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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

The New York Times has added an automated news feed to its technology page called Technology Headlines From Around the Web. Saul Hansell writes with no small amount of pride about how this robo-feed actually includes content that the Times doesn’t control. Thus the Times moves confidently, even arrogantly, into the 21^st century.

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McClatchy’s April revenue fell 14.6%. That’s revenue, not profit. The newspaper chain’s exposure to the weak Florida and California markets has hit it harder than most publishers. Revenue from its California newspapers was off 22.8%. Real estate and recruitment advertising sales were both off more than 35%.

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The Sumter, S.C. Item will stop publishing on Monday. More newspapers are likely to follow this model as business continues to decline. Monday is the least profitable day of the week for most newspapers, while Sunday is the cash cow, of course.

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Strange bedfellows: The Record of Hackensack, N.J., and the Herald News of West Paterson, N.J. will combine their copy desks and photo departments. The consolidation of six separate operations into two is expected to save $800,000 annually and cut staff by 23%. The papers are longtime rivals, but with different audiences. They say this is the least disruptive cost-saving idea they could come up with.

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European thirtysomethings like news sites, says Jupiter Research. Its survey finds that 42% of online Europeans regularly visit online news sites, which is nearly three times the number who hang out in social networks. Keep in mind that Jupiter is the research firm that predicted that 35% of large companies would have blogs by the end of 2006. Two years later, that number is hovering around 12%.

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The Associated Press is refining a new model for reporting breaking news it calls “1-2-3 filing.” Editors Weblog describes the process in an interview with AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll. Step one is a 50-character headline. Step two is 130-word summary and step three is something more that she didn’t specify. It sounds a lot like the way the AP has worked for a century. “”It doesn’t sound radical when you say it out loud, but it is if you inject it into your daily news decisions,” Carroll says. We’ll have to take her word for that.

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YouTube has launched a citizen journalism channel called Citizen News. It’ll aggregate videos from self-described video journalists. The vid service has hired a person with the title of News Manager, and she asks the community for ideas and suggestions in this post on the YouTube blog. David Chartier at Ars Technica is skeptical. He notes that credibility has been hard to come by in fledgling citizen efforts like CNN’s iReport. YouTube’s choice of a young person in her 20s to head the effort does raise questions about its commitment. While Olivia no doubt reflects YouTube’s core demographic profile, she doesn’t exactly exude journalism experience. (via Romenesko)

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Here’s a good podcast on the future of news. The topic is “Navigating Media Upheaval” and the panelists are an assortment of long-time journalists who are now navigating change with new companies. Best line is from former Wall Street Journal Publisher Gordon Crovitz. Asked what mainstream news organizations need to do to remain relevant in the new world, he suggests, “The role of the media is to mediate.” He then goes into the possible mediation opportunities between different groups, including advertisers. Bottom line: newspapers’ opportunities are to tap into very specific geographically defined groups, but most aren’t doing a very good job. Other panelists are Neil Chase, VP of author services at Federated Media, Ken Doctor, affiliate analyst at Outsell; and Jeanette Gibson, editor-in-chief of News@Cisco. The session is ably moderated by Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey.

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And finally, more morbid but priceless humor from The Onion.

The devastating earthquake in China this week was the latest in a string of incidents that cast the spotlight on the Twitter microblogging service and its value to news organizations. Jeff Jarvis has called Twitter “an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging,” but it’s really more than that. Twitter redefines the time value of news and is a critical tool in the development of citizen journalism. Individuals with cell phones can now be the eyes and ears of the world if they happen to be on the spot for a news event. Editors Weblog outlines the value of Twitter’s simplicity and open interface, which encourages people to experiment with new applications.

Writing on Global Voices, Mong Palatino notes that Twitter became a primary source of information about the recent cyclone disaster in Myanmar. We noted earlier a UK paper’s use Twitter to beat the BBC in local election coverage.

News organizations should see Twitter as an opportunity. Which paper will be the first to create a hyperlocal portal around a network of Twitter feeds provided by readers? If the mission of newspapers is to report the news quickly, shouldn’t they be outfitting reporters with Twitter accounts and streaming those feeds on their websites? Why haven’t any U.S. newspapers embraced this valuable tool yet?

CBS’s Daring CNET Play

Is CBS’s purchase of CNET a stroke of genius or a desperate play for relevance in the digital age? It does appear that CBS is serious about the Internet. In addition to laying off 160 employees recently, the network reportedly initiated talks with CNN about outsourcing some of its reporting work. Collectively, this could indicate that CBS is giving up the ghost on TV news and turning it attention to being an important player online. Alan Mutter questions the high price CBS paid for an online network that no one else appeared to want, but sees strategic value to CBS. The company certainly deserves credit for making some bold recent moves to reshuffle its cost structure and focus on the future instead of chasing a dying TV news model into the ground.

