Several outlets are reporting that Hearst has contacted a handful of journalists at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to make “provisional offers” of jobs at a much smaller, online-only version of the newspaper. It’s not known what the provisions are, but it looks like Hearst still hasn’t made up its mind whether to go through with the project. The P-I is hanging by a thread. Tomorrow will be the 60^th day since Hearst’s January 9 announcement that the paper would either shutter its print operations or close entirely if a buyer isn’t found.

If the P-I continues online, it looks to be as a dramatically leaner operation. Metro reporter Hector Castro, who says he rejected the Hearst offer, told the P-I‘s Dan Richman that the offer “increased his health insurance cost, cut his salary by an unspecified amount, offered to match his 401(k) contributions, required him to forgo his P-I severance pay, reduced his vacation accrual to zero and required him to give up overtime.” Welcome to the Internet, Hector.

Because Hearst has apparently clamped a gag order on employees it has approached about the new venture, Richman resorted to asking everyone in the office if they had been contacted by the company. He found about 20 people who responded “no comment.” This roughly matches anonymous estimates that the online P-I would have a staff of about 20. None of the copy editors, editorial writers, designers or sports or features writers declined to comment, indicating that those functions are considered extraneous by Hearst, at least for the moment. We’ll no doubt hear something more substantive this week as the deadline arrives.

The P-I is already acting like it’s over as evidenced by this memorial section on its website.

Boston Globe on Horns of Layoff Dilemma

The Boston Globe, which actually gave some employees lifetime job guarantees back in the early 90s, is struggling to figure out how to implement a layoff of 50 newsroom employees without letting go of some of its best people. The problem is that the Newspaper Guild contract specifies that layoffs need to be conducted on the basis of seniority. This visionary concept now leaves the Globe on the horns of a dilemma: some of its most productive and promising young reporters may have to be laid off so that overpaid veterans in cushy jobs can be kept on board. The Boston Phoenix names names. There’s a buyout offer on the table but it’s apparently getting only lukewarm interest because no one wants to be unemployed in this crummy economy. So the Globe will probably have to make involuntary cuts. Management is allowed to circumvent the seniority rule under special circumstances, but it must justify each and every exception and could be subject to grievances in each case.

What Went Wrong at Journal Register

The Albany Times Union has few kind words for the basket case that is Journal Register Co. Formed from the wreckage of Ingersoll Publications in 1990, JRC remained a relatively small Michigan-based chain under five years ago, when it went on a buying spree that created a 300-title empire. However, it took on way too much debt in the process, particularly in light of its concentration in the recession-prone state of Michigan. JRC has crashed and burned in spectacular fashion over the last couple of years. Its model is pretty roundly hated by the journalists who have worked there: cut costs to the bone and maximize profits. Yet did you know that even as it languishes in bankruptcy, Journal Register still makes a profit? It’s just not enough of a profit to service its huge debt load.

Layoff Log

• Editor & Publisher wraps together two layoff notices in one: Guild members at the Fresno Bee will vote tomorrow on a new management proposal to cut wages by up to 6%. If the union doesn’t agree, management is threatening to reduce newsroom staff by up to 29%. And the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is reducing its workforce by 12% and cutting wages in line with parent McClatchy Corp.’s cost-reduction targets. The Associated Press has more on the Star-Telegram cutbacks. The company is also offering a buyout to most of its 1,000 employees. It already cut 18% of it staff last year.
• We’ve frequently chided newspaper publishers for championing the public’s right to know while burying their own bad news in layers of vagueness and doublespeak. But we certainly can’t say that about the Tri-City Herald of Washington state. Its recent announcement of a wage reduction and other cost cuts offers bountiful detail about everything from ad:edit ratios to the size of its biggest advertiser contracts. There’s even a reference to mileage reimbursement expenses.
• Blogger Gary Scott reports on layoffs at the Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise. He’s got names, too: 20 of them.
• The Winnipeg Free Press laid off five people, eight if you count early retirements.
• The Columbus Dispatch reportedly used e-mail to notify 45 employees that they were being laid off.

Miscellany

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has proposed that state public transportation projects should be advertised on the Internet instead of newspapers. The proposal is buried in a big transportation bill now before the legislature. The governor’s office says it’s just trying to save money. Government contract notices have long been an annuity revenue stream for newspapers, which benefit from laws in many states that require them to be published in local dailies.

The image at left accompanies a short story about layoffs at the Buffalo News that appears on the website of a local television station in Rochester, N.Y. The uncaptioned image has no “alt” text and is named “jobcuts2009-03-02.” We wonder if these are escaping employees of the Buffalo News captured on infrared camera, the ghosts of former journalists or perhaps managers striding decisively toward the future. Your interpretations are appreciated.

Los Angeles Times Columnist David Lazarus says the solution is for big newspapers to band together and deliver services as a package for $10 a month, just like HBO. “I read a half-dozen or so newspapers online every day. Right now I pay nothing for their output. Would I be willing to pay the equivalent of several lattes at Starbucks monthly for the same privilege? Absolutely,” he says. “Like I say: fixable.” At least it’s fixable if your entire audience is people like David Lazarus.

The University of Arkansas Traveler has a short profile of Erica Smith, whose Paper Cuts layoff tracker has become the unofficial statistician for industry cutbacks.

There appears to be a run on journalistic self-indulgence today as newsroom veterans tell their readers about what a great job they’re doing in the apparent self-deception that readers give a hoot: Here and here.

And Finally…

One of our favorite new Internet companies is someecards.com, a distributor of online greeting cards that bear delightfully cynical, snarky and even obscene messages.  Someecards is to greetings what Despair is to motivational posters: an irreverent stick in the eye of an industry that suffers from unbearable cuteness. Now someecards has launched a user-generated companion site, yourecards.com, where visitors can work from a collection of templated illustrations to create their own bizarre messages.  A sampling:

• “The fact that you thanked Hugh Hefner, and not your family, in your barmitzvah speech was highly inappropriate.”
• “Here’s hoping your new music degree will get you a better Mcjob.”
• “Sorry that restricted number I ignored was your one call from prison.”

