Conde Nast Portfolio takes a look at Tribune Co.’s much ballyhooed redesigns and finds that nothing much has changed. New looks-and-feels in Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale have barely budged circulation, which continues to fall. “We can’t find any impact from the redesign,” Norbert Ortiz, the Orlando Sentinel‘s vice president for circulation and consumer marketing, tells Portfolio.

This doesn’t bode well for recent makeovers in Los Angeles and Chicago. Experts debate whether the new designs are radical or just a new coat of paint, with the painters holding the edge: “a distraction,” says Ken Doctor; “seat of the pants” adds Alan Mutter. The story focuses on Tribune chief innovation officer Lee Abrams, who is inexplicably pictured with the cast of Blue Man Group. Abrams invented the album format that revolutionized FM radio back in the 80s, but his innovations in print have been less dramatic. “I wouldn’t call it redesign. I would call it redecoration,” says Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design.

Abrams is quoted asserting that “we really had to work on reclaiming things that newspapers had traditionally owned,” from investigative reporting to election and crime coverage. Oddly, Tribune Co. has slashed editorial staff at most of its papers this year, drastically undercutting their ability to sustain provide such information.

We’ve previously shared our opinion of redesigns (“A Useless Exercise at the Wrong Time”) and see no further need to comment.

New/Old Journalism Clash in Washington Park

Mediashift tell of a new online publication at New York University that’s challenging the school’s 36-year-old campus fixture, Washington Square News (WSN). The venture was launched by three non-journalism majors who were frustrated with what they call WSN’s bland tone and faux objectivity. NYU Local, which is currently configured as a blog, takes a fundamentally different view of impartiality. “Most people who want to be objective tend to disguise their opinions,” says co-editor Lily Quateman says. “Being objective treats readers like idiots and makes them guess.”

WSN Editor-in-Chief, Adam Playford begs to differ, saying his journal will continue to report just the facts and label opinions accordingly. He also says online isn’t a major focus at WSN, which updates its website just once a day. In contract, NYU Local encourages anyone to contribute and makes it possible to do so by any means possible, including cell phone. The staff hopes to move to a social networking platform in order to further encourage community journalism. “The idea of citizen journalism is a massive misnomer,” says 20-year-old co-editor Cody Brown. “Everyone is a citizen and anyone can be a reporter. The term is patronizing.”

The piece, which is written by an NYU junior, highlights the push-pull taking place between old- and new-media models, even within the context of a college-age audience. The fundamental debate is over the question of whether professional reporters are better equipped to tell a story versus thousands of unknown citizens. The fact that the battle is taking place in an institution that’s training the next generation of journalists indicates that this issue will be debated for some time to come.

Layoff Log

• More layoffs are days away at the Baltimore Sun, according to the newspaper’s union. If true, the action would follow by just five months a 100-person downsizing this summer, a cutback that hit the newsroom particularly hard. No word on numbers, but the cuts are expected to be layoffs, not buyouts. The Sun employed 1,400 people before the 100-person cutback last June.
• With five more newsroom layoffs at the New Haven Register, the size of the newsroom staff will have shrunk from 110 to 65 in a decade. The five editors are part of a larger cutback of 20 people announced yesterday. The daily will also shutter Play, an entertainment-oriented weekly. More layoffs are possible in mid-January, when parent Journal Register may fall into default if it can’t make its debt payments. Earlier this week, Journal Register said it would probably close two small Connecticut dailies – the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press – along with 11 weeklies in the state.
• As expected, the ax has fallen in Tribune Co.’s Washington bureaus. LA Observed reports that Chicago Tribune staffers John Crewdson, Bay Fang, Stephen Hedges, and Aamer Madhani were let go. Earlier eight Los Angeles Times staffers were laid off and acting Tribune acting bureau chief Naftali Bendavid left to join The Wall Street Journal.
• Newhouse is cutting deeply in Michigan. Staff at eight newspapers have been told that massive buyouts are planned and some operations will be consolidated in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. There’s no word on numbers, but the Ann Arbor Chronicle account says nearly everyone in the newsroom has been offered a buyout. Production staff has been told that if they don’t take the buyout, they’ll have to work from the Grand Rapids office, which is 130 miles away. Papers in the group include the Grand Rapids Press, Ann Arbor News, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Flint Journal, Bay City Times, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News and the Michigan Business Review. The Ann Arbor paper early announced plans to close its Ypsilanti bureau and to slash pages and sections in an effort to control costs.

Miscellany

Outsell’s Ken Doctor has some encouraging news for newspapers. “It’s a shrinking business that only looks like it is dying,” he tells Media Life. “The U.S. newspaper business will still take in some $40 billion in revenues in 2008.” Doctor believes some papers will close and many may scale back frequency in coming years in order to align expenses with smaller revenues. However, he expects the business to come back, even the devastated classified advertising business. “Forty percent of the newspaper industry is partnering with Yahoo, and we should see a good Yahoo bump in online display ads,” Doctor says. A lot of retraining will be needed, though.

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Preliminary research by Middleberg & Associates and the Society of New Communications Research shows that 100% of reporters under 30 agree that new media and communication tools are valuable journalism tools. But only 40% of journalists over 50 year agree with that statement. There is no more change-averse animal than an old newsman. You can still take the survey here.

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The Daily Triplicate of Crescent City, Calif. celebrates awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association by trashing the slipshod tactics most awards programs use to select winners. Its tone might sound a bit snarky, but our experience is that the point is valid.

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In case you didn’t see this comment from last week, journalism professor Robert Hodierne at the University of Richmond has been commissioned by American Journalism Review “to survey folks who left the newspaper business under circumstances other than voluntary — laid off, bought out, etc. I’m spreading the word about this survey in every way I can and if you guys could help me spread the word I’d be grateful. Take the survey here.

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Newspaper Death Watch editor Paul Gillin is interviewed on The Radio Ecoshock Show about what’s ailing newspapers and what will fill the gap. You can skip the description and listen to the short interview here.

The Online Journalism Blog has been running the results of a survey of journalists about the impact of new media on their profession. In its fifth installment, the site asks how “blogging has affected what happens after news is ‘published/broadcast.” To their credit, journalists are going with the flow. “After the story goes up, instead of moving onto the next idea I’ll spend time answering reader questions and comments,” says a 26-year-old Australian journalist, reflecting the words of several colleagues. As we’ve noted in past entries, the Web has flipped the model of publishing. In the old days, publishing was the end of a process; today, it’s the beginning. Once a story is published, it’s subject to enhancement, analysis, commentary and updates. Journalists need to be ready for the likelihood that they may be called upon to revise and develop a story long after it’s been published. It’s the Wikipedia model gone mainstream. Stories never die as long as there’s some who’s still interested in them.