Hyperlocal Innovation Emerges Offshore

If the future of newspapers is hyperlocal, as many people think, then organizations outside the U.S. may lead the charge. Editors Weblog reports on lessons from a Finnish newspaper that is evolving an activist model that taps into issues that matter to the community. The editor-in-chief says the secret is to focus on soft stories that strike an emotional chord in readers and to pay attention to community issues that matter, such as the cleanup of a local park.

The Liverpool Daily Post is opening up its newsroom to observation and comment from its readers. People can see how decisions are made and contribute their ideas and comments to the process. What a concept. Newspapers demand transparency from the organizations they cover, yet the decision-making process in most newsrooms is as opaque as smoked glass.

Editor & Publisher reports on experiments in Latin America in which citizens do most or all of the reporting. The concept of citizen involvement is central to the Latin American newsgathering process, says Mark Fitzgerald. Many of the standard rules of journalism are suspended. “Irreverence is valued.”

Bloomberg Expands Editorial Footprint

Can a maker of computer terminals become an online media giant? We may be about to find out. Bloomberg LP has hired the former top editor of Time Inc. and The Wall Street Journal, to the new position of chief content officer. Bloomberg makes most of its money selling data terminals used by stockbrokers and other financial professionals, but there have been rumblings that the company, which was founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, wants to burnish its newsgathering capabilities.

Pearlstine has spent the last year and a half in the private equity world, but it sounds like news is in his blood. Bloomberg has been growing its footprint in that area. It now has 2,300 employees , nearly double its 2001 size, and it has been growing its financial news service, television and radio operations. With Michael Bloomberg’s term in office set to end next year, there’s been considerable speculation about what would happen when he returns to business. It looks like we’re about to find out.

And Finally…

• Newspapers may soon face another threat, according to Alan Mutter: the huge ecological burden of print publishing. “A prototypical publisher selling 250,000 newspapers on each of the 365 days of the year adds nearly 28,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere,” the Newsosaur says. “That’s roughly equivalent to the CO2 spewed by almost 3,700 Ford Explorers being driven 10,000 miles apiece per year.”
• Journal Register Co., which is on life support pending payment of a $625 million debt this summer, has been offered a $25 million cash infusion from a current investor, who is demanding “a number of concessions” in return. Those concessions weren’t specified.
• Two Washington Post icons are accepting the newspaper’s buyout offer: David Broder and Tony Kornheiser. Broder will continue as a contract columnist. Kornheiser’s future with the Post is less certain.
• McClatchy Co. Chairman, President, and CEO Gary Pruitt said the company is open to selling the 49.5% share of the Seattle Times Co. it acquired as part of the purchase of Knight Ridder Inc. in 2006.

Reports Say Newsday Goes to Murdoch; Rivals Disagree

Tuesday must have been a busy day for media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who concluded a handshake deal with Tribune Co. to buy Newsday while also removing the top editor of another area property: The Wall Street Journal. Newsday said its price would be $580 million, which would just about cover Tribune’s impending debt obligation. Murdoch has already contacted the county executives of two Long Island counties to confirm that he’d be spending more time there. He told one of them that he hopes to conclude the deal in two weeks.

News of the Newsday sale was first reported on Monday, and dribs and drabs of information filtered in yesterday. Editor & Publisher says the deal isn’t done yet. Rivals thought they had until next week to submit a bid and plan to do just that. E&P also notes that Murdoch’s ownership of three newspapers (he also has the Daily News) and two TV stations in New York could raise regulatory concerns. It sounds like the fat lady has yet to sing on this deal.

More Tumult at the WSJ

Meanwhile, the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal resigned after less than a year on the job. The announcement made it clear that this was a Murdoch bag job. Marcus Brauchli had appeared in public less than two weeks earlier acting like a good company man, and the official statement said only that he was leaving to become a consultant. In his letter to the staff, which the Journal published, Brauchli said, “Now that the ownership transition has taken place, I have come to believe the new owners should have a managing editor of their choosing.” That can’t have lifted the already low morale on the staff.

E&P was all over this story, too, noting that Brauchli was respected as a guardian of editorial independence and wondering what role the newspaper’s editorial independence committee would have in choosing a successor. Given the success Murdoch has had in effecting momentous change at the Journal in such a short time, it’s likely that the owner will get his way.

