New York’s Hudson Valley is edging perilously close to a news blackout. Just a week after Journal Register Co. pulled the plug on a phalanx of weeklies in the area and the weekly Ulster County Press shut down, two daily newspapers said they will reduce frequency from seven to five days a week. The Catskill-based Daily Mail and Hudson Register Star will publish their final Sunday editions this weekend. Beginning next week, the Sunday and Monday papers will be replaced by a weekend edition published on Saturday. That issue will have all the usual Sunday features, including coupons, USA Weekend and Sudoku. Thank God they kept Sudoku.

Cost savings drove the decision, said Publisher Roger Coleman in a prepared statement. “This schedule will also enable us to produce the most compelling, useful local newspaper that fits the community’s lifestyle and support level,” he added, vacuously.

There was no word on possible layoffs. As befits the leader of an organization dedicated to serving to the public’s right to know, neither Coleman nor officials at the company’s parent organization returned a reporter’s calls.

Outgoing USA Today Editor Says Don’t Be So Glum

Ken Paulson is on his way out as editor of USA Today for a new job as president and chief operating officer of the Newseum. He gives an interview to Forbes that’s filled with USA Today-like sound bites. The newspaper industry isn’t in as deep trouble as people think it is, Paulson says. Rather, it’s in a transition. “Home Depot is in the midst of massive layoffs, but nobody’s writing off hammers,” he says, using a rather odd analogy.

Paulson has some interesting perspective on USA Today‘s steady performance in a turbulent industry. The paper’s basic four-section architecture and design principles haven’t changed in 24 years. He sees peril in major redesigns at some Tribune Co. papers. “It’s just important not to risk alienating readers who will read you until their dying day,” he says.

He also explains how USA Today broke new ground in the use of anonymous sources. Reporters are no longer permitted to keep sources confidential from their editors. Read Jack Shafer’s tap dance on this issue to see why this is a great policy. Paulson even suggests, tongue in cheek, that USA Today pioneered the fundamentals of Web page design. Reading this engaging and insightful interview, you get the sense that one of the reasons USA Today has held up so well is Ken Paulson.

Miscellany

The New York Times Co. suspended its dividend, citing the need to conserve cash. The move is mainly adding insult to injury, since the Times Co. already slashed the divided from 23 cents to 6 cents last November.

Lee Enterprises has managed to push back some of its debt obligations for a couple of years. In a series of complex negotiations, the company deferred payments on some of its debt until 2012, significantly reducing its short-term obligations in exchange for much bigger payments in the future. The announcement lifted Lee’s stock, but the moves amount to shuffling around existing debt rather that reducing it. Alan Mutter explains.

“It’s not so much … a desire to make a lot of money, but it’s just a desire to not get ourselves into such a hole … that we can’t come out of it.”   Those were the blunt words from Paul Smith, president of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc., as its flagship paper announced plans to cut 60 jobs, or about 4.5% of the workforce. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is the largest newspaper in the state, employing about 1,300 people. Give the publisher credit, though.  These are the first publicly announced layoffs the Democrat-Gazette has had since the industry crisis began

And Finally…

It had to happen.  As the number of layoffs at America’s 500 largest companies nears half a million, several blogs have started to tote up the gloomy numbers. They include The Layoff List, Layoff Blog, Jobless and Less, The American Lawyer Layoff List (lawyers are people, too, we think), and the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker. Most were born late last fall. Let’s hope they live short and brutish lives.

To no one’s great surprise, the San Francisco Chronicle has joined the endangered species list. The paper has been hemorrhaging money almost since the day Hearst Corp. bought it in 2000, culminating in an astonishing $50 million loss last year. Yesterday, Hearst used blunt language in announcing that a “significant reduction in the number of unionized and non-union employees” was needed to keep the paper viable. If expenses can’t be brought into line, Hearst said it will put the paper up for sale and close it if necessary. The company is in the middle of a 100-days campaign to right itself, an initiative that includes putting the Seattle Post-Intelligencer up for sale.

The Chron is northern California’s largest newspaper, with a paid weekday circulation of 339,430, but it also sits in one of the most new-media-savvy places in the world. The Bay Area tech crowd is accustomed to getting news on BlackBerries and iPhones, Craigslist is a local institution and Google is revolutionizing the advertising business just down the peninsula. As the severely weakened San Jose Mercury-News can attest, Silicon Valley is a tough place to be a conventional media company. And there’s no Herb Caen any more.

