LAmag.com rounds up a group of former LA Times editors for one-on-ones about the past and future of the newspaper. The conversation is pleasant until you hit the jump page, when former EICs Dean Baquet and James O’Shea unload on owner Sam Zell.

Quoting from Baquet:

“Tribune was not a good steward, but Zell seems to be worse. Tribune didn’t like the L.A. Times, but Zell seems to be flailing and making it up as he goes along. At least with Tribune, you could have a rational fight—they never shouted obscenities at me. I wish somebody could tell this guy that he’s presiding over important newspapers and that sounding like a knucklehead won’t work in the newspaper business. Doesn’t he understand that the best people at the Times are floating résumés across the country because of his bullying?”

And from O’Shea:

“I think Mr. Zell looks at newspapers as he looks at any business, but a newspaper isn’t any other business. It’s a public service. If you do a good job serving the public, then business will be good. Public service is not a dividend you decrease or increase when profits fall or grow. What the L.A. Times becomes will depend on Mr. Zell’s understanding of that.”

Survey says Newspaper Websites Attract Smart, Rich People

A Nielsen survey commissioned by the Newspaper Association of America reports that newspaper websites attracted more than 66.4 million unique visitors in the first quarter, up 12.3% from last year. Page views were up a more modest five percent. In addition, the survey found that regular online newspaper readers are richer, better educated, more likely to travel and more likely to use iTunes. They have all kinds of other desirable characteristics, which you can read about in the press release.

Murdoch Still Favored to Win Newsday

Newsday continues to provide the best coverage of its own impending sale. You’d think that with Cablevision outbidding two other suitors by $70 million, the deal would be a no-brainer.  Not so, says this report. For one thing, Sam Zell may be reluctant to snub his new buddy, Rupert Murdoch. Cablevision may also face the same kind of cross-ownership regulatory hurdles as News Corp. And the whole deal needs to be rubber-stamped by a watchdog group of Tribune Co. employees, who may or may not agree with their boss. The whole thing could drag on for months. (via Romenesko)

Envisioning the Future of News

Susan Edgerley, assistant managing editor of The New York Times, is answering questions from readers. She’s focused on reinventing the newsroom. Some notable quotes:

“Two years ago, we might have been hesitant to break a scoop on the Web — we would have worried about the competition catching up to us before our print deadline. No more. Now we put the story out there and figure out how to advance it for the next day’s paper.”

 “The Web staff used to be in a different building a couple of blocks from our old Times Square office. When we moved into our new building about a year ago, we had the space to sit together for the first time.”

 “I don’t think you’re wasting your time getting a print journalism degree. Telling stories fairly and compellingly will always be at the center of what we do.”

 “We’re hiring people, some of them straight out of school, for their Web skills.”

 “Finally, NYTimes.com is more than the stories, pictures and graphics you see everyday in The New York Times. It is more than a newspaper on the Web. We want to use its blogs and reader comments and Topics pages and interactivity to talk more directly to our readers and find ways for them to share information with us.”

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ReinventingClassifieds.com has a prescription for resuscitating the dying business. Newspapers should put all their classifieds into one distributed, constantly updated database and then distribute them freely to bloggers, who can sell display ads against them. Bloggers can offer free classifieds to their readers, which become part of the master database. It’s an interesting idea, although we question how much interest bloggers – or display advertisers – will have in running ads next to ads. (via Romenesko)

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For the true TV news junkie, check out LiveNewsCameras.com. The site aggregates video feeds from more than 100 stations around the U.S. The project is the brainchild of a former Bay Area TV producer, says the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.

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Editors Weblog reports on Sunlight Foundation’s new tools for online journalists. They include a Google Maps mash-up of earmarks from last year’s Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill.

There’s also an item on the innovative uses of Twitter by the Evening Leader in the UK. The group text-messaging service recently enabled the paper to cover local election results, scooping its competition and setting up the print edition for more thoughtful next-day coverage. Will Twitter become an essential tool for journalists in the future? Let’s hear your comments.

Layoff Log

• The Lexington Herald-Leader is offering a voluntary buyout program, looking to reduce its staff of 385 employees by about four percent. Layoffs are possible if the offer doesn’t generate enough interest.
• The Camera of Boulder, Colo. laid off nine employees — 6 percent of its staff — in response to declining advertising revenues. The president of the company described the newspaper’s business as “healthy.” You figure it out.

