Lee Abrams and friend

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Magazine Ad Pages Drop, Holiday Season Looks Grim

These numbers are just gruesome. Quoting:

On Oct. 28, the Conference Board announced that its consumer confidence index had plummeted to an all-time low of about 38 out of 100, a drop of over one-third from its level of 61.4 in September. The expectations index–which evaluates consumer sentiment about the future–went even lower, dropping from 61.5 to 35.5. Lynn Franco, director of the Conference Board’s research center, said the decline in the confidence index was “the lowest reading on record” since the index began tracking consumer attitudes in 1985.

Macy’s said it will eliminate all magazine advertising in the first half of 2009, although its holiday marketing budget is still largely intact. Subsequently, The New York Times reported that Neiman’s specialty retail segment–including Neiman Marcus Stores and Bergdorf Goodman–saw sales tumble 27.6% in October, while Nordstrom is down 15.7%, and Target fell 4.8%.

Traditional Media Hit Harder Than In Past Recessions

It used to be that three mainstream media channels – newspapers, radio and magazines – reliably predicted the economy’s decline into a recession and its recovery. That all changed about three years ago. Newspapers and magazines fell while the economy was rising and show no sign of anticipating a recovery. The results, writes Erik Sass:

“While softening ad revenue anticipated the two previous economic downturns by about a year, in the most recent case, the slowdown for magazines, newspapers and radio began about three years before. In addition, the declines have already proven to be steeper in this pre-recession period than at the height of the previous ones. This suggests that all three traditional media, suffering from both secular and macroeconomic trends, are poised to suffer unprecedented losses in the economic downturn that is now unfolding.

Cleveland Plain Dealer increases job cuts to 50

CanWest cuts 560 jobs, five per cent of workforce

Cost pressures and plunging share prices prompted Canadian publisher and broadcaster CanWest Global Communications Corp. (TSX:CGS) to cut 560 jobs – about five per cent of its workforce – Wednesday as the company faces a rougher economy and more competition.

The company, which employs about 10,500 people in Canada, said the cuts would save $61 million a year.

The company, once worth billions, now has a stock market value of about $85 million.

The Winnipeg company said about 210 jobs will be cut at through a restructuring of news operations at CanWest Broadcasting’s E! stations.
CanWest Publishing, which operates the former Southam chain and other papers, will see about 350 positions disappear through a restructuring of the community newspaper group.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy

The New York Post‘s Phil Mushnick beats up on a favorite print-media whipping post: TV news:

The freshest genuine news that local TV newscasts now provide are weather forecasts, unless you count updates and previews of “American Idol,” “Survivor” and “Dancing With The Stars.”

Quoting a friend from TV land: “Today? There are reporters I work with who just want to be on TV. They’d be game-show hosts. It doesn’t matter to them. The only original stories we report these days is what [bleep] to watch on the network, that night. It’s depressing.”

It’s frightening stuff. The decline of newspapers is far more than a story about newspapers. It’s a huge TV story, an encouraging trend for the corrupt and a development that should scare the daylights out of everyone else.

Schiller Leaves ‘Times‘ To Lead NPR

NPR is already crowing about the appointment of Vivian Schiller, formerly general manager of NYTimes.com, as its new CEO. Schiller guided the Times through some difficult periods, including its migration from a part-paid to an all-free business model. She also oversaw two redesigns that were considered groundbreaking. At NPR, she’s expected to accelerate a multimedia makeover that will expand the organization’s footprint broadly into video.

Michael Rosenblum

Here are a couple of interesting ideas about the future of journalism that we thought were worth reading/viewing.

The Online Journalism Blog has clips of video visionary Mark Rosenblum addressing the Society of Editors conference this week. Rosenblum ditched a top job at CBS to go out on his own and demonstrated that a single journalist with a video camera and a Macintosh can duplicate the work of an entire television video team at a tiny fraction of the cost. He has spent the last six years helping organizations like the BBC and the Voice of America reinvent themselves as foundries of video journalism.