Alan Mutter, who used to work at the Chron, runs the numbers. He estimates the paper will have to cut nearly half of its 1,500 employees to reach break-even levels. He also speculates on the possibility that MediaNews Group, which owns a portfolio of smaller newspapers across the state, could ride to the rescue. Hearst and MediaNews have been cozy since Hearst helped the company fund a deal to buy the Merc and the Contra Costa Times. If you want to understand this story, read Mutter.

A lot of people have seen this coming. Mutter has been predicting disaster for the Chron for years. BusinessWeek‘s Jon Fine picked the Chronicle as a likely candidate to exit print more than 18 months ago. The paper has reportedly shed half its editorial staff since 2000 and is looking at cutting half of what’s left. In our travels, we’ve observed that the Chron was long an anachronism for its sophisticated audience: a tired-looking, weakly written broadsheet that actually published some sections on green paper until a few years ago.

The Chronicle joins a long line of endangered US dailies, including the Post-Intelligencer, Rocky Mountain News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Miami Herald, Tucson Citizen and Newark Star-Ledger. All have been put up for sale or pulled back from the bring in recent months. Given the drumbeat of bad news about the economy, it’s likely that the endangered species list will get longer as the year drags on. (hat tip: Richard Dooling)

Over on the other side of the country, the Providence (R.I.) Journal is reportedly getting ready to lay off 100 people as part of a bigger cost-cutting initiative by parent A.H. Belo. The ProJo reported a total staff size of about 700 last October, when it laid off 25 people. That was down nearly 40% from its peak. This new round of cuts will raise that number to about 50%.

Wrapping up the bad news parade, the publisher of the Cedar Rapids Gazette said it will cut 100 jobs. The publisher blamed a combination of the region’s devastating 2008 floods and the souring economy for the layoffs, which amount to about 16% of total staff.

The New Republic devotes 3,400 words to an examination of The Politico, a beltway publishing phenomenon that is upending the balance of media power on Capitol Hill. The piece implies that the Politico is not a place where aging reporters go to live off their reputations. It’s a pressure-cooker environment fueled by the constant drive to be first with everything and to win the attention of broadcast outlets. Witness its Politico44 diary, which documents the activities of the Obama administration literally minute by minute.

Politico’s 60 reporters file their first stories of the day by 8 a.m. and carry tech gear that makes it possible for them to post from anywhere, including a city bus. Stories are written and formatted to be read on a BlackBerry. Speed is essential. Politico aims to be first with every story and it has scored some notable exclusives, including last fall’s scandal about the price of Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.

Worked to Exhaustion

Reporters are handsomely paid but worked to exhaustion. The piece relates the story of one Politico staffer starting his daily column as other reporters covering the Hillary Clinton campaign where shuffling off to bed after a long day. Journalists are encouraged to promote their own stories. A staff of three publicists spend their days sending links to political bloggers to do just that.

The goal is not just to be first, but also to the influence of the media.  Political strategy is to be the number one source of breaking news for the cable networks that cover Washington on almost a 24/7 basis.  It is making rapid gains against the Washington Post, which initially offered to incubate the startup before alternative funding sources emerged.

Started by two ex-Washington Post editors and funded by media mogul-to-be Robert Albritton, The Politico is upsetting the applecart in Beltway journalism. On Capitol Hill, it’s considered a must-read. However, it’s earned its share of critics among mainstream media, who sniff that The Politico is too quick to go with gossip in the absence of facts.

The Politico makes most of its revenue from a print edition that recently expanded to five days a week, but Allbritton says he’s preparing for the day when print is out of the picture and The Politico makes its money online. Those preparations are going pretty well; Allbritton said the operation could turn a profit in six months. “We’re way ahead of budget…It wouldn’t surprise me if the profit this year would count in the millions of dollars.”

Blogger’s Growing Influence Doesn’t Faze Gannett

Gannett Blog's Hopkins

Dow Jones profiles Jim Hopkins, the man behind the popular Gannett Blog. Hopkins took a buyout from Gannett a little more than a year ago and has been living on severance, savings and the kindness of visitors ever since. He hopes to generate about $6,000 per quarter in advertising and donations revenue. At 100,000 page views a month, the site has impressive traffic for one about such a specific topic.

Gannett Blog is a great example of how blogs have changed corporate communications. In this case, the chief source of information about a company is outside its own walls, yet Gannett continues to ignore Hopkins. That only magnifies curiosity about the blog and boosts its visibility, not to mention its word-of-mouth popularity among disenfranchised employees. Gannett spokeswoman Tara Connell is quoted as saying that Hopkins doesn’t want to hear the company’s side of the story. “Since that’s a frustrating process with him, we try to keep it to a minimum.”