Monday was all about the Audit Bureau of Circulation report, and the news was as hideous as expected. Rather than repeat the numbers, we’ll point you to Editor & Publisher‘s overview story, the list of the largest 25 dailies, the largest 25 Sunday papers and the papers that actually grew circulation.

Big markets fared the worst. The Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Dallas Morning News all reported sickening daily circulation declines of 8.5% or more. Some of the contraction is no doubt due to publishers’ efforts to rein in free and heavily discounted circulation, but the overall trend is clear: The top 10 metropolitan daily newspapers in the U.S. (note that this excludes the nationally cirulated USA Today and Wall Street Journal) collectively lost more than 235,000 daily readers. The Sunday numbers are even more staggering: more than 635,000 readers lost in the top 10 markets in just one year.

There were no clear patterns among the daily figures. On Sunday, it was a case of the bigger they were, the harder they fell. The five biggest markets averaged a 6.6% drop, while the 21^st through 25^th largest papers averaged a 4.2% decline. Patterns were harder to find in the daily numbers. There were a few bright spots: 12 dailies did manage to show gains. But their circulation averages about 100,000, while the 10 largest papers average north of 630,000. And they were all down.

Alan Mutter does a flash analysis and notes that daily circulation in the U.S. is at its lowest level since 1946. Considering that population has more than doubled since then, that adds up to a 50% decline in readership. Sadly, the demographic trends offer little relief. The post-war era was the beginning of a surge in population and in readership. But as we’ve noted repeatedly, today’s kids and young adults don’t read newspapers and aren’t likely to start. The readership pig in the newspaper python is the over-55 crowd, which isn’t desirable to advertisers and which won’t be much of a factor in 15 or 20 years.

Layoff log

The Orange County Register, whose 11.9% daily circulation decline was the largest among the top 25 dailies, will lay off 80 to 90 people, or about five percent of its workforce. This is the third round of layoffs in a year for Orange County Register Communications, which is the Register’s parent. That’s either a sign of poor management or a completely unpredictable market. The worst way to cut expenses is by dribs and drabs. It saps morale and spreads fear among the survivors.

The Raleigh News and Observer downplayed the news that it will offer buyouts to about a quarter of its staff. No more than 1% to 2% of the employees are expected to take the deal.

WSJ’s Mystery Man Demystified

The New York Times profiles Robert Thomson, the de factor editor of The Wall Street Journal in the wake of Marcus Brauchli’s abrupt resignation last week. The generous profile portrays Thomson as a talented journalist with loads of people skills. In previous assignments, his staff reportedly loved him. His reluctance to cut headcount would make him an unlikely choice to initiate mass layoffs at the Journal. He’s also got Rupert Murdoch’s ear.

One Reason Why the FT is Ascendant

Editors Weblog is running a series of interviews about the future of journalism, and the latest one is with Dan Bogler, Managing Editor of Robert Thomson’s old employer, the Financial Times. If you want to hear the perspective of an editor who gets it, read this interview. Bogler has no illusions about what’s happening to his industry. We’ve gone from zero videos on our website to over 100 per month in the last 18 months. That’s part of the continuum: it’s us doing the same thing in different distribution channels,” he says.

Asked if the golden age of investigative reporting is over, he responds matter-of-factly, “The idea that journalists have to do long-term, deep, undercover investigations where they reveal something months later – I don’t think it works like that anymore. [J]ournalists working under cover, developing sources and breaking big scandals is less likely; but revealing news that people don’t want out there, on a short term basis, uncovering a scandal and having it come to light, that’s more likely.”

Bogler betrays no defensiveness, resentment or belligerence. He’s adapting to change. With editors like this at the helm, its no wonder the FT is coming on so strong in the U.S. market.

And Finally…

Is he a blogger? A journalist? A marketer? James Arndorfer is all three. His BrewBlog frequently breaks news or casts new light upon happenings in the beer industry. But Arndorfer is a full-time employee of Miller Brewing, which openly supports BrewBlog. Rival Anheuser-Busch is a favorite target for negative news or snarky analysis, but Arndorfer says he isn’t afraid to tweak the nose of his employer. It’s all very new media-ish. Read the WSJ profile.