Who says user-generated content doesn’t have a future?

Industry watchers are applying some mathematical discipline to various proposals to bail out the newspaper industry.

Mark Potts buries a hatchet in the idea that paid subscriptions are the salvation of the newspaper industry. Hauling out the spreadsheet, he suggests that the $10 million a good-sized daily could realize from selling 500,000 subscriptions at $20 each would be substantially offset by advertising revenue declines triggered by reductions in website traffic. Some people estimate that pay walls could cut page views by up to 90%, effectively obliterating that revenue stream. And charging a higher price will only drive traffic lower. Potts says newspaper owners aren’t doing nearly enough to optimize their online ad revenue streams. They should focus on selling ads to local businesses and shift from a reliance on traditional big display ad campaigns.

Taking a more expansive view, Ken Doctor handicaps the odds of various rescue strategies, ranging from pay walls to cable bundling to government handouts. The best bets are Cablevision’s idea of bundling Newsday into cable subscription fees and Hearst’s plan to distribute free wireless e-readers, both of which he rates at 2-1 odds. But even those have major downsides. The longshot: charging for premium content. Newspapers just don’t have the goods, Doctor says. Odds: 4-1.

Down and Out in Denver and San Francisco

If you want detailed background on what exactly happened in Denver prior to the Rocky Mountain News‘s closure last week, read this interview with David Milstead, the Rocky columnist and business reporter who broke scoop after scoop about the behind-the-scenes machinations. At nearly 5,200 words, the transcript is of epic proportions, but interested readers can learn about why Scripps chose to be the bad boy to abandon Denver, Media News CEO Dean Singleton’s’ decision not to buy the paper, the emergence of a possible buyer late in the process, the mood in the Rocky newsroom after the closure was announced and the possibility that Milstead’s critical reporting denied him a job at the rival Denver Post.

Singleton is also at the center of a San Francisco Bay Guardian analysis of what could be done to save the Chronicle. The report documents the extreme cost-cutting campaign at Hearst Corp. which is seeking to derive half its revenue from circulation by 2011. Among the news that was buried in the announcement of the Chronicle’s for-sale offering was layoffs of more than 55% of the newsroom at the San Antonio Express-News.

The only conceivable buyer for the Chron is Singleton’s MediaNews, which has gradually bought up nearly every other newspaper in the Bay Area. However, MediaNews is unlikely to want to take on a money-losing property when it is already so highly leveraged. The story also says the Society of Professional Journalists is calling for a public discussion of the Chron‘s predicament, saying the potential loss of such a large news source is an “urgent civic challenge.”

Layoff Log

• The Fort Worth Star-Telegram will cut its workforce by 12% and enact wage reductions ranging from 2.5% to 10% on employees making more than $25,000 annually. The paper cut 18% of its workforce last year and initiated other cost-reduction efforts, including a joint distribution agreement with rival Dallas Morning News and real estate sales. In addition to the layoffs, the paper is offering buyout agreements to many of its workers.
• Canada’s largest newspaper will lay off 60 unionized workers. The cuts mainly hit the advertising department, where 38 employees, or about one quarter of the unionized staff,  got their walking papers. The leader of the Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild calls the cuts outrageous in light of the $8 to $11 million package CEO Rob Prichard is getting to step down in May.
• Having announced 60 layoffs last week, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is now requiring newsroom employees to take off one work day out of every 20. The plan applies to salaried and hourly employees who work the equivalent of a full-time schedule.
• The Myrtle Beach Sun News will cut 20 positions and reduce pay and hours for all staff.

Miscellany

The Connecticut attorney general thinks it’s pretty audacious of Journal Register Co. to pay up to $1.7 million in bonuses to 31 people when the company owes the state $21.5 million in back taxes. However, we should point out that the bonuses are tied to the achievement of cost reduction objectives.

Add The Wall Street Journal to the ranks of outlets now tracking US layoffs. Its interactive layoff tracker sorts job reductions by industry, company, date, size of layoff, percent of workforce and stock decline. The Citigroup numbers are especially ugly.

And Finally…

Over the last few weeks, the mood in the news industry has shifted from a kind of morbid resignation to one of fiery indignation over the forces that are tearing apart a once-mighty business. The promising development is that media supporters have stopped trying to resurrect a dying print industry and are now focused on saving the essence of quality journalism. They’re getting creative in their approaches. Below are a few recent opinions.

Lean, Mean Media Machine

Writing in the Dallas Morning News, John Chachas says the time has come for the US government to jettison old cross-ownership rules and grant media companies broad license to prosecute people who steal their content.

Chacas, who co-heads the media practice at Lazard, proposes granting news organization “a finite (36-month) anti-trust law exemption to permit deployment of an industry-wide system to track and charge for re-use of their content.” Today’s bloggers thumb their noses at the organizations whose content they steal, and newspapers’ unwillingness to defend their value is their undoing, he says.

Chacas also calls on the government to repeal laws that prohibit media cross-ownership in regional markets. Information no longer knows geographic boundaries, he says, and laws that make it easier for the Los Angeles Daily News to merge with The New York Times than with the Orange County Register are a set of handcuffs on media businesses. Conversely, it’s no longer relevant for the government to try to preserve multiple voices in a market when readers and advertisers no longer believe they’re needed. His four-point proscription is an intelligent call for legal and legislative change.

Reinvent the Model; Save What’s Best

The New York Times rounds up opinions from thought leaders around the industry. The consensus: stop trying to revive the traditional model and focus on finding places to add value.

MinnPost.com CEO Joel Kramer says news organizations will need to derive more revenue from readers in the future, even if that means shrinking circulation: “A newspaper that sold 400,000 copies at 50 cents daily and $1.25 on Sunday might sell only 100,000 at four times the price. But there would be a business incentive to keep quality high, because each extra copy sold should increase profit, not subtract from it.”

Steven Brill mostly agrees. He says the key is to find the crevices where local information needs aren’t being served: “Local newspapers are the best brands, and people will pay a small amount online to get information – whether it be a zoning board meeting or a Little League game – that they can’t get anywhere else.”