But Gannett doesn’t have to engage with Hopkins. Blogs have a feature called comments that enables visitors to state their opinions directly, without a media filter. If Gannett would start engaging with readers through comments, it would win sympathy just for listening, regardless of whether Hopkins agreed or not.

There’s plenty of evidence that engagement works.  About 18 months ago, Dell Computer reversed its practice of ignoring blogger commentary and adopted a new policy of responding to each and every post, whether positive or negative. The initiative reduced negative commentary from 50% to 20% in a little less than a year. For businesses have good reasons for doing what they do, engagement is always a better strategy than avoidance. Gannett still doesn’t get it.

Miscellany

It’s the middle of winter and nerves are fraying up in Canada. Quebecor Media has locked out 253 employees at its flagship paper, the Journal de Montréal. Employees there “have refused to accept cuts to benefits, a longer workweek for no extra pay and a loss of journalistic independence over the paper’s content,” writes Lyle Stewart, who admits that he is affiliated with the newspaper’s union. And he thinks the Montreal Gazette may not be far behind. “Unionized workers there recently rejected a contract offer that would have eliminated several positions and offloaded the editing of the paper to a centralized office in Hamilton, Ontario.”

If you wonder why you haven’t read more about this, all we can say is how’s your French?

Tim Burden has assembled an impressive timeline of quotes about the micropayments debate. His discussion thread begins last Dec. 20 with a post by Joel Brinkley and goes for exactly two months. He hits all the high points we’ve seen. It’s a great running script of this tortuous debate and we hope he updates it from time to time.

The Yakima (Wa.) Herald-Republic says business isn’t bad, it’s making money and the layoff of four to six employees – or less than 3% of the workforce – is a response to general economic pressure. In fact, the company just signed a deal to print the 5,800-circulation Ellensburg Daily Record.

The Daytona Beach News-Journal laid off nine more staff members, bringing to 185 the number of employees it has furloughed in the last eight months. That’s 25% of the workforce. Commenters weigh in with the usual collection of politics-laden diatribes, making us wish they was a way to lay off them.

And Finally…

TJ Sullivan has posted an online petition calling upon newspaper companies to wall off their Web sites to non-paying subscribers for one week in July. He posts an extended explanation of his thinking on LA Observed. Lots of people have blogged about the petition over the last two weeks, yet it has garnered less than 200 signatures. It’s not such a bad idea, but maybe the sheer impracticality of it is inspiring ennui.

Recent news we haven’t had a chance to report.

Journal Register Co., its stock sitting at under a penny, took a machete to scores of local newspapers, putting them up for sale and threatening to close them if buyers aren’t found.  The lost include eight holdings in upstate New York: the Millbrook Round Table, Pleasant Valley Voice Ledger, Rhinebeck Gazette-Advertiser, Pawling News Chronicle, Harlem Valley Times, Hyde Park Townsman, Pine Bluffs Register Herald and Putnam County Courier. Non-news titles Weekend, Dutchess Magazine and the Hudson Valley Guide are also set to close.

In Connecticut, the condemned include the Bloomfield Journal, the Shoreline Times, Pictorial Gazette, Branford Review, Clinton Recorder and East Haven Advertiser. Michiganders will no longer have the Elk Rapids Town Meeting, the Petoskey Citizen-Journal and the Northern Star. MediaPost also reports that the Grand Traverse Insider, the Leader and Kalkaskian , the Antrim County News and the Petoskey-Charlevoix Star are closing.

The city of brotherly love lost the Northeast Philadelphia Breeze, the News Gleaner, the Olney Times, the Germantown Courier, and the Mount Airy Times Express. Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, Hershey lost its Chronicle.

Journal Register hasn’t yet declared bankruptcy, but it has already missed debt payments and is considered the next was likely candidate for Chapter 11.

Two Idaho newspapers are scaling back their production schedules to save money.  The eastern Idaho Post Register will eliminate its Monday edition and publish six days a week.  The publisher said the move will help the company avoid layoffs.  Also, earlier this month the Rexburg (Id.) Standard Journal said it would scale back to three days a week from five.

Layoff announcements at the Los Angeles Times have reportedly been delayed until tomorrow.  Rumors are that about 70 newsroom staffers will be let go.

The Los Angeles Daily News has reportedly laid off eight copy desk staffers . The paper is also reportedly considering moving the entire copy desk to MediaNews offices in the San Gabriel Valley.

