Happy Double Ten Day, everyone. In Taiwan, they’re setting off firecrackers, dancing in the streets and still fretting about the loss of the mainland.

Tampa Bay Tribune: “Um, Never Mind.”

Tampa Bay residents took a break from following the success of their hometown baseball team to scream bloody murder about recent changes to the hometown newspaper. The Tampa Bay Tribune redesigned just one week ago, collapsing multiple news sections into a single main section and reorganizing several features. The paper also broadly cut the length of news stories.

The changes apparently didn’t sit well with readers, some 300 of whom canceled subscriptions while 10 times that many called or wrote letters of protest. “Apparently the folks who came up with the idea for New Coke have finally found employment designing newspapers,” read one letter.

Tribune executive editor Janet Coats listened, and it didn’t take long for her to issue a mea culpa and to promise immediate changes, including a return to sections. “People want sports in a separate section. . . they want to be able to hand sections around. Turns out, we had really disrupted the way people communicate with each other in the morning,” says Eric Deggans’ account on TampaBay.com.

Give the Tribune credit for thinking outside the box, for listening and for responding quickly to comments. In atmosphere of crisis, institutions don’t have the luxury of researching their decisions to death, and they shouldn’t have the arrogance to stick with them in the face of strongly negative reaction. We believe the Tribune will get brownie points from its readers for listening, which it richly deserves, because it must’ve been a helluva rough week in that newsroom.

Miscellany

Journalism iconoclast Patrick Thornton asks readers to take themselves back 10 years and describe how they would do journalism differently. Always perceptive commentator Tim Windsor responds with a 15-point laundry list of suggestions, many of which would work just as well today. There are a few disconnects in Windsor’s commentary – mySQL was barely known in 1998 — but his advice is sound for publishers who still talk about “eyeballs” and “lock-in.” (via Mark Hamilton)

A comment posted on Gannett Blog notes that revenues at USA Today are running 11% under plan on a budget of 1% under plan. “Someone has to make up for that 10 percent difference,” the anonymous commenter writes. “That is not even taking into account a prospective collapse in Christmas advertisements.” USA Today employees are wondering if they should file for back overtime pay given the likelihood of layoffs.

Newsosaur Alan Mutter has a creative idea for the growing ranks of newspapers that are scrapping unprofitable Monday editions and scaling back to six days a week. Why not create a special interest edition on a popular topic like sports and deliver it free on Mondays instead? The savings achieved by axing a single edition don’t amount to much in light of the formidable fixed costs that most newspapers maintain, Mutter says. Newspapers would be better off swallowing the modest incremental cost of continuing to publish on Mondays while giving readers a product they really want and salespeople something exciting to sell. It makes sense to us.

The Wall Street Journal confirms speculation that the New York Times will shut down the web site of sister paper International Herald Tribune and host the news instead on a co-branded “global edition” of NYTimes.com. The Journal also reports that the Houston Chronicle will lay off 10 employees after failing to reach its goal of 90 volunteers for a buyout program. (via Romenesko)

The UK’s Express Newspapers group has been so shaken by circulation declines that it has sharply cut back on staff and taken to letting some reporters post their stories directly to the printed page. The resulting gaffes prompted one unidentified staff member to send a sharp rebuke to his colleagues about their sloppiness — including a reference to a couple from Wales as being English and a description of an island as “floating” (islands don’t float) — and to identify 20 serious errors in the most recent Sunday edition. Rival Guardian gleefully tells all.

And Finally…

Back in May we marked the launch of a new blog called Praying for Papers, with the stated purpose of encouraging “anyone who is touched by this shift in our industry to include it each day in their prayer life.” Having noted its launch, we feel compelled to point out that the most recent post was on July 11, when author Mike Koehler said he was going on vacation. We haven’t heard from him since. Either he’s having a great vacation, his prayers have been answered, or he’s given up hope. We’re not sure which.

Journalism junkies have been closely watching the example of Digg.com to see if the wisdom of crowds really is better than the judgment of editors. According to David Chen, it isn’t. Writing on Mashable, Chen offers a detailed deconstruction of Digg’s recent decision to jettison some of its top users, apparently for trying to manipulate the system.  The weeding-out process was positioned as a routine cleanup intended to eliminate abusers of the community adjudication process, but it was actually an acknowledgment that decision-making by the masses has serious flaws, Chen concludes.

