Hapless Sun-Times May Be Next Big Downturn Victim

Could the Chicago Sun-Times be the next big city daily to shut down? Read this BusinessWeek profile and you’ll probably come to that conclusion. Once a hard-hitting scourge of local politicians, the Sun-Times has been slammed by a combination of the industry downturn and management misdeeds that landed two former executives in jail. Having hacked away at costs in an effort to stabilize the ship, the paper that once won seven Pulitzers in one 20-year stretch is now reduced to haranguing rival Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell while also outsourcing its delivery to him. Concludes BW: “it’s hard to see how the Sun-Times will be around much past its 61st birthday next year.”

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Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun-Times Media Group (STMG) reported a dismal fourth quarter 2007 net loss of $59.1 million, up from $34.6 million a year earlier. Editor & Publisher notes that “STMG, which publishes about 100 dailies and non-dailies in the Chicago market, is in the midst of a study of ‘strategic alternatives,’ including a sale of all or part of the company.”And to highlight how bad things are, “STMG launched a plan to reduce operating costs by $50 million by June 30, 2008. Among the measures the company undertook was outsourcing distribution to the rival Chicago Tribune, outsourcing ad production, newsroom and management layoffs, and folding some newspapers.” Can you imagine outsourcing distribution to your competitor?

Profitless in Seattle

Wanna buy a newspaper? Or three of them, actually. The Seattle Times. Co. is trying to unwind its ill-advised 1998 decision to go into debt to buy three newspapers in Maine. Apparently, the purchase was homage to the paper’s founder, who hailed from the Pine Tree State. However, the cash-strapped company can no longer afford such folly and is looking to dump the Portland Press Herald, Waterville Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal. There’s even talk that Portland’s newspaper union might buy the local rag. Perhaps that’d be a way to restore the 27 jobs the paper recently cut.

Dow Jones Surveys the Damage

Regular NDW readers won’t find much new in this Dow Jones story about the perilous state of the U.S. newspaper industry, but it is a good wrap-up of recent events. It’s generous to the industry in recounting why newspapers didn’t invest more aggressively online a few years ago. Quoting:

“For one, many newspapers were scared away from online ventures when the dot- com boom turned to a bust in 2000. In order to fully nip online competition in the bud, however, newspapers would have needed to invest heavily in burgeoning Web ventures before those entities got too expensive. For many newspapers, that kind of investment was not within their means.”

Not within their means. That’s like driving a car on bald tires because new ones are not within your means. Newspapers have had gross profit margins of more than 20% for decades. There were plenty of “means” to invest if owners had simply seen the bullet train that was heading at them. The post-bubble period was the best time in a decade to buy into the Internet. So why didn’t any newspaper companies do that?

The best quote in the story comes from McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt, who told a December conference that a “significant portion” of the current troubles the industry faces are “cyclical.” Right. So is global warming.

Envisioning the Future of Journalism

The Editors Weblog interviews Jim Brady, Executive Editor of Washingtonpost.com, who provides sensible insight on the future of journalism. Newspapers aren’t going away, he says, but many smaller papers are finding that the economies of scale of online publishing make it a more sensible route that newsprint. Journalism itself will also evolve to include more reader interaction, with readers doing more of the legwork. “Iif journalists allow readers, not to investigate for them, but to help them flag and acquire easily accessible information, it makes investigative journalism easier to do than it was fifteen years ago, when the journalists had to make dozens of phone calls and go down to the public library.”

Online Media Baron’s Advice: Blow It All Up

Billionaire entrepeneur and former AOL top executive Ted Leonsis has a 10-point plan to rescue the newspaper business. It basically comes down to blowing up the existing model, going entirely online and distributing through every available channel. Oh, and search-optimizing. Veteran journalists will love this suggestion:”Get rid of senior editors. Turn them into algorithmic managers…Knowing statistically what content gets the best click through across all media is a key deliverable. Newspapers need math majors running big swaths of the organization…There are too many English majors in key positions.”

Milestone Award for New-Media Publisher

A landmark event in online journalism occurred in late February, when Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for its coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys. This New York Times account points to the difference between the new breed of online reporting and traditional print journalism. Chief among them is the involvement of readers in the process. “There are thousands who have contributed some information over the last year,” the paper quotes Talking Point’s Joshua Micah Marshall as saying. Marshall has even been known to give “assignments” to his readers, asking them to comb through official documents. His journalism also mixes original reporting with generous links to other information online. It’s very Wikipedia-like. And it’s working. The reader- and advertising-funded site gets about 400,000 page views a day and has about 750,000 unique visitors a month.