Geneva Overholser of the Annenberg School of Journalism is in the same camp. She sees value in a hybrid of community journalists and professional publishers. “These changes will be difficult for newspapers which have considered themselves the primary newsgathers, but they may lead to the next chapter of American journalism,” she writes.

Craig Newmark, whose Craigslist.org is often seen as the Great Satan by the newspaper industry, says media companies need to involve their readers in the process of determining what they do. Quoting David Weinberger, Newmark says, “a paper should be perceived as ‘ours’ (the public) not ‘theirs’ (the owners).” Perhaps the Great Satan is really the newspaper owners.

Author Andrew Keen picks up the thread, suggesting that the future is in a layered model in which community members contribute information that’s then organized by staffs of professional editors. “Rather than slithering into the democratic swamp of crowd-generated content, smart local publishers should focus on their core expertise – the organization and curation of information by professionals,” he writes.

Edward Fouhy of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism tells the story of three small operations that are proud of providing balanced, accurate coverage of local news. “Citizens are inventing a new form of locally based and financed journalism while preserving the values of accuracy, objectivity and independence,” he writes, hopefully.

There are more than 180 comments as of this morning. Thankfully, they are mostly free of the partisan politican ranting that seems to plague this discussion.

BTW, Jack D. Lai thinks micropayments are stupid and he’s got a long list of links to people who agree. It’s an impressive archive and we really hope to get around to reading it all.

Micropayments with a Twist

Steve Outing opens his Editor & Publisher column by dissing micropayments (“that model will only hasten newspapers’ death spiral”) and then goes on to make a passionate case for…micropayments! Okay, we’re oversimplifying. What Outing doesn’t like is the idea that each publisher would have its own system for charging people a few cents to consume its content, sort of like running a PayPal button in the sidebar. He’s right: That’s a dumb idea. The solution may be in a service like Kachingle, a system that distributes payments to website owners based upon their readership.

Kachingle users only have to set up and fund one account. Whenever they visit a site that’s part of the network, Kachingle allocates a portion of their account to that provider. If Newspaper Death Watch gets 20% of your monthly visits, then the owners get 20% of the payment you set aside. Thanks! Readers decide how much they want to pay and Kachingle takes care of the accounting. In theory, the value of the network grows as membership expands. The New York Times may be helping Newspaper Death Watch by joining the network, but the equation also works in reverse. Somehow, we think we’d get the better of that deal.

Steve Outing is nothing if not thought-provoking. Although this column is a tad more enthusiastic than his usual fare, he’s found an interesting model to promote. Hopefully, the column will still be available at SteveOuting.com after E&P inevitably pulls it off its website. You can also comment at SteveOuting.com, but not at E&P.

Miscellany

Last month we told you about The Printed Blog (“Extra! Extra! Blog All About It!”) a startup that’s proposing to reinvigorate print publishing by harvesting content from local bloggers. Simon Owens called up founder Joshua Karp and found an Internet entrepreneur who’s serious about print.

“The print newspaper doesn’t need to go away simply because it’s on paper,” Karp told him. The problem is that publishers haven’t revisited the way they produce their printed products to include the work of the community. The Printed Blog is on thin financial footing unless more funding can be found, Karp said. He’s funding the first issues himself and needs to find venture capital “over the next few weeks.”

They dribble out the news about cuts at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in this story. The paper will lay off 17 people but wait, there will probably be more. The neighbor island bureaus will be shut down. Oh, and there’ll be a redesign from a broadsheet to a tabloid. Praent Oahu Publications is also discontinuing its Friday edition of the MidWeek tabloid. You have to stick with this story to the end in order to learn everything.

The Charleston Post and Courier has laid off 25 employees after a buyout failed to achieve cost reduction goals. When the company announced its buyout offer in July, the newspaper reported that it had 513 full-time and part-time employees. It will employ 460 people after the latest cuts.

“The future of newspapers is rooted firmly in 1878. Some guy was doing … 130 years ago, exactly in a place like this … what I’m doing right now. Except he had a better heating system.”

The speaker is Ed Shamy, a 50-year-old former newspaper editor from Vermont who’s part of a growing number of laid-off publishing professionals who are starting their own local publications. Ed Shamy publishes the 130-year-old County Courier in Vermont. All by himself.

Is this a trend? It could be. Yesterday, we told you about Melissa Marinan, a veteran ad sales rep who lost her job when her newspaper closed. So she’s starting her own local newspaper. Just last week, we pointed to a story about Joshua Karp, an entrepreneur who wants to start hundreds of hyper-local newspapers written by bloggers.

Amid all the hand-wringing about the perilous economics of major metro dailies, one fact has been buried: the cost of publishing a local newspaper is lower than it ever has been. Digital cameras have cut the time and cost of taking and publishing photos. Desktop software can be used to lay out pages quickly and cheaply. Editors can tap in to local blogs and websites for information that used to require phone calls and faxes. Many printers can now go direct from computer file to plate. Distribution can be done in an afternoon out of the back of one’s car.

It’s not a great way to make a living, but potentially it is a living. For the ranks of laid-off baby boomers who are no longer supporting kids and big mortgages, it may be a viable way to apply their skills. We believe local newspapers actually have a bright future.

Superior Economics

Why can local publishing flourish while major metros collapse? No unions, for one thing. No presses, no delivery trucks, no circulation departments, no call centers. In fact, local newspapers have almost no infrastructure costs at all. A skilled writer who works full-time and leverages contributions from the community can turn out enough copy and photos to fill a 16-page weekly issue. A second person can cover every prospective advertiser in the area.

The advertisers are there. In fact, local businesses are the great untapped revenue source. Major metros traditionally haven’t bothered with them because the dollars are too small. There are no online services that serve local communities effectively. Most small businesses advertise through a patchwork of channels that can include place mats and business card holders in the local hair salon. It’s a frustrating, time-consuming process that small business owners would rather not bother with. A newspaper that reaches a local audience has a chance to deliver a better return at a lower sales cost.

Print is not dead, only certain manifestations of print. A lot of skilled publishers are out of work right now, and at least some of them will follow the path of Ed Shamy and Melissa Marinan. We wish them well.

