Technorati has come out with its annual State of the Blogosphere report and some numbers are truly eye-popping. The site found blogs in 81 languages and daily posts are closing in on one million. Nearly 185 million people have started a blog (although most don’t tend them regularly). Newspapers have the bug: 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews and 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands they love or hate. Most bloggers who accept advertising make a profit. Technorati did a big survey and got comments from various media influencers. We haven’t had a chance to read it all yet, but if you’re interested in publishing, you should check it out.

Meanwhile, The Politico, which is one of the more promising Web-only journalism ventures, is expanding. It will add employees, grow circulation of its Washington-area newspaper and and print more often. The staff will be expanded to at least 105 from its current 85. Circulation of its Capitol Hill newspaper will be increased 20% to 32,000 and a Monday issue will be added. All this will happen after the election, which is The Politico’s busiest season, but officials said there’s going to be plenty of news to keep people busy. Also, they expect to reach profitability next year, far ahead of schedule.

And perhaps there’s gold in them thar websites. BIA Financial Network and Borrell Associates have a new study that estimates that newspaper websites are the most lucrative local media around, with valuations of the largest properties reaching $450 million. That makes local alternatives like TV and radio small potatoes in comparison. “Given their growth potential, the value multiples of media Web sites may be 2 to 4 times that of the core business,” the BIA president is quoted as saying. The study also praises the strong cash flow at media websites. The problem is that growth is slowing. BTW, the $450 million number is only for the largest properties, so don’t get too excited. We estimate the market value of Newspaper Death Watch is about $1.23.

Miscellany

In the department of publishers that still don’t get it, we’d like to include The American Scholar, which publishes a provocative list of “12 Questions about the future of journalism” by Bill Kovach without offering visitors a way to respond. Um, guys, that’s part of the problem.

In chaos, there is opportunity, or at least that’s what Michelle Rafter says. She points to new launches at Slate, The Wall Street Journal, Silicon Valley Insider and Forbes as evidence that there’s opportunity in business journalism right now. Just make sure you get cash up front.

Death is good business, it seems. Tributes.com, which runs obituaries and related memorial messages, is teaming up with The Wall Street Journal to create a print counterpart to the website. For $80, you can buy a listing on Tributes.com where you can post photos and memories of a departed loved one. Now, for an additional $250, you can run your message in a dying medium, too. Tributes is a startup that was spun out of Eons, a social network for the over-50 crowd. Both are the brainchildren of Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor.

In the 80s, New York City brought us the Village People. Now it brings us TimesPeople. That’s The New York Times‘ new social network. “TimesPeople provides NYTimes.com readers with a way to share their thoughts and recommendations about The Times‘s content with other readers, making their public activities on the site more open,” says a company press release. Apparently you can only share your thoughts about Times content, not anybody else’s, which we suppose makes sense. You can also see the most recommended articles. The Times is a latecomer to the social networking world, trailing The Wall Street Journal by a whole eight days.

Scott Karp analyzes Matt Drudge’s influence and concludes “It’s the Links, Stupid.” The action in online publishing is in filtering and linking, not corralling your audience, he says. Drudge is successful because he tells cable TV and radio reporters what’s important and that shapes their daily broadcasts. Newspapers, in contrast, tend to tell people only what’s important in their pages on any one day, and that’s far less interesting to readers than a guide to that vast Worldwide Web. “In the web media era, when all news content is accessible by anyone, anywhere in the world, and no news brands no longer have a monopoly over news distribution, the power of influence lies in the ability to FILTER the vast sea of news,” he writes.

Layoff Log

• The Anchorage Daily News is reducing its staff by about 10%, laying off 13 employees and holding another dozen positions vacant.
• The Raleigh News & Observer has started making cuts after only 16 newsroom employees accepted a buyout offer. Its editorial cartoonist, a 33-year veteran, and ombudsmen will be cut back to part-time but their jobs won’t be eliminated.
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is going to buy out or lay off workers unless it gets concessions from its unions. Between 10 and 20 Teamsters will lose their jobs, according to a union spokesman, but that’s just the beginning. The paper’s Ohio parent has been losing money for years and is threatening to sell its Pittsburgh property.
• As if the Seattle Times Co. didn’t need more headaches, now the truck drivers are threatening to strike. About 70 truckers could walk off the job on Oct. 21 in protest over the company’s bid to outsource its trucking to Penske Logistics.
• Threats by the publisher of the Newark Star-Ledger to close the paper if cost-cutting goals can’t be met have apparently put a bee in the Jockey shorts of the local union. The union representing 400 mailers at the paper agreed by a 10-1 margin to a three-year wage freeze and buyouts of a quarter of its members. The Star-Ledger is still looking to buy out another 200 of its 750 full-time nonunion employees.

John Yemma

The Christian Science Monitor marks its 100th anniversary this fall, and the publisher is celebrating by re-emphasizing its commitment to thoughtful journalism. The Monitor has long been a maverick of the American newspaper field. It’s based in Boston, but that’s almost irrelevant to its role as an international observer. In the tradition of The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, the Monitor sees itself as a newspaper of record for citizens of the global community, but without the financial bias. The Monitor provides sober analysis of world events for an educated audience. Its 100 writers and editors emphasize explanation over immediacy. This approach is sometimes at odds with a market that increasingly values form over substance, but it is a badly needed service in a world of decimated reporting staffs and shrinking bureaus.