It’s been common knowledge for a couple of years that the Digg model lent itself to manipulation by a small number of people. In fact, there’s evidence that up to half the stories on Digg’s enormously influential home page were contributed by just 100 users.  By taking draconian action to ban members who had, in some cases, contributed hundreds of hours of effort to building the site, Digg is admitting that it has been unable to figure out an algorithmic solution to the abuse.

The problem isn’t in programs, but in people.  Individuals can attain fame within the community by contributing stories that are ranked highly by other users.  Active members discovered early on that by forming “friend” relationships with many others, they could enhance their performance and popularity.  In other words, the more you voted for another member’s contributions, the more the other member voted for yours.  As time went on, an elite corps grew more powerful, to the point that their contributions can achieve high visibility regardless of merit.

“In the years following its creation, Digg became less a democracy and more a republic, with a select few users responsible for the majority of front page stories,” Chen writes. Digg has tinkered with its settings to try to mitigate this factor, but some members responded by writing scripts that routed around the problem.  It became a giant cat and mouse game that eventually forced Digg to insert human editors at some levels to arbitrate the process.  So much for the wisdom of crowds.

Chen contends that the blockade may irreparably damage Digg’s reputation, although the site will continue to be a huge source of traffic for publishers who are lucky enough to be listed there.  At the very least, the conundrum points out the limits of a purely democratic model of news judgment.  Even successful sites like Wikipedia rely up a small cadre of elite editors to make most of the important decisions. People with significant experience in online communities agree that a very tiny percentage of members contribute the vast majority of content.  It appears that editors, whether bubbled up from the community or appointed by management, are inevitably needed to maintain order

Should this be taken as a condemnation of the community journalism model and validation for the rule of editors?  Absolutely not.  As Wikipedia has demonstrated, armies of ordinary people can create a phenomenal information resource.  However, leaving all decision-making to a group without providing rules or oversight invariably results in the ascendance of an elite.  in the case of Wikipedia, that elite is self-regulating.  In the case of Digg’s more juvenile crowd, it’s a frat party.

Into the perfect storm of Internet competition, spiraling newsprint costs and the decline of classified advertising has come a fourth factor: probable worldwide recession. It couldn’t happen at a worse time for the beleaguered newspaper industry.

Newspaper advertising revenue is expected to decline a record 11.5% to $40.1 billion this year, the Newspaper Association of America says. The organization does see light at the end of the tunnel; it’s predicting that the nosedive will level off a bit in 2009. But such forecasts should probably be taken with a grain of salt, considering that no one knows the full extent of the current financial crisis or the likelihood that worldwide government interventions will succeed. Also consider, at Tim Windsor points out in a comment on the E&P blog, that the NAA initially forecast just a 1.2% decline in business this year.

The 11.5% revenue drop would be the largest the association has seen since it started tracking results 58 years ago, and it reflects the continuing collapse of the classified advertising market at the hands of Craigslist et. al. In fact, the NAA expects classified revenues to fall from $14.1 billion in 2007 to just $9.4 billion in 2009, a 33% crash in a business that is already off by 50% from its peak. Retail advertising is expected to decline about 10% and national advertising should drop 13% in the same time period. Online revenue won’t pick up much of the slack: the NAA forecasts meager growth of 1.8% this year.

Media Life magazine catches up with David T. Clark, senior research analyst for publishing and advertising at Deutsche Bank Securities, to get his take on the wreckage. Here are a few quotes:

“This is a pivotal time for the newspaper-retailer relationship…Share losses now will be amplified when we emerge from this downturn.”

“Newspapers must be perceived as a marketplace in which the advertising is considered content, not clutter.”

“I think we’ve got at least several more quarters of very steep industry ad revenue declines to go before we see much improvement.”

“Newspapers do digital pretty well, but…it doesn’t look like a viable business model will emerge in time to save some metro dailies…They are at the bleeding edge of the structural issues the industry faces…Metro papers over-index to classified advertising, which is disappearing fast….They need to variabilize as much of their costs as possible, get all of that old media hardware off of the balance sheet…Tough to sell a printing press these days, though.”