The Kansas City Star writes about the growing crisis in the broadcast industry, where the advertising slump is expected to hit hard this year.  Television outlets, in particular, depend heavily upon automotive advertising. The crisis in the automobile industry may reduce revenues as much as 30% this year, according to some estimates. The problems don’t strike at the public’s right to know as badly as newspaper layoffs do because TV and radio stations generally employ a much smaller news staffs.

If you’re considering a career shift, read about the experience of Michael Precker: Columbia J-School grad, foreign correspondent, Dallas Morning News feature writer, Pulitzer Prize nominee and now strip club manager. Three years ago, Precker found he was losing interest in his journalism job and a chance meeting with the owner of a local strip club gave him an opportunity to jump.  Now he runs all operations at the Lodge, an upscale topless establishment. Check out the clever video ads on the site.

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

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

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

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

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

Superior Economics

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

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

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

Layoff Log

• Baltimore’s Capital Gazette Communications will cut 111 jobs as it moves all printing operations from Annapolis to Comprint, a Laurel, Md. Printer that already produces several daily and weekly papers. The body count at Capital includes 31 full-time and 51 part-time press and mailroom positions, along with 29 other people in other departments. No reporter jobs were cut. The Capital Gazette also prints the Bowie Blade-News, Crofton News-Crier and the West County Gazette. No word on whether the contractor will hire any of the laid-off employees.
• The Missoulian (Mont.) has cut six jobs and will combine its call center with four other newspapers in big sky country. The Montana Standard is doing the same thing.
• The Hutchinson (Kan.) News will lay off four employees and require everyone to take one unpaid week of before April 30. The newspaper also plans to reduce its daily page count.

Downturn Hits Ethnic Press

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

Extra! Extra! Blog All About It!

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

Layoff Log

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Finally…

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

Tribune Co. and the New York Daily News* are looking at closing their foreign bureaus and outsourcing international coverage, The Wall Street Journal says. The beneficiaries would be the Washington Post and a Boston-based startup called GlobalPost. Under the arrangement being discussed by Tribune Co. and the Washington Post, Tribune would contract with the Post for international stories to be delivered to its portfolio of newspapers and would close dozens of foreign offices, saving the bankrupt company millions each year. There’s no word on how much of that coverage would be unique to Tribune, but that’s presumably an issue in the talks. The two companies have long had an alliance via a joint news service.

The New York Daily News deal has Mortimer Zuckerman’s paper contracting with GlobalPost for its international coverage. The deal is the first big win for GlobalPost, a venture funded by deep-pocketed investors, including former Boston Globe publisher Benjamin Taylor. The co-founders are Charles Sennott, a veteran Globe foreign correspondent, and Philip Balboni, former president of New England Cable News. You can read all about the site’s mission and dive into two of the longest biographies we’ve ever seen on the site’s mission page.

Like The Politico and Politicker, GlobalPost is attempting to create a new publishing model leveraging online efficiencies, reader involvement and diversified revenue. Part of GlobalPost’s revenue is to come from syndication deals like the one with the Daily News. Stories will mostly be contributed by local stringers and embellished with reader input and reports from other online resources. GlobalPost thus hopes to deliver quality journalism at a fraction of the overhead cost of a foreign bureau. The Daily News deal will clearly put it on the map.

Blogger Lisa Williams has an interesting take on GlobalPost which Amy Gahran embellishes upon on the Poynter Blog. Williams suggests that news publishing may be moving toward an on-demand model similar to the one emerging in the computer industry. “Cloud computing” is all the rage in IT right now, with Amazon’s EC2 service blazing the trail. EC2 enables businesses to rent computer power only as it’s needed, outsourcing the expensive and specialized task of maintaining corporate data centers to specialists who serve multiple clients. Williams suggests that a similar model could provide news at a much lower cost than full-time staff. It’s kind of a super stringer model made more efficient by the Internet.

Gahran likes the idea, although she differs with Williams’ theory that this could spell the end of beats. General assignment reporters will still be needed, she says, but much of the specialty reporting could be provided by independent journalists and organizations of journalists, the latter scenario being The Politico and GlobalPost models. “You could have a situation where various kinds of organizations could purchase reporting capacity to make sure the stories or communities that matter to them get covered — whether that’s a town, a government agency, a business trend, legislation, a water quality issue or sports,” she writes.

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the New York Post instead of the Daily News.

