The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is raising newsstand prices 50 cents to $2 per weekday issue, despite the fact that weekday print circulation has dropped 54% over the last decade.rThe move continues a drive by newspapers to raise reader revenues in the face of quickening declines in advertising sales. Ad revenues at U.S. newspapers fell 8% last year, the largest decline since 2009. The price increase is also an effort to wring more dollars out of the shrinking base of older readers who can’t get through the day without a print newspaper. Those readers have money, but advertisers don’t want to reach them.

The story in the rival Tribune-Review quotes Poynter Institute analyst Rick Edmonds saying that raising prices puts pressure on newspapers to improve quality, but there is little evidence that quality and price are correlated. The Post-Gazette is more likely looking to whittle down its print reader base to the hard-core few who will pay a price at which print is profitable.

 

The Tampa Tribune is no more.

The rival Tampa Bay Times said on Tuesday that it has purchased the 121-year-old Tribune and shut it down, converting subscribers and advertisers to the Times. That makes the Times the fifth-largest Sunday newspaper in the country by circulation.

A purchase price was not specified, but TampaBay.com reported that Times ownership borrowed $13.3 million to finance the sale.

Locals saw this one coming. Few major metropolitan areas can support to daily newspapers anymore, and, with 2.8 million residents, Tampa-St. Petersburg is on the fringe of what you could call a major metropolitan area. The Times won a contract to print the Tribune in February, and experts said the writing was on the wall after that.

“The continued competition between the two newspapers was threatening to both,” said Times chairman and CEO Paul Tash, in a quote on Rick Edmonds’ blog at the Poynter Institute. “There are very few cities that are able to sustain more than one daily newspaper, and the Tampa Bay region is not among them.”

The two papers had long been able to make a go of it by targeting subscribers on either side of Tampa Bay, and at one time were considered two of the fiercest rivals in the newspaper industry. However, the collapse of business models brought about by the Internet has had both papers playing defense for the past decade.

The Tribune published continuously from 1895 until this week. Long owned by Media General, it was sold to an investment capital group in 2012 for $9.5 million. That company nearly doubled its money when it sold the Tribune’s headquarters building last July for $17.75 million, but the Tribune can hardly be considered a winning investment. The owners had reportedly borrowed more than $37 million over the last two years.

The Tribune employed 265 full-time staff. Deep cuts are expected, with Times chairman and CEO Paul Tash saying at least 100 jobs will be lost. Beginning today, the Times began appearing on Tribune subscribers’ doorsteps and in newsstand racks. The Times said it will honor all the existing subscription and advertising contracts. The Times will continue to operate the Tribune’s tbo.com website after a temporary redirect to the Times’ tampabay.com. It will also continue several local operations owned by the Tribune under their existing names.

The Times is owned by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school and journalism think tank. Until 2012 the paper was called the St. Petersburg Times under a legal agreement that had given the Tribune temporary ownership of the Times name.

The Times claims daily readership of nearly 448,000 and Sunday readership of nearly 739,000. Actual circulation is about half that. The company’s media kit claims that its print and online properties reach 1.5 million people.

A team of Times reporters who formerly worked for the Tribune put together a nice retrospective here.

Three years ago a former greeting card executive and his partner bought the Orange County Register and a handful of smaller newspapers. Operating as Freedom Communications, they stunned a gasping industry by declaring their intention to invest heavily in news.

A year later, the experiment showed signs of bearing fruit. As we wrote in July, 2013, “Newsroom staff is up to 360 from a low of 180 when Freedom took over. The Register routinely publishes daily issues that are nearly twice the size of its nearby rival, the Los Angeles Times. Page counts have been increased by half, color expanded and even the quality of paper improved.”

That was then. Two years later, the Freedom experiment can be judged a failure as Freedom filed for bankruptcy protection as part of a management-led plan to acquire the paper. The plan will end the active role of Aaron Kushner, the greeting card magnate who said two years ago that he was in the game for the long haul and who even eyed a buyout of the Los Angeles Times, whose parent Tribune Co. was itself bankrupt at the time.

A group led by Rich Mirman, who is the current CEO and publisher of Freedom, is bidding to acquire the company and reorganize its finances. Mirman said there will be no job cuts and that all bills will continue to be paid during the reorganization. He also said the company should turn a profit this year after losing more than $40 million over the past two years.

Nowhere to be seen in the deal is Kusher, the newcomer with a vision who spoke so forcefully about the value of newspapers two years ago. His plan always was a long shot, but he was at least a positive voice in an industry that’s so shrouded in hopelessness these days. He was one of a dwindling list of rich executives that includes Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos and John Henry, who seem to believe that journalism is still worth the investment. Why is it that the only people who have faith in the newspaper industry are people who have no background in newspapers?

 

Newspaper publishers pride themselves on being champions of truth, defenders of the public’s right to know and knowledgeable skeptics who cut through obfuscation and evasion to get the real story.

Except when it comes to delivering bad news about themselves.