How successfully are newspapers making the jump to the Web? It depends on whom you believe. A lot of research is trying to make sense out of people’s online reading habits as they relate to newspaper brands, and the numbers are inconclusive.

The monthly Audit Bureau of Circulation figures are due today, and the news is not expected to be good. Editor & Publisher got the drop on the figures and says that for the six months ending in March, daily circ was off 3.5% and Sunday was down 4.5%. The ABC has started tracking online readership for the first time, but it’s too soon to compare numbers. E&P did cite research by Scarborough Research that showed that combined print/online reach of major dailies is slowly declining.

“When comparing 20 papers, only two — The Atlanta Journal Constitution and The Oregonian in Portland — increased their integrated market reach year-over-year,” the story says. A Scarborough exec verifies, “Print [readership] is in a steady decline, and online readership is growing but the declines in print are not being offset by the increases in online readership.

The good news is that display advertising on newspaper websites is booming, according to a Media Post analysis. The bad news is that online classified advertising isn’t. That combination is leading to slowing growth in newspapers’ digital revenues.

But wait, there’s more good news. A Newspaper Association of America report, based on research commissioned by Google, finds that 30% of Internet-using newspaper readers went online to research a product they saw in a newspaper. It adds that 70% of those readers then made a purchase. The fact that the research was sponsored by Google will no doubt help make it appear more credible.

Notes

• Reports from several sources say The New York Times will announce its first-ever editorial layoffs this week after fewer people took the paper’s buyout offer than management had hoped. Speculation is that 30 people will lose their jobs. Expect massive news coverage of this relatively small workforce reduction, mainly for its symbolic importance.
• Speaking of the Times, the paper has a eulogy for the Capital Times, a Wisconsin afternoon institution that closed its print edition last week. The shutdown was announced in February. The Times piece has some interesting tidbits on the former popularity of afternoon dailies, which are declining faster than their morning counterparts. Afternoon papers have been hit particularly hard by online competition.
• PBS’s Idealab has “Ten Things Journalists Should Know About Surviving In a High-Tech Industry,” including “Jobs are temporary. Friends are forever” and “Nobody has the right qualifications.” This list is right on the money. Journalists considering the shift to online media organizations need to understand that the jobs aren’t lifetime guarantees. You’re on your own, but you can learn a tremendous amount and prosper more than you would as a Guild lifer .

Will New York City soon have two New York Times? That hasn’t happened yet, but the trend appears to be in that direction. The Project for Excellence in Journalism analyzed The Wall Street Journal’s editorial profile in the four months before and the three months after Rupert Murdoch’s takeover. It found that business coverage is down sharply in favor of political and international stories. While the Journal still runs far more business news than the Times, the papers appear to be headed toward a similar content model.

The tricky part for the Journal will be figuring out how to sustain its strength (and brand equity) in business coverage and not look too much like the Times. Meanwhile, you have to believe that the Financial Times is salivating at the prospect of moving in on the Journal’s traditional market.

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Newsosaur Alan Mutter believes that Murdoch’s strategy in New York is focused on the Daily News, not the Times. He runs some numbers on what would happen if Murdoch controlled both Newsday and the New York Post and concludes that Mortimer Zuckerman’s Daily News would be painted into a corner. One Newsday asset that many reports have overlooked is AM New York, a free daily with 314,000 circulation. The Newsday-Post combo would dominate the profitable Sunday market while AM New York would squeeze the Daily News’ weekday business. When you add up all the Murdoch strategies, you can see New York eventually becoming a two-publisher town, with one publisher holding three of the four titles. 

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This may answer some recent questions raised on Wall Street about just what Murdoch is trying to accomplish. Put all the pieces together and the answer appears quite clear.

Perhaps this prospect is injecting some jackrabbit juice into the U.S. Senate, which looks set to strengthen the ban on cross-media ownership in large markets.

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On a completely unrelated note, Slate’s Jack Shafer calls out Murdoch for what Shafer says is habitual lying about his 1993 decision to dump the BBC from his Star satellite TV system. The short piece is of mainly historical interest, although it does manage to use the term “genocidal tyrant” as anchor text. If you query Google on that term, you get a page full of Murdoch references.