The nonprofit Monitor enjoys a healthy subsidy from the Church of Christ, Scientist, but the goal is to make it financially self-sustaining by leveraging new-media tools and targeted advertising. In July, the Monitor recruited Boston Globe veteran John Yemma as its new editor. Yemma clearly understands the dynamics of the changing newspaper field. Although a veteran of print, he spent his last three years at the Globe overseeing the newspaper’s multimedia operations and campaigning to pull its ink-stained editors into the online world. A soft-spoken and thoughtful man, he sat down with Newspaper Death Watch to discuss the realities of the new reader-driven world and how he hopes the Monitor can serve as a model for other publishers.

The one-hour interview is available as an audio file by clicking on the link below. The following time-stamped show notes direct you to important points in the conversation. Time stamps appear on the left with corresponding comments on the right.

[audio:http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/audio/Yemma.mp3]
Listen to the interview (1:00)

[audio:http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/audio/Yemma.mp3]

Investors were all aflutter at the news late last week that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim had purchased a 6% interest in The New York Times Co. Slim, whom Forbes estimates to be the world’s second richest man behind Warren Buffett, has made his fortune principally by buying low and selling high. It helps that he owns one of the world’s largest privatized monopolies, Telefonos de Mexico, which he acquired in 1990.

Shares of NYT jumped nearly 15% on Thursday on the news, helped by Slim’s statement to reporters that his interest in the publisher was “purely financial.” Are newspaper stocks finally going to be perceived as the bargain investors believe them to be? Probably not, argues The Wall Street Journal‘s Martin Peers. Writing in Thursday’s “Heard on the Street” column, Peers notes past failures by investors who tried to wrest control of the Times company from the controlling Ochs/Sulzberger family. He also brings up Slim’s $2 billion bet on failed retailer CompUSA as an example of the billionaire’s fallibility. Finally, he points to the lofty price/earnings ration of the NYT Co. – more than 20 right now – as reason to “see Thursday’s pop in Times stock as a selling opportunity.”

Tech Publisher Bucked Trend, Cashed in With Print

In the publishing market for technology enthusiasts, print has almost evaporated. That’s what makes O’Reilly Media’s Make magazine so remarkable. Make was launched well after the destruction of the technology print media had already begun. The publishers thought there was value that print brought to their target audience of tinkerers that couldn’t be reproduced on a Web page. Not that the Internet isn’t important. In fact, most of Make‘s circulation development has been done on line. The publication also hosts a series of popular fairs where readers show off their inventions. But in a market that has largely turned up its nose at print, Make is a notable – and profitable – exception.

In this podcast, publisher and editor Dale Dougherty tells of the counter-intuitive wisdom that led to the creation of the Make brand. The speech is only 17 minutes long, but it will remind you of the value that print still brings to the publishing equation when applied sensibly.

Rx for Newspaper Websites

Mark Potts has a set of idea for fixing newspaper websites that are well worth reading. Potts recently wrapped up an engagement with Philly.com in which he says staff attempted to break the mold with some success. What is the mold of newspaper websites? Too much information crammed into too little space and surrounded by blinking banners ads. This is a legacy of the print mentality, Potts writes. Why do newspapers still organize everything by news/features/sports/metro/arts when they don’t have to be tied to such rigid structure on the Web? And what’s with all the banner ads, which are the least effective form of online advertising? Why not do more with targeted text ads and search? Again, the legacy mentality favors display ads, he says.

Potts recommends that publishers take more risks and look at the example of the online pure-plays for inspiration. Web publishers think nothing about launching mobile services, for instance, and if the gamble doesn’t pay off, they just shrug. Newspaper publishers, on the other hand, research any new initiative to death and then finally launch something that’s uninspired and late. Classified ads are dead, Potts says. Deal with it. And newspaper sites still aren’t local enough. Aggregate and outsource content to readers. Lively debate ensues in the comments section.

Easy Come, Easy Go

Novato, Calif.’s hometown newspaper since 1922 is no more. The Advance shut down last week, citing the usual factors: tough economy, stiff online competition, spiraling costs. The paper hadn’t made a profit in nine years. An unbylined announcement ticks off a list of investments and innovations the Advance undertook in an effort to stay afloat – adding staff, sectionalizing and boosting circulation among others – but the efforts were fruitless. The paper’s demise apparently wasn’t for lack of quality. It won the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s highest award four consecutive years through 2006.

Meanwhile, the state with the toughest economy in the nation saw the launch of a new title. The successful Florida Weekly will come to Naples on Oct. 2. The lifestyle-oriented tabloid covers news, arts and entertainment, dining, regional business, and real estate. The original Florida Weekly of Ft. Myers has a readership of 50,000, according to Editor & Publisher. Naples Florida Weekly will be distributed through more than 500 newsstands and by mail.

Miscellany

Tragedy in San Francisco: the long-suffering Chronicle yesterday published obituaries for several of its Sunday comics. Among the deceased are Mister Boffo, the Fusco Brothers, Brevity, Tokyopop and Sherman’s Lagoon. Dilbert is also moving. The decision was guided by more than 13,000 responses to a poll conducted this summer. “We know that readers feel strongly about comics,” an unnamed Chron editor writes. Indeed they do.

The Bowling Green Daily News is an afternoon daily that has adopted a “print first” strategy. Its audience isn’t terribly Internet-savvy and the afternoon publishing schedule limits its timeliness. What’s more, the paper is still growing revenue. The managing editor sees no reason to favor a website because print pays the bills. Moreover, the capital investment required to launch a competing website and put a staff in place is prohibitive, he says. He is on drugs.