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Columnist Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee laments the loss of veteran reporters from Capitol Hill bureaus. While he’s impressed that some smaller papers have kept their Washington corps intact, he says the survivors miss the expertise of people like recently retired San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Ed Mendel, who had more than 30 years of experience covering the budget. The Capitol press corps is a group of friendly competitors, Walters notes. The most experienced members are the first to have their heads on the chopping block because of their high salaries. But those veterans are also the ones who raise the level of performance for everyone else on the Hill. Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope in cases like that of the UCLA daily newspaper reporter who “blew the lid off insider dealing at the School of Dentistry, which was giving coveted orthodontics residencies to major donors and their relatives.”

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The Baltimore Sun’s John McIntyre sounds off on the increasingly popular option of outsourcing editing tasks to offshore body shops. “Imagine…that General Motors and Ford, fighting desperately to reverse their plummeting sales and stock values, concluded that it would be smart to save money by eliminating the quality control function. Think they’d wind up selling more cars?” he asks. There is truth in his argument. Recall the last time your call to customer service was answered by someone with an Indian accent. Was that a more positive experience than speaking to someone who shared your culture and values? Maybe it was. We’re just saying… We’re reminded of an item we posted last week about an experiment at the UK’s Sunday Express, which has started letting some reporters post their stories directly to print, leading to some horrific gaffes. Newspaper credibility is at an all-time low in the US. Tolerating typos, inconsistencies and stupid mistakes won’t make them any more credible.

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The anonymous blogger at Newspaper Biz says the trend toward big newspapers cancelling their AP subscriptions is the road to mutual suicide. Now’s the time for newspapers to leverage the AP’s status as a cooperative to fight mutual foes like Google, which make money by stealing content, he argues. We’re not so sure a lot of newspaper publishers would agree.

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Huffington Post’s Jack Myers reports on recent comments by TiVo president Tom Rogers to a group of TV executives in which he predicted that the coming implosion of TV advertising will make the newspaper industry crisis look like child’s play. “Probably two-thirds of homes or more that advertisers care about reaching will be fast forwarding the majority of television ads,” he said. With 3.5 million DVRs in the market today, Rogers should know. He says there are plenty of ways advertisers can reach DVR users, such as presenting messages when a viewer is about to delete a program or – horror of horrors – actually producing messages that viewers want to consume. Not surprisingly, he believes TiVo can be their ally because the service, which has been one of the worst things ever to happen to the television industry, knows so much about viewer behavior. He also quoted The New York Times as saying that actual TV viewership is 40% to 60% higher for some programs when DVR viewership is factored in.

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The accountants taketh away, but they also giveth back. This quarter, the giving was to McClatchy, which swung to a profit of $4.2 million because of an accounting change. A year ago, the company lost $1.3 billion in the same quarter, also because of bookkeeping gymnastics. The most telling number is in the revenues: down 16%.

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The Waterloo Courier will move printing operations to a bigger press in Cedar Rapids, causing the layoff of 52 employees at its current printer. The news was reported in the fifth paragraph of a story titled “Courier moves printing operations” next to an enormous photo of an unidentified balding man. Please post a comment naming this person if you can, because his forehead overwhelms the lead. Also note the many comments that have already been posted on the story, most of them savaging the Courier for moving jobs out of town. It appears that deliver is already a problem in Waterloo, and most commenters can’t believe the 50-mile truck ride will improve things, particularly in snow.

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The Dayton Daily News will lay off less than 10% of its 120-person workforce. Specific numbers weren’t released pending union negotiations.

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The Los Angeles Times hasn’t formally announced a new round of layoffs, but LA Observed says the axe has already fallen selectively. The website posts a memo from the head of circulation reading, “Yesterday was a tough day . . . 31 of our co-workers are no longer part of the circulation team.” There are rumors of much bigger cuts coming. The site also reports that Sam Zell is sniffing around the Orange County Register and the San Diego Union-Tribune, apparently believing that his employees’ retirement funds aren’t yet leveraged enough.

 

Philip Meyer, whose 2004 book The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, is often credited as being the first to predict the newspaper industry’s demise, writes in American Journalism Review of the dwindling options available to newspaper owners. In a superbly readable essay, Meyer frames the industry’s plight in historical contexts ranging from Gutenberg’s displacement of town criers to the opportunities modern agriculture created for packaged food makers. At the heart of the problem is one statistic we hadn’t seen before: “Classified ads moved from 18 percent of newspaper advertising revenue in 1950 to 40 percent in 2000.” Craig Newmark came along and poof! There are plenty of other Craig Newmarks out there waiting their turns, Meyer writes, ominously.

 

The good news is that there’s precedent for these problems. Meyer suggests that the saving grace for newspapers – and probably the only one they have left – is community influence. That’s where local news organizations enjoy a level of trust that online wannabes can’t approach. But by community, “I don’t mean stenographic coverage of public meetings, channeling press releases or listing unanalyzed collections of facts,” Meyer writes. It means contextual reporting that delivers useful and actionable advice. Medium is unimportant, as is frequency. Meyer infers that the seven-day-a-week mandate is a liability in a time of fluid and inexpensive information. Discerning readers will pay for information that speaks to their specific interests, he proposes, but newspapers have got to start by rejecting their all-things-to-all-people philosophy.

Tribune Co.: One Big Litigious Family

A group of current and former Tribune Co. employees has filed a class action suit against CEO Sam Zell, questioning the tactics Zell used to acquired Tribune Co. in a highly leveraged deal, his administration of the employee stock option plan, his decisions regarding layoffs and other operational issues. The plaintiffs include one current Tribune employee – Los Angeles Times auto critic Dan Neil – and five former employees, all journalists. They’re represented by noted class-action lawyers Joseph Cotchett and Philip Gregory.  In a statement, Zell called the suit “frivolous and unfounded.” In an e-mail to employees, he lamented the plaintiffs’ decision to air dirty laundry in public and concluded, “We are partners. We need to act like it.” Tell Zell characteristically minces no words in attacking the boss: “We have no power. We have no say. We have never been consulted in a single action that you or any of your cronies have taken in dismantling the Tribune Co. So stop f*****g call me your partner.” Guess who won’t be sharing a table at the company picnic.

