The New York Times Company shocked the newspaper industry last week with its threats close the Boston Globe on May 1 unless Globe unions give back $20 million in concessions.  There’s new evidence that the May 1 date is a bluff and that closing down the Globe could cost the Times more than keeping it in business.

The Newspaper Guild is taking an initially defiant stance on the Times’ request that the union shoulder half of the $20 million in targeted cost savings. “We’re willing to consider some concessions but not the draconian amount they put forth,” said union president Daniel Totten, in an apparent call of the Times’ bluff. He also characterized the Times’s demand for freedom to lay off people without regards to seniority as “a nonstarter.” Globe reporter Scott Allen, who has a lifetime employment guarantee, commented “Now, nobody thinks that if we make these concessions, there won’t be more cuts in a few months.” Yes, Scott, we think you can count on that when the paper is losing $85 million a year.

The very act of closing the paper would trigger huge expenses in itself. The Boston Herald analyzed public records and found that union members could be entitled to up to 50 weeks of severance pay and that underfunded pension liabilities could swell the total cost to more than $100 million.  Contractual obligations also make the Globe a tough property to sell, since few buyers would want to assume open-ended liabilities like the lifetime employment pledges to 435 employees.  The only way to cancel the guarantees, apparently, is to close down the paper.

If the Times Co. plans to carry forward with its threats, it has yet to tell the government. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) act requires most employers with more than 100 employees to give 60 days’ notice of plant closings and mass layoffs.  The Times Co. hasn’t yet filed a WARN notice, although it could still shutter the paper and pay employees for 60 days thereafter.

The Globe is raising its newsstand prices by as much as 60% in a gamble that readers will help pick up some of the bill for keeping the paper afloat. Residents outside of Boston will now pay $4 for a Sunday paper, compared to the current $2.50.

The Globe‘s crosstown rival Herald, which can barely disguise its glee in covering this story, also reports that four Guild leaders and six governing board executives are among those with lifetime job guarantees. Those guarantees are one of the biggest obstacles to selling the paper and are a primary negotiating point between the Times Co and the Globe unions.  The guarantees are causing friction within Newspaper Guild ranks, as some members believe that the leadership will be unwilling to negotiate in good faith out of fear of losing their jobs.

The Herald’s rapacious columnist, Howie Carr (left), skewers his blue-blooded competition for a series of past errors provoked by lapses in judgment.  Too bad there are no hyperlinks; it would’ve been nice to read the background on this stuff.

Meanwhile, the Globe itself notes a trend: newspaper owners are increasingly using the threat of closure to extract concessions from their unions. Hearst’s success in gaining significant givebacks from the union in order to keep the San Francisco Chronicle afloat may have prompted the Times Co. to threaten the Globe with oblivion. Also, Members of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild in Seattle were scheduled to vote this week on accepting a wage freeze and two weeks of unpaid furloughs in exchange for keeping the Seattle Times afloat. A similar holdup is going on in Maine. Could it be that newspaper owners are merely posturing in order to gain concessions from the unions? Nah, they both have the higher goal of quality journalism in mind.

Is AP Worst Content Thief?

A new blog called The Future Of Newspapers features a guest column by veteran Denver sports writer Dave Krieger that poses a curious question: How can the Associated Press proposed to champion the intellectual property rights of newspapers when the AP is itself the worst violator of those rights? Krieger notes that readers don’t make a distinction between the source of information and where they consume it. News from the Denver Post that appears on ESPN.com is presumed to be from ESPN.

“Why should any newspaper in the Internet age be a member of an organization that takes that paper’s original material, rewrites it and distributes it around the world without attribution or compensation? In fact, an organization that charges the newspaper for the privilege?” The AP had some utility when newspapers were expected to provide national and international coverage, but obligation is gone now.  For most metro dailies, the AP is nothing more than a subscription service that pirates their content and distributes it free on the Internet.  He has a point.

Miscellany

Executives might want to look at what’s going on at the Virginian-Pilot, where management reports that the financial outlook is brightening even as it lays off another 40 employees.  The company has cut nearly 20% of its workforce in the past year and reduced its newsroom staff by 30% since early 2007, but it has also taken some initiatives to diversify and grow revenue. These include targeted websites, expansion of entertainment coverage and contracts to deliver national newspapers in its region. While print revenue continues to fall, management said online revenue is growing. The newspaper turned a profit in the first quarter and March was its best month in a year.

Boston University’s newspaper asks three journalists-turned -academics if university partnerships could be a solution to newspapers’ financial troubles.  They agree that university endowments could be an important source of support for failing journalist enterprises and that universities have a duty to support worthy cultural and public service institutions.  However, educational institutions are not known for acting quickly and trustees would probably balk at taking on financial liabilities as daunting a complex as those that the industry faces.

Rosa Brooks fires a parting shot in her swan song as a Los Angeles Times columnist. She’s going to the Pentagon as advisor to the undersecretary of Defense for policy, but she fears that the evisceration of her industry will leave the American public wanting. She “can’t imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the news industry has more or less collapsed.” Brooks believes that the government must step up to the plate and subsidize journalism, which isn’t the same as subsidizing media. The problem with existing subsidies is that they “have actually contributed to the decline of high-quality journalism by enabling monopolies, freezing out smaller and locally controlled media outlets and encouraging large corporations to treat the news as just another product,” she writes. The issue isn’t how to save the media, but how to save quality.

The Reno (Nev.) Gazette-Journal is laying off 35 people, or about 10 percent of its workforce, and closing a weekly paper in Carson City. These are in addition to 61 other positions eliminated since December.  Do the math, and the paper has cut almost 25% of its workforce in the last four months.

Veteran newsman Ric Cox has launched a blog called “Save Our Tribune” that’s dedicated to “rescuing Chicago’s leading newspaper.”  In one of his initial posts, he suggests ways that the Tribune can make online subscriptions palatable to users who are accustomed to getting news for free.