Any idiot can operate a video camera, Rosenblum says in colorful and often off-color language. You don’t need news trucks or production teams or half-million-dollar editing consoles. Give reporters a videocam and a Mac, train them how to use the technology and send them out to find stories. They can even work out of their homes. It’s that drop-dead simple. “You are not in the newspaper business,” he says. “You are in the business of going into your communities, finding stories, processing them and delivering them back to your clients and charging advertisers for those eyeballs.”

Rosenblum urges editors to embrace new technologies instead of worrying about how to monetize them first. We’re not going back to the way things were, so move ahead with confidence. Transform your newsrooms into multimedia centers and decentralize your organization. “You are magnets for talent,” he tells the editors. So do something with it. “You will not survive unless you have the courage to embrace this new technology and go for it all,” he concludes. There are three videos. We found the first to be most illuminating.

Maegan Carberry files a report from the Web 2.0 Summit for Editor & Publisher, scolding the newspaper industry for not leading change and enabling conversation between their readers. “What is a journalist if not someone who hopes to enable others with the information they need to solve the problems of our time? To connect individual citizens with their communities? Shouldn’t newspapers be the ones championing this enterprise?” she writes.

Carberry tells of election night coverage that combined Twitter, Digg and Current TV to enable viewers to effectively control the information they were consuming. Too many mainstream media reporters still regard these tools as something they use to enhance their work, she says. What they don’t realize is that the tools  are central to the experience that media companies need to give their constituents. She also has a nice list of interesting Twitter pundits to follow.

Miscellany

Canadian correspondent Mark Hamilton rounds up the latest financial news from media companies north of the border. It isn’t pretty. Another Canadian, National Post‘s Jonathan Key, outlines the three print models that will survive the newspaper collapse. Okay, we won’t keep you in suspense. They are: business media (The Economist), premium upscale media (The New Yorker) and hyper-local media (your community newspaper).

Steve Outing quotes a missive he received from a retired management consultant whose observations should be relevant to the industry honchos gathered behind closed doors in Reston tomorrow: “Newspapers are cutting staff and in so doing, totally curbing their capability to produce a quality product and thereby even have a chance to survive. The result is an ever deepening and ever tightening death spiral.”

The Charlotte Greensboro News & Record has offered all its employees a buyout in an effort to reduce its staff by 8 to 10%, according to a haiku-like story on the paper’s website.

The Associated Press is launching two youth-oriented mobile websites via Virgin Mobile. AP Entertainment and CUBI (“Can You Believe It?”) will offer the “latest film, TV, and music news,” and “off-the-beaten-path news from around the world,” respectively.

As newspapers begin to wind down their print operations, many will take the same course as the East Valley Tribune of suburban Phoenix. Faced with steadily dwindling circulation and a cost structure that doesn’t scale proportionately, the 100,000-circulation daily has scaled back its print schedule to two four days per week. That makes it the largest daily to swallow that pill. The Christian Science Monitor all but abandoned the print market two weeks ago and a few smaller dailies have trimmed Monday or Saturday editions to save money.

The Tribune signaled this move in October, when it laid off 40% of its staff and shifted to a free distribution model. BusinessWeek notes that Wisconsin’s Capital Times took a similar approach last spring, cutting its print schedule from six to two days and abandoning paid circulation in favor of free distribution. The Capital Times had only 16,500 paid subscribers at the time, but that number has increased to 85,000 since the shift was made. Of course, circulation statistics for a non-qualified free publication are practically meaningless, but the number looks good.

Other papers are likely to follow this path. Print isn’t necessarily a bad business, but daily print is becoming a terrible one. Most major metro dailies make the majority of their profit on Thursday and Sunday editions while losing money on Monday, Tuesday and Saturday. It makes sense to start cutting where the revenues are lowest.