Star Tribune Files for Bankruptcy

Add the Minneapolis Star Tribune to the list of newspaper publishers now dwelling in the purgatory of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The filing “was necessary to reduce our operating costs, restructure our debt and create a financially viable business for the future,” Publisher Chris Harte wrote in a note to readers. Last month, the Strib said it needed $20 million in union concessions to sustain operations. But talks with the union broke down last week. The union appeared surprised that management did exactly what it said it was going to do. “The unions at the Star Tribune are conscious of the newspaper’s financial plight and the state of the industry nationwide,” said a union official said in an account in the Kansas City Star. However, consciousness apparently wasn’t enough.
The value of the Star Tribune has collapsed since McClatchy paid $1.2 billion for it in 1998. Its balance sheet currently lists assets of about $493 million and liabilities of $661 million. Chapter 11 gives is the chance to shed some debt and restructure is assets under court protection. In practice, companies rarely emerge from Chapter 11 looking anything like they did when they went into bankruptcy.

Layoff Log

• The Boston Globe will furlough 50 employees through a buyout and layoffs, if necessary. This is the fifth staff reduction at the paper since 2001 and the first to be limited to the newsroom. The cuts will reduce the Globe’s editorial staff to 329 people, down 39% from its peak newsroom employment of 552 in 2000. The local Guild boss said future cuts should come from the management side, as the worker bees have already given more than their fair share.
• Gannett’s announcement earlier this week that it would require all employees to take a week off without pay in the first quarter sparked a frenzy of media coverage, but we found the furor surprising. Manufacturing companies have used this tactic for years to preserve jobs and the modest 2% across-the-board pay cut seems bearable compared to the alternative of idling so many people. We agree with Alan Mutter’s take: By sharing the pain, Gannett avoids having to cut 600 jobs. Isn’t that a more noble objective?
• The Christian Science Monitor will cut its editorial staff by 15 or 16 people, which the mangled math in a Boston Globe story calculates to be 7%. Since the CSM employs 90 editors, our calculator says that’s more like 16%, but whatever. The Monitor is preparing to go from weekday to weekly print frequency in April and adjusting it staff size accordingly.
• The Schenectady Daily Gazette will cut 16 positions in its fourth round of layoffs in a year.
• The publisher of Vermont’s Rutland Herald and the wonderfully named Barre-Montpelier Times Argus will lay off 14 people, or about 9% of its staff.

And Finally…

Nick Christensen of the Hillsboro Argus has tongue only partly in cheek as he makes a somewhat persuasive argument for a government bailout. Give me my billions, he says. It won’t influence me. Christensen does point out correctly that judges and district attorneys are among the government watchdogs who are also paid by the institutions they monitor.

If you need another indication that citizens can be important sources of news coverage, you only need to consider yesterday’s crash of a US Airways jet in the Hudson River. The first report of the crash appeared on Twitter at 3:28, just two minutes after the plane took off. Twitter was also the first outlet to carry news that a flock of geese was probably the source of engine troubles that forced the pilot to ditch the plane. The photo below is from CNN’s iReport citizen news service. A video featuring more images taken by witnesses can be seen here.

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

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

Blurred Vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Envisioning a Future Without the Times

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

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

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

For Better or Worse, China Invests in Newspapers

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

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

Layoff Log

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

Craig Silverman

Just before the holiday, I called up Craig Silverman to talk about mistakes. Silverman, a 31-year-old Canadian journalist, has made quite a name for himself by documenting the errors that print publishers make and how and whether they correct them. I recorded the 40-minute phone call and you can listen to it here.

Error-spotting seems an odd avocation, but that’s what makes RegretTheError.com so notable. Before Craig Silverman came along and started doing this in 2004, nobody else was paying attention. On the day he launched RegretTheError in October of that year, “Thousands of people showed up. I didn’t expect the site would catch on as quickly as it did.”

Silverman spends an hour or two a day scanning the Nexis online news database and an assortment of corrections pages at notable journals. He’s selective in what he pulls out for the blog, though. “I see hundreds of corrections a day and post maybe five,” he says. His selections are often funny, extreme or illustrative of a common mistake.

Because of an editor’s error, a photograph of Neil Diamond was incorrectly used in a review of Neil Young at the DCU Center in Worcester in Monday’s Telegram & Gazette – Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Dec. 19.

RegretTheError has changed Silverman’s career. He’s written a book on the topic (the website of which features a corrections page) and just finished co-authoring a second one on an unrelated topic called Mafiaboy. It’s due to be released in the US in 2009.