Gannett CEO’s fine, even if his company isn’t

Gannett Blog tap dances on Gannett CEO Craig Dubow‘s substantial 2007 pay package, pointing out the absurdity of Dubow earning nearly $3 million in 2007 despite turning in the second world stock performance among major newspaper companies. Lots of anonymous angry comments follow Jim Hopkins’ description.

They’re doing something right in Canada

• The newspaper malaise in the U.S. may be mainly a U.S. phenomenon for now. The Toronto Globe and Mail reports on research by Newspaper Audience Databank that shows that Canada’s two national papers both saw a slight increase in weekday readership last year. The Globe and Mail’s weekday readership increased 3.9 per cent to a shade over 910,000, while The National Post’s weekday readership grew 2% to 538,400. Both papers’ Saturday circulation declined. The story goes on to say that the business picture is holding up somewhat better in Canada than in the U.S., although it’s far from good.
• Meanwhile, Marketing Charts reports that 61% of Canadians say that they’d rather look at the ads in a newspaper than watch them on TV, according to a national survey by Ipsos Reid for the Canadian Newspaper Association. What’s more, an astronishing number of Canadians read newspapers mainly for the ads, scan pages looking for advertising or consult newspapers looking for holiday sales promotions. What do people know in Canada that those in the lower 48 don’t?

A very funny takeoff at Tribune Co.

Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20 Year Club pointed to this very funny video by WGN Morning News sports anchor Pat Tomasulo spoofing Sam Zell’s exhortation to Tribune Co. staffers that “You Own This Place.” Watch till the end as weatherman Tom Skilling to steals the show.

The uneasy transition to online

Billionaire sports fan Mark Cuban weighs in on newspaper bloggers. Responding to a local newspaper’s protest over the exclusion of its staff blogger from the Dallas Mavericks’ locker room (Cuban owns the Mavs), Cuban criticizes newspaper blogging as “probably the worst marketing and branding move a newspaper can make…By taking on the branding, standard and posting habits of the blogosphere, newspapers have worked their way down to the least common denominator of publishing in what appears to be an effort to troll for page views.”

Cuban says that treating bloggers like mainstream media should be an all-or-nothing proposition. You must either admit or exclude everyone, but don’t play favorites because a blogger has a mainstream media business card. Some 20 commenters largely agree. Cuban’s position has kicked up quite a storm of debate, with some people saying he’s simply trying to get back at a reporter he doesn’t like.

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An award-winning newspaper reporter talks about how she made the leap to online media and how other ink-stained wretches can do the same thing. Michele Nicolosi comments, “In the very near future, we will all be online journalists…The outlook for online journalists — those that play well, learn about and care about the online publication as much as we all cared about the paper 15 years ago — is much, much better than it is for people who are dragging their feet, refusing to change the way they work to accommodate the new needs of the online product.”

Two Midwest Dailies Cut Staff

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch will elminate 31 jobs, mostly out of operations and marketing. No newsroom positions will be cut. The publisher said the P-D is performing pretty well, considering, but that the housing slump had hurt ad revenues. The story didn’t say how many people the paper employs.

The Duluth News Tribune plans to cut between 15 and 30 workers, or anywhere from 6% to 13% of its workforce. The company said the cuts were prompted by an ad revenue slide of more than 10%.

A Hostile Takeover in Long Beach?

It’s still too early to add the Long Beach Press-Telegram to the RIP list, but it looks like the paper is headed in that direction. MediaNews Group, which owns both publications, has said that it plans to consolidate the Press-Telegram with the Torrance Daily Breeze. That process is under way, and it looks like the Daily Breeze is running the show. Its publisher and editor will now effectively run the Long Beach paper, and the “consolidation” is mainly a matter of cutting jobs in Long Beach and requiring people to apply for the same jobs in Torrance. The Press-Telegram now has just 10 reporters covering 19 communities. Did we mention that the Press-Telegram is a unionized paper and the Breeze isn’t?

Black Humor at the Merc

It’s difficult to figure out from this AP story just how many SJ Mercury employees were cut, but we think it was 50. In any case, 20 of them were newsroom employees who got laid off or took buyouts. Employees marked the occasion by dressing in black and gathering for a noon ceremony. This is the fourth round of cuts at the Merc since 2006. HR experts will tell you that cutting by dribs and drabs is not the way to reduce staff. Better to do one deep, painful layoff and get it over with.

Washington Post Goes Buyout Route

Following the paths taken recently by the New York Times and Bay Area Newspaper Group, the Washington Post Co. offered buyouts to employees who are 50 or over and have at least five years of service. Publisher Katharine Weymouth didn’t say how many jobs were to be cut and the buyouts weren’t offered to everybody. She noted that she couldn’t rule out layoffs. The Post story says that more more than 100 of the 785 newsroom employees meet the new criteria.