The Sacramento Bee is cutting staff by 7% on top of an earlier round of cuts in June. This time, a buyout offer enticed 87 people to leave the company, including 23 newsroom employees. The editorial department had been largely spared from the June round of cuts, but the reduction took a bigger toll, with the features department along losing 11 people. Bee executives said they didn’t know if more cutbacks would be needed.

Gannett Blog reports on an innovative idea by the Pensacola News Journal: it’s distributing newsstand copies with a distinctive front page. The idea is to attract the generally younger group of readers that buys newspapers on impulse. Single-copy sales are about 18% of the Pensacola paper’s circulation, according to Gannett Blog. Commenters generally approve of the idea.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram plans to sell its 88-year-old headquarters building at the northwest corner of Seventh and Taylor streets. Its 184,000 sq. ft. are simply more than the shrinking newspapers needs, the publisher says.

The Rushville (Inc.) Republican joins the ranks of newspapers that are cutting out Monday editions. The move will save enough money to enable the paper to avoid layoffs, at least for now.

And Finally…

While strolling through Pet Rock 2008, the annual festival in east-central Massachusetts that brings hundreds of dog owners together in a celebration of their pooches, we were struck by the old cliche that dog owners and their pets frequently look alike. We started snapping examples where we thought this  was true. While the cliche is by no means universally valid, there are some striking similarities in some cases. Just for fun, here are a few examples. Do you have any of your own? Send us a link to the online photos or post them in the comments section and we’ll add them to our Flickr slideshow.

The New York Sun, which was launched in the shadow of 9/11 with the mission of providing a politically conservative alternative to The New York Times, is on its last legs. An eloquent column by Editor Seth Lipsky says the Sun, which is published on weekdays, will have to shut down at the end of this month if the owners can’t find financial backing. Interestingly, the Sun tried to compete with the worldly Times by being hyper-local, a strategy that is sometimes cited as the salvation of the newspaper industry. “It would put Manhattan and New York state news on its front page (in contrast to the Times’ emphasis on national and international news over local issues),” reads a very good description on Wikipedia. While the paper claims a readership of 150,000, its actual daily sales are less than 15,000. Talks are underway with potential partners and investors to continue publishing the Sun, but time is clearly running short.

Crisis is breeding cooperation in Philadelphia, where Newspaper Guild members from the Inquirer and Daily News voted to forego a scheduled $25-a-week pay hike for at least a year. The owner of those two papers is in serious danger of defaulting on its debt. “We want to see this company thrive, now and in the future,” said the Guild’s administrative officer.

There’s a new group on Facebook called Newspaper Escape Plan. “The newspaper industry is an abusive relationship,” writes Martin Gee, who created the group. “We keep getting beat up but we keep coming back because we love him.” The group has signed up 1,300 members in less than three weeks. Discussion forums are quiet but the wall is busy. (via Robb Montgomery).

The weekly Raytown (KanMo.) Tribune is no more. The paper stopped the presses after 83 years, citing the same pressures everyone else cites. Most of its 11,000 circulation was free, but there were a couple of thousand paid subscribers. If you want to see something depressing, take a look at its home page.

The independent Daily Orange campus newspaper at Syracuse University will stop printing on Fridays. However, its problems appear to be an exception to the rule. The president of the College Newspaper Business and Advertising Managers organization is quoted in this AP story saying that campus newspaper ad revenues actually rose 15% in 2007. Apparently, it’s all about focus.

Layoff Log

The Oklahoma City Oklahoman will cut 150 positions, beginning with an early retirement offer to 102 of its over-55 workforce and making up the difference through layoffs. The paper employs 1,100 people. The publisher noted that newsprint costs are up 40 percent.

The Providence (R.I.) Journal, which is often cited as an example of a paper that has thrived in a competitive market by staying true to its community roots, will lay off an unspecified number of employees. Owner A.H. Belo had hoped to avoid cuts through a buyout offer, but there weren’t enough takers. There’ll also be layoffs at The Dallas Morning News (50 jobs) and the Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise (30 positions).

The Missoulian of Montana will lay off four full-time and three part-time employees. No word on whether that’s a lot for Montana’s third-largest daily.

One of those employees is going to work for the Ravalli Republic in Hamilton. But the Republic is also laying off three full-time and three part-time people. But it’s also planning to make another newsroom hire in the next few weeks. Which is a lot to digest for an organization with only 17 employees.

Clarification on yesterday’s reference to a vaguely worded item in Editor & Publisher about the Raleigh News & Observer: The paper is offering buyouts to 40% of its employees. It doesn’t expect to cut 40% of its staff, although it may get there if business doesn’t improve. “We’re not anywhere near where we thought we were going to be on the revenue side,” says the publisher. The N&O is also consolidating some sections to save on printing.

And Finally…

How will technology innovation support journalism and participatory democracy? Heck, we don’t know. We’re just a blog. But the Media Giraffe project will delve into that issue at a conference in Philadelphia Oct. 23-25. It’s called Rebooting the News, and the focus is on how educators can respond to the alarming flight of young people from traditional news media. Registration is downright cheap at $105.

