purpose of gaining insight from a small group of new-media enthusiasts about its Boston.com website. The evening turned into a wide-ranging discussion about the future of the Globe itself, with no clear consensus emerging. I was struck by the vision that the Globe showed when it launch Boston.com 13 years ago and how that vision was later clouded by conventional newspaper wisdom.

Boston.com was originally intended to be a destination site for residents of the Boston area.  It was launched at a time when nearly every metro daily was going online, most under their own brands.  The Globe took a different approach: Boston.com would be branded and focused on a region rather than an existing print property. The Globe even enlisted some local media partners to contribute content and share in the profits. Those partners have mostly fallen away over the years, but the vision of the newspaper’s website as a geographic focal point was a precursor of the “hyper-local” concept that’s so popular in the industry today.

Blurred Vision

That vision didn’t carry through, though. With news editors running the show, Boston.com over the years increasingly looked like the front page of the Globe. National and international headlines shared the home page with local copy and the site lost its regional distinctiveness. Suburban bureaus were axed in the name of cost savings.  As a resident of a nearby town, I personally found that my information needs were better met by small sites that were tightly focused on topics or regions that matter to me.

Now the Globe is trying to get back some of the distinctiveness of Boston.com.  There’s no question that the site is more local today than it has been in years, but the online landscape has changed as well.  Some of the questions that came up during the meeting:

Does a website even matter anymore? So many people get their news through feeds and aggregators that the idea of a website as a destination may be outmoded.

Is brand important? Maybe The New York Times brand is, but does the Boston Globe‘s brand strike enough of a chord in people’s minds to distinguish its value?  Brand may be the only thing newspapers have left in the long run, so that’s a critical question.

How local does the site need to be? Many communities in the greater Boston area are served well by e-mail lists, community newspapers and even individual bloggers.  How granular does a major metro need to get in order to be truly hyper-local?

Who’s going to do the grunt work? Part of the service that major metro dailies perform is sitting through tedious budget committee meetings and city council sessions. It’s a little-appreciated loss leader for newspapers, but it’s essential to their watchdog role.  What blogger in his or her right mind is going to do that?

In my humble opinion, the Globe should do the following:

• Create Huffington Post-style bureaus in local communities, with news provided by stringers and citizens.  Many reporters for community weeklies make little or no money, so the exposure in the Globe would be an incentive for them.

• Borrow a page from Yelp.com, Going.com and Angie’s List and become the dominant source of buying advice for local products, services and activities.

• Ramp up its custom publishing arm to help local companies become legitimate publishers in their own right.  Many businesses want to take advantage of new media to do this, but their efforts are mostly terrible.

• Treat print as a cash cow and manage it downward gracefully while building new revenue streams.  Further cutbacks are inevitable, but it would be nice to balance that with some growth.

• Take a hatchet to the sales force, focusing on hiring and retaining people with classified advertising experience.  Future revenues are going to come from local businesses, so invest in the people who can sell to them.

The group from the Globe listened attentively and appeared to take the input seriously.  Unfortunately, the barn door has already closed on print and the declining revenue picture offers fewer options for investment with every passing day. But Boston.com is a nice website.

Envisioning a Future Without the Times

Writing in the Atlantic, Michael Hirschorn starts with an outrageous statement: what if The New York Times folds its print newspaper four months from now? Okay, it’s not likely to happen, Hirschorn writes, but the way The New York Times Co. is spiraling downward, the Big Apple’s intelligentsia should prepare for a day when they won’t have a newspaper to read in their SoHo coffee houses.

Hirschorn goes on to present a well-written summary of the changes readers are likely to see as newspapers exit the scene. “Common estimates suggest that a Web-driven product could support only 20 percent of the current staff; such a drop in personnel would (in the short run) devastate The Times’ news-gathering capacity,” he notes, suggesting that international coverage will almost disappear in the process. “Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience.”

Ultimately, emerging sources like Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo may create a new model for participatory journalism, but the quality of services they provide will be more erratic and unpredictable that those readers have known in the past. New-media operations needs to maintain low overhead. Huffington “is the prototype for the future of journalism: a healthy dose of aggregation, a wide range of contributors, and a growing offering of original reporting.” Since few of those contributors are paid, what you see is what you get.

For Better or Worse, China Invests in Newspapers

“As international media is contracting, China is going in the other direction,” says Doreen Weisenhaus, a media law professor at the University of Hong Kong, in an opinion piece by Forbes‘ Robyn Meredith, about China’s ambitious plans to expand its international media presence. Meredith says China plans to spend $6.6 billion to build the staffs of China Central TV, People’s Daily and other news organizations both on the mainland and around the world.  US bureaus are planned, among others, and new Chinese-owned, English-language newspapers will be launched in the U.S. and China.

The problem, Meredith says, is that China doesn’t have a free press.  Although controls were loosened somewhat during the 2008 Summer Olympics, there’s no indication that these expanded news organizations will be allowed to say anything that displeases the government. The result could simply be an expansion of the Chinese propaganda machine.  And if someone gets the idea to spend some of that $6.6 billion buying up distressed US newspapers, well, it’s not a pretty thought.

Layoff Log

• Even as it expands its footprint into the US market, the Financial Times is still feeling the pinch. The newspaper will cut 80 positions across its global operations. The British have their own word for this: redundancy. We would still prefer to be laid off than found redundant.
• The Billings Gazette is laying off eight people.  There’s no word on what percentage that is of the total staff size.

Miscellany

We’ve noted several examples of newspapers burying the lead in reporting on their own layoffs.  So give credit to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for doing the opposite.  Not only did SeattlePI.com cover the announcement of its likely sale or closure in detail, but now the paper’s managing editor, David McCumber, has launched a blog to document the 60 days until decision time. It’s an honest, personal and well-written account of the many thoughts are no doubt going through his mind as the clock ticks away.

Erica Smith, whose Paper Cuts maps mashup is de facto official record of newspaper industry layoffs, has put together a nice list of newspapers that use Twitter. Such a roster is automatically out of date the minute it’s posted, but it gives you a good idea of how various news organizations are segmenting their coverage and also where the list of followers is growing fastest. You can also see who gave up early. BTW, the Paper Cuts counter has been reset for 2009.

