The week started depressingly with the demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and then brightened with the emergence of a rescue plan for the San Diego Union-Tribune. We’d like to close it out with an inspiring view of the future by Steven Berlin Johnson, founder of the hyperlocal community site, outside.in.

Speaking at the South by Southwest conference last week, Johnson delivered one of the most cogent and optimistic perspectives on the future of journalism that we’ve ever read. His essay builds upon Clay Shirky’s excellent discussion last week of why revolutions are messy but necessary. Johnson does it by pointing to two of the most mature information ecosystems of the online world – technology and politics – and contrasting the state of media today to that of 20 years ago.

There is no comparison. As an Apple Mac fan from the early days, Johnson used to wait at the local newsstand for each issue of Macworld magazine to arrive. In the late 1980s, “It might have taken months for details from a John Sculley keynote to make to the College Hill Bookstore; now the lag is seconds, with dozens of people liveblogging every passing phrase from a Jobs speech. There are 8,000-word dissections of each new release of OS X at Ars Technica, written with attention to detail and technical sophistication that far exceeds anything a traditional newspaper would ever attempt.” Even Macworld, which used to dispense news only once a month, “published twenty-six different articles on Apple-related topics yesterday.”

24X7 Politics

The political sphere is also booming with information. Barack Obama’s controversial race speech in Philadelphia was seen in its entirety by 8 million people online. In 1992, “It would have been reduced to a minute-long soundbite on the evening news. CNN probably would have aired it live, which might have meant that 500,000 people caught it.” Not only was the entire presidential campaign live-blogged, but it was covered by a swarm of interested Web publishers who dissected every event and issue. And by the way, Web users all had access to a bounty of information directly from both candidates. Two decades ago, such details were hard to get and they were mostly summarized and passed through the filter of the local newspaper.

Johnson asserts that the transformation that has already taken place in technology and political news will spread into other domains as well. While praising The New York Times, he notes that a big paper can’t be all things to all people. “Every week in my [Brooklyn] neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong.”

Johnson says he gets that local news from blogs like Brownstoner, which is one of nearly 2,000 blogs focused on Brooklyn.

Future in Aggregation

Is there a future for professional news organizations in all this? Absolutely, Johnson asserts. “If they embrace this role as an authoritative guide to the entire ecosystem of news, if they stop paying for content that the web is already generating on its own, I suspect in the long run they will be as sustainable and as vital as they have ever been. The implied motto of every paper in the country should be: all the news that’s fit to link.” And this will open the door for new organizations to step in with the international coverage that is unquestionably threatened as traditional newspapers decline.

Johnson’s use of the mature new-media markets of technology and politics is an innovative approach to envisioning a future for professional news gathering, one in which aggregation and interpretation trump original reporting. With millions of enthusiasts now providing front-lines coverage, the new role of professional journalists will be to organize and make sense of it all. This doesn’t make them any less important than they are today. They’ll just deliver a different kind of value.

Layoff Log

In the meantime, though, the transformation takes its toll:

• The Minneapolis Star Tribune, already languishing in bankruptcy, is laboriously negotiation cost cuts with its unions in an effort to save $20 million in annual expenses. Its 116-employee pressmen’s union just approved contract revisions that will result in wage reductions, 24 layoffs and reduced staffing on the presses. Next up are negotiations with delivery and newsroom unions.
• The Memphis Commercial Appeal is cutting 19 newsroom jobs. No word on whether additional reductions are hitting other departments.
• McClatchy papers continue to cut jobs, working toward a corporate goal of 1,600 reductions, but McClatchy Watch says it isn’t going to happen. “Unless it plans to shut down a couple of its papers, McClatchy will not come anywhere near laying off 1,600 employees,” the site says, and it has title-by-title numbers to prove it. However, commenters don’t entirely agree. A lively debate over the blog’s estimates ensues, along with a side argument over stylistic issues, which seems to crop up frequently when journalists disagree. Meanwhile, the site reports on recent layoffs: 47 in Anchorage, 20 in Columbus, 14 in Lexington and 10 in Modesto. The Idaho Statesman is also laying off 25 people and imposing salary cuts.
• Three staffers are gone at the Las Cruces Sun-News. One of them is “the typist who transcribes calls to Sound Off!” We hope that’s not a full-time job.
• Morris Communications has managed to avoid layoffs so far, but it’s is cutting staff salaries 5% to 10% at all its properties, including the Amarillo Globe-News.

