Newspaper layoffs are now being paired with salary cuts as publishers seek to avoid running up even larger body counts. McClatchy’s announcement early this week that it will cut 1,600 jobs is already claiming victims at the publisher’s largest papers.

The Miami Herald will eliminate 175 jobs and cut the pay of salaried employees by 5% to 10%. The publisher will also require one-week unpaid furloughs beginning in April. The cuts include 33 full-time and eight part-time newsroom positions. Altogether, the move slashes 19% of the Herald‘s workforce. Other cost-cutting mesures include leasing some of the paper’s office space, cutting trim size and eliminating an international edition. McClatchy put the Herald up for sale in December, but there have been no reported takers so far.

Another McClatchy paper, the Kansas City Star, will cut its workforce by 15%, or 150 employees, in line with corporate guidelines. Pay will also be reduced by between 5% and 10% and management bonuses will be eliminated. With the latest cuts, the Star will have hacked 325 jobs over the last nine months, or about a quarter of its workforce.

Two weeks ago, the Denver Post lost its biggest competitor. Now it’s picked up the printing work for a nearby daily. The Fort Collins Coloradoan said it will outsource printing and delivery to the Denver Newspaper Agency starting May 12 and lay off 48 people. The agency was created to handle business operations for the Post and the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News. The Coloradoan said the speed of the agency’s new presses will enable it to move printing operations 50 miles away and still maintain current delivery schedules.

The union representing employees at the Modesto Bee just voted to accept a pay reduction, but the paper will lay off 11 employees anyway. It could have been worse: Management was ready to cut 10 more jobs without union concessions. Wages for surviving employees will be cut by between 2% and 10% and employees may also be required to take one-week unpaid vacations later this year. The nearby San Luis Obispo Tribune will lay off three employees at the end of the month and cut four more positions as it outsources some financial functions to the Fresno Bee. The cuts will reduce the workforce to 163 people, down about 17% from a year ago.

Members of the California Media Workers Guild, Local 39521 could vote as early as today on contract concessions intended to keep the San Francisco Chronicle afloat – at least for now. The provisional agreement reached late Monday involves terms that are usually antithetical to labor unions. Basically, management will get the authority to lay off employees without regard to seniority. Other concessions include reductions in vacation time and leave, expansion of the work week from 37.5 hours to 40 and expanded management ability to subcontract work. The Chronicle has put a gun to the union’s head, saying it would need significant concessions just to keep the paper operating. Even then, owner Hearst Corp. is on record saying that more than 30% of Guild-represented employees will be let go. The tentative contract provides for two weeks’ pay for each year of service for laid-off workers.

The Twitter microblogger who goes by the handle @themediaisdying comes out of the shadows to write about opportunity in the industry. If you care about the future of media, you need to follow Paul Armstrong’s tweets. His opinion piece in BusinessWeek is quite the contrast to his online persona. “Nothing has gone ‘wrong,’ per se,” he writes. “It is simply a changed balance of power. Creator and consumer are no longer tied to the other.” Armstrong says mainstream media can carve out a profitable place in the new world by focusing on what readers want rather than what they can deliver.  “Media, get into our daily routines any way you can and make sure you stay there,” he writes. “Once there, cultivate additional income through advertising that adds to, rather than detracts from, the reason we came to you.” It all sounds good, but the devil is in the details. Even if media organizations can reinvent themselves as reader-driven entities, it’s unlikely most can do it amid the current environment of cutbacks and despair. But we surely appreciate the message of hope.

Newspapers continue to struggle with the paradox of skyrocketing popularity of their product while their their business model crumbles.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) has released new Nielsen Online data for January that shows nearly a 12% year-over-year increase in monthly unique audience for newspaper Web sites. That’s “the highest for any month since NAA began tracking these numbers in 2004,” according to a press release.

Also up (year-over-year): Unique audience (11%), reach (7%) and page views (15%). Here are all the numbers. No doubt the Presidential inauguration and the cratering economy had a lot to do with growth, but the trajectory is still impressive.