Other News

• The Boston Globe avoided layoffs as 23 employees accepted buyout offers. We just don’t know who they are, and the Globe intends to keep it that way. Romenesko has the memo.
• A day after Wall Street pushed stocks of three newspapers to historic lows, the issues bounced back big on Thursday. Some bloggers are calling the stocks a bargain at current levels and fears appear to be easing about the credit crunch, which should lift spirits at debt-laden newspaper companies.
• Nielsen posted comparisons of view time spent on various newspaper sites in March, 2008 versus a year earlier. Editor & Publisher noted that only 11 of the top 30 sites reported increases. What struck us was that the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Houston Chronicle websites get almost as much reader time as NYTimes.com and significantly more than WSJ.com. What are they doing right?

Reports Say Newsday Goes to Murdoch; Rivals Disagree

Tuesday must have been a busy day for media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who concluded a handshake deal with Tribune Co. to buy Newsday while also removing the top editor of another area property: The Wall Street Journal. Newsday said its price would be $580 million, which would just about cover Tribune’s impending debt obligation. Murdoch has already contacted the county executives of two Long Island counties to confirm that he’d be spending more time there. He told one of them that he hopes to conclude the deal in two weeks.

News of the Newsday sale was first reported on Monday, and dribs and drabs of information filtered in yesterday. Editor & Publisher says the deal isn’t done yet. Rivals thought they had until next week to submit a bid and plan to do just that. E&P also notes that Murdoch’s ownership of three newspapers (he also has the Daily News) and two TV stations in New York could raise regulatory concerns. It sounds like the fat lady has yet to sing on this deal.

More Tumult at the WSJ

Meanwhile, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal resigned after less than a year on the job. The announcement made it clear that this was a Murdoch bag job. Marcus Brauchli had appeared in public less than two weeks earlier acting like a good company man, and the official statement said only that he was leaving to become a consultant. In his letter to the staff, which the Journal published, Brauchli said, “Now that the ownership transition has taken place, I have come to believe the new owners should have a managing editor of their choosing.” That can’t have lifted the already low morale on the staff.

E&P was all over this story, too, noting that Brauchli was respected as a guardian of editorial independence and wondering what role the newspaper’s editorial independence committee would have in choosing a successor. Given the success Murdoch has had in effecting momentous change at the Journal in such a short time, it’s likely that the owner will get his way.

Times Management Caves

The prospect of being cornered by Murdoch must have the Sulzbergers nervous. Under pressure by two large investors, the Times ownership added representatives of those funds to its board and expanded the total board size to an unwieldy 15 members. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger also dismissed talk of a possible sale of the company, which is what chairmen usually say just before they sell the company. Michael Bloomberg is rumored to be interested.

Sulzberger also outlined a four-part turnaround strategy for Times Co. including cost cuts of $230 million this year, the sale of some divisions and expansion of its online advertising programs with Google and Yahoo.

Latest Earnings Reports Dribble In

News that Journal Communications’ first-quarter profit dropped 91% would usually have some brokers on the ledge, but in this case the previous year’s numbers were boosted by an extraordinary gain. The actual revenue decline was about 9%, on par with recent results posted by other publishers. The industry-wide trend is clear. Year-over-year declines are running at about 10%. In an otherwise upbeat note to staff, McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt confirmed that the double-digit percentage declines are a fact of life adds, “At this point we simply can’t tell when this decline will end.”

Short takes

• The Chicago Sun-Times is on track to turn a profit by the end of the year, according to a memo prepared for potential buyers of parent firm Sun-Times Media Group. The company has been victimized by industry trends and past wrongdoings by two former executives. BusinessWeek recently speculated that it may not last a year.
• The Fort Worth Star-Telegram laid off 15 employees, including eight in the newsroom. The layoffs were apparently a surprise.
• Five full-time employees and four part-timers will be laid off at Maine’s Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. Both papers are up for sale by its Seattle-based owner.

We wish we could end the week on a happy note, but as we noted on Monday, it’s earnings season. Unfortunately, the news couldn’t be much worse. If troubles at the New York Times and Media General are any indication, the rest of the year could be ugly.