And Finally…

Some residents of Omaha, Neb. have created a satirical website to celebrate “Totally bogus news from the mid-heartland.”  The principal target of its barbs is the Omaha World Herald, “which has laid off employees twice (usually after throwing an extravagant party for an ex-publisher), cut back circulation, and now runs obits where it used to run op-eds,” according to a promotional message. One of the early posts notes the possibility that the state may create a precedent in capital punishment due to a typographical error. “The state might be replacing the electric chair with ‘lethal infection’ rather than the intended ‘lethal injection,'” the editors write, noting that some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee actually like the idea. One of them “added an elegant provision permitting the use of a piece of rusty barbed wire to begin the process and inject the pathogens,” says the site.

McClatchy Co. CEO Gary Pruitt addressed the Newspaper Association of America’s annual convention on Monday. Here are his remarks, courtesy of the NAA.
Each year at McClatchy’s shareholders meeting, we conclude with a video highlighting the work of our photojournalists over the past year. I pick a song that I think speaks to the year and we set the photographs to the music. This year, I wasn’t sure which song to choose. I like the Rolling Stones, and they have several songs that fit our current economic environment:

• “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” of course. But also consider …
• “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”
• “19th Nervous Breakdown”
• “Shattered” and
• “Gimme Shelter”

But I really don’t feel fatalistic. I speak to you this morning with a strong sense of resolve and hope. We have a serious fight on our hands, but I believe we are up to it. So I thought it more appropriate to select a battle song for this year’s video – the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to be specific – as we fight to ensure that truth does indeed go marching on. See what you think …. (Plays DVD)

Public Service Mandate

I came to newspapers not as a journalist or a businessman but as a First Amendment lawyer from Berkeley, California. So as you might expect, I’m passionate about free speech and a free press. I believe in the idea – and the ideal – that newspapers should provide high quality public service journalism so that the public can fully participate in democracy. This is not just some abstract concept. There is emerging empirical evidence to support the important relationship between democracy and the press.
A study published in The Journal of Law, Economics and Organization in 2003 looked at the per capita circulation of newspapers in different countries around the world and among the states in our own country. The study found that the lower the circulation, the greater the political corruption. Of course, the First Amendment isn’t a business model. Making the case that we’re important to society – proving it, even – does not guarantee our success. It just means the stakes are high. It is up to us to devise a business model that will sustain quality, public service journalism.
Our critics and the naysayers aren’t going to do it. This is the challenge before us. So while there were easier times to lead newspapers, there has never been a more important time.
Future generations will judge how we do. Or, as Abraham Lincoln said so eloquently in 1862 during an even more historic fight: “We can not escape history … The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.”

Competitive History

I think history has much to teach us. As Mark Twain said, “History may not repeat itself but it does rhyme a lot.” Newspapering, for much of its history, was a fiercely competitive, rough-and-tumble, dog-eat-dog, low-margin business.
Consider The Sacramento Bee. In the first 30 years of its life, from 1857 to 1887, 80 newspapers came and went in the Sacramento market. That was a tough business. The number of daily newspapers in the United States peaked in the early part of the 20th century. There have never been more newspapers before or since.
Not coincidentally, that same time period witnessed the birth of a new medium — commercial radio. First radio and then television emerged, taking share from existing media, namely newspapers. Many people predicted newspapers would go out of business – and many did. So many, in fact, that by the second half of the 20th century, all but the largest cities in the United States had only one daily newspaper. And then a funny thing happened. Those successful, scrappy, surviving newspapers got rich because there was no other print or classified advertising competition. It’s a noteworthy paradox that the development of radio and TV ultimately led to the enrichment of newspapers.
For the first time in the history of newspapers, profit margins exploded and newspapering became an easy and lucrative business. Warren Buffett once said: “You want to invest in a business that even your stupid cousin could run, because one day he will.” That was the newspaper business in the second half of the 20th century. As newspapers’ profit margins grew, so did their cost structures. Ah, but we were so much older then; we’re younger than that now.

New Disruption

The Golden Age of newspapering wasn’t to last. With the maturation of the Internet over the past decade, a new medium has emerged, a virulent competitor again taking advertising share from all existing media, especially share of classified advertising. The Internet’s impact has been particularly disruptive at large metro papers with their higher cost structures and greater dependence on classified advertising.
Some of our critics seem to think newspapers were blindsided by the Internet’s potential impact. But we deserve credit for the considerable progress we’ve made online. The U.S. newspaper industry generated $3 billion in digital revenue last year. At McClatchy, 15% of our advertising revenue today comes from online.
McClatchy, a company founded before the advent of electric lights, will generate nearly $200 million dollars in digital revenue this year at a higher profit margin than our print business. Our digital revenue and online audience grew by double digits last year and, we operate the leading local internet business in each of our daily newspaper markets.
None of which is to say this transition is easy or that we haven’t made mistakes along the way. Secular transitions are always disruptive and painful for all media — what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “the creative destruction of capitalism.”

Working On It

My point is that newspaper companies, to varying degrees, were working their way through it, difficult as it was. The game-changer was the arrival of the deepest and most painful recession in generations. It’s the combination of the secular shift and the cyclical downturn that has created a very real crisis for newspapers.
Many of our critics conflate the secular and the cyclical. They see the revenue declines brought about by the recession as proof we can’t weather the secular transition. This leads to the wrong, but increasingly popular conclusion, that there’s no viable future for newspaper companies.