Meanwhile, layoffs are running well ahead of last year’s pace, half the newspaper holding companies in America are in or near bankruptcy and Time magazine just published its list of The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America. We can’t remember a greater disconnect in any industry between product success and business failure.

The NAA’s announcement comes during the association’s MediaXChange conference going on in Las Vegas. We were surprised to learn about this event since we had managed to overlook it entirely until the press release showed up this week. The program looks to be focused on the right things: mobile, monetization, metrics, models and so on. Keynoter was Tony Hsieh, the Zappos CEO who has become a bit of a Twitter icon.

The NAA’s website for the event still betrays a certain clueless about the ways of the Internet, though. It’s positively hostile toward search engines and its blogs lack the essential element of the blogosphere: links. Here’s a short tutorial on why links are important. If you want to do a crash course in search optimization and online promotion, drop us a line.

Miscellany

Lots of colleges and universities now give away materials from past courses as a way of promoting the quality of their curricula. Online Degree World has a nice list of 100 Free Open Courseware Classes on Journalism, Blogging and New Media. This is the future, right? So what are you waiting for? College courses for free!

That’s the headline that appeared atop this paid opinion (PDF) in the San Franciso Examiner last Friday, urging public action to save the Chronicle. The author, who identifies himself as Delfin Virgil, evokes images of William Randolph Hearst and historic photos of guys with suits and mustaches to argue that the Chron is an institution that belongs to the people and it should be given over some group unspecified group of citizenry to keep it alive.

The South Wales Echo just launched a new design with an edgy grunge video that “manage[s] to make the newspaper seem really cool,” according to Charles Apple. He’s got a link to the 1:43 clip or you can see it on YouTube. Learn from this.

And Finally…

Two gems from Erica Smith:

Former Journalist Christopher Ave has written a song called the Copy Editor’s Lament (The Layoff Song), celebrating the contributions of the many copy editors who are being cast aside as news organizations shift to blog-style journalism:

AP Stylebook is my bible,

Helps me stop the suit for libel,

But nothing ensures my survival now…

I don’t know what what I’ll do,

Now that I am through,

Killing my last adjective.

When not writing songs Ave is the political editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Erica also offers her favorite selection from someecards:

Spain’s El Mundo newspaper has an article about the Death Watch that has received some notice in the Spanish speaking world, including Cuba and Argentina. We wish our Spanish was better, but we think they’re mostly saying the same thing.

We thought you might like to see the text of the e-mail interview with El Mundo correspondent Carlos Fresneda that formed the basis of this story. As always, your comments are welcome.

How do you feel when you read about events such as the end of the Rocky Moutain News? Which newspapers will survive in the US?

The closure of the Rocky Mountain News left me feeling sick because we are seeing institutions of knowledge collapse before our eyes. The vital public service that these newspapers provide is being lost and, for the moment, there is nothing to replace them.

I believe a few national dailies will survive, among them The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. These papers made the transition to national distribution a decade ago and that will serve them will. The need for newspapers will not disappear, but the economic model of regional dailies is no longer sustainable. Papers that do not count their national circulations in the one million range will not be able to command the advertising fees to keep them alive. However, there will be a place for some print properties and a few will remain to fulfill that need.

Do you think that something like this could happen in Europe?

It depends on the location. Areas of Europe that are well wired for the Internet and have robust wireless infrastructures, like the Nordic region, will probably see the need for newspapers decline more quickly than those that charge high fees for Internet access or do not have affluent populations. Eastern Europe, in contrast, will probably be a fairly robust market for newspapers for some time. Some cultures are also more invested in the newspaper model, as is the case in the UK. In general, Europe will discard print newspapers more slowly than the US because traditions are more embedded and, in some cases, government subsidies will keep print publications afloat. France is an example of that.

Will more newspapers follow The Wall Street Journal model and charge for their content on the Web?