New York Times Co. Troubles Deepen

The New York Times Co. swung to a small loss in the first quarter from a $24 million profit a year ago. In a conference call, the CEO didn’t indicate that things were going to get better any time soon. The more worrisome trend may be that online growth is now slowing.

As a result, it looks like the Times newspaper will have to resort to some layoffs to achieve its goal of a 100-position reduction in workforce. Not enough people have taken the buyout offer. The deadline is next Tuesday and the layoffs, if they happen, will be the first in the paper’s 167-year history.
The media’s focus on the 100 job cuts at the Old Gray Lady may obscure the bigger view of the NYT Co. crisis. Media Post points out that the company has cut over 2,000 jobs – about 18% of the total staff – since 2003. The reason for the low response to the recent buyout offer is that the job market is so bleak for ex-journalists, the article suggests.

It offers this cheery quote from analyst Ken Doctor: “Clearly, the decline in revenues is deepening. At this point, there really is no bottom.” As layoffs continue, in future he predicts “a lot of newspapers hiring part-timers, stringers and bloggers–but no more full-time, $50,000-a-year jobs.”

Media General Hammered by Florida Exposure

The news was even worse at Media General, which is heavily dependent to the recession-laden Florida market. The quarterly loss of $20.3 million is more than three times last year’s loss. But check out the declines in these ad categories:

• Newspaper ad revenue off 19.1%
• Interactive media revenue down 3.3% (this is the future, remember)
• Classified ad revenue off 28%
• National ad revenue down 21%

It’s not surprising that Media General just offered buyouts to half the employees in its Florida Communications Group. The terms are generous, ranging up to 39 weeks of pay. Media General didn’t say how many jobs it hopes to eliminate with the offer, but it did say that layoffs are possible.

And the Bad News Spreads

More talk of layoffs, closings and cost reductions. Here’s the rundown:

• The Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20-Year Club has the scoop on Advance Publications’ plan to shut down one of its two production facilities. Advance Publications publishes the Newark Star-Ledger. The two plants employ more than 600 people, though it’s not clear how many jobs would be cut. A decision is expected within the next few weeks.
• Times are hard, indeed, in the New York-Philadelphia corridor. The AP reports that the owner of Philadelphia’s two largest daily newspapers told a judge last week that unraveling its pension mess could lead to more layoffs. One of the two pensions the company merged is underfunded and the costs of bringing it up to snuff were unanticipated. In January, Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC said it had to cut costs by 10% or its viability would be in doubt.
• The Toronto Star will cut 160 jobs, or a little less than 3% of its total workforce. The Canadian Journalism Project points out that this is disconcerting in light of the recent reports that the Canadian newspaper industry is faring much better than its U.S. counterpart.
• The Raleigh News & Observer just told its staff that layoffs may be needed to cope with the business downturn. The paper employs 206 editorial staff.
• The suburban Chicago Daily Herald laid off an unspecified number of employees throughout the company. Classified ad revenues are off as much as 45% year-over-year.
• And finally, further evidence that Sam Zell’s Tribune Co. empire may be unraveling. Revenues continue to fall faster than expected, and now Zell is talking about selling off “newspapers and other properties.” Could that mean that titles other than Newsday may go on the block? One recent report said the LA Times may be in play.

But wait, there’s even more: The source of many of the industry’s problems is doing just fine. Blogger Roy Greenslade notes that Craigslist.org has quietly expanded its global footprint by 120 cities, bringing the total to 570. Craigslist may be the single biggest financial competitor the newspaper industry has. Here is the devastatingly brief, haiku-like announcement from Craig Newmark.

Finally, Philip Stone comments on the empty halls at the once-great Nexpo newspaper equipment trade show. It used to be that Nexpo was so big that only a few convention centers in the country could accommodate it, he says. But at this year’s event, you could have rolled a bowling ball down the expo floor and not disturbed anyone.

Go bowling this weekend. We can use a break.

Free daily BostonNOW abruptly closed, idling 52 full-time employees. According to a story in the final issue, the decision was driven by financial difficulties at the paper’s Icelandic parent. “[T]he tumult in foreign credit markets has forced a change in our original understanding and their focus now appears to be primarily upon their core retail holdings. North American media is not even a distant second,” the CEO said. The shutdown bucks a trend. Free dailies have been a growth market in the US and are enormously popular in Europe, where a greater percentage of the population uses public transportation. In fact, a new free daily called “b” just launched in Baltimore.