Desert Storm

The East Valley Tribune of Mesa, Ariz. will make massive cutbacks, laying off 142 people, or about 40% of its staff. The daily will also withdraw coverage from nearby Scottsdale and Tempe and scale back to four days a week, most likely Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The print format will also be scaled back to two  sections ‑ one for local news and one for sports, entertainment and late-breaking news.The Tribune has a paid and free distribution of around 100,000. It’s owned by Freedom Communications, a publisher of more than 100 mostly small newspapers and a few big ones, including the Orange County Register. Ray Stern analyzes the impact on the valley, including the huge loss the cutbacks represent to the city of Scottsdale, which may become the US’ largest major metro area without a daily newspaper.He also lists some of the prominent journalists who will be exiting the scene.

Spokane Spokesman-Review Girds for More Cuts

The Spokane Spokesman-Review, whose editor quit last week over cutbacks in his staff, named Gary Graham to the post. Publisher W. Stacey Cowles took some questions from staffers and offered little optimism about the immediate future. His responses are noted on a staff blog. Highlights:

• The S-R “is planning for the possibility of not having” the Associates Press in the future.
• Potential cost-cutting measures include a reduction in trim size reduction (next June), dropping some circulation routes in outlying areas, reconfiguring press runs and office space consolidation. The paper is likely to close its Spokane Valley bureau.
• “The company would like more flexibility in compensation of newsroom employees, more flexibility to change compensation to reflect market rates.” In other words, pay cuts are likely.

Tumbleweeds in Albany

The New York Times writes of the impact of staff cuts on the press corps covering goings-on in Albany. With the closure of the New York Sun last week, five newspapers have exited the state capitol in less than two years. The organization of statehouse journalists in Albany has seen its ranks dwindle from 59 members in 1981 to 42 journalists last year. “With the exception of Buffalo, Watertown and Albany itself, no city outside the New York metropolitan area has a newspaper with a dedicated, full-time correspondent in the Capitol,” writes Jeremy Peters. Wire-service bureau reporters don’t offer the local angle that correspondents used to provide. Reporters who once jostled for desk space now have their pick. “It’s like tumbleweed should be blowing around here,” says one reporter. Observers fret that the cutbacks are leaving legislators to play in their own private sandbox withoutthe limits of citizen oversight.

Layoff Log

• More cutbacks at the Los Angeles Times. LA Observed is reporting that the paper will cut 75 positions, which would bring total newsroom staffing to about 650. That’s down from a high of nearly 1,200 in 2001. The reductions will be achieved through buyouts, if possible, but staffers will be told that this round of cutbaks will be their last chance to get a package of two weeks’ pay for each year of service. Media Bisto says the Washington bureau will be cut back right after the election.  American Thinker comments“More and more unemployed left wing journalists are joining the sans culottes. History teaches us that unemployed intellectuals are fodder for revolutionary movements.” (via Edward Padgett)
• The Cleveland Plain Dealer plans to cut 38 unionized newsroom jobs, or about 13 percent of the newsroom’s staff. Most of the jobs being eliminated are held by Guild members. Employees have until Nov. 20 to accept a buyout offer, with layoffs expected to make up the difference. The Plain Dealer, which has 299 newsroom employees, cut 64 journalist jobs in 2006. The actual reductions are somewhat below the rumors of 20% cutbacks that circulated in June.
• Boulder’s Daily Camera is moving all of its remaining printing and packaging operations from Boulder to Denver and laying off 29 more workers by the end of October.The paper will now be printed at the Denver Newspaper Agency facilities, where the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News have recently taken up residence.

And Finally…

The industry downturn has claimed one of the world’s most famous journalists – and he isn’t even a real person. Rick Redfern, the resident ink-stained wretch of the Doonesbury comic strip for more than 30 years, has decided to accept a buyout. “Redfern leaves with utter resignation, apparently having reasoned that he has no real newsroom options,” writes The Washington Post‘s Michael Cavna. “Thanks for the 30-plus years, Rick. By the fourth panel — in the style of a true newspaperman — you always had the perfect line.”