They will try but mostly they will fail. Readers aren’t accustomed to paying the costs of news, even in the print model, where the cost of a newspaper to a reader is trivial compared to the cost of producing it. Newspapers may be able to generate some revenue from subscription fees but not enough to support their operations at their current size.

Will “micropayments” be the solution for some of them?

The only way a micropayment model can flourish is if there is a broad-based campaign by journalists, public officials and celebrities to promote it. This is the model that is creating a viable paid-content model in the recording industry. There must be a public education campaign to convince the public that a vital information source is threatened and that it must be supported. Perhaps these organizations can steal a lesson from the music industry by giving away their content free on their website but charging for downloads to a Kindle. If readers perceive the value, they’ll pay. However, I think it’s unlikely that the news industry can muster enough support to make such a campaign successful.

The new generations of reader is used to getting information for free. Will these people be willing to pay for high quality journalism?

There will be public funding models like National Public Radio’s that will have some success applying public support to worthy news organizations. However, I doubt that individual readers will be willing to pay enough to cover more than a small amount of the operating costs of conventional newspapers. A few organizations may survive on public funding and philanthropy, but the vast majority of daily newspapers will not be able to sustain themselves under that model.

What will happen to investigative journalism?

In the short term, a lot of investigative journalism will disappear. However, I believe a new style will emerge over time that leverages increased public access to government documents and the work of individual “whistle blowers”  to fulfill many of the same objectives of investigative journalism. New-journalism organizations like Talking Points Memo actually recruit their readers to assist in the reporting process by scouring public documents and fact-checking information. In a world in which everyone is a publisher, some new models of investigative journalism will emerge that harness the work of individual citizens.

Will the new model of journalism using reader-generated content reach the same quality and level that “old school” journalism?

It won’t have the finish and polish of professional journalism and it won’t be nearly as well packaged, but the new model could be richer in many ways because so many people will be involved in the “reporting” process. There will also be new aggregators emerging online that gather the work of citizen journalists and package it professionally.

What is the future of the journalist? Will we be mostly self-employed and will the lack of funds eventually affect the quality of our work?

Journalists will need to think more about their personal brand than the brand of the publication they work for. Many more of them will be freelancers in the future, but they can still make a good living by selling their services to various outlets and by publishing in multiple media. They will need to be more specialized in focus but more generalized in terms of the media they use (text, audio, photo, video).

What is the future of weekly and monthly magazines?

That depends greatly on the audience. Computer displays can’t match the visual quality of a printed page and will never match the tactile quality. Magazines that deliver high visual quality to discerning audiences – high-end travel and lifestyle publications, for example – may do very well for a long time. Those that mainly deliver news will be under more pressure. Magazines with large newsstand circulations will probably do better than those that deliver principally through the mail because people are accustomed to reading them when out of the home. However, mobile news services may blunt much of this advantage over time. I think Brides magazine has a long life in print ahead of it. I’m not sure The Economist does.

Should we blame publishers for the current crisis in the same way US car makers are being blamed for not seeing their problem coming?

Journalists aren’t responsible for this crisis. The business executives who failed to understand changes in their audiences that were apparent a decade ago deserve most of the blame. They considered the Internet to be simply another distribution medium for their printed products and they failed to adapt their services for the unique characteristics of the Web. They also failed to adjust their sales models to target small and local businesses. They placed their bets on classified and department store advertising, and as those revenue sources were taken away or went out of business, they had nothing to fall back upon. Even more damaging was the consolidation spree of the last 10 years that plunged many publishers into heavy debt. Most of them will never recover. The burden of debt service handcuffs them from making meaningful change in their business.

Delivering on promises it made last month, McClatchy Co. said it plans to cut 1600 jobs, or 15% of its workforce, and lower salaries across the board.  The cuts will be made through attrition, consolidation, outsourcing and layoffs.  Chief executive Gary Pruitt is taking a 15% pay cut and all executives are forgoing 2009 bonuses.