Veteran travel editor John Flinn recently took a buyout package from the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s not bitter or angry, but he’s a bit wistful about how the industry’s troubles are affecting his specialty area. Travel scribes are a different breed of feature writer, each with a unique voice and a different way of going about the job. Sadly, they are being replaced by “utility infielders” with their top-10 lists and “charticles.” But Flinn isn’t looking back. He’s hitting the road soon in his VW Westfalia pop-top camper van.

Give-Us-A-Break Department: “The vast majority of Americans believe the U.S. media industry’s coverage of the faltering economy is actually contributing to the economic crisis by ‘projecting fear into people’s minds.’ That’s the finding of a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults released Thursday by Opinion Research Corporation. The survey, which was conducted last month via telephone, found that 77% of respondents believe fear mongering by U.S. media outlets is negatively impacting consumer confidence in the economy.” – MediaPost, 1/2/09.

Rumors have been floating around for months that the Seattle Times would shut down, so employees at rival Post-Intelligencer were understandably shocked when a local TV station reported a single-sourced story yesterday that the paper is being put up for sale and would be shut down if no buyer is found. No one, from the P-I‘s publisher on down, is confirming the report or even knowledge of the rumor. This doesn’t stop the Seattle Times from quoting numerous staff and local officials commenting about how sucky a shutdown would be, some of them speaking in the present tense. “I think it’s a horrible tragedy,” said Seattle City Councilman Nick Licata, referring to a single-sourced story that no one has confirmed.

Speculation is focusing on a change of management at P-I owner Hearst Newspapers. Incoming President Steve Swartz reportedly sent employees a memo outlining “100 Days of Change” beginning in early 2009, but offered few specifics. Under the joint operating agreement, either of Seattle’s two daily newspapers must be offered for sale for 30 days before being shut down. The report comes as a particular surprise because well-reported financial troubles at the Seattle Times have had most locals thinking it would be that paper going down first. Keep in mind, however, that this is still a single report based on a single source at a single local TV station. The fact that the publisher of is the P-I‘s main rival denies awareness of it should be taken seriously.

A Benevolent History

Jack Shafer’s account in Slate of how newspapers innovated – and then failed – on the Web is a sympathetic story about an industry that’s often criticized for insularity. In contrast to the popular image that newspaper executives were clueless about online competition, Shafer declares that they were actually paranoid about it. In fact, newspapers threw away a lot of money trying to create early online business models.

The Washington Post had constructed its own interactive service by 1994 and nearly every major newspaper was online by 1999. “Newspapers deserve bragging rights for having homesteaded the Web long before most government agencies and major corporations knew what a URL was,” Shafer writes. In earlier years, Knight-Ridder sank $50 million in an Internet precursor called videotex and newspapers had experimented with fax and even audio editions in the early 1980s.

The problem wasn’t innovation, Shafer notes; it was attitude. Newspaper companies’ approach to these disruptive technologies was first defensive and then opportunistic. Once executives were satisfied that their revenue base wasn’t going away they sought to use new media to find new revenue streams as long as it didn’t mess with the model. Commenting on videotex, he writes, “Once [newspaper companies] they determined that nobody could make money from videotex and the technology posed no threat to the newsprint model, they were happy to shutter their ventures.

But that’s the problem. New technologies never succeed when their use is restricted like that. Shafer calls these “nongenerative” services, meaning that no third party industry can innovate on their platforms. AOL is an example of this. Nongenerative services almost always lose out to “generative” media like the Internet because customers can add their own value. That’s basically why the personal computer has 90% market share and the Mac has 10%. Intel CEO Andy Grove titled his book Only the Paranoid Survive. The newspaper industry had the requisite paranoia, but it didn’t have the innovative attitude to match.

Miscellany

Residents of the New Mexican cities of Santa Rosa, Tucumcari, Clovis, Portales, Lovington and a couple of dozen other cities and towns that currently get home delivery of the Albuquerque Journal will have to find something else to read. New Mexico’s largest daily newspaper, plans to stop home deliveries and rack sales in more than 30 communities around the state. This despite the fact that the Journal lost its only competitor, the Albuquerque Tribune, nearly a year ago. The cost of delivery was just too steep, the publisher said. Elsewhere in New Mexico, Freedom New Mexico stopped home deliveries of the Quay County Sun last week.

The Newark Star-Ledger‘s Paul Mulshine contributes an op-ed piece to The Wall Street Journal that reads at first blush like another curse-the-darkness ranting by an aging journo about the unfairness of it all, but that ultimately makes a persuasive case that no blogger in his of her right mind is going to be caught dead covering city council meetings for free.

McClatchy Watch notes a case of online cluelessness by company management. Responding to rumors that McClatchy was closing its Washington bureau, CEO Gary Pruitt sent off a memo to employees scolding them for spreading the rumor without checking with company management. Of course, it’s management’s responsibility to head off rumors quickly, not employees’ responsibility to verify them. If McClatchy had its internal communications act together, there wouldn’t be an audience for a McClatchy Watch.

Layoff Log

• The drip, drip, drip of layoffs continues at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: another 39 people have lost their jobs, including 14 in the newswroom. The AP story reckons total announced cutbacks at the P-D amount to 270 in the last 16 months. (Via PaidContent.org)
• The Winnipeg Free Press is begging employees to accept a buyout in order to avoid laying people off next week. The publisher seeks to reduce headcount by about 5%.
• The Buffalo News is offering buyouts to about 300 workers. There’s no word on how many jobs the paper is seeking to eliminate. A similar offer went out last August to 107 employees, but only about a dozen accepted.
• Dow Jones is freezing salaries for a year, reports MediaBistro. Unlike most media companies, Dow Jones has so far managed to avoid major layoffs.
• NJN Publishing, which produces four weekly newspapers in New Jersey, laid off 25 full- and part-time employees, or about 17% of its staff.