Layoff Log

• The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has laid off between 17 and 20 people, depending on which account you read. The situation is particularly unpleasant in the Gateway City because the cuts come during talks with the Newspaper Guild about an extension to the current union contract. In fact, the Guild walked away from the bargaining table, charging that newspaper management and consistently pushed ahead the timeframe for the layoffs as a bargaining tactic. Among the victims is Patrick M. O’Connell, the newspaper’s primary crime reporter.
• The bloodletting may not be over at The McClatchy Co. CEO Gary Pruitt was quoted last week saying, “It may get worse before it gets better.” McClatchy is still reeling from the $2 billion in debt it took on to finance the 2006 acquisition of Knight-Ridder, a deal that still has questionable long-term value. “It’s hard to claim it’s a good deal when you see the stock performance,” Pruitt said. McClatchy has already cut its workforce by 20% and halved its shareholder dividend. McClatchy Watch has the details.
• Tulsa World posts a note to readers about consolidating Sunday sections that presages staff cuts. It notes that the staff has been working “to conserve news space and reduce the overall page count of the newspaper by writing shorter stories,” and that, “We are proud of the fact that we have the largest news staff of any media in our area.” Prior experience would indicate that a large staff and a shrinking news hole don’t coexist nicely. Check out the comments on the story, which mostly rip the paper for cutting back on space.

Miscellany

Valleywag observes that the combined wealth of Google’s co-founders now exceeds the value of the entire US newspaper industry. Larry Page and Sergey Brin are now worth $16 billion each, compared to the $20 billion valuation Wall Street assigns to newspapers and their subsidiaries, including test prep and broadcasting businesses. 

And Finally…

Our Google Alert filter caught John McIntyre in its webbing this week, and we quickly added him to our RSS reader. McIntyre is director of the copy desk at the Baltimore Sun and a former president of the American Copy Editors Society {note: “Editors” is not possessive). His meticulously edited blog features such gems as a recent entry on the mechanics of courtesy titles such as “Mr.” and “Professor” – did you know that incarcerated criminals aren’t entitled to be called “Mr.” but may regain the title once probation has expired? -and a clever paragraph on last week’s National Punctuation Day that consists of a single sentence in which McIntyre uses all 13 forms of punctuation. Newspaper editors know that nothing elicits more reader comment than issues of spelling, punctuation and usage; ergo, McIntyre has his fingers on the pulse of the readers.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose company has played a critical role in the destruction of the US newspaper industry, bemoaned the decline of investigative journalism, a discipline he called “fundamental to how our democracy works,” in remarks at the the recent Ad Age Madison & Vine conference in New York. The executive said a fundamental challenge to the industry is that readers are spending less time on content and thus less time being monetized. The idea that new advertising models will emerge to support quality journalism after the newspaper industry collapses is misguided. “The evidence does not support that view,” he said.Schmidt observed that newspapers are being challenged by the triple whammy of advertising competition, high newsprint prices and a decline of non-targeted advertising. “These guys are in a world of hurt and we as a community need to find economic models that will fund really great content,” he said. He noted ruefully that sketchy coverage of the war in Iraq is a particularly compelling example of the loss of investigative resources.

Redesigns Called “Reinventions”

That’s the South Florida Sun-Sentinel before (left) and after its forthcoming redesign. Or should be say the SunSentinel? That’s right. As Charles Apple wryly notes, amid the cutbacks at Tribune Co., the new SunSentinel has laid off a hyphen.

Apple quotes SunSentinel design director Paul Wallen saying, “Although our median reader is in the mid to late 50s, our target audience is almost a generation younger. We’re after occasional readers, people who don’t feel they have the time or enough interest to read our paper on a regular basis…We want the paper to feel vibrant and alive, much like the community it serves.” The new design formally launches on Sunday. To get a larger (and different) example, click on the image at left.

Another Tribune Co. property, the Baltimore Sun, will debut a new design on Aug. 24. No prototypes are being floated yet, but Editor & Publisher quotes Sun publisher Tim Ryan saying the overhaul is a “reinvention.” There’ll be three sections: news, sports and features. The features section will be called “You” in a nod to the complete USATodayification of the American newspaper industry. Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams called the Sun redesign “a tour de force package that’s going to help re-write the Tribune Co. — and newspapers.” We’ve already shared our opinion on the business value of redesigns.

Milwaukee Feels the Pain

The Milwaukee Business Journal writes of forthcoming layoffs at the Journal Sentinel as the paper struggles to meet its goal of a 10% staff cut. The piece illustrates the scope of the industry’s pain. Milwaukee should be a good newspaper town. It’s got a solid blue-collar middle class, people who don’t change their habits very quickly. The Journal Sentinel has a near-monopoly position, with 70 percent readership among Milwaukee adults on Sundays and about 50 percent on weekdays. Yet ad revenue is down 13 percent so far this year on top of an 8 percent decline in 2007 and 4 percent in 2006. Sunday circulation is down 16% from a decade ago.

The story has the obligatory Newspaper Association of America quote about combined print/online audiences being larger than ever, but the nut graph is a quote from a Morningstar analyst: “For every dollar daily newspapers have lost in print revenue, they’ve been able to replace it with only 15 cents in revenue from their Web sites.” The only way newspapers can survive the online shift is to get smaller, the analyst says. It’s just that no one knows how small they have to get.

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A Journal Sentinel columnist is taking a buyout package and looking ahead. In this wistful, but ultimately uplifting farewell column he reminisces on the joys and frustrations of journalism and looks forward to taking a chance and spending some time with his family.

Miscellany

Former New York Times editor John Darnton recently retired from the paper. But instead of writing a tell-all memoir, he’s aired some dirty laundry in the form of a murder mystery called Black and White and Dead All Over (order it on Amazon). Reviewer Seth Faison knows many of the people who appear in Darnton’s fiction, including Publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Executive Editor Bill Keller. Faison praises the book for offering candid insight on the politics, chaos and juvenile behavior that characterizes a city newsroom. Darnton may lose friends as a result of this bitingly satirical work, but he’s made for darned good summer reading.