In another one of the too-many-to-keep-count examples of a newspaper candy-coating its own hairball, the New Orleans Times-Picayune announced that it is cutting 21 percent of its overall news staff in a bid “to reinforce its core journalistic mission.”

To be fair, the official announcement did quote NOLA Media Group President Ricky Mathews conceding that “It’s a difficult day for us and our colleagues who are losing their jobs,” but that brief tinge of regret is buried four paragraphs deep in the 560-word announcement that is chock full of good news about the success the media group has had online. You might remember that the Times-Picayune cut frequency to three days a week in 2012, following the lead of the Detroit Free Press which did so four years earlier.

 

The New York Times marked a milestone of sorts yesterday with the announcement that it has passed the one million paid digital-only subscriber mark, less than four-and-a-half years after launching its paywall. The milestone is validation that paywalls can work, especially if you’re The New York Times.

The news comes less than two months after the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers reported that global newspaper circulation revenues surpassed advertising revenues for the first time this century (good slide presentation here). The association didn’t say when was the last time circulation was the industry’s biggest revenue contributor – or even if that information is known – but we’d guess it was more than 50 years ago.

The newspaper industry became addicted to advertising in the 1960s – and thus began its downfall. With 80% of revenue coming from advertising by the late 1970s – and circulation functioning as a loss-leader to build audiences – the business had all its eggs in one basket. When the Internet tore a hole in that basket, there was nowhere else to turn.

A painful decade later, there is evidence that newspapers are rebuilding online around the paywall model. They have lost a lot of blood, though, and circulation revenue will never be as large or profitable as advertising was. Wired notes that only one-third of the Times‘ revenue comes from digital subscriptions. It will need a lot more subscribers – or alternative revenue sources – to keep the business stable.

This promo for “The Monsters of a Rapidly Changing Media Landscape” conference in Shreveport is perfect. The buzzwords, the phrasing, even the clothes are perfect. Our favorite line: “I like the feel of the CD. I like to hold a CD in my hand. I put it into the stereo with two hands, OK?”
Stick around for the last 30 seconds.

Two Great Examples of How Journalism Has Changed for the Better – Gigaom

Mathew Ingram writes:

“It’s worth pointing out when ‘citizen journalism’ — or networked journalism, or whatever we want to call it — really works, and a couple of great examples of that have come to light recently. One of them is related to a project that I’ve written about: namely, the open Ukrainian vehicle tracking database that British investigative blogger Eliot Higgins and his team have been putting together through his Bellingcat website, which tracks the movements of Russian troops and machinery in and around Ukraine.

Related articles

• Why Content Goes Viral: the Theory and Proof
• NYT’s David Carr on the Future of Journalism

Mathew Ingram offers a reality check on the state of journalism, citing a recent Digiday interview with Jack Shafer in which the media critic says, “news coverage has probably never been more accurate than it is today.” Ingram cites the ability of crowdsourced fact-checking projects as well as social networks to quickly spot inconsistencies that lead to embarrassments like Rolling Stone‘s recent University of Virginia rape story. Facts are now available with a quick search. So is misinformation, but through triangulation a journalist can usually arrive at the truth quickly enough.

What’s less discussed in the debates about online journalism is the contribution Google has made to unlocking expertise on a mass scale. In the pre-Internet days source development was difficult, often involving searches through clips in the morgue and calling around looking for somebody who knew somebody, and then hoping the person could be reached on the phone. Reporters often fell back to the same inner circle of sources who could be relied upon to return their calls. The result was insider news – small groups of people talking among themselves.

Today, the top Google result for “computer security expert” or “airline industry analyst” turns up names in seconds. And there are many more ways to contact them now, too.

Google’s Gift

This is one of Google’s under-appreciated gifts to journalism. When Messrs. Page and Brin conceived of the search engine, they made the decision that the principal driver of search results would be quality of content as measured by links from other high-quality sources. The algorithm has evolved considerably since that time, but the goal hasn’t, and all search engines today have fallen into line behind it.

You can’t buy the kind of authority that search engines bestow. Google decided that brand, circulation, marketing budget, employee count, volume of output and other size-related factors matter less than what you say. That’s why a dedicated blogger can – on a good day and with the right search terms – outperform The New York Times.

The journalist’s biggest handicap today isn’t information but time. In the caffeine-soaked frenzy that online news has become, fact-checking is a luxury that is sometimes easiest left to the crowd on the assumption that small mistakes can be easily fixed without anybody knowing. We’re not saying that’s bad or good. But when “every single reader is a fact-checker who can easily broadcast information,” as Alexis Sobel Fitts notes in Columbia Journalism Review, the stakes get high, particularly for the most trusted media outlets.

Which raises the question: Are media mistakes more common today or are they just more commonly exposed? What’s more amazing to us than the Rolling Stone example, which was an error in human judgment, is the embarrassment New York magazine suffered over its profile of a teenager from Queens who claimed to have made $72 million playing the stock market. Whatever fact-checking the editors may have done, why did nobody think to simply plug some numbers into a spreadsheet? Money did, and it quickly showed why the young man’s claims were too preposterous to be believed.