Circulation is also a dicey business. While paid circ is marginally profitable for many papers, that isn’t always the case. As the economy deteriorates, it’s going to become more difficult to convince people to pay for information they can get on their computers for free. Advertisers like paid circ, but they’re also learning to accept that the new generation of readers doesn’t expect to pay for information. As the Web has monetized eyeballs, the perceived value of paid circulation has declined.

While the industry debates the question of how to transition newspapers to a viable economic model for the future, papers like the Monitor and the Tribune are blazing a trail that many will probably follow. The cutbacks may be painful, but the brand survives and print continues to play a role in the business, although a reduced one.

Perhaps the newspaper executives who are meeting behind closed doors in Reston, Va. this week will bandy about this idea. Or perhaps not. Jeff Jarvis nails it with this commentary on the hush-hush affair: “These are the very same proprietors of the newspaper industry’s decline. What they need is not the same old executives but new people with new ideas,” he opines. If Jarvis was running the event, “I’d fly in people from Google and a bunch of successful tech companies as well as innovators and entrepreneurs in news and let them do all the talking.” Not a bad idea. Read the comments on his post.

Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly stated that the Tribune had scaled back frequency to twice a week. It actually cut back to four days a week. The Orange County Register has more.

A selection of stories snipped from the Web. Descriptions are quoted directly from the source.

Virginian-Pilot Considers Layoffs, Other Cost-Cutting Measures

The president and publisher of the Virginian-Pilot said the newspaper and its affiliated companies are considering layoffs before the end of the year because of steep declines in advertising revenue.”We have no sacred cows. Everything is on the table,” Maurice Jones told Virginian-Pilot readers last week. Possible moves include layoffs, raising the price of the newspaper, reducing page count, closing some of the businesses associated iwth the newspaper, and decreasing the circulation area.

McClatchy-owned Star lays off 50

This latest job reduction comes after The Star’s layoff of about 30 employees on Sept. 17 in addition to roughly that many who had accepted the newspaper’s most recent early-buyout offer, publisher Mark Zieman told employees in an internal e-mail on that date.

Zell’s Tribune Co. takes big Q3 hit

The Chicago-based newspaper and TV station owner reported a $124 million loss for its third quarter, compared with a profit of $84 million a year earlier. Operating revenues were down 10% to $1 billion…Fueling the red ink at Tribune were a 13% year-to-year decline in publishing revenues to $654 million. Advertising revenues sank 19%, or $111 million, compared with the year-earlier benchmark. Even its interactive revenues declined 7% to $4 million…The biggest ad declines came in the sectors most immediately hammered by the economic downturn: retail outlets, furniture and hardware stores, and department stores. Automotive advertising was also down, along with telecom services and movies, Tribune said. The largest revenue declines came from the Chicago Tribune, Hartford Courant and Los Angeles Times.

Time Inc. Seeks Volunteers for Job Cuts at Magazines – NYTimes.com

Editors on Monday asked for about 100 volunteers to give up editorial staff jobs at Time, People, Sports Illustrated and a few other Time Inc. magazines, and the company announced the elimination of a similar number of jobs in its business operations. The cuts are the first steps toward what Time Inc., the nation’s largest magazine publisher, has said will be the elimination of about 600 jobs worldwide, most of them at its 24 magazines in the United States.”

E.W. Scripps Co. joins the growing ranks of newspapers that are cutting broadly across their portfolios. The company will lay off about 400 people as it struggles with profits that plunged from $16.6 million a year ago to a loss of $21 million in the most recent quarter. Editor & Publisher reports that layoffs have already happened at Scripps-owner papers in Knoxville, Tenn. and Evansville, Ind. The National Press Photographers Association has more details on where the cuts are coming, including elimination of 20% of the newsroom in Ventura, Calif. Other newspaper holding companies that have cut broadly in recent months include Gannett and A.H. Belo.