Times Management Caves

The prospect of being cornered by Murdoch must have the Sulzbergers nervous. Under pressure by two large investors, the Times ownership added representatives of those funds to its board and expanded the total board size to an unwieldy 15 members. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger also dismissed talk of a possible sale of the company, which is what chairmen usually say just before they sell the company. Michael Bloomberg is rumored to be interested.

Sulzberger also outlined a four-part turnaround strategy for Times Co. including cost cuts of $230 million this year, the sale of some divisions and expansion of its online advertising programs with Google and Yahoo.

Latest Earnings Reports Dribble In

News that Journal Communications’ first-quarter profit dropped 91% would usually have some brokers on the ledge, but in this case the previous year’s numbers were boosted by an extraordinary gain. The actual revenue decline was about 9%, on par with recent results posted by other publishers. The industry-wide trend is clear. Year-over-year declines are running at about 10%. In an otherwise upbeat note to staff, McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt confirmed that the double-digit percentage declines are a fact of life adds, “At this point we simply can’t tell when this decline will end.”

Short takes

• The Chicago Sun-Times is on track to turn a profit by the end of the year, according to a memo prepared for potential buyers of parent firm Sun-Times Media Group. The company has been victimized by industry trends and past wrongdoings by two former executives. BusinessWeek recently speculated that it may not last a year.
• The Fort Worth Star-Telegram laid off 15 employees, including eight in the newsroom. The layoffs were apparently a surprise.
• Five full-time employees and four part-timers will be laid off at Maine’s Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. Both papers are up for sale by its Seattle-based owner.

Meet Ben Popken. Attention, newspaper executives: this guy is going to mess you up.

Ben is 26 years old and sits atop the editorial pyramid at the blog Consumerist.com. In conventional media terms, that pyramid isn’t very big – only seven people – but Consumerist’s reach far outweighs its small staff. The site gets 15 million unique visitors per month. Maybe more importantly, it’s closely watched by mainstream media outlets, which frequently pick up on its best stuff and broadcast it to a global audience.

For example, The New York Times has referenced Consumerist 381 times, The Wall Street Journal 114 times and BusinessWeek 37 times. Consumerist stuff gets picked up on Digg.com constantly – 34,000 citations and counting. Popken was recently featured in a cover story in BusinessWeek and wrote a 2,300-word article for Reader’s Digest. All without a day of formal journalism training.

Ben Popken isn’t a professional journalist, at least not as that role is traditionally defined. In fact, prior to joining Consumerist two years ago, he had never worked at a newspaper, TV station or in radio. His career during and after college consisted of a variety of entrepreneurial sales ventures and odd jobs. He worked as a delivery man not long before joining Consumerist. He only got the job because the previous editor’s mother read his blog.

Consumerist gets about 100 e-mails a day from consumers talking about their horrible encounters with businesses of all kinds. Big box retailers, banks, cell phone providers, cable companies and airlines are popular targets. Consumerist editors read and respond to each and every e-mail (how many of you editors at major metropolitan dailies have a policy like that?) and write up about 30 of those submissions a day for the site.

New Style of Journalism

They don’t fact-check what they post and they don’t call the companies in question for comment. The mission of the site is “to empower consumers by informing and entertaining them about the top consumer issues of the day,” Popken says. “We give them a voice by directly publishing their tips and e-mails and then following up on them as warranted.”

A lot of journalists shudder when they read words like these. “Directly publishing their tips and e-mails?” With no editorial oversight? It sounds like an invitation to disaster. But it works. If the story is wrong, the editors take it down. So far, the lack of fact-checking hasn’t been a problem. Consumerist gets the occasional legal threat, but it’s never amounted to much. The cease-and-desist letters have almost stopped, Popken told me.

What is changing is that consumer-facing companies are beginning to revisit their customer service operations and remove the walls that have separated them from the public, walls that are relentlessly beaten upon by consumer advocacy sites. Like this one A few have even asked Consumerist for advice, although not as many as you might think.

With no formal journalism training, no years spent covering city council meetings for a small daily and no editorial oversight, Ben Popken is becoming one of the most powerful voices in consumer journalism. And what’s funny is that if you ask him about the secret of Consumerist’s success, he’ll use the same words that any good editor would use: “The secret is to be reader-centric in a fundamental way. The content is driven by the readers and reacted to by the readers. We’re really just a curator of consumer-generated content.”

A lot of newspaper editors dismiss citizen journalism because they know that good journalism could never be done by an amateur. Could it be that journalism isn’t really all that mysterious? Or that the way we’ve done things for the last 100 years isn’t necessarily the only way to practice the craft? Ben Popken doesn’t care what the old rules are, and so far he’s doing just fine.