This is one reason the debate over journalism quality is to complex. There’s no question that journalists have more and better information available than ever. There’s also no question that they have less time to check facts and more pressure to publish sensational stories that generate clicks and shares. Journalism isn’t broken, but the business model that enables good journalism to thrive is still undiscovered.

On one level we can understand the teeth-gnashing that follow the Associated Press’ announcement that it plans to start using robots to write the majority of U.S. corporate earnings stories. Robots seem to bring out the Luddite in all of us. What we can’t understand is why anyone outside of a few shop stewards should want to preserve the jobs that will invariably be lost to this new kind of automation.

Actually, the AP says no jobs will be eliminated. “This is about using technology to free journalists to do more journalism and less data processing, not about eliminating jobs,” wrote Lou Ferrara, vice president and managing editor, on the AP blog. You can bet that robots are going to eliminate reporting jobs in the future, though, just like linotype machines replaced human typesetters and computer pagination replaced paste-up jobs. It’s called efficiency, and job loss is one of the distasteful consequences.

We’d suggest that much of the labor impact will actually be felt overseas, which is where the menial jobs have already migrated. Robo-journalists in India and the Philippines will need to improve their skills to continue to get work from U.S. and European publishers, and journalists in home offices will need to up their games as well. That’s a good thing.

What isn’t good is preserving jobs that eat up time and editors’ attention. In one of our recent assignments we worked with a technology news site that employs a small staff of seasoned journalists but that gets most of its content from an offshore body shop that rewrites press releases and news from other websites. The reporters who write this chum make about five cents a word, and in our view they’re overpaid.

Stories come in full of grammatical and usage errors, and many are missing basic facts or explanations. Professional editors spend hours each day fixing these mistakes and trying to educate the writers, which is a fool’s errand because most of them don’t last more than a few months on the job anyway. These tasks can now be automated, and many of them will be. The result will be at a better quality of work for everyone involved.

Will the stories that robots produce be as good as those that humans could write? Probably not, but it’s the market’s job to judge that. The only thing that’s certain is that the quality of robotic journalism will only improve over time. The human journalists who embrace this trend will learn to use their silicon sidekicks as research associates and fact-checkers. Robotics should ultimately make journalism a much more rewarding profession, but it will cost jobs.

Take heart in the fact that newsrooms won’t be hit nearly as hard as many other workplaces. “The factory of the future will have only two employees: a man and a dog,” said Carl Bass, the CEO of Autodesk. “The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”

Related articles

• AP will use robots to write some business stories
• The Anatomy of a Robot Journalist
• Why we should be celebrating the rise of robot journalism instead of criticizing it
• This Is What A News Story Written By Robots Looks Like
• How robots will write earnings stories for the AP
• Another News Outlet Is Using Robots To Write Stories
• Jobless Future
• Patents show how robot journalists work for Narrative Science, Automated Insights and more (Nicholas Diakopoulos/Tow Center …)
• Will robots eventually overtake journalism?

The leaked “innovation” report from The New York Times that made the rounds in May recommends that the company take more risks, move more quickly and consider radical steps to reinvent itself. Steve Outing wonders what would happen if the Times abandoned daily print editions, and he’s built an elaborate “what-if?” model to test the idea.
Outing’s model doesn’t answer the question, but it does provide a new tool with which to evaluate options. “Most news companies aren’t very good at grokking what’s coming at them or what likely futures could be ahead for them,” wrote Outing in an e-mail to us. “What I did was demonstrate one tool of strategic foresight that news companies should consider using.”
Outing would like to get more consulting gigs working for news organizations that need reinvention, and we hope he gets some. A self-described media futurist, he’s been challenging assumptions about the slow-moving newspaper industry for the past two decades. Read more here. We were fans of a blog called Reinventing Classifieds that he launched back in 2008 that recommended radical new ways to revive the highly profitable newspaper classified advertising business. To our knowledge, no on took him up on his ideas.
For this exercise, Outing applies a “Futures Wheel” to envision a Times that only publishes on Sunday. The exercise is meant to envision every impact on the paper’s business, including staffing costs, production savings, new sources  of revenue and circulation revenue. Outing has modeled his scenario out to two levels of detail. To fully understand the implications you need to go to  third level, and that involves surveys and pilots. Outing will do you that for any newspaper that wants to hire him.
Asked what value news organizations can gain from this exercise, he wrote, “Technological change is accelerating at a faster rate; indeed, exponentially, when it comes to computing power. This means that anyone’s business model can be disrupted, if not obliterated, faster than ever before. So now is a critical time to start seriously using strategic-foresight tools and techniques (futures wheels being just one) to better prepare for likely and plausible challenges and opportunities.”
He’s right. How many media executives have the vision to take him on the offer? Click here to see an enlarged view of the image.