Feeling the Chill Downeast

The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram will eliminate 27 jobs – requiring 15 layoffs -and cut the size of its news hole. No reporters will be laid off, although some editorial jobs will be cut. The publisher cited a continuing gloomy business climate. The Time Record in nearby Brunswick laid off 10 employees last month.

The state of Maine’s Department of Economic and Community Development is investigating layoffs of 10 people at the Times Record in Brunswick. Apparently the new owner financed the purchase of the paper in part with tax-free bonds from the Department, which put the state in the difficult position of financing local layoffs to support an out-of-state publisher.

Also…

The New Haven Register hasn’t announced anything, but you can’t tell a journalist not to share a good story. The paper’s Capitol reporter, Greg Hladky, told someone at the Courant that he was one of five people let go in “cuts” (not necessarily layoffs). The NH Register editor couldn’t be reached for comment and that’s all she wrote.

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.

Bay Area Newspaper Group (BANG) was able to avoid involuntary layoffs because 107 out of 1,100 employees took a recent buyout offer. The cuts affect the Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune and 14 other daily and weekly newspapers. The president of the company said he couldn’t guarantee there wouldn’t be more cuts. BANG executives cited a “drastic economic slump.”

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Down the coast, ex-SJ Mercury employees are taking to the blogosphere to ponder the paper’s future, if it has one. A sampling:

• Ryan Sholin offers proscriptions for the Merc on his blog. They including ending the ghettoization of bloggers and podcasters, ditching the focus on national news and switching software platforms.
• Meanwhile, more than 100 members of the San Jose Newspaper Guild’s Mercury News unit dressed in black and rallied in front of the paper to show their support for laid-off workers. Oft-quoted Guild unit president Sylvia Ulloa vowed to show management that employees are “united, not intimidated.” That works okay when the owners are making money, but that doesn’t seem to be the case these days.
• Michael Bazeley writes an early obit for the Merc. He doesn’t blame the new owners as much as some other disenfranchised ex-employees, but rather sees the Merc’s troubles as being rooted in rudderless leadership and lack of vision. When technology journalism exploded, the Merc stood still, he says. That was its big opportunity and the paper blew it. Now, he concludes, “I fear the paper will not recover.”
• Robert Butche writes not about the Merc but about the shockwaves of fear that the firing of LA Times editor James O’Shea sent through newsrooms and protests that “owners devoid of newspaper experience have been lulled into believing that a newspaper can flourish and survive by downsizing.” True ’nuff. The problem is that when the business shows declining readership, declining advertiser interest and no long-term hope of reversing those trends, an aggressive investment strategy isn’t a very palatable option, either.

Drumbeat of terrible earnings news continues

As if the newspaper industry needs any more bad news, a new survey finds that high-margin print classified ads perform dismally compared to online competition. The only exception: recruiting blue-collar workers. Quoting:

‘A survey of human resource executives revealed that print ranked the lowest when it comes time to finding good candidates. ‘Statistically and anecdotally,’ editors with Classified Intelligence wrote, ‘print advertising is an ineffective medium for recruiting candidates.’ Seventy percent of respondents said print was either ‘very ineffective’ or ‘ineffective’ up 60% from 2006. Only 14% of the 70 recruiters polled said that print was a good way to find employees. One interesting piece of information from the study: Recruiters did give print high marks for finding blue-collar candidates.”

It’s getting a little bizarre out there

Perhaps some unscrupulous publishers are taking advantage of the situation

• In the first case of its kind that we can remember, a publisher has been fined for running a journalism sweatshop. E&P reports that the Chinese Daily News has to pay $5.2 million for allegedly forcing reporters to file five stories a day and to rush between news conferences and interviews. Ad quotas were unreasonably high and production workers were forced to labor nonstop. Reporters testified that they had to work six days a week, 12 hours a day, but weren’t able to complain because of pressure and the culture of intimidation. We’ve heard that morale is bad in newsrooms pretty much everywhere, but this is extreme!

• And this would be funny if it weren’t true. The following item is reprinted in its entirety from Media Post: “Under a new Wall Street Journal policy, if a reporter writes a book based on a newspaper story, Rupert Murdoch wants a piece of the action, reports Crain’s New York. Any reporter’s book that uses research for Journal stories would qualify. In exchange a share of the book’s proceeds, the newspaper provides marketing and advertising support for the title. Most publishers do not require such a fee.”