McClatchy had announced plans to cut up to $110 million in expenses last month, but didn’t provide details.  The company already cut 10% of its workforce late last year. The 15% figure is a goal and the job of deciding where to cut will be left up to individual newspapers within the company’s portfolio.

If you’re likely to be caught up in the McClatchy layoffs – or anybody else’s, for that matter – now’s a good time to head over to Recovering Journalist Mark Potts’ website for his 10 Tips For Suddenly Unemployed Journalists.

Several outlets are reporting that Hearst has contacted a handful of journalists at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to make “provisional offers” of jobs at a much smaller, online-only version of the newspaper. It’s not known what the provisions are, but it looks like Hearst still hasn’t made up its mind whether to go through with the project. The P-I is hanging by a thread. Tomorrow will be the 60^th day since Hearst’s January 9 announcement that the paper would either shutter its print operations or close entirely if a buyer isn’t found.

If the P-I continues online, it looks to be as a dramatically leaner operation. Metro reporter Hector Castro, who says he rejected the Hearst offer, told the P-I‘s Dan Richman that the offer “increased his health insurance cost, cut his salary by an unspecified amount, offered to match his 401(k) contributions, required him to forgo his P-I severance pay, reduced his vacation accrual to zero and required him to give up overtime.” Welcome to the Internet, Hector.

Because Hearst has apparently clamped a gag order on employees it has approached about the new venture, Richman resorted to asking everyone in the office if they had been contacted by the company. He found about 20 people who responded “no comment.” This roughly matches anonymous estimates that the online P-I would have a staff of about 20. None of the copy editors, editorial writers, designers or sports or features writers declined to comment, indicating that those functions are considered extraneous by Hearst, at least for the moment. We’ll no doubt hear something more substantive this week as the deadline arrives.

The P-I is already acting like it’s over as evidenced by this memorial section on its website.

Boston Globe on Horns of Layoff Dilemma

The Boston Globe, which actually gave some employees lifetime job guarantees back in the early 90s, is struggling to figure out how to implement a layoff of 50 newsroom employees without letting go of some of its best people. The problem is that the Newspaper Guild contract specifies that layoffs need to be conducted on the basis of seniority. This visionary concept now leaves the Globe on the horns of a dilemma: some of its most productive and promising young reporters may have to be laid off so that overpaid veterans in cushy jobs can be kept on board. The Boston Phoenix names names. There’s a buyout offer on the table but it’s apparently getting only lukewarm interest because no one wants to be unemployed in this crummy economy. So the Globe will probably have to make involuntary cuts. Management is allowed to circumvent the seniority rule under special circumstances, but it must justify each and every exception and could be subject to grievances in each case.

What Went Wrong at Journal Register

The Albany Times Union has few kind words for the basket case that is Journal Register Co. Formed from the wreckage of Ingersoll Publications in 1990, JRC remained a relatively small Michigan-based chain under five years ago, when it went on a buying spree that created a 300-title empire. However, it took on way too much debt in the process, particularly in light of its concentration in the recession-prone state of Michigan. JRC has crashed and burned in spectacular fashion over the last couple of years. Its model is pretty roundly hated by the journalists who have worked there: cut costs to the bone and maximize profits. Yet did you know that even as it languishes in bankruptcy, Journal Register still makes a profit? It’s just not enough of a profit to service its huge debt load.

Layoff Log

• Editor & Publisher wraps together two layoff notices in one: Guild members at the Fresno Bee will vote tomorrow on a new management proposal to cut wages by up to 6%. If the union doesn’t agree, management is threatening to reduce newsroom staff by up to 29%. And the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is reducing its workforce by 12% and cutting wages in line with parent McClatchy Corp.’s cost-reduction targets. The Associated Press has more on the Star-Telegram cutbacks. The company is also offering a buyout to most of its 1,000 employees. It already cut 18% of it staff last year.
• We’ve frequently chided newspaper publishers for championing the public’s right to know while burying their own bad news in layers of vagueness and doublespeak. But we certainly can’t say that about the Tri-City Herald of Washington state. Its recent announcement of a wage reduction and other cost cuts offers bountiful detail about everything from ad:edit ratios to the size of its biggest advertiser contracts. There’s even a reference to mileage reimbursement expenses.
• Blogger Gary Scott reports on layoffs at the Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise. He’s got names, too: 20 of them.
• The Winnipeg Free Press laid off five people, eight if you count early retirements.
• The Columbus Dispatch reportedly used e-mail to notify 45 employees that they were being laid off.