Layoff Log

• Baltimore’s Capital Gazette Communications will cut 111 jobs as it moves all printing operations from Annapolis to Comprint, a Laurel, Md. Printer that already produces several daily and weekly papers. The body count at Capital includes 31 full-time and 51 part-time press and mailroom positions, along with 29 other people in other departments. No reporter jobs were cut. The Capital Gazette also prints the Bowie Blade-News, Crofton News-Crier and the West County Gazette. No word on whether the contractor will hire any of the laid-off employees.
• The Missoulian (Mont.) has cut six jobs and will combine its call center with four other newspapers in big sky country. The Montana Standard is doing the same thing.
• The Hutchinson (Kan.) News will lay off four employees and require everyone to take one unpaid week of before April 30. The newspaper also plans to reduce its daily page count.

Downturn Hits Ethnic Press

New York’s ethnic press, which has been mostly insulated from the downturn affecting the newspaper industry, is beginning to suffer. A Spanish-language daily and a Chinese weekly have already closed this year and now the Ming Pao Daily News, which is considered the most intellectual of New York’s four Chinese newspapers, is reportedly slated for closure by its Hong Kong parent. The New York Times notes that ethnic newspapers enjoy an intimacy with their readers and advertisers that big-city dailies traditionally don’t and that this has bought them some security in the past. But the lousy economy is threatening the already thin margins of these small-circulation properties, and many don’t have websites to fall back on. Ming Pao will continue to publish a free daily, which has been the sole bright spot in the market. New York had 10 Chinese daily newspapers just 20 years ago.

Extra! Extra! Blog All About It!

Blogging has come full circle in San Francisco, where a software entrepreneur-turned-publisher has launched a weekly newspaper composed entirely of blog entries. Joshua Karp has big plans for the chain he calls The Printed Blog. If his idea reaches its full potential, he’ll have hyper-local twice-daily editions in thousands of communities around the US. Chicago alone could support 50 localized Printed Blogs. Karp’s editorial model is very Web 2.0-like: bloggers give him their stuff in exchange for a slice of the profits. More than 300 have already signed on. Profits aren’t an issue right now, but Karp believes that local businesses will appreciate the tight control they’ll have over their ad messages as well as the low cost of $15 to $25 to reach 1,000 readers. The New York Times account quotes one advertiser exulting in his new ability to tailor his ads to specific neighborhoods. Printing is outsourced to local distribution points. Naturally, there’s a website.

Layoff Log

• Voice of San Diego is reporting that another 50 employees will be laid off at the Union-Tribune. The paper has been a prominent victim of the area’s cratering economy, having already laid off 15% of its employees a year ago and staging another buyout since then. The U-T has also been for sale for the past six months. While several local investors have expressed interest, no one has written a check yet.
• The Mason City (Ia.) Globe Gazette has laid off nine full-time employees and will leave six open positions vacant. No word on how large the total staff is.
• Lee Enterprises-owned River Valley Newspaper Group, which includes two dailies and eight weeklies in Wisconsin, has cut 10 positions across the company.
• The Traverse City (Mich.) Record-Eagle has cut the equivalent of eight positions from a staff of unspecified size.
• The Peoria Journal Star is laying off an unspecified number of employees part of a plan to reposition the paper. Asked for a quote, publisher Ken Mauser delivers one of the most vapid comments of this new year: “Like many companies operating in today’s business environment, change will be inevitable and necessary to position our business for the future.” A blogger at Illinoize says 11 people lost their jobs.

Miscellany

The sour economy has spurred the San Jose Newspaper Guild and two newspapers to come to terms after 23 months of negotiations. The 25 Guild members get a year of job security and pay raises through 2012, but give up the right to block management from outsourcing some of their jobs.

The right-wing Tulsa Beacon takes the publisher of the Tulsa World to task for joining the most exclusive country club in the city while simultaneously laying off 28 people at the newspaper. Hypocrisy, the Beacon reports, is exclusively the domain of the liberal media.

Good obituary writers have their research done well before the subject is laid to rest. In that spirit, Newsosaur Alan Mutter begins the process of writing an obit for the Chicago Sun-Times, a newspaper that he clearly believes is destined for our R.I.P. column in the not-too-distant future. Mutter, who used to work at the Sun-Times, begins his tale in 1984 and tells the story of the first 10 years of ownership changes that “turned our thoughtful, respected and reasonably prosperous tabloid into a scandal sheet.” It’s a personal, poignant and sometimes funny account that will be told in installments.

Congratulations to Martin Langeveld, whose thoughtful News After Newspapers blog has been scooped up by the Nieman Foundation as part of its journalism lab.  He’s joined there by Tim Windsor and Matthew Ingram. In an introductory entry tellingly tagged “audience, doom, newspapers, and print,” Langeveld describes the reasons why the industry has entered into an inescapable vortex and how the thinking at daily papers must change if there is to be any hope of survival. He will continue to serve up the provocative ideas he started at NAN and the industry will be better for it.

The Register-Pajaronian of the Santa Cruz valley area will cut back its publication schedule to three days a week from six. The 141-year-old paper blamed its financial troubles on the collapse of major advertisers Mervyns and Circuit City. Unspecified layoffs accompanied the move.

If you’re still wondering “Who the hell is Carlos Slim?” Fortune has some background for you. A brilliant investor who specializes in buying distressed firms, Slim is now bailing out The New York Times Co. and may end up controlling the company as a result. For journalists, the nut graph is near the end: ‘Slim seems to neither covet the attention nor access that comes with being a media baron, nor to share the controlling Sulzbergers’ view that their ownership is a trust that puts the company’s journalistic mission ahead of commercial imperative.” If it’s a bio you want, get thee to Wikipedia.

And Finally…

The Boston Globe held out longer against front-page advertising than The New York Times – about two weeks longer. The Globe‘s first page-one ad ran on Wednesday, timed to coincide with the production of an additional 100,000 inauguration issues. The ad was for the movie “Defiance” (see below).