Journalists are at each other’s throats in the Windy City. It all started last Tuesday, when provocative Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Jay Mariotti quit the paper after 17 years and only a few weeks after signing a lucrative three-year contract. Mariotti’s epiphany apparently was a trip to the Beijing Olympics, where he observed that most of the journalists in attendance were “there writing for Web sites.”

After resigning, Mariotti launched into attacks on his former employer and the newspaper business in general, which he said is dying. The Sun-Times and the Tribune probably won’t survive, he said. “To see what has happened in this business. … I don’t want to go down with it,” he told the Tribune.

Mariotti has clearly made some enemies with his tough-guy style, and critics didn’t hesitate to pile on. Film critic Roger Ebert abandoned his usual soft style to post a blistering open letter, concluding, “On your way out, don’t let the door bang you on the ass.” CBS Chicago caught up with several of Mariotti’s colleagues, who didn’t mince words. “We wish Jay well and will miss him — not personally, of course — but in the sense of noticing he is no longer here, at least for a few days,” said Sun-Times editor Michael Cooke. White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen chipped in “Am I enjoying this? Yes.” There are more good quotes in the CBS account.

Meanwhile, the Cubs have lost four in a row, and the team’s NL Central division lead has shrunk to four games. There is no apparent correlation with Mariotti’s departure.

San Juan Star Gave No Clue of Shutdown Plans

Aug. 29, 2008 was the final issue of the San Juan Star

Here’s the front page of the last issue of the San Juan Star, which shut down abruptly last Friday after nearly 50 years. This leaves the island of Puerto Rico with no English-language daily. The paper gave no indication that it would cease publishing. On page three of that day’s issue, there was a small announcement that frequency would be scaled back to five days a week (above right). Employees said they were unaware of the change in plans until a general announcement was made.

Miscellany

More proof that adversity makes strange bedfellows: The Miami Herald, Palm Beach County Sun-Sentinel and the Palm Beach Post will share basic news stories with each other while continuing to compete vigorously in the South Florida market they serve. The experiment will last for three months, after which the participants will decide if they want to continue.

2008 Newspaper Job Cuts Total Nearly 4,000; Source: Erica Smith

The Des Moines Register has laid off 12 staffers and frozen another 11 open positions. The publisher is being unusually open about who’s losing jobs. They include a 30-year veteran farm reporter and a top feature writer. Daily circulation is down 20% since 1994 and Sunday circulation is off nearly 30%.

After trying to make a go of it as a daily newspaper for five years, the Noblesville (Inc.) Daily Times gave up the ghost last week and shut its doors, idling 24 full-time employees. Owner Schurz Corp. had tried to sell the paper for the last six months but was unable to find a buyer. The Daily Times had increased from weekly to daily frequency in 2003. The company also shut down the twice-monthly Westfield Times.

Apparently, a lot of central California residents think that just because the Modesto Bee will now be printed in Sacramento, the paper is going away. Its editor says that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Arizona Republic is shedding 27 newsroom employees on top of 35 pressroom workers laid off earlier this month. Gannett Blog claims the paper has 2,700 employees, which makes these reductions a drop in the bucket compared to the typical industry cutbacks of about 10% of the workforce. Blog visitors say the mood at the Republic is horrible. “Morale here is so low people who weren’t offered buyouts congratulated those who took them,” writes one.

Following the lead by several papers recently to reduce “soft” news and features, the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C. will cut its second editorial page and eliminate its dedicated book reviews section. Editorial Page Editor Allen Johnson doesn’t mince words: “We won’t even attempt to pretend that these changes will give you a bigger, better opinion section. They won’t. And you know that.”

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has canceled its Associated Press subscription, and it probably won’t be the last paper to do so. The Strib is one of several papers that have complained loudly about the AP’s pricing policies, which they say constitute an onerous tax at a time when member newspapers are already bleeding red ink. Now it’s given the wire service the required two-year notice of its intention to cancel.

More papers are likely to follow. In Ohio, a group of dailies has banded together to share stories, a move driven in part by a desire to cut dependence on the AP. Many papers rely on the wire service to deliver national and international coverage, but with the recent push to go “hyper-local,” the need for such information is declining. Readers already get most of that stuff online anyway, and with its liberal syndication agreements with various online portals, the AP is actually competing with its member companies.

If newspapers begin opting out of their AP subscriptions, it could have interesting ripple effects for the AP and its members. Alan Mutter has noted that the AP gets two-thirds of its stories from member papers. If it loses those sources, then the wire service will have to invest in its own staff to make up for the shortfall. That means the AP has to make a choice between cutting its license fees or losing members and the content that drives its other licensing arrangements. However, as David Brauer notes, “If AP gets less cash and copy from the Strib and cuts its local presence, Minnesota’s news ecosystem could take a big hit. The wire service’s copy fleshes out local papers big and small; a diminished AP weakens a key line of defense for cash-strapped newsrooms.”

In short, the AP is engaged in a stare-down with its member newspapers. Will more defections like that of the Star Tribune force it to blink?

The industry’s dire financial situation has got newspapers thinking creatively about how to avoid cutting into bone. Editor & Publisher continues its recent reporting on this issue, focusing on creative content-sharing and partnership agreements that many papers are hatching to deliver quality information to readers while abandoning traditional rivalries. Adversity is the mother of invention, and some editors are reporting that by abandoning their “not invented here” bias, they’re minimizing the impact of layoffs and cost cuts.