And Finally…

In times of trouble, people now have a new way to commiserate and cooperate: Facebook. A new group called Newspaper Escape Plan has been hatched to enable laid-off journalists to pull together and share job-hunting tips and gossip about the business. You can go there to learn about services like Publish2, which is a social bookmarking service for journalists.  Follow it on Twitter.

The AP posted this sobering photo of discarded newspaper racks languishing in a San Francisco junkyard.

The pending purchase of the San Diego Union-Tribune by a private equity firm opens an interesting new chapter in the newspaper industry’s history. Not much is known about Platinum Equity other than the company has completed more than 100 acquisitions in the last 15 years and one of its partners is a successful newspaper owner. For a company that has spent $27.5 billion on acquisitions, it’s website is almost defiantly sparse, as if to reinforce that it doesn’t have to tell anybody anything it doesn’t want to.

Based on our experience with similar takeovers in the past, here’s a short FAQ of what we think you can expect. Also be sure to check out Alan Mutter’s analysis for the views of a professional investor.

What’s a private equity firm?

It’s basically a group of rich people who pool their money and invest in companies that they think are undervalued. They bring their expertise to bear to quickly grow the value of the assets they acquire and then sell them, hopefully at a substantial profit. There are a lot of private equity companies out there, but you don’t hear much about them because they prefer to work in the background and they’re largely unregulated.

Why did this one buy the Union-Tribune?

For starters, it probably got a great price. Private equity firms look to unlock asset value and Platinum Equity must believe that it can quickly make changes that will substantially increase the value of the paper. What those changes are is still unknown.  Because private equity firms don’t have to tap into the lending market to any great degree, they are among the few institutions that are capitalized to make big purchases right now. That’s another reason we can presume they got a great price.

Platinum Equity would not have bought the Union-Tribune unless the partners believed that the business was undervalued.  That’s another indication that perhaps the market has hit bottom.  The big question is what changes the partners believe they have to make to increase the value of the asset.  That’s going to be the really interesting question

So what’s going to happen now?

In the short term, not much.  The new owners will spend the next couple of months on paperwork to get the deal done. However, things are likely to happen pretty quickly after that.

The partners in these private equity firms are usually decisive, no-nonsense people who don’t fear making tough decisions.  It’s likely there will be downsizing and probably a lot of it since the new owners don’t have the sentimental attachments of the current owners.  One thing is for sure: the new owners will treat the Union-Tribune as a business and probably a short-term business at that.  Professional investment firms rarely work on timelines of more than three to five years.  If they haven’t sold the business and doubled their money by that time, the deal is considered a failure

Is this good for the Union-Tribune? 

It probably is. Platinum Equity spokesman Louis Samson said the right things in endorsing the value of the Union-Tribune brand: “We will bring a strong operational focus that helps ensure the Union-Tribune not only survives in this market, but thrives.”  This is good news, because professional investors are as likely carve up and destroy a company as readily as they can build one.  It appears that the new owners are focused on stabilizing and supporting the brand, but that doesn’t mean they will avoid hard decisions.   It should be noted, by the way, that the company’s press release about the acquisition makes no reference to continuing the Union-Tribune s as a newspaper

Is this good for the newspaper industry?

Yes, because it is one sign that the market has become attractive again. With the exception of a few small papers in Connecticut, nobody has bought a major newspaper in over a year.  The fact that someone finally did buy one may open the door for other investors to come forward. 