We constantly hear about the angst that aspiring young journalists face as they wrestle with the decision of whether they made a huge mistake in choosing journalism as a career. Let us share a story that hopefully provides some encouragement. We can’t name all the names because we don’t have permission.

A friend of ours has a son attending a Boston area university.  In his sophomore year, this young man found himself interning at the Boston Globe, where he worked the overnight shift on the rewrite desk.  This past summer, the Globe offered him the opportunity to write a daily blog about activities in the New England area.  Last month, the young man headed back to school and a paid internship at a major newspaper, where he is spearheading an initiative to build a new online community.  This young man is 21 years old.

There’s a lesson in this anecdote.  The decline of traditional media creates huge opportunities for those who have the stomach to take a chance. Back in the 1970s, the conventional wisdom was that the path to a journalism career involved slaving away at a small daily paper, working for food and rent and hoping to catch the eye of a big-city editor.  Today, so few young people want to go into journalism that the opportunity for those who do is virtually limitless.

Savvy investors know that the people who make the biggest killing in any market are those who are willing to buy when everyone else is selling.  The field of journalism right now is a buyers market for the few who buck the conventional wisdom.  Newspapers may not survive much longer in their print form, but most people agree that the core skills of journalism will be needed in one way or another long into the future.  Risk-takers like our young journalist are capitalizing on this trend to gain experience and visibility that a decade or two ago would have taken many years of hard and anonymous work.

That’s why it’s a great time to get into a journalism career.  The current malaise about media will eventually give way to optimism about new models.  The people who have gained the core skills that are necessary to succeed in a reinvigorated industry will rocket ahead in their careers.  Sure, there’s plenty of uncertainty about what media institutions will look like in the future, but if you’re willing to take a chance, you stand to reap huge rewards.  Newspapers are hungry for new ideas, and the best ideas are coming from the generation of young people who aren’t burdened by a romantic attachment to the past.  There’s never a better time to take risks than when you’re in your 20s.  My friend’s young son knows that, and we predict he will be one of the big winners when the trend inevitably reverses itself.

Redesigning Newsrooms

The Tampa Tribune will introduce a new design on Monday, and it’s keeping the details secret. The St. Petersburg Times has some inside dope, though. An interesting sidelight is that the merged Tribune/WFLA/TampaBayOnline.com newsroom is also being redesigned around these subject areas: data, deadline, watchdog journalism, personal journalism and grassroots. We wouldn’t have thought of those ourselves. Give credit to Executive Editor Janet Coats, who’s communicating some urgency: “For most of us, it’s only been in the last year to 18 months that we’ve started getting away from the idea that the Web site is the newspaper on a computer screen . . . I’m worried that if we don’t change how we think about this further it won’t matter what falls through the cracks because we’ll have no readers.”

Speaking of redesigning the process, editors at the UK’s Birmingham Post, Sunday Mercury and Birmingham Mail are also turning the newsroom on its head. Editors Weblog reports that the three papers now share a physical space and some resources. The process of publishing news story has been condensed from five steps to three, with online leading the way. News editing and production have been merged into a single stage. Reporters carry laptops and video cameras and can file from anywhere. There’s been tension, of course; 65 jobs were eliminated in the redesign and staffers were made to re-apply for available positions. However, these three paper are envisioning a future and doing something about it, which is what we call leadership.

Editor Quits, Speaks

Yesterday, we noted the resignation of Steven A. Smith as editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review in protest of job cuts that he said were cheapening the product. Knight Digital Media Center caught up with Smith for an interview and provides interesting background. If you think this guy is some old-line curmudgeon who won’t face up to new realities, think again. Smith has actually be an outspoken proponent of the need to change calcified newsroom thinking and to reinvent newspapers around digital platforms. He conceived of an innovative idea to invite readers to observe and participate in daily news meetings. There’s more detail in the Knight story. We think Steven Smith won’t have trouble finding a job. Vision like that is still rare in this business.

Miscellany

Calamity and politics are good for online traffic. The Washington Post’s Web site, washingtonpost.com, scored a 42% jump in year-over-year traffic. The trend was driven, not surprisingly, by political and business stories.

Google says it’s figured out a way to tell when bloggers are writing news. A new feature of Google Blog Search shows categories of blog entries in a left sidebar. In some cases, the popularity of topics is displayed in chart form on the right. Here’s an example.