Absolutely we’ve got a future. But just what does it look like and how do we hurry up and get there? Alan Kay, the visionary computer scientist, once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” That’s where we are today. It’s up to us to invent that future.
There is no silver bullet. There are no easy answers. And, sadly, as we have seen already, not every newspaper will make it. But here is what I see going forward:

Reinvention

Print remains viable now and into the future. Most newspapers today are profitable even in the depths of this crippling recession. More than 100 million adults in the United States read a printed newspaper every day – more than watched the Super Bowl. As troubled as the U.S. economy is, if 100 million consumers want and use something, that product usually doesn’t go away.
Sixty-one percent of 18 to 34-year-olds read a newspaper in an average week. So much for the notion that younger people don’t read newspapers.
Despite all these positives, newspapers alone are not enough. Our future depends on becoming successful hybrid media companies – fully engaged and vested in digital publishing and digital platforms as we have been historically with print. This isn’t breaking news. In the month of January, 44 percent of all U.S. internet users visited a newspaper website. And audience growth at newspaper websites is outpacing overall U.S. internet audience growth.
So we’ve been moving in this digital direction for some time – but we need to accelerate the pace and sharpen our focus. We need to establish our brands and offer our services on many different platforms. We need to leverage social media, mobile technology and the web’s interactivity as our communities and customers change how they acquire and share information.
This economic downturn makes it difficult to take risks, but we need to experiment smartly and partner where it makes sense. We need to learn from our mistakes, adjust and move on. Let’s listen to our audience and our advertisers – not conventional wisdom.

Transform the Business

The same technology that challenges us on the revenue side offers savings on the expense side through centralization, collaboration and outsourcing. We must continue to shed those legacy, 20th century, monopoly cost structures that weigh us down, limit our flexibility, jeopardize our health.
Think of the newspaper company of the future as an athlete – lean, fit and trim, yet muscular where we need to be. We need to ensure strength in our newsrooms and advertising sales staffs – our two most powerful assets, our core competencies and our social responsibility. Even today, with all the downsizing across our industry, we have the largest newsgathering operations in our markets by far. No other local media outlet is as well equipped to produce and deliver the high value, premium local content that’s growing our total audience in print and online. And we know that audience growth remains the best predictor of long-term success for any medium.
While we’ve done a good job growing audience, we need to do a better job of leveraging our sales forces. We must empower our sales staffs to sell our full portfolio of print and digital products – giving them the right tools, training and incentives. Also, think of the possibilities of harnessing that large, local sales staff to sell on behalf of others and share revenues. The untapped potential of local digital advertising in each of our markets is why internet giants like Yahoo and Google seek partnerships with newspapers. We need to mine that local digital revenue stream. We can’t afford to fumble the opportunity.
Lastly, we need to accept the reality that we’re in a tougher, more competitive business, now and forever. Ours is a business that’s still viable and vital – just with a smaller margin for profits and a smaller margin for error. Let’s appreciate how lucky we are to work in the media business in this critical time of transition. Our actions count. No unbearable lightness of being here. The ball is in our hands and the game is on the line.

I’d like to leave you this morning with a bit of inspiration from Bob Dylan and his song “Silvio.” Although written more than 20 years ago now, I think Dylan’s lyrics speak to the newspaper industry today:

Stake my future on a hell of a past
Looks like tomorrow is coming on fast
Ain’t complaining ’bout what I got
Seen better times, but who has not?

McClatchy Co. CEO Gary Pruitt addressed the Newspaper Association of America’s annual convention on Monday. Here are his remarks, courtesy of the NAA.

Each year at McClatchy’s shareholders meeting, we conclude with a video highlighting the work of our photojournalists over the past year. I pick a song that I think speaks to the year and we set the photographs to the music. This year, I wasn’t sure which song to choose. I like the Rolling Stones, and they have several songs that fit our current economic environment:

• “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” of course. But also consider …
• “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”
• “19th Nervous Breakdown”
• “Shattered” and
• “Gimme Shelter”

But I really don’t feel fatalistic. I speak to you this morning with a strong sense of resolve and hope. We have a serious fight on our hands, but I believe we are up to it. So I thought it more appropriate to select a battle song for this year’s video – the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to be specific – as we fight to ensure that truth does indeed go marching on. See what you think …. (Plays DVD)

Public Service Mandate

I came to newspapers not as a journalist or a businessman but as a First Amendment lawyer from Berkeley, California. So as you might expect, I’m passionate about free speech and a free press. I believe in the idea – and the ideal – that newspapers should provide high quality public service journalism so that the public can fully participate in democracy. This is not just some abstract concept. There is emerging empirical evidence to support the important relationship between democracy and the press.

A study published in The Journal of Law, Economics and Organization in 2003 looked at the per capita circulation of newspapers in different countries around the world and among the states in our own country. The study found that the lower the circulation, the greater the political corruption. Of course, the First Amendment isn’t a business model. Making the case that we’re important to society – proving it, even – does not guarantee our success. It just means the stakes are high. It is up to us to devise a business model that will sustain quality, public service journalism.

Our critics and the naysayers aren’t going to do it. This is the challenge before us. So while there were easier times to lead newspapers, there has never been a more important time.

Future generations will judge how we do. Or, as Abraham Lincoln said so eloquently in 1862 during an even more historic fight: “We can not escape history … The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.”

Competitive History

I think history has much to teach us. As Mark Twain said, “History may not repeat itself but it does rhyme a lot.” Newspapering, for much of its history, was a fiercely competitive, rough-and-tumble, dog-eat-dog, low-margin business.

Consider The Sacramento Bee. In the first 30 years of its life, from 1857 to 1887, 80 newspapers came and went in the Sacramento market. That was a tough business. The number of daily newspapers in the United States peaked in the early part of the 20th century. There have never been more newspapers before or since.

Not coincidentally, that same time period witnessed the birth of a new medium — commercial radio. First radio and then television emerged, taking share from existing media, namely newspapers. Many people predicted newspapers would go out of business – and many did. So many, in fact, that by the second half of the 20th century, all but the largest cities in the United States had only one daily newspaper. And then a funny thing happened. Those successful, scrappy, surviving newspapers got rich because there was no other print or classified advertising competition. It’s a noteworthy paradox that the development of radio and TV ultimately led to the enrichment of newspapers.