Miscellany

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has proposed that state public transportation projects should be advertised on the Internet instead of newspapers. The proposal is buried in a big transportation bill now before the legislature. The governor’s office says it’s just trying to save money. Government contract notices have long been an annuity revenue stream for newspapers, which benefit from laws in many states that require them to be published in local dailies.

The image at left accompanies a short story about layoffs at the Buffalo News that appears on the website of a local television station in Rochester, N.Y. The uncaptioned image has no “alt” text and is named “jobcuts2009-03-02.” We wonder if these are escaping employees of the Buffalo News captured on infrared camera, the ghosts of former journalists or perhaps managers striding decisively toward the future. Your interpretations are appreciated.

Los Angeles Times Columnist David Lazarus says the solution is for big newspapers to band together and deliver services as a package for $10 a month, just like HBO. “I read a half-dozen or so newspapers online every day. Right now I pay nothing for their output. Would I be willing to pay the equivalent of several lattes at Starbucks monthly for the same privilege? Absolutely,” he says. “Like I say: fixable.” At least it’s fixable if your entire audience is people like David Lazarus.

The University of Arkansas Traveler has a short profile of Erica Smith, whose Paper Cuts layoff tracker has become the unofficial statistician for industry cutbacks.

There appears to be a run on journalistic self-indulgence today as newsroom veterans tell their readers about what a great job they’re doing in the apparent self-deception that readers give a hoot: Here and here.

And Finally…

One of our favorite new Internet companies is someecards.com, a distributor of online greeting cards that bear delightfully cynical, snarky and even obscene messages.  Someecards is to greetings what Despair is to motivational posters: an irreverent stick in the eye of an industry that suffers from unbearable cuteness. Now someecards has launched a user-generated companion site, yourecards.com, where visitors can work from a collection of templated illustrations to create their own bizarre messages.  A sampling:

• “The fact that you thanked Hugh Hefner, and not your family, in your barmitzvah speech was highly inappropriate.”
• “Here’s hoping your new music degree will get you a better Mcjob.”
• “Sorry that restricted number I ignored was your one call from prison.”

Who says user-generated content doesn’t have a future?

Newspaper Fan, who comments frequently on this site, asks the following question. How about giving him/her your views? Comment below.

I work at a newspaper and am trying like crazy to get out. But let me say this for the record. It’s over for newspapers. I mean over, done. Right now, the plan is to hang on for as long as possible before folding up. Obviously some papers will remain, and some well-run ones will turn a profit, but this has reached the endgame for 90 percent. It’s over. There will be no rebound. Who would be these products? Would like to hear others’ opinions.

Industry watchers are applying some mathematical discipline to various proposals to bail out the newspaper industry.

Mark Potts buries a hatchet in the idea that paid subscriptions are the salvation of the newspaper industry. Hauling out the spreadsheet, he suggests that the $10 million a good-sized daily could realize from selling 500,000 subscriptions at $20 each would be substantially offset by advertising revenue declines triggered by reductions in website traffic. Some people estimate that pay walls could cut page views by up to 90%, effectively obliterating that revenue stream. And charging a higher price will only drive traffic lower. Potts says newspaper owners aren’t doing nearly enough to optimize their online ad revenue streams. They should focus on selling ads to local businesses and shift from a reliance on traditional big display ad campaigns.