And Finally…

When you can’t beat ’em, steal ’em. Fading to Black has a short item about a newspaper war in the San Francisco Peninsula area that heated up this week when the San Francisco Examiner caught a delivery man for the Palo Alto Daily Post apparently stealing copies of the Examiner as he delivered his own newspaper. When confronted and asked to open his trunk, the man had more than 1,000 copies of the rival newspaper stashed away. Maybe he just had a lot of birdcages to line.

With the newspaper industry already reeling from a perfect storm of recession, Internet flight and falling real estate prices, it’s hard to imagine how things could get much worse. Well, they just did. The bankruptcies and sales of several prominent Wall Street firms have severely tightened capital markets at a time when many newspaper companies are already groaning under the burden of enormous debt. The collapse of the mortgage industry will also drive down real estate prices, further crimping a vital source of classified advertising revenue. One analyst estimated that the total value of US real estate could fall from a high of $22 trillion to a low of $9 trillion before the healing begins. This will leave creditors will massive amounts of real estate assets that are worth pennies on the dollar. And there are few buyers available. As John Duncan explains in this insightful analysis, no one is giving credit right now, which drives prices lower and further limits the pool of available buyers.

With credit markets tightening, publishers have few places to turn to raise capital. Duncan cites the example of McClatchy which just restructured its debt payments. McClatchy’s debt is based on the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), which is the rate at which the world’s most preferred borrowers are able to borrow money. The LIBOR climbed to an all-time high of 6.88% this week, which Duncan estimates will cost McClatchy at least $1 million a week more in debt service payments than it expected just a week ago. The same dynamic applies to any other publisher looking to relieve debt loads. Restructuring will only force those costs further upward.

For businesses like Tribune Co., the news gets even worse. Sam Zell has been performing financial card tricks just to meet quarterly debt payments. His ace in the hole has been non-newspaper assets like the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field, as well as real estate picked up in the Tribune LBO. Those assets are now valued at significantly less than they were just a few weeks ago, meaning that Tribune Co. has far less leeway to leverage them to generate cash.

On top of all this, of course, is the worsening outlook on the revenue side. As the economy settles in to what is likely to be a protracted recession, ad revenues will shrink further. The real estate sector, which has traditionally been a profitable source of classified advertising revenue, will suffer most of all. Just look at the effect that the devastation of the Florida real estate market has had on newspapers there. Now imagine this scenario spread across the entire country.

Alan Mutter theorizes that even a broad recovery in real estate prices wouldn’t help very much. He notes that advertisers are spending a shrinking proportion of their dollars on newspaper advertising. The emergence of more-efficient online channels is sucking dollars away, meaning that even an unlikely quick recovery in large consumer markets like housing and cars would benefit newspapers disproportionately less than other media.

Duncan’s likely scenario is that cash-rich investors will sit on the sidelines until the carnage is complete and then enter the markets to buy properties at pennies on the dollar. This isn’t necessary a bad thing: “If newspapers were managed by new groups of people with no real romantic link to the glory days of newspapers, and freed from management grown fat and lazy on the easy profits of the glory days of American local newspapers, maybe titles can innovate again and start thinking about how they serve audiences better in print and online,” he writes. In other words, instead of saving the American newspaper industry as we now know it, the more likely scenario is that the business collapses completely and is reinvented by people who have no romantic attachment to earlier times.

Philip Meyer

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.

Not to harp on The Politico, but we continue to be impressed by the stunning success of this for-profit venture whose value is built on delivering – gasp! – quality journalism. To those who mourn the newspaper industry’s implosion as foreshadowing the end of public service reporting, we point to this news boutique as an example of What Might Be. MediaBistro’s Fishbowl NY has a brief but interesting interview with Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei, who comments on the appeal of his unique business model. The focused mission is to “provide the fastest, smartest, most essential coverage of Congress, the White House, politics and those who try to influence all three.” And not to rely on classified advertising, which is one reason things are going so well.

A vandal disrupted distribution of the Boston Herald Wednesday morning, just two weeks before the paper plans to shut down its printing plant and outsource the operations to the west. Someone who apparently knew what he or she was doing cut several belts and wires on collating machines. Workers scrambled to compensate, but not all subscribers got their Heralds that day. The unions denounced the vandal’s actions. Members stand to get severance benefits – but only if the transition to the new printer goes smoothly.