Tribune Co. and the New York Daily News* are looking at closing their foreign bureaus and outsourcing international coverage, The Wall Street Journal says. The beneficiaries would be the Washington Post and a Boston-based startup called GlobalPost. Under the arrangement being discussed by Tribune Co. and the Washington Post, Tribune would contract with the Post for international stories to be delivered to its portfolio of newspapers and would close dozens of foreign offices, saving the bankrupt company millions each year. There’s no word on how much of that coverage would be unique to Tribune, but that’s presumably an issue in the talks. The two companies have long had an alliance via a joint news service.

The New York Daily News deal has Mortimer Zuckerman’s paper contracting with GlobalPost for its international coverage. The deal is the first big win for GlobalPost, a venture funded by deep-pocketed investors, including former Boston Globe publisher Benjamin Taylor. The co-founders are Charles Sennott, a veteran Globe foreign correspondent, and Philip Balboni, former president of New England Cable News. You can read all about the site’s mission and dive into two of the longest biographies we’ve ever seen on the site’s mission page.

Like The Politico and Politicker, GlobalPost is attempting to create a new publishing model leveraging online efficiencies, reader involvement and diversified revenue. Part of GlobalPost’s revenue is to come from syndication deals like the one with the Daily News. Stories will mostly be contributed by local stringers and embellished with reader input and reports from other online resources. GlobalPost thus hopes to deliver quality journalism at a fraction of the overhead cost of a foreign bureau. The Daily News deal will clearly put it on the map.

Blogger Lisa Williams has an interesting take on GlobalPost which Amy Gahran embellishes upon on the Poynter Blog. Williams suggests that news publishing may be moving toward an on-demand model similar to the one emerging in the computer industry. “Cloud computing” is all the rage in IT right now, with Amazon’s EC2 service blazing the trail. EC2 enables businesses to rent computer power only as it’s needed, outsourcing the expensive and specialized task of maintaining corporate data centers to specialists who serve multiple clients. Williams suggests that a similar model could provide news at a much lower cost than full-time staff. It’s kind of a super stringer model made more efficient by the Internet.

Gahran likes the idea, although she differs with Williams’ theory that this could spell the end of beats. General assignment reporters will still be needed, she says, but much of the specialty reporting could be provided by independent journalists and organizations of journalists, the latter scenario being The Politico and GlobalPost models. “You could have a situation where various kinds of organizations could purchase reporting capacity to make sure the stories or communities that matter to them get covered — whether that’s a town, a government agency, a business trend, legislation, a water quality issue or sports,” she writes.

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the New York Post instead of the Daily News.

Star Tribune Files for Bankruptcy

Add the Minneapolis Star Tribune to the list of newspaper publishers now dwelling in the purgatory of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The filing “was necessary to reduce our operating costs, restructure our debt and create a financially viable business for the future,” Publisher Chris Harte wrote in a note to readers. Last month, the Strib said it needed $20 million in union concessions to sustain operations. But talks with the union broke down last week. The union appeared surprised that management did exactly what it said it was going to do. “The unions at the Star Tribune are conscious of the newspaper’s financial plight and the state of the industry nationwide,” said a union official said in an account in the Kansas City Star. However, consciousness apparently wasn’t enough.
The value of the Star Tribune has collapsed since McClatchy paid $1.2 billion for it in 1998. Its balance sheet currently lists assets of about $493 million and liabilities of $661 million. Chapter 11 gives is the chance to shed some debt and restructure is assets under court protection. In practice, companies rarely emerge from Chapter 11 looking anything like they did when they went into bankruptcy.

Layoff Log

• The Boston Globe will furlough 50 employees through a buyout and layoffs, if necessary. This is the fifth staff reduction at the paper since 2001 and the first to be limited to the newsroom. The cuts will reduce the Globe’s editorial staff to 329 people, down 39% from its peak newsroom employment of 552 in 2000. The local Guild boss said future cuts should come from the management side, as the worker bees have already given more than their fair share.
• Gannett’s announcement earlier this week that it would require all employees to take a week off without pay in the first quarter sparked a frenzy of media coverage, but we found the furor surprising. Manufacturing companies have used this tactic for years to preserve jobs and the modest 2% across-the-board pay cut seems bearable compared to the alternative of idling so many people. We agree with Alan Mutter’s take: By sharing the pain, Gannett avoids having to cut 600 jobs. Isn’t that a more noble objective?
• The Christian Science Monitor will cut its editorial staff by 15 or 16 people, which the mangled math in a Boston Globe story calculates to be 7%. Since the CSM employs 90 editors, our calculator says that’s more like 16%, but whatever. The Monitor is preparing to go from weekday to weekly print frequency in April and adjusting it staff size accordingly.
• The Schenectady Daily Gazette will cut 16 positions in its fourth round of layoffs in a year.
• The publisher of Vermont’s Rutland Herald and the wonderfully named Barre-Montpelier Times Argus will lay off 14 people, or about 9% of its staff.

And Finally…

Nick Christensen of the Hillsboro Argus has tongue only partly in cheek as he makes a somewhat persuasive argument for a government bailout. Give me my billions, he says. It won’t influence me. Christensen does point out correctly that judges and district attorneys are among the government watchdogs who are also paid by the institutions they monitor.

If you need another indication that citizens can be important sources of news coverage, you only need to consider yesterday’s crash of a US Airways jet in the Hudson River. The first report of the crash appeared on Twitter at 3:28, just two minutes after the plane took off. Twitter was also the first outlet to carry news that a flock of geese was probably the source of engine troubles that forced the pilot to ditch the plane. The photo below is from CNN’s iReport citizen news service. A video featuring more images taken by witnesses can be seen here.

Rumors have been floating around for months that the Seattle Times would shut down, so employees at rival Post-Intelligencer were understandably shocked when a local TV station reported a single-sourced story yesterday that the paper is being put up for sale and would be shut down if no buyer is found. No one, from the P-I‘s publisher on down, is confirming the report or even knowledge of the rumor. This doesn’t stop the Seattle Times from quoting numerous staff and local officials commenting about how sucky a shutdown would be, some of them speaking in the present tense. “I think it’s a horrible tragedy,” said Seattle City Councilman Nick Licata, referring to a single-sourced story that no one has confirmed.