Bright spots: some small-town papers are thriving

Not all newspapers are suffering. While the big metro dailies struggle to become more local, a host of existing local newspapers are seeing revenues and circulation grow to record levels. The secret seems to be focusing on mom-and-pop advertisers, making editors a part of the communities they serve and coming up with new ways to get the paper into the hands of everyone in the community.

E&P reports on several, including “the publisher of two paid Texas weeklies that between them don’t quite sell 5,000 copies: the Aransas Pass Progress and the Ingleside Index. The papers ended 2007 up 14% in ad revenue from 2006. ‘We are planning for a similar 2008,'” the publisher says.

Most of these papers are free, by the way, and that’s how they’re getting results for advertisers. Quoting one publisher: “I can remember for years Bill Dillard, the head of [department store] Dillard’s, would tell all of us daily newspaper publishers year after year — you have to get into more households. I don’t think he said you have to go out and get more paid subscribers.”

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Alan Mutter has expertly documented the crumbling business models of American newspapers, often finding insights in the financial reports that everyone else has missed. In this post, he focuses on the good news: there’s evidence that some small publishers are figuring out innovative new publishing models that are both profitable and popular with their readers. The one thread through all of them is that they target small audiences.

Vignettes from the field

Our RSS reader picks up occasional commentary by newspaper readers and former journalists that provide a glimpse into how the newspaper industry collapse is affecting ordinary people:

• A Bay Area book enthusiast laments the Chron’s decision to fold its stand-alone book review section into the weekly news analysis pages.
• A Twin Cities consultant lists the reasons he’s canceling his newspaper subscription. There are several. Like many readers, he simply doesn’t see much value any more. As newspapers slash costs and staff, the devaluation spiral continues. The product gets worse, which gives readers less inclination to read it.
• Mark Hamilton remarks wryly on the dubious value of incessant political polling
• Finally, the head of global public relations for Disney Parks & Resorts issues the most pessimistic forecast for the newspaper industry that we’ve heard anywhere. At about 10:20 in this podcast interview Eric Schwartzman, Disney’s Duncan Wardle states, “The printed newspaper industry has three to five years to live.” We hope his staff heard that!

Business sections feel the blow

Newspaper business sections have been hard hit by the ad downturn,

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Meanwhile, European specialty publisher Reed is going one stop further. It’s eliminating not just the business section but the whole business. Instead, it’ll double down on online media and risk analytics.

Glimmers of digital hope

The U.S. political campaign has apparently given a lift to newspaper websites, according to Media Post. Quoting: “The week ending February 23 saw visits to Web sites in Hitwise’s news and media category increase 22% compared to the same week in 2007. The upswing especially benefited Web sites for print publications, including online portals for magazines and newspapers. The New York Times Web site was the winner in the print category, taking 5% of total visits–a 50% increase in visits over last year. It was followed by People.com, with 3%, and The Washington Post, with 2%.”

Vignettes from the field

Our RSS reader picks up occasional commentary by newspaper readers and former journalists that provide a glimpse into how the newspaper industry collapse is affecting ordinary people:

• A Bay Area book enthusiast laments the Chron’s decision to fold its stand-alone book review section into the weekly news analysis pages.
• A Twin Cities consultant lists the reasons he’s canceling his newspaper subscription. There are several. Like many readers, he simply doesn’t see much value any more. As newspapers slash costs and staff, the devaluation spiral continues. The product gets worse, which gives readers less inclination to read it.
• Mark Hamilton remarks wryly on the dubious value of incessant political polling
• Finally, the head of global public relations for Disney Parks & Resorts issues the most pessimistic forecast for the newspaper industry that we’ve heard anywhere. At about 10:20 in this podcast interview Eric Schwartzman, Disney’s Duncan Wardle states, “The printed newspaper industry has three to five years to live.” We hope his staff heard that!

Business sections feel the blow

Newspaper business sections have been hard hit by the ad downturn,

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Meanwhile, European specialty publisher Reed is going one stop further. It’s eliminating not just the business section but the whole business. Instead, it’ll double down on online media and risk analytics.

Glimmers of digital hope

The U.S. political campaign has apparently given a lift to newspaper websites, according to Media Post. Quoting: “The week ending February 23 saw visits to Web sites in Hitwise’s news and media category increase 22% compared to the same week in 2007. The upswing especially benefited Web sites for print publications, including online portals for magazines and newspapers. The New York Times Web site was the winner in the print category, taking 5% of total visits–a 50% increase in visits over last year. It was followed by People.com, with 3%, and The Washington Post, with 2%.”