Miscellany

Almost two-thirds of the top 30 newspaper websites had double-digit percentage increases in year-over-year unique traffic in July, according Nielsen Online. Ottaway Newspapers led the good news parade with a gain of 167%. The Los Angeles Times was up 66% and The Wall Street Journal Online advanced 94%. Editor & Publisher didn’t try to explain the dramatic improvements, but the combination of high gas prices driving more at-home “staycations” along with interest in the presidential campaign and Summer Olympics probably all played a role.

University of South Carolina journalism professor Ernest Wiggins was curious about how newspaper websites handle comments from readers, so he looked at 10 of the largest titles to see if there was any consensus. His findings: not really. All of the newspapers he reviewed post some language intended to keep discussions civil, and a minority actually screen contributions. Beyond that, practices range from the New York Daily News‘ genteel “Be nice” plea to the Los Angeles Times‘ draconian warning that “A VIOLATION OF THESE POSTING RULES MAY BE REFERRED TO LAW ENFORCEMENT AUTHORITIES.” He cites advice from two Poynter faculty as a rule of thumb: encourage comments, state the purpose of the forum but don’t threaten people.

Alan Mutter says the distressed financial condition of American newspapers could make them appealing buyout targets to foreign interests with a political agenda. He focuses, in particular, on Arab and Asian governments that are flush with cash in overseas investment funds and that could benefit from having bully pulpits in the US market. The Unification Church-owned Washington Times set the precedent by using a newspaper to champion its conservative political causes and there are no rules that would prevent other overseas buyers from doing the same thing. At current valuations, newspaper companies would be a rounding error for some of these funds, which boast assets of as much as $400 billion. If overseas interests bought big into the US market, it could lead us back to the early days of newspapering, when publications typically took strong positions on the issues and made no effort to deliver “just the facts” journalism, he says.

The Honolulu Advertiser is again moving to cut headcount, even as it pursues rocky negotiations with the Newspaper Guild. The company will eliminate 27 positions at its Pacific Media Publications community newspaper group and consolidate seven community newspapers into three. The company had earlier cut 54 jobs at the Advertiser. A Guild spokesman said the move “certainly does not reflect a move toward trying to get a contract.”

The Chicago Sun-Times is seeking more staff cuts on top of the 40 positions eliminated earlier this year as part of a $50 million expense reduction campaign. The editor didn’t specify a reduction target, but said the cuts are driven by the “awful” advertising climate. Two weeks ago, parent Sun-Times Media Group announced that it was outsourcing its inbound classified advertising operations after reporting a dismal $38 million loss in the second quarter.

Sam Zell says Tribune Co. will be able to cover its debts for at least the next seven years. Buried in a Bloomberg story about Zell’s forecasts for the real estate market is the tycoon’s comment that “We don’t have any real maturities that aren’t covered until 2015.” Zell also said he expects to sell the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley field later this year for “a lot” of money.

At Tribune Co.’s namesake newspaper, social media has come of age. Huffington Post’s Todd Andrlik writes that a four-person social media team has come up with strategies to monitor news reports on Twitter, establish communities on Facebook and generally improve its reader interaction. A recent page three story about a bomb threat at Daley Center bomb originated as a Twitter message to Colonel Tribune, the paper’s online avatar that’s a throwback to colorful onetime owner Col. Robert R. McCormick. Sharing content through social networks has also resulted in an immediate 8% uptick in site traffic.

CNN has joined with the free Metro papers in New York, Boston and Philadelphia to deliver columns by CNN correspondents in select Metro editions every Friday for 12 weeks. Their stories began appearing last Friday. The deal expands an existing agreement that provides 70 Metro editions with content produced by CNN exclusively for Metro.

The Sacramento and Fresno Bee newspapers offered buyouts to employees and held out the possibility of layoffs if unspecified cost-reduction goals aren’t met. Sacramento’s buyout offer covers 55 percent of its full-time employees and a smaller number of part-timers, including most editorial employees. The Fresno Bee‘s offer is open to most of its full-time workers. The publisher called the current situation, “some of the worst economic times we’ve faced.” Both papers cut staff just two months ago.

The Gainesville Sun and Ocala Star-Banner will merge news operations, with the editor of the Sun running the show. News, copy desk, design, layout and pagination for both papers will move to Gainesville. Executives at both papers stressed their intent to remain committed to their local communities. However, they also said jobs will be cut at each newspaper, although specifics haven’t been determined. (via Romenesko).

Management and union executives are cooperating in Philadelphia as the owners of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News seeks to cut staff amid a growing financial crisis. Responding to union concerns, the owners are targeting newsroom managers for cuts instead of unionized reporters. No numbers were specified. Standard & Poor’s recently reported, that owner Philadelphia Media Holdings (PMH) was trading at less than 50 cents on the dollar, meaning that the risk of bankruptcy is high. PMH missed a key interest payment in June, forcing it into a forbearance agreement with its creditors that lasts through September 10th.

Miscellany

GateHouse Media Inc. and American Community Newspapers (ACN) could become the third and fourth newspaper companies to be delisted from a major stock exchange this year.  ACN disclosed on Friday that it has been warned that it may be delisted from the American Stock Exchange for failing to file a 10-Q report. ACN publishes more than 100 community papers and shoppers. The company has until Sept. 4 to file a report telling how it will come into compliance. GateHouse has been notified by the New York Stock Exchange that it could be delisted if it doesn’t get its stock price over $1 a share (it’s at 60 cents now) and maintain a market capitalization above $75 million.