For the first time in the history of newspapers, profit margins exploded and newspapering became an easy and lucrative business. Warren Buffett once said: “You want to invest in a business that even your stupid cousin could run, because one day he will.” That was the newspaper business in the second half of the 20th century. As newspapers’ profit margins grew, so did their cost structures. Ah, but we were so much older then; we’re younger than that now.

New Disruption

The Golden Age of newspapering wasn’t to last. With the maturation of the Internet over the past decade, a new medium has emerged, a virulent competitor again taking advertising share from all existing media, especially share of classified advertising. The Internet’s impact has been particularly disruptive at large metro papers with their higher cost structures and greater dependence on classified advertising.

Some of our critics seem to think newspapers were blindsided by the Internet’s potential impact. But we deserve credit for the considerable progress we’ve made online. The U.S. newspaper industry generated $3 billion in digital revenue last year. At McClatchy, 15% of our advertising revenue today comes from online.

McClatchy, a company founded before the advent of electric lights, will generate nearly $200 million dollars in digital revenue this year at a higher profit margin than our print business. Our digital revenue and online audience grew by double digits last year and, we operate the leading local internet business in each of our daily newspaper markets.

None of which is to say this transition is easy or that we haven’t made mistakes along the way. Secular transitions are always disruptive and painful for all media — what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “the creative destruction of capitalism.”

Working On It

My point is that newspaper companies, to varying degrees, were working their way through it, difficult as it was. The game-changer was the arrival of the deepest and most painful recession in generations. It’s the combination of the secular shift and the cyclical downturn that has created a very real crisis for newspapers.

Many of our critics conflate the secular and the cyclical. They see the revenue declines brought about by the recession as proof we can’t weather the secular transition. This leads to the wrong, but increasingly popular conclusion, that there’s no viable future for newspaper companies.

Absolutely we’ve got a future. But just what does it look like and how do we hurry up and get there? Alan Kay, the visionary computer scientist, once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” That’s where we are today. It’s up to us to invent that future.

There is no silver bullet. There are no easy answers. And, sadly, as we have seen already, not every newspaper will make it. But here is what I see going forward:

Reinvention

Print remains viable now and into the future. Most newspapers today are profitable even in the depths of this crippling recession. More than 100 million adults in the United States read a printed newspaper every day – more than watched the Super Bowl. As troubled as the U.S. economy is, if 100 million consumers want and use something, that product usually doesn’t go away.

Sixty-one percent of 18 to 34-year-olds read a newspaper in an average week. So much for the notion that younger people don’t read newspapers.

Despite all these positives, newspapers alone are not enough. Our future depends on becoming successful hybrid media companies – fully engaged and vested in digital publishing and digital platforms as we have been historically with print. This isn’t breaking news. In the month of January, 44 percent of all U.S. internet users visited a newspaper website. And audience growth at newspaper websites is outpacing overall U.S. internet audience growth.

So we’ve been moving in this digital direction for some time – but we need to accelerate the pace and sharpen our focus. We need to establish our brands and offer our services on many different platforms. We need to leverage social media, mobile technology and the web’s interactivity as our communities and customers change how they acquire and share information.

This economic downturn makes it difficult to take risks, but we need to experiment smartly and partner where it makes sense. We need to learn from our mistakes, adjust and move on. Let’s listen to our audience and our advertisers – not conventional wisdom.

Transform the Business

The same technology that challenges us on the revenue side offers savings on the expense side through centralization, collaboration and outsourcing. We must continue to shed those legacy, 20th century, monopoly cost structures that weigh us down, limit our flexibility, jeopardize our health.

Think of the newspaper company of the future as an athlete – lean, fit and trim, yet muscular where we need to be. We need to ensure strength in our newsrooms and advertising sales staffs – our two most powerful assets, our core competencies and our social responsibility. Even today, with all the downsizing across our industry, we have the largest newsgathering operations in our markets by far. No other local media outlet is as well equipped to produce and deliver the high value, premium local content that’s growing our total audience in print and online. And we know that audience growth remains the best predictor of long-term success for any medium.

While we’ve done a good job growing audience, we need to do a better job of leveraging our sales forces. We must empower our sales staffs to sell our full portfolio of print and digital products – giving them the right tools, training and incentives. Also, think of the possibilities of harnessing that large, local sales staff to sell on behalf of others and share revenues. The untapped potential of local digital advertising in each of our markets is why internet giants like Yahoo and Google seek partnerships with newspapers. We need to mine that local digital revenue stream. We can’t afford to fumble the opportunity.

Lastly, we need to accept the reality that we’re in a tougher, more competitive business, now and forever. Ours is a business that’s still viable and vital – just with a smaller margin for profits and a smaller margin for error. Let’s appreciate how lucky we are to work in the media business in this critical time of transition. Our actions count. No unbearable lightness of being here. The ball is in our hands and the game is on the line.

I’d like to leave you this morning with a bit of inspiration from Bob Dylan and his song “Silvio.” Although written more than 20 years ago now, I think Dylan’s lyrics speak to the newspaper industry today:

Stake my future on a hell of a past
Looks like tomorrow is coming on fast
Ain’t complaining ’bout what I got
Seen better times, but who has not?

Vanity Fair uses a lot of words to describe Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. in its 11,000-word profile of the New York Times Co. chairman, but “complex” isn’t one of them. That isn’t to say that Sulzberger isn’t bright. It’s just that he appears to be ill-suited to cope with business problems that are swamping executives with far more business savvy and seasoning.