The Boston Globe plays it straight in covering the news of its buyout-based staff reduction. As reported earlier, 60 jobs will be axed at the Globe and 20 at the Worcester Telegram. That’s on top of the 125 jobs cut at the papers a year ago. The amazing tidbit in this story is this line: “Globe employees who received lifetime job guarantees in the early 1990s will be given three weeks pay for each year of service, capped at two years’ pay.” Lifetime job guarantees?

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Newsday is cutting 120 jobs, or about five percent of its workforce. The cuts include about 25 editorial employees, along with 24 pressroom positions. The head of the local union is quoted in the article wondering how a paper on an island of 3 million people can have only 400,000 circulation. “That just tells me that Newsday is not putting effort into growing circulation,” he said. He should read the papers more often.

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The Los Angeles Daily News is cutting 22 people from its newsroom staff, or nearly 20% of its editorial workforce. This story got considerably less attention than layoffs at rival Los Angeles Times, but in percentage terms, the cuts are much deeper. The Times still has 850 newsroom employees. The Daily News’ editorial staff has been cut by about half from its peak level, according to a story in the LA Times. The Times’ story wraps up the recent carnage at California newspapers and laments the loss of local reporting. It quotes a local public official as saying, “I think people are losing any understanding of what local government does and how it figures in people’s lives.

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Meanwhile, graphic designer Erica Smith has created a Google Maps mashup of newspaper layoffs going back nearly a year.

There are so many cutbacks to report that we have to spread the news across two posts.

Bay Area Blues

The big news comes out of the Bay area, where some 1,300 employees at San Francisco-area newspapers were offered buyouts. The San Jose Mercury News offered packages aimed at shedding nearly 200 non-union employees and also said it would cut an unspecified number of union jobs. Bay Area News Group-East Bay, which includes the Tribune, the Times and 14 other newspapers, offered all 1,100 of its employees the chance to apply for buyouts, raising the question of what it would do if everyone took the offer. On the other hand, that might be a preferable option to staying in business. Employees have to decide by the end of this week.

MetroActive describes the somber mood in the Merc newsroom, which has lost half its staff since 2001. The story quotes the president of the San Jose Newspaper Guild says, “A whole lot [of people] have been looking for something else because they are done. This is not a company that people want to work for.” But where else are you going to go?

The AP quotes a veteran Merc business reporter saying, “We’ve been through this a number of times. You just wonder when it’s all going to end. The problem is nobody knows where the bottom of this is.” Hint: it’s still a long way down. The Merc covers its own gloomy news here.

In nearby Tracy, Calif., the Tracy Press has scaled its frequency back from five times weekly to twice weekly over the last six months and just laid off an unspecified number of staffers. The paper has a free circulation of 9,700. One of the laid-off employees commented, “I’m a victim of three things: the Internet, the real estate mess and the recession.” Management at Tracy‘s two other daily newspapers — the San Joaquin Herald and Stockton Record — have also recently announced cost-cutting measures, though this story didn’t specify what they were.

 

Venture Trims and Tells the Tale

In the spirit of true openness The Ventura County Star devotes 750 words to a layoff amounting to 2% of its staff, including perspective on its parent company’s finances and the overall health of the newspaper industry. No editors were affected in this round, however, the newspaper’s publisher ominously noted, “I don’t think we’ve seen the bottom yet…Things could get worse before they get better.”

Meanwhile, on the East Coast…

A blogger published a memo sent by Boston Globe publisher Steve Ainsley confirming layoff plans. “We are expecting a total reduction of 80 positions, with approximately 60 from the Globe and roughly 20 from the [Telegram & Gazette],” the memo said. “This reduction in staff is a difficult but necessary step toward our ongoing goals of reducing costs and finding efficiencies that allow for the long-term health of our business.” As the Silicon Valley of the east, Boston will see the ugly scenario now being played out in the Bay Area spread next to its shores. However, the whole thing will play out much more slowly there.

Can it get any worse in Philadelphia? In January, the publisher of the Inquirer spoke of “dire consequences” if costs aren’t cut at least 10%. Now Philadelphia Newspapers has laid off 68 Guild employees in the advertising, circulation, customer service, finance, marketing, and systems departments. That’s about 10% of Guild membership. It sounds like management-union relations aren’t so rosy there. Management basically tells the Guild it’s cutting expenses and that’s that. Meanwhile, Guild reps complain that they can’t get management to listen to their revenue-generating ideas. The concept of a union coming up with ideas to grow revenue sounds just a little too bizarre for this editor. What are they going to do: charge advertisers dues?

Not far away, in Allentown, the Morning Call announced an unspecified number of buyouts. No newsroom jobs will be affected, said editor Ardith Hilliard. A newsroom reorganization last month already resulted in eight lost positions, mostly through attrition.