Yahoo Japan is experimenting with user-generated editorial content. The Japanese Yahoo News page now features large amounts of material suggested and edited by readers. It’s a variation on Wikipedia and Google’s Knol, which are two experiments in community journalism. Unlike those two examples, though, Yahoo requires user editors to apply and take a test before they can contribute. (via Editors Weblog)

The Editor of the McDowell (N.C.) News remembers fondly the days when a good monkey story merited a trip to Tokyo and a phalanx of support staff. Now all people want to read about is presidential candidates and their love children. Sheesh.

And Finally…

Editors at the annoyingly elitist Wine Spectator must be red-faced after their magazine bestowed a coveted Award of Excellence on a non-existent restaurant named Osteria L’Intrepido. The prank was dreamed up by Robin Goldstein, author of The Wine Trials, as part of a research project. Goldstein concocted a website featuring a menu assembled from recipes found in an Italian cookbook and submitted it as an entry in the magazine’s contest, along with a $250 entry fee. To twist the knife a little, he put together a reserve wine list “largely chosen from among some of the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past few decades.” His blog entry lists some of the reviews Wine Spectator published of his choices:

“Sweet and cloying. Smells like bug spray.”

“Smells barnyardy and tastes decayed.”

“Turpentine. Medium-bodied, with hard, acidic character.”

These reviews apparently missed the fact-checkers at the magazine, which awarded it a top honor anyway. We suppose $250 will buy you a lot these days.

Chicago Tribune Editor Gerry Kern sent a memo to staffers last week that challenges some shibboleths of journalism and appears to advocate for giving readers more entertainment at the expense of traditional community affairs.

The message reads like a mission statement. “We clearly are moving toward a 24/7 online business that also publishes in print once a day,” Kern says. While acknowledging the value of traditional fare like public service and investigative reporting, he also stresses the need to delight and entertain.

The nut graph is about halfway down, where Kerns relates that “One of the most revealing insights from recent research is how little excitement some people feel about their daily encounter with us. Many of our regular readers regard us like the electric company or water utility. Yes, everyone wants electricity and water and it’s a pain to do without them. But your soul just isn’t stirred by the sight of working faucet or wall socket.

“Without an engaged audience that finds value in what we offer, we cannot succeed. Journalism is not an abstraction that exists apart from the audience. It must deliver what the audience needs and wants.”

This sounds like a not-too-subtle message that Tribune staff need to take themselves a little less seriously and listen to their readers a little more closely.  If that means giving them record reviews and Sudoku puzzles, so be it.  The Tribune is about to debut a new design along the lines of its Tribune Co. brethren.  If their lead is any indication, you’ll see a lot more color and a little less gravity.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has apparently got the same religion.  The paper is upgrading its features sections with more emphasis on local entertainment and leisure destinations while merging its news sections and cutting back on commentary.

Also, the Tribune has a new managing editor with a track record of success addressing young audiences. Jane Hirt was the founding co-editor of Redeye a free tabloid aimed at Chicago commuters that is considered one of the Tribune’s more successful recent ventures.

All this may be too little too late. Fitch Ratings on Friday cut the debt rating of Tribune Co. to “CCC” and said default is a “real possibility.”  The assessment comes just a week after Tribune CEO Sam Zell said the company had paid down $807 million of borrowing to meet its obligations for the rest of the year.  Fitch isn’t very positive, though.  The firm believes lenders can expect to get between 31 and 50 cents per dollar of investment.

Too Much Time Spent on “Time Spent”

Editor & Publisher has its regular exclusive report on the amount of time people spend reading newspaper sites. At first blush, the numbers look bad. “Nearly half of the top 30 newspaper sites, ranked by total number of unique users, fell year-over-year,” E&P says. “Fourteen dropped slightly or significantly.”

E&P has been reporting the Nielsen numbers dutifully since Nielsen said it would rely on “time spent” as the most important attribute of newspaper website stickiness a year ago, but a review of some historical numbers shows that this metric has its limitations. Look at the examples below, taken from previous E&P accounts.

While these numbers aren’t necessarily indicative of the overall health of the industry, they demonstrate how unreliable the “time spent” figure can be. Look at The Wall Street Journal, which presumably has enough readers to make its figures consistent.  What on earth happened this past May to cause such a drop-off in reader interest?  And what happened over the next three months to cause a revival?

Similarly, the Houston Chronicle tanked in July, 2007 but recovered spectacularly in the year since.  And are readers in Minnesota staying home this summer cruising the Internet instead of driving?  How else to explain such a dramatic recovery?  We’re sure the people Philly.com would like to know the answer.

Here’s some interesting perspective on the subject.

Miscellany

Media General’s publishing revenue fell nearly 19% in July compared to a year ago as the sour Florida economy continue to eat away at its business.  Classified advertising revenue plunged 32.5% with real estate falling an incredible 47%.  Online revenue was up a scant 5.7%,

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel laid off 22 employees to reach its goal of 130 total job cuts after a voluntary buyout program failed to achieve the magic number.

Valleywag digs up some old screenshots in a trip down memory lane as it tells of “5 ways the newspapers botched the Web.”  Reading the account, you get the sense that there were some smart people who saw the opportunities in online publishing as early as 1983 but cluelessness about how people would use the Web combined with a compulsion to protect their print franchises scuttled the early innovations.  It’s a depressing account of opportunities lost.

Your obedient editor will be on vacation for a few days and posting less frequently, to the relief of newspaper executives everywhere.