Platinum Equity’s moves  certainly will be closely watched.   It will also be interesting to see how a professional investment firm treats its new asset.  While Platinum Equity has some experience in the market in the person of partner David Black, it is not a professional publisher.  The partners will be looking at the Union-Tribune as an asset and trying to maximize the value of the asset.  In other words, their minds won’t be clouded by assumptions of what a newspaper should be.  It will be just a business to them.  Since the problems in the newspaper industry are fundamentally business problems, it will be interesting to watch what a professional management firm does to solve them.

What would you do if you were an employee of the Union-Tribune right now?

I’d think hard about how to justify my value to the organization, not in terms of my length of service or number of awards but rather relative to the company’s bottom line.  When business managers with no newspaper background took over at Tribune Co., they started measuring journalist productivity by column inches of copy.  The new owners at the Union-Tribune probably aren’t that dense, but they will almost certainly take a financial analyst’s approach to managing the operation.  Employees who can’t demonstrate why they are critical to the business will be most at risk, as will those who carry  the highest salaries.

Just one day after the closing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dramatized the industry’s misery, signs of hope have emerged in the apparent rescue of another beleaguered paper.  The San Diego Union-Tribune, which has struggled amid the plunging real estate market and generally sour Southern California economy, has been sold to an investment group that “specializes in acquiring businesses facing complex operational challenges in declining or transitioning markets.” The price wasn’t disclosed.

Future owner Platinum Equity will add the Union-Tribune to the list of the more than 100 acquisitions it has completed over the last 13 years. Little is known about the firm at this point (you’ll see if you visit the website), but its intent appears to be to stabilize the Union Tribune rather than to close it or sell it off in pieces. “We will bring a strong operational focus that helps ensure the Union-Tribune not only survives in this market, but thrives,” said Louis Samson, a principal at the company.

There appears to be some needed operational expertise on staff. Investors include David H. Black of Black Press, which owns dozens of community newspapers along with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and the Akron Beacon Journal, according to a company statement.

In contrast, the Union Tribune was an orphan. It is the last daily newspaper owned by the Copley family, which once held nearly 50 daily and weekly newspapers in California and Illinois. Copley Press has been methodically selling off its holdings over the last couple of years and the sale of the Union-Tribune marks its exit from the newspaper business.

The U-T has a brief profile of platinum here, but it doesn’t add much.

The news comes on the same day that the Tucson Citizen, which had been left for dead by its own parent earlier this week, was pulled back from the brink by the emergence of two potential buyers.  However there is no guarantee that the negotiations will rescue the Citizen, which was originally planned to cease publishing this weekend.

It ain’t over yet for the Tucson Citizen.  The struggling Arizona paper was set to close on Saturday — and had even prepared a farewell edition — but now two prospective buyers have emerged and Gannett Co. has announced that the Citizen will continue to publish on a “day-to-day basis” until negotiations are completed.

Talks are in progress with two “very interested buyers,” according to Robert Dickey, president of U.S. Community Publishing for Gannett Co. in a memo to staffers. Reporter Renee Horton dug up the name of one likely party: Santa Monica Media Corp., a “blank check company” that exists solely to perform mergers and acquisitions.

Staffers were stunned by the news, since many have already landed new jobs or had made plans for how to spend the severance they were promised.  About 25 of the paper’s 65 employees would have been eligible for at least 20 weeks of pay under the severance deal, according to the story in the Citizen.  Several staffers were none too pleased about the news.

Randy Harris, a staff artist who presumably is not looking forward to continuing his employment at the paper, said the news was “just one more instance where they are screwing us over one last time.”

More coverage by the Associated Press.

Representatives from a Who’s Who of major newspapers will gather on Saturday for a daylong event in Washington focused on finding new revenue solutions to the newspaper crisis.

Calling itself Revenue Two Point Zero, the group says it’s fed up with all the talk and  is going to focus on solutions.  “We reject the belief that media companies should pursue models based on pay-for-content plans or philanthropy,” the group’s manifesto says.  “Instead, we believe the best hope for media companies to make money is the old-fashioned way — by earning it from advertising.”