And finally

In a print market that’s hemorrhaging, The Slammer is one newspaper that’s flourishing. Its “newsstand profit margin is four times that of most local dailies, and its circulation has grown to 29,000 – up nearly 50 percent from 20,000 just last year. At more than 500 convenience stores across North Carolina, it’s selling at a buck a pop,” writes The Christian Science Monitor. The secret: The Slammer is full of mug shots, crime reports and allegations of misdeeds. “The men and women, with their dour mugs, bloodied noses, and booze-induced grins, have been arrested for everything from skipping a court date to robbing a food mart. It is, in essence, the local police blotter writ large,” the Monitor writes.

Journalism ethicists bemoan The Slammer‘s perverse appeal, but the genre is spreading. Two papers with a similar format have sprung up in Florida and The Slammer is planning to expand its North Carolina distribution.

The secret isn’t just the mug shots and wrongdoings. It’s also the snarky style the paper uses. It sometimes mocks repeat offenders and hosts weekly features like the worst late-night arrest hairdos. Such public flogging is a “step up from the stocks,” says one critic. But victims don’t seem to mind too much. In fact, “the chief complaints the weekly paper gets come from perps complaining that their photos didn’t get printed,” the Monitor writes.

It looks like a chain of Connecticut newspapers that were just days from closure will continue publishing under the guidance of a New Englander. Longtime newspaper executive Michael E. Schroeder (left) has bought the group that includes the Bristol Press, the New Britain Herald and three nearby weeklies. Schroeder was most recently publisher of BostonNOW, a free daily with a promising future that abruptly closed under unusual circumstances last spring. Schroeder was previously with Newsday. There’s no word on what he plans to do with his new possessions, but the papers will continue to publish on their current schedule for now. “We look forward to building upon the rich history of these properties,” reads Schroeder’s quote from the press release.

Selling Local

Steve Outing has a dozen tips for how newspaper companies can make money. Some are amplifications of his earlier ideas and a few are brand new. Two themes run throughout: create lots of niche products and learn to sell them that way.

It’s the latter theme that doesn’t get as much press as it should. Newspaper industry pundits tend to focus a lot on what needs to be fixed on the editorial side of the house (still plenty) but we don’t read that much about ad sales. While admitting that he’s an editorial guy, Outing addresses that issue repeatedly.  Success in the emerging hybrid print/online world demands that ad sales staffs be able to sell targeted advertising aimed at niche interests. This is antithetical to many print sales veterans, who have grown up in a world that demands skill at selling 26-time print schedules to large department stores and cell phone companies.

This is a problem for newspaper companies.  In our own experience working at an Internet publisher a decade ago, we found that sales reps recruited out of the print world were often disasters at online sales.  They didn’t understand how to define the value of niche markets and they sometimes appeared to believe that signed contracts in the few hundreds or thousands of dollars was beneath them.  Yet this is the only way that advertising works online.  The most successful print refugees often came from the classified sales field, where success was all about closing lots of small deals.

Outing’s recommendations deserve careful consideration, as do most of his ideas.  What he doesn’t address in this column is the thorny issue of how to equip a generation of sales reps with a whole new set of skills.  In our experience, it’s difficult at best and often impossible.

Shooting Holes in “Hyper-Local”

Last month, we reported on new Gallup research that shows the Internet closing the gap with local newspapers as people’s preferred news source. Now David Sullivan of “That’s the Press, Baby” has taken Gallup’s own numbers and sketched out a counter-intuitive case that newspaper readership is actually stable or growing among the young people who are widely believed to be abandoning the medium. What’s more, he makes an argument that readers are gravitating to national news and not to the hyper-local content that’s frequently held out as the industry’s salvation.

A big factor could have been last year’s election, Sullivan posits. People just couldn’t get enough of news from the campaign trail, which is too bad because local newspapers were busily paring back national coverage in the name of being more local. There’s no question that national newspapers saw the least erosion in circulation during the last year. Could it be that hyper-local isn’t a obvious as solution as it seems? We weren’t able to give Sullivan’s number-crunching adequate scrutiny, but his logic looks sound. Please have a look and post your comments here.

Here Comes Shirky

If you haven’t read any Clay Shirky, you’re in for a treat. The NYU adjunct professor and author of Here Comes Everybody has a chat with the Guardian about the future of media that yields several fine quotes:

• Newspapers “were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be.”
• “The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press – high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication – is over. But will The New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.”
• “Imagine only having one browsing copy of every book in a bookstore. You could say ‘Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers looks good’, and out pops a brand new copy. Why does a bookstore or a publisher have to be in the shipping and warehousing business?”

Layoff Log

• The Springfield (Mass.) Republican plans to cut 22 full-time and 14 part-time positions, although the cutbacks won’t affect news or sports staffing. There was also some good news for the Republican: it will soon begin printing the Record-Journal from nearby Meriden, Conn.  Apparently, the Connecticut paper’s 30-year-old presses were no longer up to the task. The bad news: the Record-Journal is eliminating 24 full-time and 32 part-time jobs.
• The Wyoming Tribune Eagle revealed that it has cut 14 positions in the past year, but didn’t say how many people it employs. Two more were laid off this week.
• Oklahoma’s second largest newspaper will lay off 28 employees, 26 of them in the newsroom. The Tulsa World said the cuts amount to about 5% of the workforce.
• The Anchorage Daily News is shrinking and re-sectionalizing to accommodate smaller issue sizes. Here’s Editor Patrick Dougherty’s super-nice explanation.

Miscellany

Expect many more papers to follow the lead of Detroit’s Free Press and News this year. Hernando Today, a daily produced by The Tampa Tribune, will cut back to five days later this month by eliminating its Monday and Tuesday editions. Founded as a weekly in 1981, Hernando Today went daily in 1996. It covers Florida’s Hernando County.

Detroit-area writer Dave Hornstein has an interesting history of the newspaper wars – or lack thereof – in Detroit. The miserable condition of the two dailies in that city is largely self-inflicted, as Hornstein tells it. The killer was a bitter battle between newspaper management and labor unions that led to a lockout, large circulation declines and $500 million in losses in the late 1990s. Add to that a couple of ownership changes and major modifications to the joint operating agreement and you have two organizations that were severely weakened when the recession hit. Under those circumstances, it’s not surprising that Detroit was the first city to swallow the bitter pill it did last month.