The New Yorker devotes 6,600 meticulously edited words to the impending death of newspapers, examining objectively the promise and perils of a new-media world which writer Eric Alterman sees embodied in the Huffington Post. Drawing on sources ranging from Walter Lippman to The Simpsons, Alterman concludes:

• That the death of newspapers is inevitable;
• That the model that will emerge to replace them looks strikingly like that of the newspapers of 200 years ago; and
• That our democracy is probably better off for this trend, although the plight of people in “the dark” is worse.

Here are some excerpts. Everything is elliptical:

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.”

The McClatchy Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5-billion purchase. Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year. America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared.

Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they could believe “all or most” media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago, Nearly nine in ten Americans, according to the Sacred Heart study, say that the media consciously seek to influence public policies, though they disagree about whether the bias is liberal or conservative.

Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. “People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,” she says. “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

[Huffington Post] is poised to break even on advertising revenue of somewhere between six and ten million dollars annually, according to estimates from Nielsen NetRatings and comScore, the Huffington Post is more popular than all but eight newspaper sites.

The blogosphere relies on its readership, €”its community, €”for quality control.

Most posts inside the [Huffington] site, however, go up before an editor sees them.

Journalism works well, [Walter] Lippmann wrote, when “it can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch.” But where the situation is more complicated, journalism “causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation.”

When Lippmann was writing, many newspapers remained committed to the partisan model of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American press, in which editors and publishers viewed themselves as appendages of one or another political power or patronage machine and slanted their news offerings accordingly.

The twentieth-century model, in which newspapers strive for political independence and attempt to act as referees between competing parties on behalf of what they perceive to be the public interest, was, in Lippmann’s time, in its infancy.

[The piece goes into an analysis of a 1920s debate between Lippman and rival John Dewey over the nature and methods of democratic discourse.]

As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected, top reporters, anchors, and editors naturally rose in status to the point where some came to be considered the social equals of the senators, [P]olitics increasingly became a business for professionals and a spectator sport for the great unwashed

The Huffington Post was hardly the first Web site to stumble on the technique of leveraging the knowledge of its readers to challenge the mainstream media narrative. For example, conservative bloggers at sites like Little Green Footballs took pleasure in helping to bring down Dan Rather after he broadcast dubious documents allegedly showing that George W. Bush had received special treatment during his service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Talking Points Memo “was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the fired U.S. Attorneys to a boil,” a scandal that ultimately ended with the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a George Polk Award for Marshall, the first ever for a blogger.

During the Katrina crisis, for example, [Talking Points Memo] discovered that some of [its] readers worked in the federal government’s climate-and-weather-tracking infrastructure. They provided the site with reliable reporting available nowhere else.

Traditional newspaper men and women tend to be unimpressed by the style of journalism practiced at the political Web sites, Real reporting, especially the investigative kind, is expensive, they remind us. Aggregation and opinion are cheap.

In October, 2005, at an advertisers’ conference in Phoenix, Bill Keller complained that bloggers merely “recycle and chew on the news,” contrasting that with the Times‘ emphasis on what he called “a ‘journalism of verification,’ ” rather than mere “assertion.”

“Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out,” Arianna Huffington protested, “In the run-up to the Iraq war, many in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, lost their veneer of unassailable trustworthiness for many readers and viewers.”

Newspaper editors now say that they “get it.” Yet traditional journalists are blinkered by their emotional investment in their Lippmann-like status as insiders. They tend to dismiss not only most blogosphere-based criticisms but also the messy democratic ferment from which these criticisms emanate. The Chicago Tribune recently felt compelled to shut down comment boards [because they] “were beginning to read like a community of foul-mouthed bigots.”

[Huffington] predicts “more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism, €”wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting, A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom, €”with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times.”

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism.

Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

In “Imagined Communities” (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel’s comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” It is at least partially through the “imagined community” of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged.

 

Newsday in Play: Media Moguls Salivate

The New York Times has more details on Sam Zell’s interest in selling Newsday. In addition to the previously reported interest by Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman, it now appears that Cablevision also wants to get in on the bidding. Unless Cablevision wins, the most likely outcome is that Newsday’s production facilities will be combined either with Zuckerman’s Daily News or Murdoch’s New York Post, thereby putting heavy pressure on the loser. It’s been questionable for some time whether New York City could support three tabloids and this may decide the issue. For Zell, the sale of Newsday must be a defeat. As the Times points out, the deal “illustrates the paradox Tribune faces: The best way to raise cash to meet short-term demands is to sell the very same properties the company would want to keep in the long run because they generate healthy profits.”