The group has several examples of how it hopes to do this, including mobile advertising, better classifieds and a stronger appeal to small businesses.  About 20 representatives of major publications will be there, and the Society for News Design has joined the parade. A post on the society’s blog asks people to volunteer criticism, comments and inspiration in the spirit that “everyone in the industry agrees that radical changes needed.”  You can follow the action via tweets from Logan Molen, VP of Interactive Media at the Bakersfield Californian. He’s at rev2oh.

New Ideas

Speaking of Bakersfield, the Californian is the lead in a BusinessWeek story about how newspapers are trying to develop new revenue streams.  In an industry where nearly everyone is sinking, the Californian is actually growing.  One of the secrets is Baktopia.com, an online social network aimed at young people that publishes the best of the Web in print.  “Advertisers pay full rate,” says the company’s digital products manager.

The story further talks about the Californian‘s launch of Printcasting.com, a Web venture that lets anybody create a digital magazine.  The best stuff is turned into a print publication supported by advertising. Money in print? It’s true.

The rest of the BusinessWeek article mainly covers companies and technologies we’ve written about here before, including blog aggregator Outside.in, micro-payments start up Kachingle and community content provider Helium.  Almost no one quoted in the article is actually making much money with these ventures, but at least they’re thinking differently. That counts for a lot these days.

Seattle Times Still In Deep Weeds

You’d think the closure of its largest rival would be a boost to the Seattle Times, but Seattle’s other paper is still struggling to make ends meet. That news comes from Doug Henderson, an economist with the Joint Council of Teamsters No. 28, who was allowed to have a look at the paper’s financial data available as part of the owner’s request to slash 12% of its workforce. Henderson said that despite having already laid off 25% of its employees, the Times‘ “financial status is still serious” and it “needs to consider either selling off some operations or shutter some. However, with the economic climate being in utter chaos, the opportunity to sell any type of operation is very slim.”

The news should come as no surprise to surveyors of the Seattle scene. The Times‘ financial position is so perilous that many people were surprised when it was the Post-Intelligencer that  pulled the plug. The Blethen family, which owns the Times, has been unable to sell a money-losing chain of newspapers in Maine. Less than three months ago, Senior Vice President Alayne Fardella admitted that the company’s situation is “dire,” and added that “It has been and continues to be a long and difficult fight for our survival.”

Miscellany

News & Observer Publishing Co. said it will lay off 27 people in the Raleigh News & Observer newsroom, reduce wages and implement unpaid furloughs as part of an overall reduction of  11 percent of its work force, or 78 people. Management added that the N&O will also “increase cooperation with the Charlotte [Observer] newspaper and will speed its transition to a narrower format to save on production costs.” Both the Raleigh and Charlotte papers are owned by McClatchy. The local ABC affiliate has a news story about the N&O’s problems bluntly titled “N&O struggles to survive.”  Says reporter Larry Stogner: “No one wants to talk about when the ax will fall again – and on whose neck.” Managing Editor John Drescher says a subscription model to the paper’s website is under consideration.

Former Flint Journal reporter Jim Smith said last week that publishers at the Flint Journal, Bay City Times and Saginaw News were are expected to call together their staffs this week to announce:

• They’ll reduce the publishing schedule to three days a week: Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday;
• They won’t honor a “lifetime” employment pledge of parent companies Newhouse Newspapers and Booth Newspapers;
• An unspecified number of layoffs;
• Reduced pay and benefits for remaining employees;
• Consolidation of printing and copy desk functions and content-sharing among the three titles.

No word yet on whether Smith is right.