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Tucson Citizen assistant city editor Mark B. Evans has some kind words for political bloggers who are, in some cases, outclassing the area’s newspapers in political coverage. We ignore these new voices at our peril, he says. Newspapers are falling further behind, so why not welcome these emerging opinion leaders into our fold and benefit from the readership and revenue they can bring?

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The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader is trying to further reduce staff through buyouts. Kentucky’s largest newspaper already cut its workforce from 417 to 382 in June, but that wasn’t enough. Executives didn’t set a target figure for this round of cuts.

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The Christian Science Monitor‘s Jan Worth-Nelson has quietly, subtly replaced her morning newspaper with a MacBook and an RSS feed, but she still remembers the days when reading the Sunday paper was a treasured ritual. Sadly, cutbacks at the LA Times have made the paper less relevant to her Sunday mornings and she misses the thrill that came with snapping open that first issue of the day to drink in the fresh news that it promised.

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Howard Rheingold has an interesting essay on how to get more out of Twitter. Best advice: keep the list of people you’re following short and engage in meaningful interactions with them. He also doesn’t tweet what he had for breakfast. (via Mark Hamilton)

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End of an era: In a nod to the realities of advertiser pressure and a weakening print market,  Rolling Stone will ditch is unique, awkward trim size and switch to a standard format effective with the Oct. 30 issue. The magazine’s size will be reduced from 10″ x 11 3/4″ to 8″ x 10 7/8″.

And Finally…

People always celebrate success, but they don’t give enough credit to really creative failure. Thank goodness, then, for The Fail Blog, a photographic tribute to failures big and small. Don’t look at this site in the office. Your colleagues will wonder why you’re laughing so hard. And don’t, under any circumstances, view it while you’re drinking milk, if you know what we mean.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose company has played a critical role in the destruction of the US newspaper industry, bemoaned the decline of investigative journalism, a discipline he called “fundamental to how our democracy works,” in remarks at the the recent Ad Age Madison & Vine conference in New York. The executive said a fundamental challenge to the industry is that readers are spending less time on content and thus less time being monetized. The idea that new advertising models will emerge to support quality journalism after the newspaper industry collapses is misguided. “The evidence does not support that view,” he said.Schmidt observed that newspapers are being challenged by the triple whammy of advertising competition, high newsprint prices and a decline of non-targeted advertising. “These guys are in a world of hurt and we as a community need to find economic models that will fund really great content,” he said. He noted ruefully that sketchy coverage of the war in Iraq is a particularly compelling example of the loss of investigative resources.

Redesigns Called “Reinventions”

That’s the South Florida Sun-Sentinel before (left) and after its forthcoming redesign. Or should be say the SunSentinel? That’s right. As Charles Apple wryly notes, amid the cutbacks at Tribune Co., the new SunSentinel has laid off a hyphen.
Apple quotes SunSentinel design director Paul Wallen saying, “Although our median reader is in the mid to late 50s, our target audience is almost a generation younger. We’re after occasional readers, people who don’t feel they have the time or enough interest to read our paper on a regular basis…We want the paper to feel vibrant and alive, much like the community it serves.” The new design formally launches on Sunday. To get a larger (and different) example, click on the image at left.
Another Tribune Co. property, the Baltimore Sun, will debut a new design on Aug. 24. No prototypes are being floated yet, but Editor & Publisher quotes Sun publisher Tim Ryan saying the overhaul is a “reinvention.” There’ll be three sections: news, sports and features. The features section will be called “You” in a nod to the complete USATodayification of the American newspaper industry. Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams called the Sun redesign “a tour de force package that’s going to help re-write the Tribune Co. — and newspapers.” We’ve already shared our opinion on the business value of redesigns.

Milwaukee Feels the Pain

The Milwaukee Business Journal writes of forthcoming layoffs at the Journal Sentinel as the paper struggles to meet its goal of a 10% staff cut. The piece illustrates the scope of the industry’s pain. Milwaukee should be a good newspaper town. It’s got a solid blue-collar middle class, people who don’t change their habits very quickly. The Journal Sentinel has a near-monopoly position, with 70 percent readership among Milwaukee adults on Sundays and about 50 percent on weekdays. Yet ad revenue is down 13 percent so far this year on top of an 8 percent decline in 2007 and 4 percent in 2006. Sunday circulation is down 16% from a decade ago.
The story has the obligatory Newspaper Association of America quote about combined print/online audiences being larger than ever, but the nut graph is a quote from a Morningstar analyst: “For every dollar daily newspapers have lost in print revenue, they’ve been able to replace it with only 15 cents in revenue from their Web sites.” The only way newspapers can survive the online shift is to get smaller, the analyst says. It’s just that no one knows how small they have to get.

---

A Journal Sentinel columnist is taking a buyout package and looking ahead. In this wistful, but ultimately uplifting farewell column he reminisces on the joys and frustrations of journalism and looks forward to taking a chance and spending some time with his family.

Miscellany

Former New York Times editor John Darnton recently retired from the paper. But instead of writing a tell-all memoir, he’s aired some dirty laundry in the form of a murder mystery called Black and White and Dead All Over (order it on Amazon). Reviewer Seth Faison knows many of the people who appear in Darnton’s fiction, including Publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Executive Editor Bill Keller. Faison praises the book for offering candid insight on the politics, chaos and juvenile behavior that characterizes a city newsroom. Darnton may lose friends as a result of this bitingly satirical work, but he’s made for darned good summer reading.

---

Tucson Citizen assistant city editor Mark B. Evans has some kind words for political bloggers who are, in some cases, outclassing the area’s newspapers in political coverage. We ignore these new voices at our peril, he says. Newspapers are falling further behind, so why not welcome these emerging opinion leaders into our fold and benefit from the readership and revenue they can bring?

---

The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader is trying to further reduce staff through buyouts. Kentucky’s largest newspaper already cut its workforce from 417 to 382 in June, but that wasn’t enough. Executives didn’t set a target figure for this round of cuts.

---

The Christian Science Monitor‘s Jan Worth-Nelson has quietly, subtly replaced her morning newspaper with a MacBook and an RSS feed, but she still remembers the days when reading the Sunday paper was a treasured ritual. Sadly, cutbacks at the LA Times have made the paper less relevant to her Sunday mornings and she misses the thrill that came with snapping open that first issue of the day to drink in the fresh news that it promised.