Looks Like a Newspaper, Smells Like a Newspaper

They’re having a good old-fashioned hockey brawl in Toronto over the publication at left. It’s called Our Toronto (no, you won’t find it online anywhere) and it’s a quarterly communication from the mayor’s office that looks an awful lot like a newspaper. Or at least some city council members and watchdog groups think it’s awful. They use terms like “travesty,” “offensive propaganda” and “Pravda” to describe what Mayor David Miller says is simply an honest attempt to inform citizens about what’s going on in their city.

Our Toronto will be mailed to residents’ homes and also published online and translated into languages ranging from Chinese to Urdu. The editor is city communications director Kevin Sack and Mayor Miller will have a column in each issue. The cost to the taxpayers is about $850,000 a year.

Debate centers upon whether this is a propaganda sheet masking as a legitimate news organ or simply a propaganda sheet. Critics complain that all the content is positive about the mayor, but Mayor Miller says he’s simply doing what every other elected official does in providing facts and updates to his constituents. In any case, it’s interesting to see somebody getting into the newspaper business these days.

Miscellany

Too little, too late. The American Press Institute will host a “Crisis Summit” for the newspaper industry this week. Executives will gather behind closed doors to ponder what to do to reverse the industry’s downward spiral. Session leader James Shein says one of the purposes of the head-knock will be to “illuminate for newspaper industry leaders the urgency of their situation.” If any of those leaders still need to be illuminated in this respect, then shareholders should be demanding their heads on a plater.

Barack Obama’s win caused a big one-day surge in newspaper sales as people scrambled to get souvenirs of the historic event. One opportunist was asking $2,000 on eBay for a copy of the Charlotte Observer, of all things. Perhaps attendees at the API Crisis Summit can come up with ways to create more big news events so they can sell out at the newsstand and make a killing on online auctions.

Mark Gunther tells the encouraging story of a nonprofit organization that is funding entrepreneurs to solve pressing social problems, including the decline of traditional media. The group is called Ashoka, and among its investments are several citizen journalism organizations around the world. Gunther has details and links.

And Finally…

Sam Zell could be stuck with the Chicago Cubs for a while. The Wall Street Journal reports that the real estate billionaire-turned-newspaper magnate may be foiled in his effort to sell the storied franchise for $1 billion, the victim of a plunging real estate market and dried-up sources of capital. So Zell, who has said he’s not a baseball fan, could end up with a 50% stake in America’s Most Frustrating Team for some time to come. Perhaps that was on his mind when this photo was snapped during Game One of the National League Division series, where Chicago was swept in three games by a Dodger team that had won 13 fewer games during the regular season.

We caught up with Christian Science Monitor editor John Yemma today to see how the big shift from mostly print to mostly online is going. It’s going pretty well, Yemma said. Only about 15% of comments received have been negative and peers have mostly applauded the Monitor for making the bold move. We recorded the 10-minute conversation and present it below for your listening pleasure.

Now comes the hard part. In order to sustain the business in the long run and free it from an ongoing church subsidy, the Monitor needs to roughly quintuple traffic to CSMonitor.com. That’s because the operation needs to shift from an economic model driven largely by revenue to one based on advertising. The bigger hurdles may be internal. With the likelihood of some staff reductions looming, Yemma needs to keep morale high while phasing in a new editorial model.

That new model was described in a panel discussion the previous evening as “perfection vs. good enough.” Publishers are oriented toward producing perfect products because it’s impossible to change them once they’re in the field. That means sweating a lot of details that take time and reduce potential impact. The Monitor and others are wrestling with finding the right balance between the legacy of perfection and the emerging culture of “good enough” reporting in which details – and that may include facts – aren’t always 100% right.

Ultimately, Yemma doesn’t see the Monitor as being a cutting-edge online publication as much as one that can lead its traditional audience smoothly into a new age. The demographics of the audience at the previous evening’s panel on The Future of Journalism were telling. Many of the attendees were over 60. That’s not surprising, as the average age of the traditional news media consumer creeps toward retirement. “We’re not on the cutting edge of new technology. We’re on the cutting edge of bring the mainstream along into this new world,” he said. We wish him luck.