Speculation is focusing on a change of management at P-I owner Hearst Newspapers. Incoming President Steve Swartz reportedly sent employees a memo outlining “100 Days of Change” beginning in early 2009, but offered few specifics. Under the joint operating agreement, either of Seattle’s two daily newspapers must be offered for sale for 30 days before being shut down. The report comes as a particular surprise because well-reported financial troubles at the Seattle Times have had most locals thinking it would be that paper going down first. Keep in mind, however, that this is still a single report based on a single source at a single local TV station. The fact that the publisher of is the P-I‘s main rival denies awareness of it should be taken seriously.

A Benevolent History

Jack Shafer’s account in Slate of how newspapers innovated – and then failed – on the Web is a sympathetic story about an industry that’s often criticized for insularity. In contrast to the popular image that newspaper executives were clueless about online competition, Shafer declares that they were actually paranoid about it. In fact, newspapers threw away a lot of money trying to create early online business models.

The Washington Post had constructed its own interactive service by 1994 and nearly every major newspaper was online by 1999. “Newspapers deserve bragging rights for having homesteaded the Web long before most government agencies and major corporations knew what a URL was,” Shafer writes. In earlier years, Knight-Ridder sank $50 million in an Internet precursor called videotex and newspapers had experimented with fax and even audio editions in the early 1980s.

The problem wasn’t innovation, Shafer notes; it was attitude. Newspaper companies’ approach to these disruptive technologies was first defensive and then opportunistic. Once executives were satisfied that their revenue base wasn’t going away they sought to use new media to find new revenue streams as long as it didn’t mess with the model. Commenting on videotex, he writes, “Once [newspaper companies] they determined that nobody could make money from videotex and the technology posed no threat to the newsprint model, they were happy to shutter their ventures.

But that’s the problem. New technologies never succeed when their use is restricted like that. Shafer calls these “nongenerative” services, meaning that no third party industry can innovate on their platforms. AOL is an example of this. Nongenerative services almost always lose out to “generative” media like the Internet because customers can add their own value. That’s basically why the personal computer has 90% market share and the Mac has 10%. Intel CEO Andy Grove titled his book Only the Paranoid Survive. The newspaper industry had the requisite paranoia, but it didn’t have the innovative attitude to match.

Miscellany

Residents of the New Mexican cities of Santa Rosa, Tucumcari, Clovis, Portales, Lovington and a couple of dozen other cities and towns that currently get home delivery of the Albuquerque Journal will have to find something else to read. New Mexico’s largest daily newspaper, plans to stop home deliveries and rack sales in more than 30 communities around the state. This despite the fact that the Journal lost its only competitor, the Albuquerque Tribune, nearly a year ago. The cost of delivery was just too steep, the publisher said. Elsewhere in New Mexico, Freedom New Mexico stopped home deliveries of the Quay County Sun last week.

The Newark Star-Ledger‘s Paul Mulshine contributes an op-ed piece to The Wall Street Journal that reads at first blush like another curse-the-darkness ranting by an aging journo about the unfairness of it all, but that ultimately makes a persuasive case that no blogger in his of her right mind is going to be caught dead covering city council meetings for free.

McClatchy Watch notes a case of online cluelessness by company management. Responding to rumors that McClatchy was closing its Washington bureau, CEO Gary Pruitt sent off a memo to employees scolding them for spreading the rumor without checking with company management. Of course, it’s management’s responsibility to head off rumors quickly, not employees’ responsibility to verify them. If McClatchy had its internal communications act together, there wouldn’t be an audience for a McClatchy Watch.

Layoff Log

• The drip, drip, drip of layoffs continues at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: another 39 people have lost their jobs, including 14 in the newswroom. The AP story reckons total announced cutbacks at the P-D amount to 270 in the last 16 months. (Via PaidContent.org)
• The Winnipeg Free Press is begging employees to accept a buyout in order to avoid laying people off next week. The publisher seeks to reduce headcount by about 5%.
• The Buffalo News is offering buyouts to about 300 workers. There’s no word on how many jobs the paper is seeking to eliminate. A similar offer went out last August to 107 employees, but only about a dozen accepted.
• Dow Jones is freezing salaries for a year, reports MediaBistro. Unlike most media companies, Dow Jones has so far managed to avoid major layoffs.
• NJN Publishing, which produces four weekly newspapers in New Jersey, laid off 25 full- and part-time employees, or about 17% of its staff.

And finally

In a print market that’s hemorrhaging, The Slammer is one newspaper that’s flourishing. Its “newsstand profit margin is four times that of most local dailies, and its circulation has grown to 29,000 – up nearly 50 percent from 20,000 just last year. At more than 500 convenience stores across North Carolina, it’s selling at a buck a pop,” writes The Christian Science Monitor. The secret: The Slammer is full of mug shots, crime reports and allegations of misdeeds. “The men and women, with their dour mugs, bloodied noses, and booze-induced grins, have been arrested for everything from skipping a court date to robbing a food mart. It is, in essence, the local police blotter writ large,” the Monitor writes.

Journalism ethicists bemoan The Slammer‘s perverse appeal, but the genre is spreading. Two papers with a similar format have sprung up in Florida and The Slammer is planning to expand its North Carolina distribution.

The secret isn’t just the mug shots and wrongdoings. It’s also the snarky style the paper uses. It sometimes mocks repeat offenders and hosts weekly features like the worst late-night arrest hairdos. Such public flogging is a “step up from the stocks,” says one critic. But victims don’t seem to mind too much. In fact, “the chief complaints the weekly paper gets come from perps complaining that their photos didn’t get printed,” the Monitor writes.

We sorted through our 147 entries of 2008 to come up with the stories that surprised us, delighted us or made us shake our heads in disbelief. We’re presenting them as a series of posts entries over four days. Tomorrow we’ll conclude with our favorite quotes of the year.

Creative Solutions

A group of Ohio newspapers got together to share stories and even reporting assignments in a novel response to cost pressure. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, Toledo Blade, Cincinnati Enquirer and Akron Beacon Journal now post all their daily stories on a private website where editors can pick whatever they want and publish it in their own pages. The tactic has now been tested in several other parts of the US.