Mark Bowden’s profile is sympathetic, even moving in places, but it won’t put shareholders of the New York Times Co. at ease. Sulzberger, who is the fourth member of his family to run the company, is clearly a hard-working, well-meaning, engaging man. When he assumed stewardship of the company in the late 1990s, he saw his job as being to keep the ship on course. That worked well until tectonic shifts began reshaping the business began around 2001. Since then, we get the sense that Sulzberger has been way out of his league.

“The Sulzbergers embody one of the newsroom’s most cherished myths: Journalism sells,” Bowden writes. “But as a general principle, it simply isn’t true. Rather: Advertising sells, journalism costs.” The Sulzberger family has always operated on the principle that investing in a quality product will lead to business success, and Sulzberger has perpetuated that value in the face of recent overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Throughout his 20-year tenure at the Times, he has concentrated his investments in traditional media like the Boston Globe while demonstrating almost blithe ignorance of the changing publishing landscape.

Agnostic = Indifferent

Bowden homes in on Sulzberger’s famous quote that he is “platform agnostic.” Agnosticism implies lack of commitment, but it also reveals a basic misunderstanding of new media. “When the motion-picture camera was invented, many early filmmakers simply recorded stage plays, as if the camera’s value was just to preserve the theatrical performance and enlarge its audience,” Bowden writes. “The true pioneers realized that the camera was more revolutionary than that. It freed them from the confines of a theater.” So it is with newspapers today. The issue isn’t the platform, but rather the basic approach to news. The Times’ traditional top-down style is less and less meaningful to an audience that wants diversity and immediacy and online revenues simply won’t support a large, vertically integrated organization.

The Times Co. has made a few spot investments in Internet ventures like About.com and its website is arguably the best (and most well-trafficked) of any newspaper in the world. However, these times demand reinvention of the business and the Vanity Fair piece implies that Sulzberger is not the guy to do it. In contrast, it singles out Rupert Murdoch as the company’s most dangerous competitor and potential acquisitor.

Described as a “lightweight” and even “goofy” at one point, Sulzberger is clearly a nice and likable guy but not one given to tough decisions. He is a fan of pop psychology team-building exercises, even though they make his hard-bitten managers groan. And he is prone to risk avoidance. Bowden describes one management offsite exercise in which executives played a game that challenged them to decide between safe choices and higher risk but potentially more rewarding long shots. An employee who had witnessed many groups play the game observed, “This is the most conservative group I have ever seen.”

The Vanity Fair piece doesn’t attempt to cast any new light on the problems facing the newspaper industry; it’s a profile of the man who is perhaps under more pressure than anyone to come up with a solution. This is a complex profile of a man who doesn’t sound very complex. That can’t be good news for the Times.

Miscellany

The Associated Press, which has drawn much scorn from newspapers for its licensing terms, is cutting prices again. At its annual meeting in San Diego, the news cooperative announced $35 million in rate assessment reductions for 2010 on top of $30 million it made this year. The service also said members can now cancel their membership with one year’s notice instead of two. The AP also threatened to “pursue legal and legislative actions” against websites that don’t license news content and that it would track news distributed to members to see if it’s being misused. The AP may be in a better position than any of its member news outlets to actually enforce such a policy and it has the clout to put together a consortium of members to charge for news access if the law permits it.

The AP’s Canadian counterpart, called the Canadian Press, is laying off 25 people, or about 8% of its workforce. The service has been the victim of withdrawals by two of Canada’s largest publishers.

Newsosaur Alan Mutter is so fed up with people dancing on the graves of newspapers that he is banning newspaper-bashing comments from his blog. He can’t resist offering one last example, though.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel laid off 26 full-time and five part-time employees and proposed a third round of buyouts aimed at cutting newsroom staff.

And Finally…

Is this how you’d like your typical reader portrayed? It’s an ad created by the North Carolina Press Association to urge citizens to fight legislation which would allow local governments to post public notices on the Web instead in local newspapers. We don’t know about you, but the ad seems to imply that newspaper readers are old and technophobic (courtesy McClatchy Watch).

Two numbers stood out in Friday’s shocking news that the New York Times Co. was threatening to shut down the Boston Globe: $85 million and 450. The first number is the amount of money the Globe is expected to lose this year without union concessions. The second is the number of employees at the paper who have lifetime-employment contracts. All of those people should be very nervous right now.

The Times Co., which is groaning under $1.1 billion in debt, wants the unions to give up $20 million in concessions or face closure of the 137-year-old Globe, which has dominated the news business in Boston for more than 30 years. Given the size of the projected loss this year, $20 million seems like a modest amount. This would indicate that the Times Co. threat is merely posturing, as Alan Mutter argues. But ultimatums appear to be working in San Francisco, where the union just voted 10-1 to give the Chronicle broad authority to lay off employees without regards to seniority as well as to cut vacation time and extend working hours. The Chronicle and the Globe have similar audience characteristics.

The brass ring for Times negotiators has to be the 450 Globe employees who work under lifetime job guarantees. We knew such guarantees existed, but we hadn’t seen a count of the number of employees who have them until this past Friday; they comprise nearly a third of the unionized workforce. It’s hard to imagine any company handing out promises of that kind, but the Globe did that in 1993, when the economy was emerging from recession and businesses were being conservative about guaranteeing anything. Such management hubris testifies to the dominance the Globe enjoyed at the time over the Boston market, where its only competition is the working-class Herald and a string of suburban dailies.

We live in Globe country and can testify to the paper’s reach in the affluent suburbs. Drive through a quiet subdivision on any Sunday morning and the Globe is the paper you see in the driveways of the $700,000 homes. However, the tech-savvy Boston audience is also more open than most to online alternatives, which is perhaps one reason Boston.com is the sixth largest newspaper website while the Globe reported a circulation decline of more than 10% last November on top of an 8.3% decline six months earlier.