Taking a more expansive view, Ken Doctor handicaps the odds of various rescue strategies, ranging from pay walls to cable bundling to government handouts. The best bets are Cablevision’s idea of bundling Newsday into cable subscription fees and Hearst’s plan to distribute free wireless e-readers, both of which he rates at 2-1 odds. But even those have major downsides. The longshot: charging for premium content. Newspapers just don’t have the goods, Doctor says. Odds: 4-1.

Down and Out in Denver and San Francisco

If you want detailed background on what exactly happened in Denver prior to the Rocky Mountain News‘s closure last week, read this interview with David Milstead, the Rocky columnist and business reporter who broke scoop after scoop about the behind-the-scenes machinations. At nearly 5,200 words, the transcript is of epic proportions, but interested readers can learn about why Scripps chose to be the bad boy to abandon Denver, Media News CEO Dean Singleton’s’ decision not to buy the paper, the emergence of a possible buyer late in the process, the mood in the Rocky newsroom after the closure was announced and the possibility that Milstead’s critical reporting denied him a job at the rival Denver Post.

Singleton is also at the center of a San Francisco Bay Guardian analysis of what could be done to save the Chronicle. The report documents the extreme cost-cutting campaign at Hearst Corp. which is seeking to derive half its revenue from circulation by 2011. Among the news that was buried in the announcement of the Chronicle’s for-sale offering was layoffs of more than 55% of the newsroom at the San Antonio Express-News.

The only conceivable buyer for the Chron is Singleton’s MediaNews, which has gradually bought up nearly every other newspaper in the Bay Area. However, MediaNews is unlikely to want to take on a money-losing property when it is already so highly leveraged. The story also says the Society of Professional Journalists is calling for a public discussion of the Chron‘s predicament, saying the potential loss of such a large news source is an “urgent civic challenge.”

Layoff Log

• The Fort Worth Star-Telegram will cut its workforce by 12% and enact wage reductions ranging from 2.5% to 10% on employees making more than $25,000 annually. The paper cut 18% of its workforce last year and initiated other cost-reduction efforts, including a joint distribution agreement with rival Dallas Morning News and real estate sales. In addition to the layoffs, the paper is offering buyout agreements to many of its workers.
• Canada’s largest newspaper will lay off 60 unionized workers. The cuts mainly hit the advertising department, where 38 employees, or about one quarter of the unionized staff,  got their walking papers. The leader of the Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild calls the cuts outrageous in light of the $8 to $11 million package CEO Rob Prichard is getting to step down in May.
• Having announced 60 layoffs last week, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is now requiring newsroom employees to take off one work day out of every 20. The plan applies to salaried and hourly employees who work the equivalent of a full-time schedule.
• The Myrtle Beach Sun News will cut 20 positions and reduce pay and hours for all staff.

Miscellany

The Connecticut attorney general thinks it’s pretty audacious of Journal Register Co. to pay up to $1.7 million in bonuses to 31 people when the company owes the state $21.5 million in back taxes. However, we should point out that the bonuses are tied to the achievement of cost reduction objectives.

Add The Wall Street Journal to the ranks of outlets now tracking US layoffs. Its interactive layoff tracker sorts job reductions by industry, company, date, size of layoff, percent of workforce and stock decline. The Citigroup numbers are especially ugly.

And Finally…

As journalism educators struggle with questions of how to teach students about a new media world that even they don’t fully understand, some teachers are moving forward and reshaping their programs to prepare students for a very different career track. Hanson Hosein was an Emmy-winning television news producer at NBC News before ditching the world of “big-box” media and setting out to discover how citizen publishers would change journalism. Today he heads the masters of communication program at the University of Washington, where his curriculum has created considerable debate over its rejection of traditional media models. We interview him on our MediaBlather podcast.

Click here to go to MediaBlather.

The Associated Press wraps up the debate over public and non-profit funding for newspapers, concluding that the economics could work for a few large players but not for most metro dailies. The New York Times would need an endowment of about $5 billion to sustain its current newsgathering operation, for example. The more promising and popular approach is a targeted for-profit model like MinnPost.com and investigative journalism foundry GlobalPost.