 Richard Pachter says the new book, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, is well worth a read. The inside scoop on what went on with Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal acquisition is worth the price of admission (a modest $19.77 on Amazon) and the reviewer praises author Michael Wolff for maintaining balance in a book about a man who inspires strong opinions from both fans and foes. Interesting tidbit: while Murdoch’s Fox News is often criticized for its right-wing slant, the media mogul’s Sky News network in the UK has a liberal tone. Murdoch is politically conservative, but his current wife has broadened his thinking.

Steve Yelvington has created The Shutdown List, an interactive timeline of newspaper closures. The site appears to be more of a programming exercise than an actual tracker, but it’s a lot slicker than our lousy RIP list to the left. You can submit your own candidates for inclusion.

Last month we told you about new Gallup research that showed the Internet is fast closing the gap with local newspapers as the number one news source in the US. Now Pew Research says the lines have crossed. The survey of 1,489 adults found that 40% said they get most of their national and international news online, compared with 35% who rely primarily on newspapers. Television continues to the number one choice, at 70%. Among people under 30, however, the Internet is now just as popular as television for news. In fact, among that age group, the Internet’s role as a primary news source jumped from 34% to 59% in just 15 months, a leap that suggests that these results might be an aberration. We’ll know soon. Pew conducts the survey roughly once a year. There’s also information about the top news stories of 2008, a list dominated by economic issues.

A Public Utility

Should newspapers get a government bailout? One Connecticut lawmaker says yes. Frank Nicastro of Connecticut’s 79^th Assembly district is worried that Journal Register Co. will carry out its threats to shutter the Bristol Press and he’s asking the state for loans, tax breaks or anything else that will save the daily. The Press reportedly has just 11 days to live.

Nicastro’s campaign has fueled an ongoing debate over whether newspapers are entitled to the same government support as airlines, banks and the automobile industry have received. Some people say newspapers are an essential public utility that a democracy can’t afford to lose. Others think the market will find a way to provide this service one way or the other. Almost everyone admits there’s a conflict-of-interest question when a government funds its own watchdog, kind of like letting the banking industry regulate itself. We have an opinion, but we’d like to hear yours, so we made this into a poll question. Cast your vote in the sidebar widget to the right.

A Different Kind of Death Watch

“My beat at The Globe and Mail is the dead,” writes Sandra Martin, in a quote that already goes on our short list for best of 2009. That’s only one of many good lines in her superbly written piece on the craft of obituary writing, one of the least understood and most often satirized disciplines in journalism.

Martin is the Toronto Globe and Mail‘s chief obituary writer and she really, really likes the job. So do a few hundred other people who make up the Society of Professional Obituary Writers (SPOW) (“The first time I Googled the society’s acronym, I came up with ‘sex position of the week,'” Martin comments in another of the 3,700-word essay’s good lines). This fun and fact-filled feature touches on some of the profession’s stickier issues, such as how to balance facts about the deceased’s sexual escapades with the need to avoid angering grieving relatives or how to tell a person you’re interviewing them for their own obituary. She also describes the nightmare all obituarists face: what to do when someone dies suddenly and you’ve got nothing prepared on them.

Martin’s words are relevant to the topic of newspaper survival. She cites Northwestern University research that found that obits were “important” to 45 per cent of readers and “very important” to an additional 12 per cent. That wouldn’t surprise the people at Eons, a social network for baby boomers. They discovered that death notices quickly became the most popular features on their site, which is why they launched Tributes.

Obituary writing isn’t morbid, Martin notes. Rather, it is “about life; death is merely the occasion to set the subject into context.” Read this delightful story and you’ll probably agree that this beat has plenty of, er, life to it.

Miscellany

The Kansas City Kansan will end an 87-year print run on Wednesday when it ceases twice-weekly publication and goes online-only. The Kansan was once the only daily newspaper serving Kansas City, Kan. The revamped website will invite lots of reader contributions through photo-sharing and blogs. Half the staff will be cut. That’s four people. (via Todd Epp).

“Newspaper stocks fell an average of 83.3% in 2008 – twice the fall of the S&P 500 – wiping out $64.5 billion in market value, according to Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog.” Want more stats like that? Jeff Jarvis has assembled a few and is asking for more contributions.

John Schrag of the Forest Grove (Ore.) News-Times resists the urge to wring his hands and instead gives specifics on how staff cutbacks are affecting city-hall reporting. This column manages to be both opinionated and dispassionate, documenting with examples how citizens are less informed about their government because reporters aren’t there to sit through the boring meetings. Bloggers, Schrag writes, “may show up in Salem, but I doubt they’ll be posting reports about the Banks Budget Committee or the county’s Joint Watershed Commission.” True that.

Editor & Publisher‘s Mark Fitzgerald lists his choices for the top 10 industry quotes of 2008. Many relate to the stocks of major companies becoming worthless. And Christopher Wink posts some gems in his Twelve months of top journalism blog posts in 2008.

Terrible financial results barely merit a mention any more, other than the fact that each month or quarter seems to be worse than the one just preceding it. Media Post reports ad revenues fell 22.4% at McClatchy in November and publishing revenues were down 17.9% at Media General. The sole bright spot: online revenue was up over 7% at both companies.

Swift Communications has cut staff at its Western Slope newspapers in Colorado and closed some weekly papers. Unspecified cutbacks were made at the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, Aspen Times and Grand Junction Free Press. The company shuttered the weekly Carbondale Valley Journal, Leadville Chronicle and the Spanish-language La Tribuna based in Glenwood Springs.

And Finally…

Here are the results of our recent query about the drama in Detroit. Thanks to everyone who voted. We’re trying out a new polling app in the sidebar to the right and will keep plugging away till we find one that we like. Suggestions are welcome:

Note: An earlier version of this story was erroneously headlined “Survey Says Web is #1 News Source.” A reader pointed out that television still holds the top spot.

We sorted through our 147 entries of 2008 to come up with the stories that surprised us, delighted us or made us shake our heads in disbelief. We’re presenting them as a series of posts entries over four days. Tomorrow we’ll conclude with our favorite quotes of the year.