If the 450 employees each cost $100,000 on a fully loaded basis, that’s $45 million in annual costs over which management effectively has no control. We don’t have to comment on the lack of motivation that guaranteed employment must instill in a heavily unionized environment. If we were Times Co. management, though, we’d probably aim the first few blows of the ax directly at that soft middle.

The Globe covers its own news with reaction from community members ranging from fry cooks to U.S. Senators.

College student Adam Sell, who has interned at the Globe for two years, sent us a link to a Flickr photostream he created of the closing of the Globe‘s NorthWest bureau 10 days ago.

Miscellany

Two central Pennsylvania newspapers that have published separately with a single weekly combined edition will join forces on a permanent basis at the end of June. The Intelligencer Journal and Lancaster New Era will be published Monday through Saturday mornings with combined news and features operations but separate editorial pages.  The merger will result in the reduction of 60 full-time and 40 part-time positions, or about 20% of the workforce. Management said the combined circulation of 229,500 has been growing but that the economics of the publishing industry demands changes.

Publishers who are struggling with solutions to the revenue problem, none of them very appetizing, might want to look to Europe for inspiration. The big German publisher Axel Springer just reported record profits and is looking to expand overseas, possibly into the US.  Norway’s VG Nett charges citizens for access to its news through a cable TV subscription fee. And a group of papers in Belgium joined forces to force Google to remove their content from its search results. All in all, some papers in Europe are doing just fine, thanks to tight government partnerships and creative approaches to revenue

The Detroit Media Partnership, which publishes the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, has closed a deal with Plastic Logic to distribute the Plastic Logic Reader under purchase or lease to subscribers of the Detroit dailies as an alternative to paper delivery.  The reader is the size of an 8.5 x 11-in. pad of paper, weighs less than many print magazines and sports a touch-screen interface.

With the Minneapolis Star Tribune in bankruptcy, employees have started a grass-roots effort to save the paper. A group has launched a Facebook group (1,280 members, but only one discussion post since Jan. 17), a website (inactive as of this morning) and plans to hand out paper hats and scorecards at the Twins’ home opener. It’s probably going to take more than that.

If you like Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper, you probably won’t after reading this egotistical, self-indulgent monument to himself. If this is how newspaper columnists regard their own celebrity, it’s no surprise readers are turning elsewhere. But there are a couple of good anecdotes that illustrate how divorced these scribes are from their readers.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt will keynote the Newspaper Association of America national convention in San Diego this week. Schmidt, who is often considered the great Satan by newspaper publishers, has nevertheless been a vocal proponent of the need to help the industry.  It should be an interesting encounter. Schmidt is scheduled to speak on Tuesday at 10 a.m. PDT. You can listen to his remarks live. NAA will offer a moderated “Cover it Live” discussion on its PressimeNow! blog, where visitors can pose questions, share their thoughts and get live reactions from attendees.

The Sun-Times Media Group is considering ending publication of some of its suburban newspapers as it struggles to emerge from its recently declared bankruptcy.

A.H. Belo Corp., owner of the Dallas Morning News and three other daily newspapers, will cut employee salaries next month and suspend a retirement supplement to pension plan participants next year. Cuts will range from 2.5% to 15%, depending on an employee’s salary. The company’s CEO will also take a 20% cut in pay.

Last month we told you about St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Christopher Ave’s use of song to lament the layoffs of newspaper copy editors. Now, 26-year old Berkeley musician named Jonathan Mann has joined forces with the staff of the East Bay Express to come up with a solution to newspapers’ business problems. You have to wait to the end to hear it, but the three minutes are time well spent.

Editor & Publisher looks at the list of solutions being proposed to the newspaper industry’s troubles and adds a new one into the mix: the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company, or L3C. An L3C “is a corporation that qualifies as a charity under IRS rules but runs as a for-profit business,” Mark Fitzgerald explains, and it’s gathering momentum as a rescue strategy among various chapters of the Newspaper Guild.

That’s right: The Newspaper Guild may get into the business of running newspapers, if only to save its membership from annihilation. An L3C is allowed to take investments from charities and nonprofits because it has a “social benefit.” This new kind of nonprofit is now permitted in several states and the Guild “is lobbying for federal legislation – expected to be introduced later this spring – that would explicitly include newspapers among businesses that have a ‘social benefit.'”  

Apparently, the thinking is that a lot of newspapers are going to come on the market selling at pennies on the dollar this year and this new tax structure would allow owners to spread out ownership among a great many entities, including businesses like printing press makers and auto dealers who have a vested interest in maintaining the business. Foundations would also be able to treat their donations as investments that could earn a return.

Another school of thought is to tear down antitrust rules that prevent newspapers from cooperating on fixing prices, E&P says. This could be a solution to the “content wants to be free” problem: If newspaper owners can legally collude to set prices and licensing fees for their content, then they can conceivably reverse the tide and charge for their product.

One thread is clear throughout the feature, though: No one is seriously arguing that newspapers should be publicly supported like National Public Radio. The consensus among owners and even Guild officials is that these businesses must stand on their own.

BTW, this story was just put online on April 1 after first appearing in E&P‘s print edition in March.

Sun-Times Parent is Bankrupt

Sun-Times Media Group, Inc. (STMG), which operates 59 newspapers and websites, including the Chicago Sun-Times, filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday. The company has been under severe financial and competitive pressure and was weakened by a fraud scandal that landed two previous executives in jail. Chairman and interim CEO Jeremy Halbreich said the company is looking at possible asset sales and new investments, and that it has sufficient resources to work through the bankruptcy process.

The Toronto Globe and Mail looks deeper into STMG’s financial situation and the ripple effect of the 2007 fraud convictions. Last year, the company lost $344-million on revenue of $324-million, as advertising revenue fell 18 per cent in the fourth quarter and is expected to drop 30 per cent in 2009. What’s more, STMG is contractually obligated to pay the former executives’ legal costs, which total $118 million so far. To top it all off, it may face a $510 million tax obligation as a consequence of illegal deductions those executives took.