---

Howard Rheingold has an interesting essay on how to get more out of Twitter. Best advice: keep the list of people you’re following short and engage in meaningful interactions with them. He also doesn’t tweet what he had for breakfast. (via Mark Hamilton)

---

End of an era: In a nod to the realities of advertiser pressure and a weakening print market,  Rolling Stone will ditch is unique, awkward trim size and switch to a standard format effective with the Oct. 30 issue. The magazine’s size will be reduced from 10″ x 11 3/4″ to 8″ x 10 7/8″.

And Finally…

People always celebrate success, but they don’t give enough credit to really creative failure. Thank goodness, then, for The Fail Blog, a photographic tribute to failures big and small. Don’t look at this site in the office. Your colleagues will wonder why you’re laughing so hard. And don’t, under any circumstances, view it while you’re drinking milk, if you know what we mean.

Demonstrating the power of diversification, News Corp. bucked industry trends and posted a profit of $5.8 billion for the fiscal year just ended, buoyed by a string of box office hits, robust online growth and a strong Australian economy. However, CEO Rupert Murdoch warned of tough times ahead in the US market and said News Corp. will step up investments overseas to compensate.

Robust retail and real estate advertising at the company’s Australian, Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun newspapers in Australia helped burnish profits, which were up by 21%. While US and UK performance was weak, The Wall Street Journal grew online subscriptions by 88%, results that stand in stark contrast to the prevailing wisdom in the US that newspaper publishers should give away all their content for free. MySpace.com also had a pretty good year, Murdoch said, without elaborating.

News Corp. is looking to India and China to fuel growth as western economies stumble. India’s GNP is expected to grow 7% in the next year, Murdoch said, and the company is responding by investing $109 million) in six new television channels there.

News Corp. has invested wisely in its online and broadcast diversification strategy over the last decade and the investments appear to be paying off. With the US newspaper industry flat on its back, News Corp. has managed to find growth in areas that US publishers largely shunned in better days. As a result, the company expects operating profits to grow another 4% to 6% in the coming year.

Despite the rosy results, Wall Street continues to debate the wisdom of the Murdoch strategy. A detailed piece in Variety questions whether the mogul overpaid for the Journal last year and whether weakness in US newspaper stocks could tempt Murdoch to go on an ill-advised buying spree. The piece lists a number of investments Murdoch has made in the Journal and in the Dow Jones wire services that he acquired and notes that News Corp. is the only publisher that has appeared to be impervious to the layoffs and downsizing that are afflicting the competition.

Good news, right? Not exactly. News Corp. shares are off 40% this year and some analysts cluck that Murdoch has failed to outline a compelling vision for integrating the Dow Jones properties with his other holdings. Murdoch remains optimistic, but cautious. “This is destined to be an extra-inning game, and to use an overly used metaphor, we’re only in the first inning,” he said recently.

Tuesday brought a welcome respite from the pummeling newspaper stocks have taken recently. Buoyed by a 332-point rally in the Dow, most domestic newspaper companies enjoyed share price increases of between 3% and 10%, with Media General leading the way.

Ombudsmen Becoming History

When I was a ninth-grade student in 1972, my English teacher presented us with “ombudsman” on a Word Power quiz. I scanned every dictionary I could get my hands on, but couldn’t come up with a definition of the term.

Ombudsmen, however, were destined to become fixtures at newspapers over the next few years. These reader representatives were all the rage in the 1970s and 80s. The idea was to take an aging reporter and make him or her a sort of armchair quarterback for the editors, fielding complaints from readers and rendering judgments that carried no particular weight but hopefully made the quality of journalism better.

Now it appears that ombudsmen role may be destined for the scrap heap. Karen Hunter, the Hartford Courant‘s reader representative, pens her farewell column as her job is eliminated in the current round of layoffs.

“Of the nearly 1,500 newspapers in the United States, only a few dozen have ombudsmen and the number is decreasing,” Hunter writes. “Over the past year, reader representatives/public editors/reader advocates/ombudsmen have been reassigned, retired or bought out at the Baltimore Sun, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Palm Beach Post. She points readers to the Organization of News Ombudsmen, which carries on the fight.

Pam Platt, reader representative at the Louisville Courier-Journal, also writes an obit for the position this week. The Courier-Journal was the first US paper to employ an ombudsman 40 years ago, she says, but the job doesn’t make sense any more in the current economic climate. Platt will write editorials and columns instead.

Layoff Log

• The San Francisco Chronicle, which has been losing money for years, continues to be the poster child of industry problems. Now it’s offering a buyout package to 125 employees. The paper has shed half its editorial staff since 2000 and is reportedly losing about $1 million a week. BusinessWeek‘s Jon Fine last year predicted that it could be the first major metro daily to fold its print edition.
• The Sarasota Herald-Tribune laid off 33 staff on Tuesday, with cuts coming about equally from the editorial and business sides. Parent company New York Times Co. didn’t elaborate.
• The soap opera at Blethen Maine Newspapers continues, with an exasperated publisher of the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram denying reports that the paper could be shut down without a sale. Charles C. Cochrane said that option was a worst-case scenario outlined in recent court documents and is highly unlikely. Blethen is trying to sell its Maine portfolio to a group of local investors.
• The Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger will reduce its headcount by 20 people, or about 5% of total staff. Romenesko has a memo from the publisher outlining all the usual reasons.
• The Cincinnati Enquirer is asking 50 non-union staffers to take a buyout and says layoffs may be necessary if there aren’t enough takers. Parent Gannett Co. just reported a 36% drop in profits on a 10% revenue decline.
• The good news is that the LA Times ended up shedding fewer jobs than expected: 135 instead of the planned 150. Editor Russ Stanton writes an inspirational memo to his colleagues, exhorting them to continue to innovate despite their depleted numbers.

Miscellany

Los Angeles Times veteran William Lobdell left the paper after 18 years last week. He posts a bitter 42-point analysis of the mistakes the paper made, particularly on the business side. Lobdell says Sam Zell isn’t the villain, but the Tribune CEO did accelerate the company’s s fall. He doesn’t mince words in his criticism of Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams, whom Lobdell clearly considers to be a dunce. He also refers to “good sources” who say another 150-200 layoffs are coming. Lobdell doesn’t see much hope for the Times barring a Herculean effort by the editorial and business operations to reinvent the paper. He’s happy he’s not sticking around for that. Lots of comments on this entry.