Grab Bag

Here are some interesting stories that have accumulated in our RSS readers but which we haven’t had the chance to publish over the last couple of weeks. They’re too good to overlook:

Author, professor and media expert Robert Picard posts an upbeat account of the state of traditional media industries on his blog. The way he sees it, media industries are changing and change is difficult to handle, but the need for robust mainstream media will exist for a long time, the economic picture isn’t nearly as dire as many people think and we all have reason to be optimistic.

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The Daytona News-Journal is for sale. The paper, which is owned by News-Journal Corp., was put on the block after News-Journal lost a court appeal and was ordered to either pay Cox Enterprises $129 million or sell the newspaper. News-Journal is in no position to raise that kind of cash these days, so the paper goes on eBay. Or wherever they sell newspapers these days.

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Alan Mutter sees a dark side to the Washington Post’s recent haul of a half-dozen Pulitzers: It’s one of the few newspapers that still has the resources to produce the kind of journalism that wins the prize. Quoting: “Sadly, only a shrinking handful of fortunate newspapers have a realistic hope of capturing the prize in the future.”

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Via Editors Weblog: San Jose Mercury News designer Martin Gee has posted a photo documentary of the effects of several rounds of layoffs and buyouts in his California newsroom. It’s a sad human story told in pictures in which very few humans are present.

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Illinois’ third largest daily is asking staffers to take off one unpaid day per month and is hinting at layoffs. The DailyHerald of suburban Chicago has been slammed by a 45% drop in help-wanted advertising, a 40% fall in real estate advertising and a 35% decline in ads associated with home improvement. Plus newsprint price increases are unwelcome.

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In an interview with Forbes, TV newsman Tom Brokaw says, “I was at MIT yesterday with the best and brightest. There were about 15 students in the room with me, and I asked how many of them read a newspaper on a daily basis. Two hands went up. Then I asked how many watched the evening news on a nightly basis. No hands went up. And then I asked how many spend a lot of time during the day going to their PDA or computer to find out what’s going on, and every hand went up.”

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It’s not a layoff, it’s an “accomplishment celebration!” At least that’s how the publisher of the Washington Times phrased it in a memo to his staff. John Solomon praised the staff for coming up with creative ideas to improve profitability but said it just wasn’t enough. Layoffs are coming, though he didn’t say how many.

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The American Journalism Review posts an opinion by a newspaper consultant and former reporter who points out the futility of current cost-cutting efforts. “Can newspapers really expect to recapture what they have lost with less circulation, a thinner newspaper offering fewer services to readers, with editorial products undermined in breadth and depth by layoffs and space constrictions? I think not,” says John Morton, echoing similar comments by the late, great Molly Ivins. Morton notes that in the past, newspapers have been able to recover from downsizing initiatives because they had so little competition, but that just isn’t the case any more.

Better Make That A Double; It’s Earnings Time

Today’s lead factoid: The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) says the number of U.S. newsroom journalists shrank to its lowest level since 1984 after total cutbacks of 2,900 in 2007. Update: Newsosaur Alan Mutter says this survey is a load of hooey.

In this week’s news, earnings season is upon us, and investors will be watching nervously as Media General and the New York Times Co. kick off what is likely to be a gruesome round of financial reports. Reuters says Media General revenue could fall 10.6% and lose money. The revenue slide at the times is expected to be a more modest 3.5%.

The news from Journal Register Co. could be worse than that. The floundering chain is being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange this week, which is hardly surprising given that its stock is off more than 99%. The company has hired an investment banker to explore it options. What a rapid fall from grace. Your obedient editor actually owned a few shares of this catastrophe two years ago when one of the leading money magazines called it a sleeper. Today, it looks like sleep of a permanent variety is a more likely possibility.

Alan Mutter writes that JRC was actually a model of expense management under the reign of CEO Robert Jelenic, but the disasterous acquisition of a chain of newspapers in the Detroit area saddled the company with a debt burden that may now pull it under. Some of Mutter’s stories about Jelenic’s obsession with expense reduction are amusing. What’s not amusing is the outlook: with debt at seven times trailing operating earnings and a business rooted in declining markets, it looks unlikely that JRC can successfully pull out of this tailspin.