Steve Outing comments on NYU journalism professor and Pressthink blogger Jay Rosen’s initiative to get his Twitter followers to submit accounts of reporters who document untruths by the McCain presidential campaign. You can see some of the results here. Outing things social networks are a great way for people who share common interests to quickly self-organize around a common goal, such as the one defined by Rosen. Unfortunately, the tools can also be misused. In an update, Outing notes that some troublemakers are now trying to subvert the effort.

Somebody help this guy, if you know him. He needs a hug.

Appropriately named columnist Joe Grimm has useful advice for a newspaper veteran who fears he’s about to lose his job. 

Layoff Log

News has been trickling out about planned cuts at the Raleigh News & Observer, but some numbers are finally available: 53 people, including 20 newsroom staffers. Among the notables leaving the N&O: TV columnist Danny Hooley, illustrator Grey Blackwell, consumer-affairs columnist Vicki Lee Parker and book editor Marcy Smith. Cartoonist Dwane Powell, who earlier said he would scale back to part-time but keep his job, has also decided to leave. Most of the cuts were achieved through buyouts, but some layoffs were necessary. The N&O already cut 40 positions earlier this year.

Pittsburgh’s largest newspaper, the Post-Gazette, told its staff to expect layoffs soon. Meetings between management and union leaders to discuss the specifics begin next week. The closure of a major department store (and advertiser) downtown hasn’t helped. Stay tuned.

The Kenosha (Wisc.) News plans to lay off three full-time and three part-time employees, all from editorial.

The Tacoma News Tribune will lay off one employee and buy out 17 others in continuing reductions that have reduced its workforce by 100 people this year.

And Finally… 

How appropriate. Now you can generate your own tombstone messages for free. Tombstone Generator creator J. J. Chandler has left plenty of space for you to wax eloquent about the dearly departed – or those whom you wish would depart. 

Technorati has come out with its annual State of the Blogosphere report and some numbers are truly eye-popping. The site found blogs in 81 languages and daily posts are closing in on one million. Nearly 185 million people have started a blog (although most don’t tend them regularly). Newspapers have the bug: 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews and 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands they love or hate. Most bloggers who accept advertising make a profit. Technorati did a big survey and got comments from various media influencers. We haven’t had a chance to read it all yet, but if you’re interested in publishing, you should check it out.

Meanwhile, The Politico, which is one of the more promising Web-only journalism ventures, is expanding. It will add employees, grow circulation of its Washington-area newspaper and and print more often. The staff will be expanded to at least 105 from its current 85. Circulation of its Capitol Hill newspaper will be increased 20% to 32,000 and a Monday issue will be added. All this will happen after the election, which is The Politico’s busiest season, but officials said there’s going to be plenty of news to keep people busy. Also, they expect to reach profitability next year, far ahead of schedule.

And perhaps there’s gold in them thar websites. BIA Financial Network and Borrell Associates have a new study that estimates that newspaper websites are the most lucrative local media around, with valuations of the largest properties reaching $450 million. That makes local alternatives like TV and radio small potatoes in comparison. “Given their growth potential, the value multiples of media Web sites may be 2 to 4 times that of the core business,” the BIA president is quoted as saying. The study also praises the strong cash flow at media websites. The problem is that growth is slowing. BTW, the $450 million number is only for the largest properties, so don’t get too excited. We estimate the market value of Newspaper Death Watch is about $1.23.

Miscellany

In the department of publishers that still don’t get it, we’d like to include The American Scholar, which publishes a provocative list of “12 Questions about the future of journalism” by Bill Kovach without offering visitors a way to respond. Um, guys, that’s part of the problem.

In chaos, there is opportunity, or at least that’s what Michelle Rafter says. She points to new launches at Slate, The Wall Street Journal, Silicon Valley Insider and Forbes as evidence that there’s opportunity in business journalism right now. Just make sure you get cash up front.