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The Newspaper Association of America Newspaper says newspaper websites attracted more than 40% of all unique visits on the Internet in the second quarter of 2008, a 12.2 percent increase over the same period a year ago. The custom analysis prepared by Nielsen Online also says total page views averaged three billion per month in the period. Considering that Google alone reportedly processes more than 25 billion queries a month, the 40% figure seems questionable.

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The Audit Bureau of Control (ABC) made a bunch of changes to its procedures in an effort to “simplify ABC rules, reduce audit costs and provide greater pricing and marketing flexibility to publishers,” the organization said in a press release. Publishers have been clamoring for ways to boost their numbers in a period of declining circulation and the ABC adjustments appear to give them a bit more latitude to do so.

And Finally…

There’s no question that the 81 squares that make up a Sudoku grid have been one of newspapers’ greatest friends over the last decade. Many people buy their daily newspaper just to get their fix. True achievers will have a chance to compete for fame and fortune at the 2008 Philadelphia Inquirer Sudoku National Championship on October 25 in the City of Brotherly Love. The Inquirer has even launched a line of apparel honoring the pencil game, but is doing what it can to prevent sales. The Sudoku apparel web page invites visitors to click on the image of a shirt to make a purchase, but none of the images are clickable, meaning that there is effectively no way to make a purchase. Click the image at left to see how it’s done.

As editors and bloggers have combed through the “Changing Newsroom” study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism over the last couple of days, they’ve increasingly focused on the study’s findings that editors are, on the whole, positive about the future.

“Newspaper editors optimistic despite downs” was UPI’s headline. Writing on Conde Nast, Jeff Bercovici focuses on all the good news in the study and observes that newspapers are “very sensibly shifting their resources away from areas where their efforts can easily be duplicated and into the sorts of coverage where they can best distinguish themselves from competitors in all media.”

How can crusty old news editors remain positive amid the drumbeat of dreadful news that’s afflicting the industry? We can only speculate, but that’s what blogs do.

For one thing, perhaps there aren’t as many crusty old news editors any more. Layoffs have washed out a lot of the old guard. Some of them now content themselves blogging about the good old days, although a few still run editorial departments. Mostly, though, the editors who are left are the fighters, and fighters tend to think positively.

There’s also a silver lining to any crisis: the opportunity to focus and rethink the business. In that spirit, the most remarkable section of the Pew study is the chapter about the future. Read it to see quotes from veteran editors who believe the downsizing has required them to become more resourceful, creative and open-minded. In the words of Miami Herald Managing Editor David Wilson, – Through all that- ™s happened over the last few years, the quality of our work is among the best I- ™ve seen- ”and I- ™ve been here 31 years.- 

The study also reports that editors are more involved than ever in trying to identify new revenue streams, even offering an investigative reporting project for sale on Amazon in one case. What’s more, editors don’t think this breach of the traditional ad/edit wall is such a terrible thing. Some are actually invigorated by the idea of becoming more involved in the success of the business.

“They are working hard, innovating, making changes,” says the report. “They may have fewer reporters and less space to work with, [but] they are certain that what they are producing today is better than what they produced a few years ago.”

We’ve noted before the importance of discarding assumptions. It’s hard to do, but it’s the essential first step toward envisioning the future. The inspiring message from the Pew research is that the editors who are working through the ritual destruction of their industry are discarding assumptions en masse and finding that there really are better ways to do their jobs.

Curmudgeons persist but, as Jeff Jarvis notes, they are being marginalized. Times of crisis are also times to rethink everything. That appears to be the bright spot in the industry right now.

Layoff Log

The Tribune Co.-owned Allentown Morning Call will cut 35 to 40 newsroom positions, according to a memo from the publisher posted on Tell Zell. The Morning Call did a small buyout in March, but this appears to be much more sweeping, amounting to more than a quarter of the news staff, according the blog.

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Also in stealth mode is the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune Co. property which is cutting its 290-person news staff by 20% but choosing not to report it. Commenting on the paper’s decision not to tell its customers about significant changes to the product they pay for, Editor Earl Maucker comments, ironically, “It serves nobody’s interest to put it out ahead of time. As I’ve found, it gets butchered in the media.”

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There are bad times all over the Sunshine State. The Fort Myers News-Press is laying off 36 people, eliminating some unfilled positions and killing a weekly supplement targeted at Hispanic readers. We hope Publisher Carol Hudler is wrong in calling the region’s economic climate “the worst local economy since perhaps the crash of 1929.” In fact, the economy did pretty well in 1929. The worst years of the Great Depression were from 1933-1937.

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The beleaguered staffs at Maine’s Portland Press-Herald and Sunday Maine Telegram are bracing for the fourth set of layoffs in 12 months. The problem is that owner Seattle Times Co. can’t find a buyer for its Maine Newspaper Death Watch – º Edit – ” WordPressholdings, so it keeps cutting and cutting in an effort to prop up the finances. This layoff will take out 10% of the remaining 85 news staffers. Crosscut Seattle has exhaustive background. There’s also a depressing blog devoted to this situation.

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Laid-off newspaper employees and their colleagues are increasingly taking to the street to publicize their plight. Baltimore Sun employees staged a rally last week, complete with 100 empty chairs to symbolize lost jobs. Alan Mutter asks if this is really an appropriate response, or if the protests might actually backfire and cause subscriber flight. What do you think? Is all the publicity about the death of newspapers actually worsening the industry’s decline? Maybe they’re on to something at the Sun-Sentinel.

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Tell Zell reprints some of the farewell memos that went out last Friday as laid-of LA Times staffers packed their bags. Journalists write some of their best stuff at times like these.

And Finally

Our WordPress template chokes when we try to embed video, so we’ll have to settle for a link. If you want to understand the macroeconomic and demographic shifts that are disrupting this and so many other industries, spend eight minutes watching this video. You will be riveted.

It’s the dog days of summer, so even unsurprising research is good enough to draw lots of attention. This time the subject is a new Pew Research study that finds – “ surprise! – that newspapers are getting smaller, more local and more focused.

The New York Times chooses to focus on the obvious in its coverage. – “Almost two-thirds of American newspapers publish less foreign news than they did just three years ago, nearly as many print less national news, and despite new demands on newsrooms like blogs and video, most of them have smaller news staffs,” reads its lead.