Listen to the recording (10:12) Right-click and choose “save” to download

Always-provocative Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing proposes that publishers need to change their definition of news. Those Twitter and Facebook feeds that stream information about what your friends are having for lunch? That’s news, Outing says. Only most professional editors don’t consider it that. If information doesn’t have a wire-service imprimatur or at least the watermark of a professional writer, it doesn’t quality as news.

But guess what? Customers don’t care. To them, advice from friends is at least as valuable as advice from a news pro. The popularity of social networks and Twitter attests to that. Professional publishers need to tap in to this phenomenon, but they’re too addicted to conventional definitions of news to make that happen, Outing suggests. They’re missing the boat and the market is passing them by.

Outing nails it. For a great perspective on the popularity of social networking read this piece on “ambient intimacy” from the International Herald-Tribune. Clive Thompson explains the value of sustaining relationships through casual awareness of what others are doing.

Twitter and the Facebook News Feed bring new breadth to this concept, enabling people to glimpse others’ lives through occasional insights into their everyday activities. This intimacy becomes addictive. People who initially reject the News Feed as too intrusive or the constant stream of Twitter chatter as too overwhelming often find themselves drawn in to the point that monitoring the stream becomes engrossing. It’s an experience that appeals to basic human instincts.

The 18-year-olds who log on to Facebook 15 times a day are telling us something. Their friends network is their news stream. As we all know by now, they are rejecting packaged media in favor of a jumbled, unpredictable gush of information from all kinds of sources. They choose who to listen to. If publishers aren’t in the news stream, they’re irrelevant. Outing is proposing that publishers could be the source of the news stream, mixing packaged content from professional sources with ambient chatter from individuals. Of course, Facebook is already pretty well entrenched, but it’s not very localized. Publishers could still transform their websites into something more than a print archive with a few blogs wrapped around it.

Miscellany

More layoffs at the Boston Globe. This time, 42 people in the advertising, circulation, marketing and production departments lost their jobs, or a little less than 2% of the 2,450-person workforce. That’s a bloodbath, says the hyperbolic headline in rival Boston Herald, which should know about bloodbaths. No newsroom jobs were cut. The ranks of the idled reportedly include several senior managers, although no one named names. The Boston Phoenix has the memo from Globe publisher Steve Aimsley. The Globe‘s website is now also reporting to the Globe instead of to The New York Times, which kind of makes sense. And in unrelated news, the newspaper’s truck driver’s union rejected an offer of a 5% pay cut and less vacation. The Globe reported the fourth-worst percentage circulation decline among the top 25 US newspapers in the most recent numbers from the Audit Bureau of Control.

The Redding (Calif.) Record Searchlight is laying of 12 people, or about 6% of its workforce. No newsroom jobs were affected and the publisher says the paper’s financial position is strong. Read the delightfully random comments from readers, who attribute the layoffs to everything from the Bush administration to yellow journalism, although not to the 85-lb. salmon carcass that is the paper’s most e-mailed story of the day.

Reuters says the outlook is worsening for Canadian newspapers. Ad revenue at the Toronto Star fell 8.5% in the most recent quarter on top of an 18% jump in newsprint prices. Canwest, which is Canada’s biggest publisher of daily newspapers, can cut back print runs of the National Post daily in western provinces. The Canadian dollar is off more than 20% in the past year, which can’t help.

There are rumors that the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger is planning more layoffs in early December, even as it invests in a new lifestyle website that will show pictures of all the bars in town. Jackson Free Press Editor Donna Ladd sums up: “So there’s money for drunk pictures, but not for news coverage.”  Well, what the heck is wrong with that, Donna? Commenters pile on. Ladd says the C-L Scroogishly cancelled the $50 holiday bonus and is asking staffers to pay for coffee while hardwood floors are installed in the publisher’s office.