Craig Silverman just wants to help. He has resisted the temptation to make RegretTheError’s tone mocking or rude. “It would be easy to be mean and nasty, but people don’t want to read that,” he told me. The voice is “helpful, constructive with a little bit of a sense of humor.” As a result, reaction among journalists has been unanimously positive. “There hasn’t been a word of negativity,” he said. As a result, many of the major news organizations in North America have contacted him for help in improving their own corrections policies or in formulating new ones to accommodate the flood of new information being posted on their own blogs or submitted by readers.

Untamed Beast

The vast majority of errors in newspapers and magazines are never corrected or even reported. Research has established that about 80% of published articles contain errors, but most aren’t fixed because they either aren’t worth reporting or journals fail to make it easy for readers to report them.

It’s the latter problem that rubs Silverman raw. “We’re failing in our contract to do our best as journalists,” he said, citing a recent University of Oregon study that found that only about 2% of newspaper errors are corrected. “In our newsrooms, we often don’t have a culture of wanting to get errors corrected. People keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to get in trouble.”

“In yesterday’s column about badminton, I misspelled the name of Guatemalan player Kevin Cordon. I apologize. In my defense, I want to note that in the same column I correctly spelled Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarak, Poompat Sapkulchananart and Porntip Buranapraseatsuk. So by the time I got to Kevin Cordon, my fingers were exhausted.” – Miami Herald, Aug. 19.

Is the problem getting worse? Because of all the recent layoffs, “We’re in a pretty low period right now,” he said. “At a certain point we’re not going to be able to do even the base level of control we did before.” Part of the problem is that quality control systems are rooted in an old paradigm in which reporters and editors have been separated from their readers. Because readers spot the vast majority of errors, this disconnect has prevented most from being reported.

Publishers could improve their overall level of fact-checking if they involved readers in the process, perhaps by rewarding them for good error-spotting. However, most publishers resist having their flaws highlighted in this way. “Instead of creating a better process, we’re decimating the one we already have,” Silverman said.

Some media are innovating. The website Slate, for example, notes original errors in links from the corrected passages. Reuters maintains a blog called Good, Bad, and Ugly that documents its own gaffes. However, the sheer volume of information being reported online is challenging conventional remediation tactics.

Misinformation Online

One new problem is the difficulty of incorporating consumer-generated reporting into mainstream media content on a timely basis while still checking important facts. In October, Apple Computer stock fell more than 5% because of news on CNN’s ireport.com that CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. The New York Times documented this and other transgressions in an article titled Spinning a Web of Lies at Digital Speed.

However, even as the Web has helped to spread falsehood, it has also helped to perpetuate an unprecedented level of accountability. Silverman noted that the journalists who broke the Watergate story in 1973 actually made a few significant errors along the way. Had the Washington Post been subject to the level of scrutiny that newspapers receive today from political bloggers, it’s possible that Woodward and Bernstein would never have been able to overcome such mistakes and break the biggest story of the last 50 years.

“In our November 3 issue, we suggested that the actress Kelly Reilly was having a relationship with Guy Ritchie. It is now clear from the further information that we have received that Ms. Reilly is engaged and there is and has been no romantic relationship between Kelly Reilly and Guy Ritchie. We apologize for any embarrassment caused to Ms. Reilly in our original report.” – Us, Nov. 12.

I asked Silverman what were his favorite errors of the last four years. There are too many candidates to choose just one, he said, but a favorite is this year’s front page from New Hampshire’s Valley News, in which the paper misspelled its own name in the logo. He also likes this year’s Associated Press gaffe in which the news service described Senator Joseph Lieberman as a former “Democratic vice-presidential prick.”

Spell checkers can actually be part of the problem. As useful as these error-correcting programs are, they can run rampant when allowed to operate, er, unchecked. Two years ago, a spell-checker replaced a reference to “queen bee” with the name of the British monarch, enabling led Reuters to report that “Queen Elizabeth has 10 times the lifespan of workers and lays up to 2,000 eggs a day.”  Just this week, a spell-checker at the Canadian Press changed the name of Supreme Court judge Michel Bastarache to “Michel Bastard.”

There are thousands of examples like these at RegretTheError, and thanks to Craig Silverman, the journalism profession has someone to identify and report them.

Listen to the interview: [audio:Regret_the_Error_Silverman.mp3]

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

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

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

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

Some Good News, Too

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

Cuts Take Toll on Quality

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

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

Report: Newspaper Sites Embrace Web Tools

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

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

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

Miscellany

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Finally…

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