We were actually more intrigued by Editor & Publisher‘s take, which zooms in on the paradox of staff cuts: – Editors by big numbers think their papers are actually improving their coverage, even as they lament that their staffs have lost their most veteran journalists in waves of buyouts and layoffs,-  reads the nut graph. E&P also pulls out other nuggets like the fact that copy editor positions are being cut more than any other and that editors feel conflicted about the move to the Web. Quoting from the research: “A plurality of editors (48%), for instance, say they are conflicted by the tradeoffs between the speed, depth and interactivity of the web and what those benefits are costing in terms of accuracy and journalistic standards.”

The study does highlight the angst that’s being caused by an epic platform shift and the departure of many veteran journalists. The good news is that more than half the editors say the quality of their product has improved over the last three years. The unsettling news: – Only 5% of those responding to the survey said they were very confident of their ability to predict what their newsrooms would look like five years from now.- 

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Perhaps the gloom that pervades the industry is misplaced. Media Mark Research & Intelligence (MRI) reports that total readship is up in the top 100 markets. A survey commisioned by the Newspaper National Network (NNN) found a 2.1% increase in audience size to 80.6 million between spring 2007 and spring 2008. However, media outlets were somewhat ambiguous in their interpretation of the results. Editor & Publisher interprets the data as indicating that print readership is up
while MediaPost refers to unduplicated audience, which includes online readers. Both outlets cite newspapers’ recent clampdowns on free bonus circ as improving audience quality.If the research (which isn’t mentioned on either sponsor’s site, as far as we could tell) is about online audience, then the results aren’t that encouraging. Most newspapers have been reporting increases of 10% or more in online audience, which about mirrors the growth of the Internet overall. If the numbers refer to print readership, then they are indeed surprising, given that the Audit Bureau of Control has reported a steady downward trend in that area. Perhaps more details will emerge when the NNN actually says something about the research.

Layoff Log

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is spending $30 million on new printing presses and cutting its staff by 8%. The loss of 189 jobs includes 85 newsroom employees and 104 people in the advertising group. The paper is also discontinuing all its regional editions, including the Gwinnett County regional, where its main printing press is located. In an open letter, the publisher explains that the AJC drives 80,000 miles a day to deliver its product and that spiraling fuel costs have hit hard. The paper has also had to absorb a 35% increase in the cost of newsprint.

In light of all those factors, the decision to invest so heavily in new presses seems a bit bizarre. We’re sure there are good business reasons, but if all the growth is online, why invest in a print product that already has a near-monopoly position in its market? We suspect there are nearly 200 soon-to-be-ex-employees of the AJC who are asking the same thing right now.

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More than 3,500 newspaper jobs have vanished this summer, according to Media Post. You’ve read about most of them here, but the media publisher’s roll-up demonstrates how widespread and entrenched the industry’s problems are.

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An already tense labor-management standoff at the Honolulu Advertiser wasn’t helped by last week’s announcement that the paper must cut 54 positions, or about 10% of its workforce, for the same reasons everybody else is laying off. It took all of one day for the union to authorize a strike. Workers said they had no idea the layoffs were coming and that the Advertiser claims to be profitable.

Being profitable, of course, is not a guarantee against layoffs, especially when parent Gannett Corp. just announced a 36% drop in earnings. Advertiser management is actually pressing the issue by proposing that the union be abolished so that it can have the flexibility assign reporters to take photos, for example. The union says no. In an age when competitive websites leverage content contributed by local citizens for little or no money, it makes sense to send both a reporter and a photographer to cover a story at union scale. This is a business model that the Advertiser can ride comfortably into oblivion.

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The Gleaner of Henderson, KY, will eliminate nine pressroom positions and four other unspecified jobs as it moves printing to the Evansville Courier & Press. The item didn’t say how many people work at the paper.

Miscellany

The owner of Pacific Coast Business Times, a weekly business journal in Southern California, says business is great. The closure of business sections in some big dailies has helped, says Henry Dubroff. Business weeklies have lower costs and just as much credibility as the dailies they’re challenging he says. If you read between the lines of this piece, though, you’ll also see that business weeklies are more attuned to playing nicely with the businesses they cover: – The culture of a business journal is more like a small business than a traditional newspaper,” Dubroff says. “Other departments are close at hand, not on another floor. A mix of high standards and cooperation are keys to success.-  Translation: business journals are more likely to write nicely about the companies they cover.

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The editor and publisher of American Thinker, Thomas Lifson, writes somewhat mockingly about the decline of The New York Times under publisher Pinch Sulzberger. Repeatedly referring to the publisher by his preppy nickname, Lifson ticks off a list of questionable business judgments at the Old Gray Lady, including the decision to increase the dividend while the stock was tanking and the Ochs/Sulzberger family’s refusal to consider selling the operation. Noting Rupert Murdoch’s designs on the Times, Lifson references recent reports that Murdoch and Daily News publisher Mortimer Zuckerman are discussing ways to combine some operations in order to reduce costs. – With the financial muscle to cut prices and steal advertisers away from the Times national and metropolitan editions, Murdoch can force the Times to cut its own prices for the advertisers and readers who remain with it, further pressuring circulation revenue and readership,-  he says. In other words, a death spiral.

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The Asheville, NC Citizen-Times has started making reporters punch a time clock. Actually, it’s a thumbprint reader, and you have to punch in and out even if you’re going down the block to the bank. With that kind of management penny-pinching, it’s unlikely that C-T reporters are going to be burning the midnight oil on a big story any time soon.

And Finally…

Conspiracy theory? Tell Zell reveals internal communications from Tribune Co.’s IT organization telling how computer systems are being centralized at the company, making it possible for a reporter at the Baltimore Sun, for example, to file a story directly to the LA Times. Previously, the systems couldn’t talk to each other. Does this mean it will soon be possible for the Tribune papers to pool resources and send, say, four reporters to witness the same Presidential press conference instead of eight? If so, then we take back the mean things we’ve been saying about Sam Zell. Maybe the guy really does have a vision.

The ax has fallen at Sam Zell’s hometown Chicago Tribune, although not as hard as it did at sister papers in Los Angeles, Baltimore and Hartford. The Trib will cut 80 of its 578 newsroom positions – that’s about 14% – but less than 60 people are actually expected to lose their jobs because some vacancies won’t be filled. The news hole will also shrink by up to 14%, which is in line with the cuts Tribune Co. is making elsewhere.