Death is good business, it seems. Tributes.com, which runs obituaries and related memorial messages, is teaming up with The Wall Street Journal to create a print counterpart to the website. For $80, you can buy a listing on Tributes.com where you can post photos and memories of a departed loved one. Now, for an additional $250, you can run your message in a dying medium, too. Tributes is a startup that was spun out of Eons, a social network for the over-50 crowd. Both are the brainchildren of Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor.

In the 80s, New York City brought us the Village People. Now it brings us TimesPeople. That’s The New York Times‘ new social network. “TimesPeople provides NYTimes.com readers with a way to share their thoughts and recommendations about The Times‘s content with other readers, making their public activities on the site more open,” says a company press release. Apparently you can only share your thoughts about Times content, not anybody else’s, which we suppose makes sense. You can also see the most recommended articles. The Times is a latecomer to the social networking world, trailing The Wall Street Journal by a whole eight days.

Scott Karp analyzes Matt Drudge’s influence and concludes “It’s the Links, Stupid.” The action in online publishing is in filtering and linking, not corralling your audience, he says. Drudge is successful because he tells cable TV and radio reporters what’s important and that shapes their daily broadcasts. Newspapers, in contrast, tend to tell people only what’s important in their pages on any one day, and that’s far less interesting to readers than a guide to that vast Worldwide Web. “In the web media era, when all news content is accessible by anyone, anywhere in the world, and no news brands no longer have a monopoly over news distribution, the power of influence lies in the ability to FILTER the vast sea of news,” he writes.

Layoff Log

• The Anchorage Daily News is reducing its staff by about 10%, laying off 13 employees and holding another dozen positions vacant.
• The Raleigh News & Observer has started making cuts after only 16 newsroom employees accepted a buyout offer. Its editorial cartoonist, a 33-year veteran, and ombudsmen will be cut back to part-time but their jobs won’t be eliminated.
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is going to buy out or lay off workers unless it gets concessions from its unions. Between 10 and 20 Teamsters will lose their jobs, according to a union spokesman, but that’s just the beginning. The paper’s Ohio parent has been losing money for years and is threatening to sell its Pittsburgh property.
• As if the Seattle Times Co. didn’t need more headaches, now the truck drivers are threatening to strike. About 70 truckers could walk off the job on Oct. 21 in protest over the company’s bid to outsource its trucking to Penske Logistics.
• Threats by the publisher of the Newark Star-Ledger to close the paper if cost-cutting goals can’t be met have apparently put a bee in the Jockey shorts of the local union. The union representing 400 mailers at the paper agreed by a 10-1 margin to a three-year wage freeze and buyouts of a quarter of its members. The Star-Ledger is still looking to buy out another 200 of its 750 full-time nonunion employees.

John Yemma

The Christian Science Monitor marks its 100th anniversary this fall, and the publisher is celebrating by re-emphasizing its commitment to thoughtful journalism. The Monitor has long been a maverick of the American newspaper field. It’s based in Boston, but that’s almost irrelevant to its role as an international observer. In the tradition of The Wall Street Journal and The Economist, the Monitor sees itself as a newspaper of record for citizens of the global community, but without the financial bias. The Monitor provides sober analysis of world events for an educated audience. Its 100 writers and editors emphasize explanation over immediacy. This approach is sometimes at odds with a market that increasingly values form over substance, but it is a badly needed service in a world of decimated reporting staffs and shrinking bureaus.

The nonprofit Monitor enjoys a healthy subsidy from the Church of Christ, Scientist, but the goal is to make it financially self-sustaining by leveraging new-media tools and targeted advertising. In July, the Monitor recruited Boston Globe veteran John Yemma as its new editor. Yemma clearly understands the dynamics of the changing newspaper field. Although a veteran of print, he spent his last three years at the Globe overseeing the newspaper’s multimedia operations and campaigning to pull its ink-stained editors into the online world. A soft-spoken and thoughtful man, he sat down with Newspaper Death Watch to discuss the realities of the new reader-driven world and how he hopes the Monitor can serve as a model for other publishers.

The one-hour interview is available as an audio file by clicking on the link below. The following time-stamped show notes direct you to important points in the conversation. Time stamps appear on the left with corresponding comments on the right.

[audio:http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/audio/Yemma.mp3]
Listen to the interview (1:00)

[audio:http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/audio/Yemma.mp3]