Rate of Decline Quickens In Seattle

How bad is the newspaper business in Seattle? Despite owning a legally sanctioned near-monopoly, the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer have seen revenues drop more than 25% since 2000. What’s potentially worse is that online revenues are shrinking, too. No doubt the 2000 figures were bolstered by recruitment advertising revenue during the tech stock bubble, but the current year-to-year declines are outstripping industry averages. The fact that the company has made two major belt-tightening moves in just four months indicates that the shrinkage of its business is racing ahead of its own forecasts.

Crosscut Seattle publisher David Brewster has some ideas for rejuvenating the struggling Times. He advises the company to start delivering more products to people’s doorsteps, create an advertising network to sell locally on behalf of national advertisers and find a big partner, among other things.

Good And Bad News In The Numbers

This chart from eMarketer illustrates painfully the obscuring effect of percentages. Online ad sales at U.S. newspapers were up almost 19% in 2007, while print sales were down 9.4%. But the online revenue increase amounts to just $500 million, compared to a $4.4 billion drop in print sales. That means that print contracted eight times as fast as online expanded last year. This trend is ominous. In 2006, the falloff in print sales was only 1.3 times the growth in online sales.

There’s good news, though. Newspapers are doing pretty well in local advertising markets, according to Borrell Associates. Quoting from Media Post: “The survey of 3,000 local Web publishers found that newspaper sites garnered 26.9% of total local online advertising dollars, and also forecast big increases in spending for online video in particular in 2008. Overall, in 2007 newspaper Web sites netted over $2 billion in local online advertising. Thus, according to Borrell, they dwarfed online Yellow Pages sites…” The researcher says the secret is that newspapers are learning to sell better to local advertisers.

And finally…

Los Angeles Daily News Editor Ron Kaye quit 23 years after joining the paper and one month after being forced to lay off nearly 20% of his newsroom staff. “All good things in life come to an end sooner or later, even my love affair with the Daily News,” he wrote. with characteristic bluntness. Noted the E&P writeup: “During his tenure at the Daily News, Kaye became the public face of the newspaper, and his bombastic personality and scathing criticism of Los Angeles City Hall shaped the editorial pages of the paper.”

Romenesko treats us to t-shirts given out at a recent Hartford Courant awards event.

Tribune Co. Faces Default Threat

Reuters digs into Tribune Co.’s finances and decides that they’re pretty grim. Unless the current ad revenue trend turns around, Tribune could default on nearly $4 billion in debt and interest payments due at the end of 2009. That could force the company into receivership and asset sales. However, CEO Sam Zell is going to have to sell assets to cover debt payments, anyway. Reuters says Tribune’s previous management grossly underestimated the 2007/2008 revenue picture, which raises the question of whether Zell would have a legal case that he was sold a bill of goods.

Best quote in the story is from Zell, who recently joked to an audience that going from real estate to newspapers was like “going from leprosy to cancer.” He sure knows how to motivate the troops. Meanwhile a Lehman Brothers Analyst is reducing guidance on McClatchy’s earnings, saying it also faces a risk of default.

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LA Observed has assembled some of the parting e-mails sent by laid-off staffers at the LA Times. Several take shots at TribCo owner Sam Zell. “You want people to ‘Talk to Sam’ but not to ‘Talkback to Sam,'” says one.

But Journal Register May Go First

Looks like the Journal Register could be the first big newspaper company to go bankrupt. Editor & Publisher quotes the New York Times as saying that the company may be unable to service its $625 million debt load on revenues that were $90 million last year and that could fall to $70 million this year. This creates the nightmare prospect of JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank owning a newspaper company, which has never happened before in this traditionally predictable and stable business. It’s also hard to imagine who would buy the assets for something more than pennies on the dollar. Sam Zell, perhaps?

Some Newspapers Doing Just Fine, Thank You

The media buzz over the tailspin of major metro dailies obscures the fact that there are newspapers that are actually growing. New America Media notes that the ethic press is benefiting from the tide of immigration and actually creating jobs where the dailies are laying off. Daily newspapers in Korean, Chinese and Spanish are seeing healthy circulation growth, although they struggle with the same advertiser reticence as their English-language counterparts.