And Finally…

We don’t know who’s behind Criggo.com – the owner’s name is disguised and the site is registered to a fax number in Los Angeles – but we hope he or she never stops tending the site. Even as classified advertising has shriveled, newspaper ads continue to deliver a seemingly unending stream of entertaining and bizarre humor. Very often, what’s funny isn’t the double entendres or typos; it’s in the fascinating stories that must underly these truncated missives to the world. Aren’t you just dying to know what’s going on behind closed doors at the house that placed this ad?

This is the final front page of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which published its last issue this morning after 145 years of daily operation.

Here’s a slide show of the final day. About 150 of the paper’s 170 employees will lose their jobs.

The P-I says it will be the first daily to shutter its print operations and go fully online, although technically the Capital Times did this last year. Reporter Joe Tartakoff writes about how Seattlepi.com will work very differently from its print predecessor.

At Seattlepi.com, “We don’t have reporters, editors or producers—everyone will do and be everything. Everyone will write, edit, take photos and shoot video, produce multimedia and curate the home page,” says assistant-managing-editor-turned-executive-producer Michelle Nicolosi. And that’s not all. This is going to be a pure Web news operation in every sense, she says.

Can a venerable print newspaper create a brand, a business and a future for itself on the Web? The news world will be watching.

It’s a bad week for newspapers as two more titles totalling 284 years of continuous publication have been slated to close.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will publish its last issue tomorrow, ending 146 years of print publishing. The Hearst-owned daily will maintain its website, seattlepi.com, thus becoming the largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital format. The decision was expected. Hearst had put the paper up for sale in early January, promising to close it if a buyer wasn’t found. The demise of the P-I, which is Seattle’s oldest business, idles most of its 170-person workforce and leaves the city with one daily newspaper, the Seattle Times, and its financial footing is shaky.

The P-I is choosing to focus on the future. Even as the paper announced its closure today, its assistant managing editor posted an upbeat letter to readers about the continuation of the Web presence. “I hope you’ll pardon our dust for the next few weeks as we launch our new digital news and information Web site,” writes Michelle Nicolosi. That dust will be covering a lot of empty desks for a while.

The Tucson Citizen will also close this Friday if a buyer doesn’t step forward. The Gannett daily was put up for sale in January with a stated deadline of this week to find a buyer. No buyer has been found and Gannett has now taken to talking about the Citizen in the past tense.

The Citizen‘s circulation has been sliding for years and now numbers just 17,000, compared to rival Arizona Daily Star‘s 117,000. The two papers share some resources under a joint operating agreement. The Citizen, which publishes six days a week, has 65 full-time and three part-time employees. There’s no word yet on whether the paper’s website will continue after print operations are shut down.

Clay Shirky takes us back 500 years to reflect on the revolution that’s going on right now. Everyone who wonders “What will become of journalism when newspapers are gone?” should read this superbly voiced essay by the author of Here Comes Everybody. The piece has racked up 225 comments and trackbacks just over the weekend, and there will be many more.

To sum up Shirky’s case:  The game is over for newspapers. Nothing can save the business, so it’s pointless to try. We’re in the middle of a revolution and revolutions are uncomfortable things because “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

His distant mirror is 16^th century Europe, when the printing press was beginning to lift the world out of the Dark Ages. As translations of the Bible into languages other than English began to threaten the church-dominated world order, everyone frantically searched for assurance that the old institutions would be preserved. This applied even to disrupters like Martin Luther,  who insisted he wasn’t creating a schism in the church even as he was inventing Protestantism.

“And so it is today,” says Shirky, fast-forwarding. “When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution…They are demanding to be lied to.”

Revolutions are messy things because old institutions have to be destroyed before new ones are put in place. We’re witnessing the destruction now but we have no idea what will grow out of the rubble. And that’s scary.  “The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case,” Shirky writes. The only certainty is that the newcomers will be more specialized, distributed and democratized than the old, vertically integrated institutions.

We won’t say Clay Shirky puts our minds at ease, but he at least points out that we have come this way before and that everything turned out pretty well in the long run. All we have at this point is faith and optimism.  The sooner we can turn our attention from salvaging the unsalvageable to inventing the future, the sooner we can get on with the rebuilding.

Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard columnist Bob Welch should read Shirky’s essay. So should Mark Willes, former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and now head of Deseret Management Corp., who’s quoted in this Salt Lake Tribune story remarking “[I]f we’re going  to have all the things I think are central to having a civilized society and a successful society, [newspapers] must grow.”

Union Grants Broad Concessions to San Francisco Chronicle Management

Their collective backs against the wall, members of the Northern California Media Workers Guild voted 10-1 to give the San Francisco Chronicle broad authority to lay off employees without regards to seniority as well as to cut vacation time and extend working hours. The union, which represents 483 employees at the Chron, had little choice. Owner Hearst Corp. has threatened to close the entire operation without major concessions. Even so, Hearst is still likely to lay off 150 Guild workers.

Union members took consolation in the fact that that figure is one-third less than the 225 jobs Hearst originally threatened to eliminate. The Guild was also able to secure a decent severance package for laid-off employees. However, members will pay more for health benefits, lose 25% of their vacation and work longer hours. The Mercury News story notes that Hearst had threatened to make “most” of the 225 threatened job cuts in the Chron‘s 260-person newsroom. This seems incredible, since a cutback of that magnitude would leave less than 200 reporters covering the entire Bay Area. That may still be the case after the anticipated layoffs happen. Hearst is also eliminating 100 unionized pressroom jobs after it outsources printing to a Canadian contractor in June.

How to Save the Classified Advertising Business

Christopher Ryan and Steve Outing propose some head-slappingly simple ideas in their “Classifieds Manifesto.” So why aren’t more newspaper companies following them?

Newspapers can still have important and profitable classified advertising businesses, the authors say, but first they have to stop thinking about classifieds as agate type on a page. Craigslist has won that battle, so newspapers have to change the rules of the game.

Why not open a used-car lot for your auto clients? Or create a division that helps realtors sell homes? And while you’re at it, reinvent the way you present information. Craigslist is butt-ugly, man. Use tables and icons and easily navigable ways to get readers to the stuff they want to buy. And while you’re at it, get a video camera out to those properties that realtors are trying to sell and give them a hand.

There are a bunch of other smart and simple ideas in this essay. Send the URL to the head of your classified advertising group.

Miscellany

Mark Potts totes up the market capitalizations of the publicly held newspaper companies in the US and comes to a striking conclusion: Their combined value is just $1.3 billion, or a little more than what The New York Times Co. paid for the Boston Globe alone ($1.1 billion ) in 1993. This same group of companies was worth over $7 billion just six months ago. And speaking of the Globe, Potts says Barclays recently valued the paper at just $20 million.

McClatchy Watch is reporting that the Kansas City Star could announce a layoff early this week that’s larger than the newspaper’s last three layoffs combined. This rumor is a little confusing, however, since the Star announced plans to cut 15% of its workforce just last week.

Owners of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and its pressmen’s union have reached agreement on a set of union concessions involving layoffs, wage cuts, health care premium increases and staffing reductions. No details were released pending a vote by members on the agreement this week.

McClatchy Watch is reporting that the Kansas City Star could announce a layoff early this week that’s larger than the newspaper’s last three layoffs combined. This rumor is a little confusing, however, since the Star announced plans to cut 15% of its workforce just last week.

The business media is in self-flagellation mode and with good reason. Editors are beginning to pick up the pieces and wonder how they managed to miss the biggest economic story of the last 50 years. Liberal commentators are having a field day.

Did the media blow it in failing to predict the financial crisis? Eric Alterman sums up a variety of perspectives and suggests that the real problem with US financial journalism is that at some point journalists stopped treating their audience as consumers and started treating them as investors.

Insiderism, the cult of personality and a lopsided emphasis on stock market performance created an oversimplified view of the financial world that led readers to believe that that super executives could defy gravity. The result was business sections running flattering profiles of people like Countrywide Financial’s Angelo Mozilo (right) even as those executives were driving their companies into the ground.