Creative Solutions

A group of Ohio newspapers got together to share stories and even reporting assignments in a novel response to cost pressure. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, Toledo Blade, Cincinnati Enquirer and Akron Beacon Journal now post all their daily stories on a private website where editors can pick whatever they want and publish it in their own pages. The tactic has now been tested in several other parts of the US.

Pasadena Now, a small weekly, fired its entire editorial staff and farmed out coverage to a staff of Indian writers recruited on Craigslist. Publisher James McPherson pays the virtual staff about $7.50 per 1,000 words, compared to the $30,000 to $40,000 he was paying each reporter annually. The Indian writers “report” via telephones, web harvesting and webcams, with support and guidance from McPherson and his wife.

Neighborsgo.com, a spinoff of the Dallas Morning News, uses a social network to anchor a community journalism initiative. Local residents create profiles and post information about their interests, and some celebrities are emerging, like the Helpless Housewife (right). Every week, editors dig through content submitted by citizens and produce 18 local print editions.

Research and Markets released a report entitled “Offshoring By US Newspaper Publishers” that sees big growth in the newspaper outsourcing industry, particularly in India. About 2,300 people were employed offshore to serve US and UK newspaper companies in July, 2008, the report said. However, “The total offshore opportunity from newspaper publishers is estimated to be approximately $3.5 billion,” in the long run.

A team of enterprising publishers in the UK produced a four-page newspaper created entirely by hand. “Every word and every image and every mark of any kind in The Manual was drawn by a team of volunteers – mostly illustrators,” the website says. The group foresees a day when “handmade qualities can transform newspapers from ‘junk’ to collectable.

The Politico, a Washington-based boutique news service that specializes in Capitol Hill coverage, signed up more than 100 newspapers for its news service, including the Arizona Republic, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Philadelphia Inquirer. Launched in early 2007, the specialized print/online/broadcast hybrid focuses exclusively on politics, is reportedly profitable and has become a must-read for political junkies.

CNN announced plans to challenge the Associated Press with its own wire service. The AP suffered subscriber flight in 2008 as several large newspapers have canceled their subscriptions, claiming the price is too high.

The Chicago Sun-Times offered 44 copies of its Nov. 5 front page on eBay as a “museum wrap fine art giclée print on canvas.” Nov. 5 was a rare bright spot in an otherwise disastrous year. The historic election created a brief surge of demand and many publishers sold out that day’s issue.

The Sun-Times had another idea to attract readers: It brought back dead columnists. “Vintage” columns written by Chicago institution Mike Royko began appearing in August, some 11 years after Royko died. The first one was about a Windy City citizen who was also dead.

Brave New World

Huffington Post employee Mayhill Fowler captured a three-minute rant by Bill Clinton about a Vanity Fair report that questioned the propriety of his post-presidential behavior. Fowler didn’t identify herself as a reporter but said she had the video camera in plain view while Clinton was talking. The LA Times account describes the recorder as “candy bar-sized” and Clinton claims to have not known he was being recorded.

CNN reported on a Yahoo employee who Twittered his layoff in February and gained an eager following. Ryan Kuder eventually took a job from the hundreds of leads contributed by his followers . His story was covered on prominent blogs and in mainstream media.

Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for its coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys. The New York Times account pointed to the difference between the new breed of online reporting and traditional print journalism. Chief among them is the involvement of readers in the process. Editor Joshua Micah Marshall has even been known to give “assignments” to his readers, asking them to comb through official documents.

Gutsy Moves

Monitor Editor John Yemma

The Christian Science Monitor said it is all but exiting the print business. Management chose the paper’s 100^th anniversary year to make the shift, attracting worldwide attention. The Monitor‘s dramatic move legitimized frequency cuts as a survival tactic. Other papers have followed its lead.

Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing cancelled his newspaper subscription and wrote about it at length, invoking a deluge of scorn from newspaper vets. Outing stuck to his guns.

Tampa Tribune intern Jessica DaSilva documented a contentious meeting about the need for change at the newspaper and posted the editor-in-chief’s comments on her blog. The young woman endured a torrent of abuse from veteran journalists, including many personal insults, as more than 200 comments piled up on her blog. The incident dramatized the industry’s difficulty in dealing with change.

Land of the Rising Seniors

Newspaper sales in Japan are 2.5 times those of the US as a percentage of the population and journalist layoffs are all but unheard of. The reason: the population is declining. The percentage of children 14 and younger is the lowest it’s been in 100 years and the overall population of Japan is expected to decline by a third over the next 50 years. The lack of a new generation of Web-savvy upstarts means papers have less pressure to move online and figure out how to serve a new audience.

Just Plain Fun

The Onion offered a tutorial in how to write a provocative magazine cover line (right).

A tongue-in-cheek investigation by IowaHawk rounded up recent incidents of criminal activity by journalists and concluded that newsrooms are at risk of becoming a “killing field.” Of course, the reporters could have conducted the exercise for lawyers, accountants or plumbers and come to the same conclusion. The best line was from Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit: “I think it’s unfair to single out journalists as thieves, or violent, or drunks, or child abusers. Sometimes they’re all of the above.” The chart is amusing, too.

Don’t forget to take our poll: Will the Detroit Experiment Succeed?

Want it? The Seattle Times Building

Few newspapers in the US are in worse shape that the Seattle Times, reports its rival, the Post-Intelligencer. How bad is it? “Dire,” in the words of Times Senior Vice President Alayne Fardella, who announced yesterday that the company will now freeze the pensions of non-union workers in addition to requiring them to take unpaid vacation. “It has been and continues to be a long and difficult fight for our survival.”

The Seattle Times Co. holds $91 million in debt, which is secured by a parking lot. The company  borrowed $233 million in 1998 to buy a string of newspapers in Maine which are now a white elephant that no one wants to take off its hands. The company has put up two of its four Seattle properties for sale. McClatchy Co.’s stake in the business, which it acquired for $102.2 million in 2006, is now worth less than $8 million. But they do have that parking lot.

McClatchy itself has to be considered a candidate for the endangered species list. Its stock closed at 75 cents a share yesterday, down from a high of nearly $71 five years ago. Its $5 million in cash is down from $30 million at the end of last year.  Having had no luck selling its newspapers, the company is now trying to sell property to stay alive. However, that may also be a losing strategy. At least a half dozen newspapers are trying to unload property right now, but buyers have every reason to wait them out, says an AP report. As publishers become more desperate to generate cash to meet debt obligations, they’ll further cut asking prices. This is also a terrible time to be selling real estate, which makes sellers even more desperate.