Editor & Publisher has a 3,000-word special report on the newspaper industry’s prospects that doesn’t turn up much new ground but documents the panic that has set in across the business. Everything is on the table, industry execs now say. In the coming year, expect a lot of papers to eliminate money-losing Monday, Tuesday and Saturday editions, dump their classified advertising sections and combine forces with rivals or outsource overseas. Recent redesigns like those at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel are intended to be produced by smaller staffs. Some papers consider giving up on courting the youth audience and decide to just focus on giving their older readers something they’ll want to consume for the next 25 years.

The problem is that newspaper are tinkerers, not re-inventers, the piece concludes. Their core skills are mis-matched to the enormity of the task that faces them, and the unrelenting declines in business have left them with no option to think through bigger changes. Noting the waning interest in the the “Newspaper Next” program, the American Press Institute’s Drew Davis quotes one board member as saying, “We are like drowning people, who are treading water as fast as we can. And you people are throwing life preservers and we can’t even get our hands out of the water to reach them.”

In its first year, Newspaper Next reached some 6,000 people, but since API rolled out its 2.0 version last February, the response has not been anywhere near that, says Davis. The biggest newspaper companies, he adds, are most conspicuous in their absence.
Not everyone is as dour as the people quoted by E&P. Kevin Slimp reports on a recent meeting by a group of consultants, speakers and trainers who call themselves the Media Specialists Group. They discussed the future of newspapers and, while they agree that big dailies are mostly toast, they’re generally optimistic about circulation trends among regional and focused titles. Expect to see a lot more free distribution and segmentation, they say. Newspaper publishers will also do more contract printing and use their delivery channels to distribute advertising.

Decline is Worse Than Numbers Indicate

Vin Crosbie submits the most lucid, dispassionate and coherent explanation for the decline of the US newspaper business that we’ve seen since Eric Alterman’s groundbreaking piece in The New Yorker this spring. The industry’s problem isn’t the Internet, he argues, it’s the steady loss of respect for and contact with its readers, a trend that began more than 30 years ago. While absolute circulation has declined only 14.5% since 1970, the real decline is more like 45% when adjusted for population growth. Only a third of Americans say they read a newspaper yesterday and only 46% read one regularly, down from 71% in 1992.

Crosbie skillfully skewers the online readership data that newspaper execs use to obscure their problems, pointing out that readers who visit four or five times a month can’t be compared to subscribers. He also dismisses the so-called “passalong rate,” which dying publications like to use to inflate circulation numbers

In the end, he predicts that half of all American dailies will be gone – both online and in print – by the end of the next decade. He promises more analysis of what went wrong in essays today and next week.

Is Yahoo Friend or Foe?

First, Yahoo created an ad consortium and invited newspapers in so they could sip from the cup of online spending. Now it’s competing with its partners. In an Agence France Presse story (carried, ironically, on Yahoo News), Glenn Chapman reports that Yahoo is here to stay as a primary news source. It’s got feet on the street in Beijing for the Olympics (following the herd there) and has scored coups with recent interviews with South Korean president Lee Myung-bak and George W. Bush, who gave his first Internet-only interview to Yahoo. One of its tactics is apparently to ask readers to submit questions during interviews with dignitaries, which is kind of cool, when you think about it. (via Josh Catone).

For some reason, the industry’s troubles are hitting particularly hard in New Jersey. Newsday gathers up the bad news: Gannett just 120 jobs in six Jersey papers. The owner of the Newark Star-Ledger says the paper is on track to lose $30 million to $40 million this year. And the Hackensack Record just sold its building and will turn most of its staff reporters into “mobile journalists,” which is a new euphemism for “stringer.”

Novel Concept

Jason Mandell writes about a writer’s novel approach to sustaining investigative journalism using a community support model. David Cohn, a former tech and science reporter for Wired, has created Spot.Us, a place where journalists can float ideas for investigative reporting pieces and get funded by visitors, who vote with their wallets for the stories they like. The results are then syndicated to partner outlets. “If you get 100 people to give just $15, that’s enough to pay a journalist to do a story on something that will benefit the community,” Cohn told Mandell. Spot.US is partially funded, ironically, by Knight Foundation. Knight-Ridder was forced to sell out to McClatchy two years ago and has suffered along with its acquirer. Maybe Spot.Us is a way to begin to build at least a shell of a new vision for investigative journalism.

Layoff Log

How bad is morale at USA Today? The Gannett Blog floats the possibility that the national daily, which has so far escaped outright layoffs, may finally be on the chopping block. What’s most interesting, though, is the 50+ comments, most of them from people purporting to be USA Today employees, describing the dour mood in the halls and speculating about a big meeting next week with the publisher. There’s also an interesting account of a recent internal meeting at which tensions flared between print and online staff. Apparently, online is now the favored child at McPaper and some of the print veterans resent it.

Also,

• The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is now offering a buyout to “the majority of regular full-time employees.” This is its third job reduction this year.
• The Rockford (Ill.) Register Star laid off 13 employees and closed its Springfield bureau. A round of voluntary buyouts this spring wasn’t enough. from April to June that resulted in the departure of 17 employees. The publisher wouldn’t rule out further cuts.
• Warren Buffett’s Buffalo News may be somewhat insulated by Berkshire Hathaway’s might, but it’s still offering a small buyout. The package is good, though, starting at $60,000 and going up. Staffers were surprised to learn of the offer first on the newspaper’s website, though.
• The Burlington (Vt.) Free Press is laying off six people, which is only about 3% of its staff. A 50-year-old columnist says he “didn’t see it coming.”
• The St. Petersburg Times avoided layoffs as 200 people accepted a buyout. The early-retirement package took out 40 percent of the paper’s staff of 50-and-older employees.