Dour Pew Report Nevertheless Offers Hope

“This is the sixth edition of our annual report on the State of the News Media in the United States. It is also the bleakest,” reads the introduction to The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual State of the News Media report. It certainly delivers on that promise. We haven’t read all 180,000 words, nor are we likely to, but you can start with the executive summary if you want to dive in yourself.

The media overall had a terrible year in 2008 with the newspaper and magazine segments being hit the hardest and the cable TV industry providing the single bright spot. Cable networks actually increased their newsroom investments by an average of 7% during the year, with CNN adding bureaus in 10 cities. This modest growth wasn’t nearly enough to make up for the huge cost cuts in other media, though. By the end of 2008, all three TV networks had pulled their embedded reporters from Iraq. Newspaper circulations continued to decline; Sunday readership is off 17% since 2001.

The biggest disaster was in news magazines, with only one in four Americans reporting they’ve read one the day before. Time, which invented the genre, may be the only one left pretty soon, the report says.

Public trust in media dropped, but historical data shows that this trend is erratic. Interestingly, a vast majority of Americans (70%) believe the media favored Barack Obama in the most recent election. Even a majority of Democrats believe that.

Newspapers are in “free fall,” the report concludes, although “We still do not subscribe to the theory that the death of the industry is imminent. The industry over all in 2008 remained profitable,” turned in revenues of $38 billion and employed 45,000 professionals gathering and editing the news. There is reason to believe that traditional walls between online and print are falling and that newspapers are figuring out how to monetize targeted audience segments. They also appear to be much more open to working with aggregators and partners.

Still, the long-term outlook continues to be dim because of the economy, debt pressure and the unwillingness of investors to spend money in mature markets. The value that papers provide, though, is only increasing in importance. “In what traditionalists tend to dismiss as a cacophony of talking heads, celebrity infotainment, opinion-driven blogosphere exchanges and information overload, the integrity and sense-making of professionally done news should be more valuable than ever.”

The report also has an interesting section analyzing the practices and credibility of citizen media. It features an update of an earlier report that audited 64 citizen news sites. The new research should provide some comfort to established news organizations because it finds that, in general, they do a better job of incorporating citizen voices into their coverage than pure grassroots citizen operations. In particular, legacy news organizations are better at giving citizens a voice in published content and making it easy for readers to download and share information. In fact, the only area in which mainstream media’s citizen journalism ventures failed to outshine the grassroots sites was in linking to competitors’ content.

Finally, the report includes profiles of several new media ventures, ranging from NewHavenIndependent.org to MinnPost.com to GlobalPost.com.

Miscellany

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s buyout offer has 120 takers, which is more than was expected. As a result, the involuntary layoff total won’t be as high as many had feared. The newspaper management has been working with the union to restructure its contract. Even with the buyout, remaining employees will still see pay cuts and longer hours.

The Livingston County (Mich.) Daily Press & Argus has announced a “significant but unspecified number of layoffs” in its 95-employee workforce. Management would only say that the number was more than 10 and included Managing Editor Maria Stuart.

The Staunton (Va.) Daily News Leader will cut eight full-time employees and 15 part-timers from a workforce of unspecified size. Just one day earlier, the paper said it would outsource its printing operations to the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record. Laid-off employees include “press operators, mailroom workers and other employees charged with the production side of printing the paper every day.”

If you’re in Eugene, Oregon this afternoon, you can stop by the university at 4 p.m. and hear Boston Globe editor Martin Baron talk about the challenges facing newspapers, presumably including his own. The Globe laid off another 50 people last week.

The Guardian announced today that it will cease print publication after 188 years and go Twitter-only. All future content will be formatted to less than 140 characters and the newspaper has launched an ambitious effort to retweet its entire archive. 

“[Celebrated Guardian editor] CP Scott would have warmly endorsed this – his well-known observation ‘Comment is free but facts are sacred’ is only 36 characters long,” a spokesman said in a tweet that was itself only 135 characters long.”

The newspaper says it has found that many events that had previously required thousands of words to describe could be more efficiently communicated within the 140-character limit. For example, it has summarized its coverage of the JFK assassination as “JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?”

The Guardian‘s decision is a bold move, but tough times call for tough decisions.

Demotix is a new kind of citizen journalism site that acts as an intermediary for photojournalists. Its media clients can select images from the site’s feed and Demotix splits the revenue 50:50 with the photographer. Unlike the many citizen journalism ventures that pay on the order of a few dollars to contributors, Demotix prides itself on getting professional pay scales. Non-exclusive fees can run from $50 to $3,000, according to the company’s website.

“We are raising citizen-journalists to professional rates, because that’s what they are worth,” says Tim Saunders, Demotix’ North America Editor. “We see this as fundamental to our core aim of incentivizing quality citizen journalism and securing a viable income for talented freelancers.”

The London-based company principally serves up photos at the moment, but will expand into written journalism soon, according to CEO Turi Munthe (left). The business has signed on several high-profile newspapers and is hoping that its international scope will make it appealing to US journals that have had to lay off their international correspondents. Services like its concentrated coverage of the G20 Summit in London fill gaps left by the absence of foreign bureaus.

Anyone can contribute to Demotix by simply setting up an account and uploading reports and photos. A staff of professional editors decides what goes out on the wire and pays a small fee to contributors just for being selected. If a client outlet publishes an item from the wire, Demotix negotiates a fee.

On the day we caught up with Munthe for a short interview last week, the office was a bit chaotic. Demotix had just won the Media Guardian Award in the Independent Media category, an honor that Munthe said is like the “media Oscars.” 

To listen to the interview, click below or right-click here and save to download.