Success Without the Web

New York Times media critic David Carr is an staunch print guy and he found an ally in the TriCityNews (yes, that’s really all there is to its website), an alternative weekly out of Asbury Park, NJ that has thrived for a decade and is still growing 10% annually by aggressively ignoring the Web. Carr quotes publisher Dan Jacobson expressing astonishment that any print publisher would choose to undermine its  business by giving its product away for free. “Why should we give our readers any incentive whatsoever to not look at our content along with our advertisements, a large number of which are beautiful and cheap full-page ads?” he asks. TriCityNews has never raised its advertising rates in 10 years and its costs are cheap enough that even small businesses can buy full-page ads.

Carr clearly loves this whole idea, but Recovering Journalist Mark Potts sees few lessons for major metro dailies in Asbury Park. The paper only has three employees, for cryin’ out loud, he notes. “Many small community papers, with and without Web sites, are doing just fine, and will continue to do so,” Potts writes. “Web or not, their readers have almost no place else to go.” He’s right, you  know. Pat Thornton chimes in with the observation that publisher Jacobson isn’t quoted once talking about journalism. He speculates that the paper is basically a community advertiser and that local news coverage has little to do with its success.

Sun, Post Head Toward Indistinguishability

Timothy A. Franklin is stepping down as editor of The Baltimore Sun, the Associated Press reports. He’ll be replaced on Jan. 1 by J. Montgomery Cook, who’s currently director of content development for the Baltimore Sun Media Group. Franklin is head off to Indiana University to chair a new sports journalism program at his alma mater. He said his decision was unrelated to the turmoil at the Sun, which has shed more than 150 jobs this year. The AP report provides a helpful graphic showing where Baltimore is. Meanwhile, in a move designed to make both newspapers less relevant to their local audiences, the Sun and the Washington Post have a new deal to share articles and photos. This will make two major metro dailies less than 40 miles apart from each other even harder to tell apart.

Miscellany

Now that Detroit’s News and Free Press have broken the ice by backing away from daily frequency, everyone is jumping into the pond. The University of Missouri-backed Columbia Missourian will eliminate Saturday and Monday editions in a bid to save $350,000 annually. And the Klamath Falls (Ore.) Herald and News will mess with time itself by cutting it Monday edition and introducing a new “Monday on Sunday” section. We know that readers just can’t wait to get started thinking about the first day of the work week when they’re enjoying their Sunday morning coffee.

Nine weekly newspapers in Connecticut will close in January if a buyer isn’t found in the next week. It looks like a done deal, though, since the staffs have already reportedly been laid off.

The New York Times has admitted that a letter to the editor from the mayor of Paris criticizing Caroline Kennedy’s bid for Senator Clinton’s seat is a fake. The letter characterized Kennedy’s ambitions as being “in very poor taste,” which was not the kind of language Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe would ordinarily use, according to one French editor. She called the mayor’s office, which also professed surprise.  The Times said it’s reviewing its authentication policies. Editor & Publisher has more.

We briefly thought we were back in 1996 when we read that GateHouse Media is suing the Boston Globe for linking to its stories. So-called “deep linking” suits went out of fashion a decade ago. Of course, with its shares trading at four cents, GateHouse may be out for whatever it can get. We think “frivolous” is too generous a term for this threat.  We agree with Jeff Jarvis and will leave it at that.

Death Watch editor Paul Gillin was interviewed for an hour on Bob Andelman’s Mr. Media show on Blog Talk Radio yesterday. Click the link to listen or see the Blog Talk Radio widget in the sidebar to the left.

And Finally…

More than 30 million people have Elfed Themselves, making this three-year-old OfficeMax promotion one of the most successful viral marketing campaigns in history. Better hurry before it’s too late!

It looks like 2009 will be a make-or-break year for many media companies, thanks to an advertising climate the some forecasters are predicting will the worst in generations.

Media economist Jack Myers is predicting an “advertising depression,” says Dow Jones. “Myers, a longtime industry consultant who runs JackMyers.com, is now forecasting an unprecedented three straight years of declines in advertising and marketing spending in the U.S. starting this year,” the wire service says. “To put that in perspective, the industry hasn’t suffered even a two-year spending decline in advertising since the 1930s.” The result will be a “massive shakeout” in industries that depend on advertising for their livelihood. Myers expects advertising spending in the U.S. to call 2.4% this year, 6.7% next year and 2.3% in 2010. His forecast roughly agrees with estimates by Publicis Groupe. The downturn will make it more difficult for media companions to effect the transformations that are necessary to survive in the customer-driven marketing environment of the future.

Meanwhile, Barclays Capital expects domestic ad spending to drop 10% next year, which is dramatically worse than performance during both the 1991 and 2001 recessions. The forecast is a substantial revision of Barclays’ prediction just two months ago that next year’s decline would be a less-drastic 5.5%. The investment bank sees trouble in the local advertising industry, which is often seen as the best hope for newspaper salvation. Local spending, which makes up some 39% of the $252.1 billion U.S. ad market, will fall 12.2% in 2009, while national spending will drop 8.4%. Barclays forecast that local ad spending would decline an additional 1.4% even when the broader market recovers in 2010. The one positive note: Internet advertising should increase 6.1% in 2009 and 12% in 2010, but that segment will still account for just 10% of ad spending next year.

Given those forecasts, it’s not surprising that asset values have tanked. “Some 30 US newspapers are up for sale…but few buyers have emerged in spite of rock bottom prices,” notes the Financial Times. Valuations have fallen by at least half compared to their highs and signs that the advertising environment is worsening aren’t helping, the paper says. To illustrate the degree of loss in asset values, the Boston Globe was valued at $650 million by a consortium of buyers just two years ago. Today, the value of the Globe and the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette combined is just $120 million. In fact, The New York Times Co.’s most valuable New England asset may be its equity stake in the Boston Red Sox. It was worth about $135 million before the financial crisis hit. And that’s without Mark Teixeira.