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Variety analyzes the first few months of Zell’s Tribune ownership and concludes that the real estate magnate got more than he bargained for. The 15% decline in revenues was unexpected, insiders say, and that’s why extreme measures like layoffs and asset sales are on the table. Zell has tried to bring in managers who question everything, but the problems at Tribune Co. run deeper than a calcified corporate structure. The industry is imploding and that’s not good when there’s a $13 billion debt to service.

Faltering Economics

Alan Mutter comments on the potential impact of bond rating downgrades on the newspaper industry. In a helpful tutorial on the workings of the bond market, he explains why the near-junk status of Belo, GateHouse Media, McClatchy, Media General, MediaNews Group, Morris and Tribune increases their debt burden at a time when they can least afford it. Paying off bonds is simply a matter of growing the business faster than the debt burden, but newspapers are unable to do that right now. Lenders don’t want to run newspapers, so they’ll do what they can to right the business, but that usually means vicious cost cuts. In a worst-case scenario, the defaulting borrower’s assets are chopped up and the company shut down.

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On top of everything else, the price of newsprint is up over 10% in the last six months. The increases are offsetting many of the savings publishers had hoped to realize from resizing initiatives. Dow Jones spent $30 million to retrofit presses and manufacturing operations when it shrunk the Wall Street Journal a year ago. Those expenses may have done little more than stave off the impact of the rise in paper prices for a while.

 

Three From the Coast

Pasadena Weekly attempts to total up the newspaper layoffs in the Los Angeles area. It comes up with 70, including 31 pressroom workes at the LA Times, 22 at the LA Daily News and 10 in Pasadena (where there are now five reporters left to cover a dozen communities). The epicenter (‘scuse the reference) of coverage is LA Observed, which journalists are reportedly checking every half hour for more bad news.

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That’s the Press, Baby! proposes a novel explanation for the San Jose Mercury News’ implosion: geography. The author proposes that in a high-cost area like the South Bay, the Merc had to expand or be pecked to death by free local papers in the bedroom communities crowded into the narrow corridor between the bay and the mountains. There was simply nowhere to expand.

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Finally, the Los Angeles Times has an interesting new example of grassroots journalism. The Homicide Report blog, written by a reporter and one contributor, documents every homicide in Los Angeles County (which adds up to 165 as of this writing). It’s the type of reporting that only a professional news organization could do and it dramatizes that real people are affected by homicide, a topic that is often treated matter-of-factly by the news media.

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Staff Reductions Taking Their Toll

The steady stream of newspaper staff and budget cuts is beginning to be felt on the street.

Politico reports on the shrinking ranks of regional reporters covering Capitol Hill – the local Regional Reporters Association’s membership has dropped from 200 to 84 in a decade – and suggests that a lot of politician shenanigans may be going uncovered thanks to the dearth of watchdogs looking out for local interests. However, the story notes that specialty newsletters and publications like Congressional Quarterly have grown their staffs and that the total size of the congressional press pool has stayed about the same as a result.

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Ken Doctor notes the broad trend toward cuts in newspaper business coverage and speculates about how newspapers can maintain a foothold in this area, which is often critical for ad sales. He sees national and international organizations like Dow Jones and Reuters increasingly syndicating their coverage to smaller papers in almost pre-packaged form.

E&P Totes Up the Numbers, and They Aren’t Good

Top U.S. newspapers have lost about 1.4 million copies in daily circulation, says Editor & Publisher. Declines of 20% or more have occurred at the LA Times, SF Chronicle and Boston Globe. Only two papers covered in the report – USA Today and the New York Post – managed to increase circulation. Factors include competition from other print and online media, publisher iatives to cut discounted or free copies and the creation of a national do-not-call list.

Despair and hope

Veteran journalist-turned-academic Tim McGuire writes a remarkably somber confession on his Arizona State University blog titled “I suddenly feel a lot worse about the future of newspapers.” The catalyst was comments by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. Hoffman apparently said that newspapers’ model of mixing profits with civic responsibility is fatally flawed. The two objectives just don’t mesh. This and other comments left McGuire, 58, feeling like he and others of his generation just don’t get the Internet enough to envision a newsroom’s future. Strong words for a man who’s supposed to be doing just that for his students. “Hoffman convinced me I’m way out of my element,” he comments.

Reid Hoffman weighs in with a lengthy comment on McGuire’s post, proposing to offer “some rays of hope.” However, there’s little hope evident in what he says.

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Meanwhile, the publisher of the San Antonio Express-News exhorted his colleagues to fight the good fight at the Texas Daily Newspaper Association’s annual convention. Thomas Stephenson said that investing in digital platforms is only part of the solution. Newspapers have to earn reader loyalty and then make it easy for advertisers to reach them through whatever channels they can.