Pasadena Now, a small weekly, fired its entire editorial staff and farmed out coverage to a staff of Indian writers recruited on Craigslist. Publisher James McPherson pays the virtual staff about $7.50 per 1,000 words, compared to the $30,000 to $40,000 he was paying each reporter annually. The Indian writers “report” via telephones, web harvesting and webcams, with support and guidance from McPherson and his wife.

Neighborsgo.com, a spinoff of the Dallas Morning News, uses a social network to anchor a community journalism initiative. Local residents create profiles and post information about their interests, and some celebrities are emerging, like the Helpless Housewife (right). Every week, editors dig through content submitted by citizens and produce 18 local print editions.

Research and Markets released a report entitled “Offshoring By US Newspaper Publishers” that sees big growth in the newspaper outsourcing industry, particularly in India. About 2,300 people were employed offshore to serve US and UK newspaper companies in July, 2008, the report said. However, “The total offshore opportunity from newspaper publishers is estimated to be approximately $3.5 billion,” in the long run.

A team of enterprising publishers in the UK produced a four-page newspaper created entirely by hand. “Every word and every image and every mark of any kind in The Manual was drawn by a team of volunteers – mostly illustrators,” the website says. The group foresees a day when “handmade qualities can transform newspapers from ‘junk’ to collectable.

The Politico, a Washington-based boutique news service that specializes in Capitol Hill coverage, signed up more than 100 newspapers for its news service, including the Arizona Republic, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Philadelphia Inquirer. Launched in early 2007, the specialized print/online/broadcast hybrid focuses exclusively on politics, is reportedly profitable and has become a must-read for political junkies.

CNN announced plans to challenge the Associated Press with its own wire service. The AP suffered subscriber flight in 2008 as several large newspapers have canceled their subscriptions, claiming the price is too high.

The Chicago Sun-Times offered 44 copies of its Nov. 5 front page on eBay as a “museum wrap fine art giclée print on canvas.” Nov. 5 was a rare bright spot in an otherwise disastrous year. The historic election created a brief surge of demand and many publishers sold out that day’s issue.

The Sun-Times had another idea to attract readers: It brought back dead columnists. “Vintage” columns written by Chicago institution Mike Royko began appearing in August, some 11 years after Royko died. The first one was about a Windy City citizen who was also dead.

Brave New World

Huffington Post employee Mayhill Fowler captured a three-minute rant by Bill Clinton about a Vanity Fair report that questioned the propriety of his post-presidential behavior. Fowler didn’t identify herself as a reporter but said she had the video camera in plain view while Clinton was talking. The LA Times account describes the recorder as “candy bar-sized” and Clinton claims to have not known he was being recorded.

CNN reported on a Yahoo employee who Twittered his layoff in February and gained an eager following. Ryan Kuder eventually took a job from the hundreds of leads contributed by his followers . His story was covered on prominent blogs and in mainstream media.

Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for its coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys. The New York Times account pointed 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. Editor Joshua Micah Marshall has even been known to give “assignments” to his readers, asking them to comb through official documents.

Gutsy Moves

Monitor Editor John Yemma

The Christian Science Monitor said it is all but exiting the print business. Management chose the paper’s 100^th anniversary year to make the shift, attracting worldwide attention. The Monitor‘s dramatic move legitimized frequency cuts as a survival tactic. Other papers have followed its lead.

Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing cancelled his newspaper subscription and wrote about it at length, invoking a deluge of scorn from newspaper vets. Outing stuck to his guns.

Tampa Tribune intern Jessica DaSilva documented a contentious meeting about the need for change at the newspaper and posted the editor-in-chief’s comments on her blog. The young woman endured a torrent of abuse from veteran journalists, including many personal insults, as more than 200 comments piled up on her blog. The incident dramatized the industry’s difficulty in dealing with change.

Land of the Rising Seniors

Newspaper sales in Japan are 2.5 times those of the US as a percentage of the population and journalist layoffs are all but unheard of. The reason: the population is declining. The percentage of children 14 and younger is the lowest it’s been in 100 years and the overall population of Japan is expected to decline by a third over the next 50 years. The lack of a new generation of Web-savvy upstarts means papers have less pressure to move online and figure out how to serve a new audience.

Just Plain Fun

The Onion offered a tutorial in how to write a provocative magazine cover line (right).

A tongue-in-cheek investigation by IowaHawk rounded up recent incidents of criminal activity by journalists and concluded that newsrooms are at risk of becoming a “killing field.” Of course, the reporters could have conducted the exercise for lawyers, accountants or plumbers and come to the same conclusion. The best line was from Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit: “I think it’s unfair to single out journalists as thieves, or violent, or drunks, or child abusers. Sometimes they’re all of the above.” The chart is amusing, too.

We sorted through our 147 entries of 2008 to come up with the stories that surprised us, delighted us or made us shake our heads in disbelief. We’re presenting them as a series of posts entries over four days. Tomorrow we’ll conclude with our favorite quotes of the year.

Creative Solutions

A group of Ohio newspapers got together to share stories and even reporting assignments in a novel response to cost pressure. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, Toledo Blade, Cincinnati Enquirer and Akron Beacon Journal now post all their daily stories on a private website where editors can pick whatever they want and publish it in their own pages. The tactic has now been tested in several other parts of the US.

Pasadena Now, a small weekly, fired its entire editorial staff and farmed out coverage to a staff of Indian writers recruited on Craigslist. Publisher James McPherson pays the virtual staff about $7.50 per 1,000 words, compared to the $30,000 to $40,000 he was paying each reporter annually. The Indian writers “report” via telephones, web harvesting and webcams, with support and guidance from McPherson and his wife.

Neighborsgo.com, a spinoff of the Dallas Morning News, uses a social network to anchor a community journalism initiative. Local residents create profiles and post information about their interests, and some celebrities are emerging, like the Helpless Housewife (right). Every week, editors dig through content submitted by citizens and produce 18 local print editions.