Some Good News, Too

While admitting that 2009 will be a mostly crummy year for the economy, Poynter Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds sees reasons to believe better days are ahead. For one thing, oil is comparatively cheap right now and the price of paper is coming down. While you shouldn’t get comfortable with short-term trends in these commodities, at least they are two fewer factors weighing on the industry. The buyouts and layoffs of 2008 will show also benefits in 2009 as newspapers remove those costs from their books. And there are promising signs in newspapers’ online activities that may broadly benefit the industry. Edmonds is careful to hedge his bets, but he wants to exit the year on a positive note.

Cuts Take Toll on Quality

Print editors are accustomed to getting letters from readers taking them to task for erroneously saying the California Gold Rush started in 1845 instead of 1848 and  concluding, “Shoddy fact-checking like this makes me skeptical of anything you report in your journal.” Editors usually laugh off these missives, but with readers enjoying a bounty of choice these days and freely publishing their own critiques, the gaffes caused by overworked news staffs potentially become more damaging. Detroit NASCAR Examiner Josh Lobdell points out three major errors in a Detroit News story and questions how a newspaper in the Motor City can do such a shoddy job of covering motoring. The Sunday Business Post of Ireland restates almost verbatim what we suggested 2 1/2 years ago: that the cycle of cutbacks will lead to inferior products that people won’t want to read, which will harm circulation and lead to more layoffs. You don’t cost-cut your way to leadership.

If errors are your thing, read Craig Silverman’s year-end column in the Toronto Star about the worst publishing gaffes of 2008. Our favorite is the AP’s reference to Joseph Lieberman as a “Democratic vice-presidential prick.” There are plenty more on Silverman’s awesome blog, Regret the Error. Be sure to read his annual celebration of the worst errors and corrections in the media, an award he calls the Crunks. One of the best has to be this front page of northern New England’s Valley News, which actually managed to misspell its own name on its front page one day.

Report: Newspaper Sites Embrace Web Tools

The Bivings Group examined the websites of the 100 top U.S. newspapers to see what they’re doing with the Internet. While a few activities have changed little over the last year (RSS, reporter blogs and video), there have been striking increases in the use of some features:

• Fifth-eight percent of newspaper websites post user-generated photos, 18% accept video and 15% publish user-generated articles.  That’s way up from the 24% that accepted such material in 2007.
• Seventy five percent now accept article comments in some form, compared to 33% in 2007.
• Facebook-like social networking tools are beginning to gain traction, with 10% of newspapers now using them, or double last year’s figure.
• Three-quarters list some kind of most-popular ranking, such as most e-mailed or most commented. Just 33% had that feature in 2006.
• You can now submit articles to social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us at 92% of newspaper sites, compared to only 7% in 2006.
• Only 11% of websites now require registration to view full articles, compared to 29% last year.
• Other stats: 57% have PDF editions, 20% have chat, and 40% offer SMS alerts.

Don’t strain your eyes: Click the image below for a larger version. More charts and data is in the summary report.

Miscellany

Journal-Register has reportedly closed a chain of Connecticut weeklies. The North Haven Courier reports, “On Dec. 18, members of [the Shore Line and Elm City Newspapers, a weekly newspaper chain in the shoreline and Greater New Haven area] were notified they had been laid off…The affected papers include the North Haven Post, the East Haven Advertiser, the Branford Review, the Shore Line Times of Guilford and Madison, the Clinton Recorder, and the Pictorial Gazette and Main Street News in Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Essex, Deep River, Chester, Lyme, and Old Lyme…Joyce Mletschnig, who until Thursday was the Pictorial Gazette’s associate editor, said that their newspapers would be shut down.”

The Seattle Times is asking about 500 non-unionized employees to take a week’s unpaid vacation in order to avoid more layoffs. Employees can take the seven days off at any time over the next two months. Management at the Times, which has cut 22% of its staff this year, may believe that further layoffs will undermine quality to too great a degree, so it’s getting creative with strategy.

Russ Smith has some good quotes in a piece on Splice Today about what he believes is the inevitable demise of print newspapers. Smith, 53, is an unabashed newspaper fan but he’s noticed that even his contemporaries are dropping their print subscriptions or not noticing when the paper no longer arrives on the doorstep. He also notices that his kids and their friends are just as well-informed about current events as he, a counter to the conventional wisdom that young people don’t read. Smith boldly predicts that The New York Times will be sold by the end of 2009, with Rupert Murdoch on the short list of likely buyers. On the other hand, Murdoch may be content simply to let his nemesis fade away.

Raleigh News & Observer Staff Writer Mark Schultz writes with passion about why he got into newspapers and why they’re still relevant. His best line comes in an account about interviewing a woman in her trailer home in Mexico: “We enter people’s lives for an hour and ask for instant intimacy.”

The Knoxville News Sentinel has apparently managed to avoid the carnage that has devastated many of its brethren. In an upbeat column plainly titled “News Sentinel is NOT going out of business,” Editor Jack McElroy pays homage to owner E.W. Scripps Co. for shrewdly diversifying its revenue stream and not loading up on debt. He also says the News Sentinel wisely diversified into TV and specialty publishing to insulate itself from the newspaper advertising downturn. Critics naturally accuse the paper of selling out to political interests.

The New York Times will launch “Instant Op-Ed” next month in a bid to compete with instant cable television analysis. The Web feature will post immediate expert viewpoints on breaking news, according to Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal.

And Finally…

The Baltimore Sun’s John McIntyre asked readers to contribute the best line heard in the workplace. They come through with some winners. Our favorite: “Yeah, he thinks he’s God’s gift to sliced bread.”

Don’t forget to take our poll: Will the Detroit Experiment Succeed?

Writing in Fortune, Richard Siklos has the most perceptive analysis of the Tribune Co. ownership picture we’ve seen. Siklos scores Sam Zell for his hubris and for characterizing his company as employee-owned when the only votes that counted were his and those of the former shareholders who approved the transfer of Tribune shares to a toothless employee stock option plan. What happens to those employee-owners now, Siklos asks? Barring an unlikely market turn, they’ll lost most or all of their investment, leaving them just with their 401(k) holdings. In all fairness, Sam Zell also stands to lose his investment, Siklos points out, although we doubt they’re stocking up on the macaroni & cheese at the Zell mansion. This brief, insight-packed piece ends by speculating that Tribune Co. will emerge from bankruptcy with about a $4 billion valuation. At that price, Zell may actually be tempted to put in some more money. Eeek!