The story on chicagotribune.com also notes that Tribune Co. sold its stake in Shoplocal.com to Gannett for $22 million.  That values the 141st most popular site on the Web at about $50 million.  The expected sale of the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field should cover Tribune’s 2009 debt obligation, but after that, things get dicey.

Alan Mutter looks at the market for newspaper properties and finds it to be a wasteland.   Playing off of News Corp.’s abandoned plans to sell its Ottaway line of small newspapers and other frustrations at Landmark Communications and Sun-Times Media Group, he concludes that there simply aren’t any buyers at the moment. With so many publishers teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, there’s a possibility that scores of newspapers could hit the market within the next year selling for pennies on the dollar. It’ll be a buying opportunity for somebody, but the most likely buyers are frozen right now, either because they have debt issues of their own or they don’t know where the bottom is.

For highly leveraged giants like Tribune, this is a particularly worrisome trend. Zell got good money for Newsday, but there isn’t a Cablevision lurking in every market looking to buy up the hometown daily. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to want to do a big deal until revenues stabilize. This is a race against time. If the market bottoms out by the middle of next year, Zell can start selling off titles like the LA Times and Baltimore Sun to keep the company afloat. If the market is still in free-fall, it’s unlikely he’ll find anyone willing to put up the cash that Tribune needs to service its debt.

This is particularly tragic for the 21,000 employees of Tribune Co., since they own the company. If Tribune defaults and debtors step in to sell off assets, the actual value of the company will be set by the market. There’s no way to tell what the value will be, but the hard reality at the moment is that thousands of retirement plans are tied up in assets that, for the moment at least, no one seems to want to buy.

More on Editorial Outsourcing

Yesterday we noted a piece in the Hindustan Times about the emergence of a fledgling editorial outsourcing business in India. Now BusinessWeek has done a deeper dive on the issue, sending reporters to visit the modestly titled Mindworks Global Media near New Delhi, where 90 employees are doing jobs once done in U.S. newsrooms. The story notes that Mindworks stumbled into this line of business by accident. It began as a custom publisher for local companies, but then got an assignment to write a story for a British airline magazine. The editors found they could report the story from 6,000 miles away. That gave them the idea to take the operation global and a new business was born.

BusinessWeek reports that venture capital firm Helion Venture Partners  has pumped a staggering $350 million into Mindworks. Yes, you read that right – $350 million. The story quotes Helion’s managing director as saying media outsourcing could be a $2 billion industry. Mindworks is planning to grow from 100 to 1,500 employees over the next two years.

You can be certain that this will be a major growth business for India and an equally large source of angst for US journalists and publishers.  Forner newspaper editor David Stancliff kicks it off in this opinion piece in the Eureka Reporter, which reads like something steelworkers were saying in the early 1970s.

The migration of jobs offshore will happen if it makes economic sense. Patriotism, loyalty and tradition have nothing to do with it. Sadly, that’s a fact. Journalists need to look at the value they provide, determine whether their job can be done more cheaply by somebody else and adjust their skills accordingly. An industry that’s flush with cash can afford luxuries like loyalty, but in the do-or-die environment like most publishers face today, those options aren’t available. (via Romenesko)

Miscellany

The Charlottesville Daily Progress buries the lead in announcing that it will lay off its entire pressroom and move printing operations to neighboring Richmond. Its headlines the story “Daily Progress moves printing to Richmond facility” and mentions in the second paragraph that the move “affects 25 employees whose positions were eliminated.” Can you spell “layoff.” Apparently not at the Daily Progress.

The Washington Post has named ousted Wall Street Journal editor Marcus Brauchli executive editor. That’s a cultural shift for the Post, which has a tradition of promoting internally. Brauchli called the assignment “possibly the most challenging thing I have ever done.”

The Hindustan Times writes about a fledgling business in the booming Indian outsourcing economy: editorial services. The paper looks at Mindworks Global Media and Express KCS, two small companies that gained an early toehold in outsourced advertising production and that are now moving to the editorial side. Mindworks has tripled its staff to 100 in the last year, while Express KCS has grown an incredible 20-fold to 400 people in that time.

The COO of Express KCS is quoted saying the company is in talks with “seven or eight” interested papers. The editors are usually Indian journalists who are trained in the nuances of American editing. Most are young and they work dirt cheap compared to their US counterparts. The firm runs shifts around the clock. Poynter Institute’s Rick Edmonds is quoted estimating that “a copy editor at a medium-sized American newspaper makes between $30,000 to $60,000 per year, compared to between $4,800 and $14,480 at Express KCS.”

Is this the future of journalism? It’s unlikely that anyone will figure out how to cover a city council meeting from Bangalone any time soon. For office functions like copy editing, though, the economics of offshore outsourcing look pretty compelling. Although there’s evidence that quality can be a problem, the trend looks unstoppable. Forrester Research estimates that 3.3 million U.S. jobs and $136 billion in wages could migrate offshore by 2015. Indian firms have a lot of incentive to improve the quality of their services. The lousy quality of English taught in US public schools doesn’t help keep jobs on shore.

There’s lots more information online

Must Be a Slow News Week

• The weeks surrounding Independence Day in the US are notoriously bereft of news, which leads to very long stories about topics that don’t seem to deserve very long stories. This is true even in the shrinking age of the newspaper.
• Crain’s Detroit Business speculates about the future of the Detroit News, which is the weaker of the Motor City’s two dailies. The News and the Free Press coexist under a joint operating agreement that makes ownership of the News by MediaNews Group a no-lose proposition. It could become a loser for JOA partner Gannet, though, particularly as business deteriorates. In the end, nothing is likely to happen soon, Crain’s says, leading one to wonder why it needed a 1,200-word story to come to that conclusion.
• The Maryland Daily Record devotes nearly 800 words to the news that the Baltimore Sun will cut its business section. This has become standard operating procedure for newspapers that are cutting back, since the business section generates little advertising and its the most vulnerable part of the paper to online competition. Papers have devoted less space to announcing layoffs of 10% of their staff.
• The managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier kicks in 700 words about the decision to make the paper one inch narrower and cut back a little on wire copy. Otherwise, no biggie.
• Meanwhile, all’s well and good with the UK tabloids, thank goodness.

And Finally…

• If you want a really different and refreshing perspective on the role of newspapers in people’s lives, read what fans of the syndicated column The Amish Cook have to say.  It will humble you.
• We love Dave Barry, so we thought we’d remind you of one of his best columns: “25 Things I Have Learned in 50 Years.”