Amid all the hand-wringing about the lack of new-media alternatives to newspapers, the online-only Huffington Post is setting up a small investigative unit to examine the nation’s economy. The news site is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and others to launch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million and plans to hire 10 investigative journalists who will primarily coordinate work done by freelancers. “All of us increasingly have to look at different ways to save investigative journalism,” said founder Ariana Huffington (left). She added that the fund will probably hire laid-off newspaper journalists.

Everything the venture produces will be available free for any publication or website to publish. While the group’s initial focus will be on the economy, the founders intend to cover a wide range of topics over time. Content won’t reflect HuffPo’s left-leaning politics because the philanthropic funding requires a neutral perspective. Jay Rosen, who will advise the project, has more detail on his blog.

Critics find a hint of irony in Huffington’s journalism bailout plan. Joseph Tartakoff notes that “Some traditional media outlets have previously accused the HuffPo of stealing their content. The Chicago Reader, for instance, charged Huffington Post with ‘grand theft‘ after it reprinted one of the publication’s articles wholesale on its site.” HuffPo practices a new style of journalism with a small staff of reporters and links to other sources aggressively from its home page.

Jeff Jarvis likes the HuffPo idea and suggests that $1.75 million can go a lot farther than one might think. He evokes the “1% rule” of online communities, which is that 1% of the people create the content that the other 99% consume and discuss. “You need only a limited number of contributors to support great things in a gift economy. See: Wikipedia and NPR,” Jarvis writes.

John Yemma would probably agree. As his publication, the Christian Science Monitor, goes Web-mostly, the editor (right) has launched a blog that he hopes will be “a place to talk about the changes in media.” In his second entry, he compares the crowd-sourced Wikipedia model to the closed Encarta and Britannica products. “General knowledge…can’t withstand an effort that was developed specifically for the Internet and that harnesses gifted amateurs,” he writes. And he issues a warning to newspapers about putting content behind a pay wall, as Britannica and Encarta did. “The Web is its own universe with its own rules,” he writes. Such new-media thinking from a veteran print journalist indicates that the Monitor experiment will be an interesting one to watch.

Debating the Value of Newspapers to Democracy

Slate’s Jack Shafer takes a dim view of the idea that newspapers are essential to democracy. Before the current crisis, he writes, people mostly complained about the lousy job newspapers did of getting the facts straight and delivering balanced coverage. Now that the medium is failing, newspapers have been “reduced to a compulsory cheat sheet for democracy. All this lovey-dovey about how essential newspapers are to civic life and the political process makes me nostalgic for the days, not all that long ago, when everybody hated them.”

17th Century Newspaper

Shafer points out that when Thomas Jefferson said he preferred newspapers without government to government without newspapers, he wasn’t talking about the broadsheets we know today. Newspapers in Jefferson’s time were baldly partisan and often skewed the facts to suit their views. How did people figure out the truth when each journal had its own version of the truth? They triangulated, they checked other sources and they figured it out. This worked okay up until about 50 years ago, when newspapers decided to become the arbiters of truth. That’s convenient, but it doesn’t mean we can’t go back to a form that the founding fathers believed was essential to democracy.

The idea that many small contributions can out-produce a few big ones is nicely articulated by Timothy Lee on TechDirt. In order to understand how journalism can be reinvented, you need to discard the notion that only monolithic, vertically integrated organizations can cover the news. “The Internet makes possible a much more decentralized model, in which lots of different people, most of them volunteers, participate in the process of gathering and filtering the news,” he writes. “If millions of people each contribute small amounts of time to this kind of decentralized information-gathering, they can collectively do much of the work that used to be done by professional reporters and editors.”

If you’re geeky enough, you’ll recognize the open-source software model in this thinking. The most powerful force ever to come along in software development depends upon teams of loosely-organized developers each contributing a little bit of their time to building software that anyone can use for free. No, journalism isn’t software development, and there are certain practices of journalism that can’t be duplicated by a person sitting at a desk in India. However, Lee suggests that if the gadflies who already hang around city council meetings start reporting upon them on their blogs, then the community effect can take over to turn that amateur reportage into real journalism. You don’t need professional reporters for everything.

Jon Talton begs to differ. In an angry and resentful blog entry, he derides the idea that grass-roots efforts can ever replace the depth and credibility of what professional journalism organizations produce. Special interests, “will all have stronger voices for their agendas. Manias, rumors and groupthink will be more prevelant. In many localities, people will be particularly ill-informed about their government and major economic powers, pluralism will decrease and corruption will rise,” he writes. After that, we suppose, come the locusts.

Miscellany

Media General is cutting back again in Florida, saying there are no signs yet that the economy is picking up. Its Florida Communications Group cut 53 jobs, eliminated 12 vacant positions, closed two niche publications and added three more days of unpaid furlough to the 10 that employees were already required to take.

Back in the early days of the Web, some newspapers were criticized for withholding information from their websites until the stories had already appeared in print. Now that times have changed, the Minneapolis Star Tribune is being labeled a visionary for doing the same thing. The Strib has enjoyed good success online despite its small-market roots, so the paper is gambling that it can entice readers to become print subscribers by withholding some deep investigative reporting from the website. “The best of our deep, exclusive content will be available online later in the week, unless we have a compelling reason to post it sooner,” wrote editor Nancy Barnes in a letter to readers.

The Boston Herald laid off 12 people, or 6% of its workforce.

The Associated Press has a great list of “daily newspapers that have reduced publication days since last year.” In reality, many of the papers on the list were not technically dailies to begin with, but all publish at least five days a week.  It looks like Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays are the most popular days to cut.

Courtesy of our friends at the Christian Science Monitor, here’s an image of the final front page of the daily newspaper. Beginning this week, the Monitor moves most of its news operations online with a weekly wrap-up in print. The Monitor was the first major daily to shift the bulk of its operations from print to the Web, and its success will be watched closely. Click the image to download a PDF.