Dallas Publisher Urges Focus on Future

James Moroney, publisher and CEO of Dallas Morning News, told the 9th International Online Journalism Symposium what newspapers must do to survive. “If you are in the newspaper business, you are in the business of managing decline. If you are in the news and information business, then you have a healthy future,” he said. His organization has a strategy built all around hyper-local. No numbers cited.

TV Layoffs Hit Most Visible Journalists

Brittney Gilbert, who blogs for KPIX in San Francisco, writes about the layoffs of 14 people at the station, including two reporters who have five Emmys between them. She also notes that she, who looks to be about 27, was spared. This is the form that layoffs usually take, unfortunately. The most seasoned, highest paid staffers are the first to go. And who’s going to hire them?

Vermont Publisher Leaves for No Apparent Reason

The publisher of the Brattleboro Reformer is leaving after only two years. He says he likes Brattleboro and he isn’t leaving for any particular reason. No one seems to question why he would quit so early in his tenure. It’s all very Brattleboro.

We have a stack of good news about the reinvention of journalism that we really, really will get to you ASAP. It’s just that this depressing stuff keeps coming up.

2007 Newspaper Ad Plunge Was Worst in a Half Century

You’ve got to admire John Sturm, the CEO of the Newspaper Association of America. Here’s his quote in Editor & Publisher, commenting on news that the newspaper industry experienced its worst one-year drop in advertising revenue in 50 years in 2007: “Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms.”

You get the sense that John is the kind of guy who could find a silver lining behind any cloud. In this case, it’s the news that online revenue now represents 7.5% of overall newspaper ad revenue, up from 5.7% the previous year. The “near-term challenges” are that print ad revenue plunged 9.4%. Run the numbers, and you can attribute at least half of the gains in online revenue to the fact that the whole pie is getting smaller.

Newsweek Cuts 111, Including Many Top Critics

Newsweek is buying out 111 staffers, reports Radar, and a lot of institutional memory is going out the door. Quoting: “Among those leaving are some of the magazine’s best-known, most-admired and longest-service critics, including David Gates, David Ansen and Cathleen McGuigan. Harold Shain…All of the chief researchers are also leaving, including Nancy Stadtman, Ray Sawhill and Ray Anello, and their positions may be eliminated.” The report doesn’t say what percentage of the total staff this represents, but the cuts were probably inevitable in light of the recent 16% decline in newsstand sales.

Cuts aren’t just in print

Online technology publisher CNet has laid off 120 people, or about 10% of its workforce. The cuts were announced suddenly and were immediate, with no grace period. International Business Times has the details and the corporatese memo from the CEO. CNet is suffering from an overall downturn in tech ad spending, the result of consolidation and lack of new startup activity in the IT market. It’s also being pecked to death by ducks, as bloggers steal traffic in dribs and drabs. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington remarks on this phenomenon, but suggests that bloggers will have to band together to form a significant media entity. He says it’s going to happen, though.

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Malaise is apparently spreading into local broadcast media. U.S. New’ Liz Wolgemuth reports that TV stations in Miami, Denver and Sacramento have laid off staff. A commenter says it happened in Dallas, too.

Short Takes

One of the few newspaper chains to resist the recent write-down frenzy, Lee Enterprises, finally swallowed the bitter pill, taking $500 million to $700 million in lost goodwill charges for the first quarter. A defiant management statement said the current stock price undervalues the company.

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LA Observed has assembled some of the parting e-mails sent by laid-off staffers at the LA Times. Several take shots at TribCo owner Sam Zell. “You want people to ‘Talk to Sam’ but not to ‘Talkback to Sam,'” says one.

As If You Didn’t Know, “The State of the News Media Is Troubled”

If you don’t have time to read the voluminous (180,000-word) State of the Media Report, J.D. Lasica gives a pretty fine overview here. Summarizing his summary: The old “destination” model is dead. The job of the news organization today is as much to direct people to information as to tell stories. The big-brand news organizations may have even more throw weight online than they do in print. The vast democratization of news that was expected isn’t occurring. In the age of search, every story is a home page (we liked this one). More reporting will consist of incremental updates, some even being simple e-mail or Twitter messages.