Alterman quotes a report from the UK’s POLISMedia: “If journalists see themselves mainly or merely as serving the market or investors, they may be less effective in their watchdog role…. Ultimately, do journalists have a broader professional duty to ensure that corporate malpractice comes to light, or is their role merely to provide whatever their readers want?”

He also points to an even more damning account in Mother Jones by former Wall Street Journal reporter Dean Starkman and bluntly titled “How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?”  Starkman was a member of the financial press corps that transformed itself from loyal opposition to chummy insider as the bubble grew. “I rode in black cars, lunched at all the places you read about, and more than once flew across the country to report a 1,200-word story,” he writes.

Reporters and the subjects of their reports both benefited from the Wall Street boom, creating little incentive for either side to end the party. The result was a rash of glowing coverage of larger-than-life executives and very little investigation into what they were executing. Starkman (left) pays homage to “The Reckoning,” a 1990 Wall Street Journal account of the devastating human toll of a corporate leveraged buyout. “It is safe to say that that piece, which tied the Safeway LBO to workers’ suicides, heart attacks, and more, would never be proposed, let alone published, today,” he writes.

He’s also blunt in attacking the formulaic executive profiles that conferred a god-like aura on corporate executives while paying scant attention to the underlying rot in their businesses. “Personality profiles, critical as they may be, are comfortably within the narrowing business-press discourse. Plus they’re a lot easier, and less risky, than investigations-and it’s that part of business journalism that has been allowed to wither,” Starkman writes, quoting Fortune‘s Katie Brenner.

Ultimately, insiderism ruins objectivity. “Increasingly, business coverage has addressed its audience as investors rather than citizens, a subtle but powerful shift in perspective that has led to some curious choices,” Starkman writes, citing as an example the Journal‘s claim that borrower fraud was a big part of the subprime financial mess when no such evidence existed.

Much attention is being focused on the damaging impact of layoffs on newspapers’ watchdog role. Reading these two pieces, one gets the sense that in the case of the financial press at least, the watchdogs were inside snuggled comfortably at the feet of their masters.

Layoff Log

Three dozen employees of the Buffalo News have accepted a generous buyout offer of a minimum $60,000 cash payment, but that’s still not enough. The Berkshire Hathaway-owned newspaper may need to cut another 21 jobs. That would be about 6.5% of the company’s 900-person workforce.

The Wichita Eagle is one of McClatchy’s top-performing newspapers, so it only has to lay off 5% of its workforce.

The Fargo-Morehead (N.D.) Forum is eliminating 25 more full-time jobs on top of the 21 it cut last month. Altogether, that amounts to 19% of its 240-person workforce. The neighboring Grand Forks Herald is cutting eight jobs and will end publication of an advertorial supplement.

The Toledo Newspaper Guild is pleading with management of the Toledo Blade not to lay off as many as 60 more people. The newspaper laid off 23 people in December, mostly in the newsroom. The new cuts could amount to as much as 14% of its remaining 425-person workforce.

This week was technically the deadline for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to either find a buyer or exit the print business. However, it appears the stay of execution has been extended a bit . “We expect to announce a decision regarding the P-I at some point next week,” Hearst Corp. spokesman Paul Luthringer told the Seattle Times in a one-line e-mail.

The deadline may have passed, but no one is expecting the P-I to last much longer in print. The paper has been running a “P-I Memories ” section to commemorate past triumphas. The Times noted that KOMO-TV sent a commemorative cake this week and staff have spent the week cleaning out their desks. Their hearts didn’t appear to be into covering the news. There’s no clear reason for the delay. Speculation is centering on the possibility that parent Hearst Corp. could keep the P-I alive as an online-only newspaper, that there have been glitches with severance payments or that the joint operating agreement between the P-I and the Times could be holding things up. In any case, most people are expecting the Post-Intelligencer to cease print operations next week.