2009 Forecasts Offer Little To Smile About

Researchers quit using euphemisms to describe the industry’s troubles some time ago. Now they vie to see who can come up with the strongest adjectives. “Terrible” is how Kubas Consultants describes the newspaper ad revenue outlook for 2009 after surveying 400 newspaper executives. The report offers a “very negative outlook” because a “disaster area” is looming in employment classifieds. Seemingly at a loss for more superlatives, the report summarizes: “the severity of expected declines is remarkable.” All this for a forecast of a 9.1% decline in revenues in 2009, which would actually be less than the 2008 wreckage to date. It’s the cumulative effect that invokes shock and awe, though. “If Kubas’ predictions for 2009 come to pass, by the end of next year, newspapers will have lost about 30% of their total revenues in four years,” says MediaPost. This story has no hope in it. If you’re hoping for a nice weekend, read something else.

Scribes Sum Up Industry Woes In Painful Detail

“Across the U.S., more than 30 papers are up for sale, but there are no buyers,” sums up a long piece from Britain’s Independent that’s kind of a Wikipedia entry for newspaper industry turmoil. Regular readers of this blog and others like it won’t find a lot of new information in Stephen Foley’s 1,900-word opus, but the piece is a nice digest of the events of 2008.

Particularly notable is its description of the travesty that was Sam Zell’s purchase of Tribune Co. just 19 months ago. Foley dug up some choice Zell boasts about how his deal didn’t require the stars to line up perfectly in order to succeed, while Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal acquisition did. Fast forward to today and look who’s laughing. The Journal‘s circ is holding steady and Murdoch is actually investing in the paper while Tribune Co. is in court receivership. “Sam Zell is a demonstration of the proposition that a group of people that knows nothing about the newspaper business going in, is unlikely to be successful,” says Poynter’s Rick Edmonds in the story’s best quote.

Solutions? Sadly, the piece turns up nothing new, other than the idea of putting some papers into a not-for-profit trust, as the St. Petersburg Times has done. The nonprofit ideas may have some merit, since profits won’t be an issue before long, anyway. Why not call a spade a spade?

Maybe it’s because the new year’s drawing close, but this is certainly the week for epic analyses of the state of the industry. The Toledo Free Press kicks in a rambling 1,700-word essay with lots of facts but little new perspective. And the headline, “Changing media landscape causing problems, new opportunities in Toledo and nationwide,” appears to have been written by a search engine.

The story has one great quote, though, from FOX Toledo’s President/General Manager Ray Maselli in response to a question about recent layoffs: “We are adjusting to the needs of our environment and re-engineering the way we do business. WUPW’s ongoing investments in operational efficiency as well as our commitment to serving viewers and advertisers with optimal products and services are effectively positioning us as a more diversified, multi-media news organization.” We think “investments in operational efficiency” is the best euphemism for “layoff” we’ve seen all year.

Plain Dealer Kicks Laid Off Employees When Down

The 2008 Conflict Avoidance Trophy goes to the Cleveland Plain Dealer for the surreal way in which it handled the layoffs of a dozen people. Management turned an already unpleasant task into a humiliating water torture for the entire staff and then kicked the sacked employees when they were down.

Cleveland Scene has the details. As we noted earlier, the Plain Dealer staff was told not to come in to work until after 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 2. Laid-off employees were notified by phone. So if someone didn’t call to say you were out of a job, you were expected to come in to the office. And smile, dammit! As if that wasn’t bad enough, management arranged for laid-off employees to clean out their desks on a Saturday morning and to enter the building from the back where they would attract the least attention. “For some, decades of service ended like a protected, shameful secret,” writer D.X. Ferris sums up.

Ferris showed up in the P D parking to try to interview the sacked employees but they told him to bug off. That’s not surprising under the circumstances: People with some of the most well-recognized names in Cleveland being hustled out the back door so no one would have to witness their shame. It doesn’t get much more humiliating than that.

Miscellany

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has laid off 39 employees at the newspaper and affiliated community publishing group as part of an ongoing plan to cut staff by 10% before the end of the year.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is offering a buyout package to all 200 of its Guild employees. Management said the offer is being made to avoid layoffs, which is management shorthand for saying there are probably going to be more layoffs.

We were interviewed by freelancer Michelle Rafter for her blog WordCount – Freelancing in the Digital Age (freelancers need all the support they can get these days). The focus was on community news, which is a mixed bag of an industry these days. While it seems that big publishers like Gannett and Journal Register can’t be bothered with community newspapers at the moment, some of the most innovative work is actually going on there.

Faced with devastating cuts to their arts coverage, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have teamed up to share reporting resources, according to a local blog called Art&Seek. The deal means that some local music and theatre will continue to get newspaper coverage that would have otherwise been lost, but some members of the arts community also fear that the loss of competing perspectives will put too much influence in the hands of too few critics.

An expected write-down at Lee Enterprises could force the troubled owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other newspapers into default on $306 million in debt, the St. Louis Business Journal reports.

Last month we told you about Helium, a citizen journalism site that’s seeking to partner with newspapers to provide what is essentially high-quality blog content. Now the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune has become Helium’s second customer. The paper will use Helium’s writer’s marketplace to find and contract with local stringers “who are compensated for contributing articles on a variety of topics ranging from wedding planning tips to great day trips with your kids, to seasonal gardening advice and concert reviews.” While this isn’t exactly hard-hitting journalism, it is going to cost the Eagle-Tribune a lot less than paying professional writers.

And Finally…

If the rapidly developing world of social media has you feeling dazed and confused, you’re not alone. There are so many new websites and so little time to drink them all in. Boston interactive agency Overdrive Interactive is trying to help with Social Media Map, a visual guide to the most essential social media resources that resembles a really dense version of the New York City subway system. You can download the clickable PDF here.