The latter example is particularly interesting because GlobalPost was founded as a nonprofit but switched to a for-profit model after potential donors demanded too much accountability. The venture later raised $8 million from individual investors.

Steven Coll, former managing editor of the Washington Post and now president of the New America Foundation think tank says some big paper is going to go the endowment route eventually and “is going to have an advantage.” However, the piece also points out that the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, has had to lay off 30% of its staff, just like everybody else.

”Why a once-profitable industry suddenly seems as outmoded as America’s automakers is a tale that involves arrogance, mistakes, eroding trust and the rise of a digital world in which newspapers feel compelled to give away their content,” writes the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, in a tight summary of the last 50,000 or so words posted to this blog.

Final day at the Rocky Mountain News

Kurtz uses last week’s closing of the Rocky Mountain News as a jumping-off point to tap into the industry’s angst over What Went Wrong. The story sheds little new light on the problem or the solutions but sums up the issues and possible solutions so much more succinctly than self-important opuses like the one last week in the New Republic. And it has a striking quote from Joshua Micah Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo (TPM) is often held up as an example of the focused model that may replace sprawling daily newsrooms. “If all the big papers disappeared right now and we replaced them with 50 TPMs, it wouldn’t come close to doing the job,” says Marshall, who employs just six people. “But we’re in a broader transformation where models like ours and others are going to evolve that can fill the void.”

TechDirt’s Mike Masnick rants about what he sees as the absurdity of newspapers’ plans to charge for content. He’s especially put out that Newsday, which has poor audience affinity to begin with, should lead the way. Charging for access to news websites isn’t just dumb, it’s arrogant, he says. Newspapers “always made their money selling the attention of their community to advertisers. But when they treat that community with contempt at the very same time that the community has many other options, it should be no surprise that the community goes away.” Masnick sees no chance for pay walls to work out. If anything, it will only accelerate the emergence of free alternatives.

Layoff Log

• Two large upstate New York publishers are taking the ax to their payrolls. The Albany Times Union needs to cut its costs by 20% in order to stay viable, said Publisher George Hearst III. Employing blunt language, Hearst said the cuts were needed or the paper would be at risk. “The very survival of our enterprise hinges upon cost-cutting that must include the departures of people who are part of this company,” he said. While no numbers were mentioned, the paper’s total employment of 453 indicates a forthcoming reduction of about 90 jobs. Hearst called the advertising slowdown unprecedented. “I’ve been here two decades and I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
• The Buffalo News plans to lay off 52 employees if union negotiations fail to achieve a breakthrough, says WKBW-TV. The station got hold of a memo publisher Stan Lipsey that lists 33 layoffs in circulation, eight each in editorial and classified advertising, two in accounting and one in marketing. The paper also extended a buyout offer that so far has had only lukewarm acceptance. While Guild negotiations continue, the paper has taken other cost-cutting measures, including a wage freeze for non-union employees and closing the Niagara County bureau. The newsstand price was also increased to 75 cents.
• The Columbus Dispatch will lay off 45 people by April 3, citing an advertising slowdown. “We avoided staff reductions as long as possible long after many other news organizations took such action,” Publisher John Wolfe said, adding that readership is holding up pretty well but advertising is way down.
• The Sacramento Bee will lay off 25 to 27 employees, but only if the Newspaper Guild agrees to a set of cost reductions that include pay cuts of up to 6 percent, limitations on vacation time and other sacrifices. If the union doesn’t agree, 11 additional newsroom jobs could be cut. The union represents 268 of the Bee’s 1,126 full- and part-time workers.
• The Wilmington (N.C.) Star News says it will outsource the printing of the newspaper to a company that has not yet been named. Nearly 40 full-time workers in the mail room and press room could be laid off as a result.
• The Bellingham (Wash.) Heraldis cutting 10 staff positions and reducing remaining workers’ salaries by up to 5%. A similar tack is being taken by the Myrtle Beach Sun News, which will cut 20 jobs, reduce the length of the work week and cut pay for all salaried employees.