And Finally…

Slate’s Jack Shafer Ron Rosenbaum hates pencil puzzles, and his rant against a practice that he sees growing in popularity is worth reading just for gems like his characterization of Sudoku as the “mind-numbing hillbilly heroin of the white-collar class.” Shafer Rosenbaum picks up copies of Will Shortz’s Funniest Crossword Puzzles and let’s the first “down” clues speak for themselves:

4. Highly ornamented style

5. Tell ___ glance

Whoa, dude, you’re killin’ me!

Puzzle addicts could cure cancer if they’d apply their brains more appropriately, like by reading a book, he says. “For you puzzle people: Reading is a seven-letter word for what you’re depriving yourself of every sad minute you’re spending on your empty boxes.” In the end, “there are two kinds of brains. Those hardwired to obtain deep pleasure from arranging letters in boxes and those hardwired to get the creeps from the process.”

It’s very funny. Now, back to our puzzle…

The inclusive model of journalism that is evolving online will demand more editors than the media world has ever seen. In effect, all journalists will become editors. They will learn to gather first-person accounts and combine them with expert insights to create a tapestry of information. They may then be called upon to tend and update those stories for years. Journalists will be at the vortex of an information swirl, and their ability to sort through and harmonize information from many sources will be their principal value.

These new rules will demand a different set of skills than the ones historically taught by journalism schools and demanded by professional editors. As we have noted in earlier essays, the role of the reporter will become less prominent in the value chain. In the past, reporters were taught to gather and sift through large amounts of information, discarding selectively as time and space limitations dictated. In the future, space limitations will be irrelevant. Every bit of information can be captured and archived forever. Time demands will both shrink and expand.

Deadlines Compress, but Stories Never Die

They’ll shrink because deadlines will be constant and unrelenting. Journalists will be under pressure to publish news in near real-time. This will demand new aggregation and organization skills. A single journalist will no longer be the funnel — or bottleneck, depending on how you view it — for news events. Ordinary citizens will deliver important news accounts as they happen. A journalist’s competitors will no longer be a handful of regional print and broadcast outlets but an army of interested stakeholders who, in many cases, are more knowledgeable about the topic than the reporter.

It will be futile for a news organization to compete with this kind of citizen firepower. The only rational strategy is to co-opt it. That means reporters must develop relationships with people closest to the story, create the means to capture their observations and perspectives and deliver them quickly. Reporters will become, in effect, editors supervising a loosely formed team of interested stringers.

On the back end, time frames will lengthen considerably as news stories become archives. The Wikipedia model is perhaps the best illustration of this. On Wikipedia, stories begin as a “stub” and grow to sometimes epic proportions. Journalists will no longer write just “the first draft of history,” but will help to shape an archival account of considerably more long-term value. In some cases, a journalist’s career may become tied to a single story that he or she tends and enriches over time.

Promise and Problems

This model has great potential but also great challenge. The loss of trust is a huge issue. While not everyone trusts the news media, they can at least be reasonably certain that professional editors are working in their best interest. The inclusive journalism model has no such guarantees. Anyone can publish anything he or she wishes online, so editors will be needed to arbitrate conflicting claims.

This will certainly require old-fashioned reporting techniques. When the facts can’t be discerned from field reports, it will still be up to the professional journalist to get on the phone and verify them. Readers will come to trust these professional truth-sayers, whether they be individual journalists or media institutions. That’s an important point. In the future, readers may make little distinction between The New York Times and an independent journalist as long as they believe they can trust the source. As Matt Drudge demonstrated a decade ago, trusted brands can emerge without the blessing of media institutions.

Disclosure Trumps Verification

News will increasingly be published without the rigorous fact-checking that information consumers have come to expect. This is a controversial issue, but all trends point to accuracy becoming less vital as a criteria for publication than it is today.

The reason is that published information is no longer archival. Online reports can be changed at any time, which means that the impact of incorrect information is greatly diminished. Today, publication is no longer an end but a beginning. Disclosure will become more important than confirmation. Readers will come to accept that not all the facts are confirmed as long as those shortcomings are disclosed.

The fit and finish that has been characteristic of print publications will diminish in importance. While this is a difficult idea for many editors to accept, the reality is that online information consumers are more tolerant of typos, grammatical errors and structural inconsistency than print readers (this blog is perhaps a good example!). While some media outlets will continue to take pride in delivering high quality finished product, many readers will accept a trade-off between perfection and timeliness. Top editors are already coming to accept this. Faced with staff cuts and the need to do more with less, major newspapers are discovering that they no longer need a dozen editors to touch every front-page story.

In short, journalists will need to significantly broaden their range of skills.. The journalist of the future will be a resourceful, online-savvy and relationship-driven aggregator of information with the ability to apply reportorial shoe-leather where needed. Deadlines will contract on the front end, but stories may live for years in a continually updated archive. The journalist will become part reporter, part editor and part librarian, playing a pivotal role in framing the stream of events and opinion for an audience that demands context.

Other posts in this series:

The Future of Journalism, Part I

The Future of Journalism, Part II