Did you know US News & World Report is going to go monthly? We didn’t even know it was still around.

News After Newspapers says what we’ve been saying for two years about the outlook for the newspaper industry, but the author sees hope in a new class of product.

And Finally…

This isn’t news, at least as professional editors define it, but the Top 10 Strangest Coincidences on 2Spare.com is worth the waste of time. In fact, the whole site is a time sink. You can get lost for hours. We don’t know how much of the information is true, but this is the Internet and you shouldn’t believe what you read, anyway.

The Christian Science Monitor will host a live event and simultaneous webcast at 7 p.m. EST this evening about The Future of Journalism. We’ll be there twittering the proceedings as pgillin. Join Twitter and follow me to see my notes. You can also follow the Christian Science Monitor on Twitter. The publisher says a URL for the webcast will be posted today, but we haven’t seen anything yet. Check back with the website later if you’re interested in watching the live event.

The Folger Library in Washington, D.C. is best known for housing one of the world’s great Sheakespeare collections, but on a visit last weekend we were intrigued to discover that it’s currently also hosting an exhibit on early newspapers.

We’re talking very early newspapers, as in those that emerged within the first couple of centuries after the printing press was developed. The style and topical choices of those early efforts look strange and even comical now, but you can see elements of modern organization and editorial voice emerging. In fact, the exhibit points out that many standards of layout, arrangement and frequency are over 300 years old.

Early account of Parliamentary proceedings

I took a few notes and snapped a few photos before being politely informed that photography was prohibited (click on the images to see enlargements). The history of newspapers is fascinating. They were an almost instant success.

They were also a distant mirror of today’s explosion of blogs and citizen media. Back in the 17th century, there were no commercial newspaper publishers. Journals were published by people who had the skill and money to use the press to promote an agenda. Often, these people had strong political biases or they wrote salacious accounts purely for the purpose of selling papers. There was no such thing as impartial journalism. Every title produced by these “pamphleteers” had something to sell.

Report on the 30 Years War

Yet the public evidently found value in what they said, because newspapers were an immediate success. Favorite topics included freakish occurrences: giant storms, conjoined twins, murder, atrocities and the supernatural. In fact, early newspapers were so sensational that Ben Jonson was moved to ridicule readers  for “wasting money on salacious and inaccurate news.”

Not all of it was inaccurate, though. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) gave birth to the modern newspaper. Citizens wanted to know how the conflict was going on the continent and whether England was going to be drawn in. A small number of professional journalists made a living reporting the facts of the war for anyone who would pay them. Their reports were hugely popular in England. Prior to the 17th century, news had been passed entirely by personal letter and word-of-mouth, which quickly distorted the facts. While early newspapers weren’t always accurate or unbiased, they were a lot better than the system that preceded them.

Account of the sensational murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey (1678)

The English press was heavily regulated throughout much of the 17th century, but rogue publishers constantly sprouted up to do battle with the government. Publishing was dangerous in a day when ordinary mail was routinely scanned by law enforcement officials for evidence of treason. if you could be arrested for what you said in a letter, imagine the risks taken by a pamphleteer!

Weekly London death notes, including 29 people who died of "teeth"

Drop by the exhibit if you’re in the D.C. area before Jan. 31, 2009. Here are a few other nuggets I learned:

• The first newspapers were called “corantos”. That word later became “courant.”
• The first courant was the Conventicle Courant of 1682. The first daily courant was published in 1702. The Hartford, Conn. Courant is a descendant of those first journals and is the only newspaper in the US to still call itself a courant.
• The first newspaper to call itself a “post” was probably The London Post of 1644.
• The first known illustrated ad appeared in 1680. It was for a mysterious product called  “Indian water-works.”
• The weekly newspaper report of London deaths in 1680 included 57 people who died from “griping in the guts,” 29 from “teeth” and 2 from “evil.”