Miscellany

The Salt Lake Tribune has so far managed to avoid layoffs, but its decision to cut a half page of op-ed material nevertheless drew cries of outrage from readers. Columnist Vern Anderson asks readers to keep it all in perspective. Circulation has held steady, but the situation in the industry is “somewhere between grim and dire.” Everyone is cutting back, he says.

Last Friday’s final edition of the Rocky Mountain News ”sold like wildfire,” according to an article in India’s Sify News. “Some buyers who succeeded in getting a copy wasted no time reselling them on eBay. Multiple copies of the paper were posted to the online auction house, with prices ranging from a penny to $14.99.”

And Finally…

Former San Franciso Examiner Editor Phil Bronstein identifies the one person who deserves the blame for the newspaper industry’s troubles: It’s him. Bronstein contributes a wry, Web-savvy and ultimately engaging insider’s perspective on the sequence of events that began in 1992 when he saw his first Web page and culminated last week with a colleague slumped in his chair muttering, “I thought I had this job till I retired.” Having read what sometimes feels like hundreds of angry screeds by resentful editors over the last two years, we were refreshed to find a refugee who’s managed to keep some perspective on it all and even find some humor. We guess we live on what Bronstein calls the “scold side” of the business.

As a public service, we staggered through The New Republic‘s 8,900-word opus about the perilous state of the newspaper industry so you wouldn’t have to. We suppose this ponderous, professorial epic is supposed to put  TNR‘s weighty stamp of legitimacy on the crisis. If you buy legendary Chicago Tribune editor Colonel Robert McCormick’s view that the greater newspaper is the one that weighs more, then this is the greatest analysis ever published.

Unfortunately, it isn’t. Lacking much insight that wasn’t stated better in Eric Alterman’s briefer and more readable New Yorker analysis of nearly a year ago, Princeton professor Paul Starr proposes that the demise of major metro dailies is a threat to democracy itself.

This is not a new opinion, although Starr does cite research that supports the idea that communities without active news organization tend to suffer from more government corruption and less accountability.

Two teams of researchers found “a very strong association: the lower the free circulation of newspapers in a country, the higher it stands on the corruption index. Using different measures, they also find a similar relationship across states within the United States: the lower the news circulation, the greater the corruption,” he writes.

This isn’t startling news, but the 2003 and 2006 studies cited lend some factual support to an emotional issue. It’s one of the few bits of new information in the whole sprawling opus.

Polarizing Forces

Starr’s sole original insight is that growing polarity between populations that  are “in the know” and those that choose to ignore the news leads to partisanship, which is in turn reflected back by the media.

“The viewers who gave up news for entertainment tended to have little or no attachment to party, while the news junkies tended to be strong partisans–and so the audience for news has become more partisan than it used to be. Cable news programs with a sharp ideological slant have responded to this shift, and perhaps contributed to it,” the author states.

It’s a good point, but we wonder why it takes so long to make it.

Starr concludes that a public funding model is the only likely solution to the news industry’s crisis, an idea that has been pretty thoroughly eviscerated by people with spreadsheets. He observes, correctly, that the critical public service that newspapers have traditionally delivered as a loss leader thanks  to their enormous profitability is probably lost forever. He’s right that the efficiency of the Internet is not always a good thing, but he gives only scant attention to the new models that are succeeding while casually discarding wonders like Wikipedia as a mere rehash of information reported by journalists. How myopic.

TNR also thumbs its nose at emerging media outlets by failing to provide a single hyperlink in its nine-screen report. Perhaps this was merely oversight or a shortcoming of technology, but the omission appears to say, “Screw you, Internet. Here’s the self-contained first and last word on the topic, which is how God intended journalism to work.” Hyperlinking is an essential value of online communications and the failure to give readers the means to educate themselves about anything that wasn’t touched by New Republic editors appears clueless at best and arrogant at worst.