Research and Markets released a report entitled “Offshoring By US Newspaper Publishers” that sees big growth in the newspaper outsourcing industry, particularly in India. About 2,300 people were employed offshore to serve US and UK newspaper companies in July, 2008, the report said. However, “The total offshore opportunity from newspaper publishers is estimated to be approximately $3.5 billion,” in the long run.

A team of enterprising publishers in the UK produced a four-page newspaper created entirely by hand. “Every word and every image and every mark of any kind in The Manual was drawn by a team of volunteers – mostly illustrators,” the website says. The group foresees a day when “handmade qualities can transform newspapers from ‘junk’ to collectable.

The Politico, a Washington-based boutique news service that specializes in Capitol Hill coverage, signed up more than 100 newspapers for its news service, including the Arizona Republic, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Philadelphia Inquirer. Launched in early 2007, the specialized print/online/broadcast hybrid focuses exclusively on politics, is reportedly profitable and has become a must-read for political junkies.

CNN announced plans to challenge the Associated Press with its own wire service. The AP suffered subscriber flight in 2008 as several large newspapers have canceled their subscriptions, claiming the price is too high.

The Chicago Sun-Times offered 44 copies of its Nov. 5 front page on eBay as a “museum wrap fine art giclée print on canvas.” Nov. 5 was a rare bright spot in an otherwise disastrous year. The historic election created a brief surge of demand and many publishers sold out that day’s issue.

The Sun-Times had another idea to attract readers: It brought back dead columnists. “Vintage” columns written by Chicago institution Mike Royko began appearing in August, some 11 years after Royko died. The first one was about a Windy City citizen who was also dead.

Brave New World

Huffington Post employee Mayhill Fowler captured a three-minute rant by Bill Clinton about a Vanity Fair report that questioned the propriety of his post-presidential behavior. Fowler didn’t identify herself as a reporter but said she had the video camera in plain view while Clinton was talking. The LA Times account describes the recorder as “candy bar-sized” and Clinton claims to have not known he was being recorded.

CNN reported on a Yahoo employee who Twittered his layoff in February and gained an eager following. Ryan Kuder eventually took a job from the hundreds of leads contributed by his followers . His story was covered on prominent blogs and in mainstream media.

Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for its coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys. The New York Times account pointed 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. Editor Joshua Micah Marshall has even been known to give “assignments” to his readers, asking them to comb through official documents.

Gutsy Moves

Monitor Editor John Yemma

Editor & Publisher columnist Steve Outing cancelled his newspaper subscription and wrote about it at length, invoking a deluge of scorn from newspaper vets. Outing stuck to his guns.

Tampa Tribune intern Jessica DaSilva documented a contentious meeting about the need for change at the newspaper and posted the editor-in-chief’s comments on her blog. The young woman endured a torrent of abuse from veteran journalists, including many personal insults, as more than 200 comments piled up on her blog. The incident dramatized the industry’s difficulty in dealing with change.

Land of the Rising Seniors

Newspaper sales in Japan are 2.5 times those of the US as a percentage of the population and journalist layoffs are all but unheard of. The reason: the population is declining. The percentage of children 14 and younger is the lowest it’s been in 100 years and the overall population of Japan is expected to decline by a third over the next 50 years. The lack of a new generation of Web-savvy upstarts means papers have less pressure to move online and figure out how to serve a new audience.

Just Plain Fun

The Onion offered a tutorial in how to write a provocative magazine cover line (right).

A tongue-in-cheek investigation by IowaHawk rounded up recent incidents of criminal activity by journalists and concluded that newsrooms are at risk of becoming a “killing field.” Of course, the reporters could have conducted the exercise for lawyers, accountants or plumbers and come to the same conclusion. The best line was from Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit: “I think it’s unfair to single out journalists as thieves, or violent, or drunks, or child abusers. Sometimes they’re all of the above.” The chart is amusing, too.

Newspapers continue to retreat from print rather than surrender.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the big announcement expected tomorrow from Detroit’s two major metro dailies will be a major pullback from home delivery on all but the three most lucrative days of the week: Thursday, Friday and Sunday. This means that for the nearly 300,000 home subscribers to the News and the Free Press, the ritual of the morning newspaper will cease to exist.

The Journal says parent company Detroit Newspaper Partnership plans to instead produce a scaled-back print edition for newsstand sale on the four least profitable days of the week and direct readers online for expanded coverage. Significant job cuts are expected, but the editorial operations will probably be affected least because of the need to maintain a vigorous online news service.

However, the risky maneuver may ultimately be a disservice to the two troubled newspapers. Quoting the Journal:

Curtailing home delivery would bring the Detroit papers much needed savings, but would also carry considerable risk. At a time when newspapers are fighting to retain readers, steering those readers online instead of delivering their paper to the door could cause them to lose the habit of reading a paper daily.

Pundits largely agree. Chicago Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal calls the plans “less a bold innovation than a Hail Mary pass.” He suggests that a reduction in subscriptions “won’t driver readers to the online product but rather to other ways to get their news.”

Newsosaur Alan Mutter is more blunt: “The reported plans to cut home delivery to just a few days a week…does not merely tweak the classic newspaper model. It eviscerates it, perhaps mortally.” Mutters basically agrees with one anonymous former Gannett circulation exec he quotes who argues that any strategy that breaks readers’ daily habit of picking up the morning newspaper ultimately sends them away forever. Mutter also raises questions about the logistics of transitioning a delivery force that used to operate on a full-time basis to working only part-time. It’s a good point.

The biggest question in our mind is the advisability of continuing to print a substantially smaller edition on the least profitable days of the week and then to deliver it to 65% fewer customers. Advertisers already shun Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday issues, so why give them less reason to advertise? It’s possible that this decision is a means to appease the forces within the Partnership that simply can’t accept the idea of not publishing daily. They would find considerable support among the analysts quoted here. However, appeasement could also be a deadly mistakes.

We’re not sure that audiences will have that much trouble adapting to a new publishing schedule. Today’s readers are increasingly motivated by content rather than routine. Tivo customers can tell you that they prefer to consume programming when it’s convenient for them. If audiences are already rebelling against scheduled television programming, why would they have a problem with newspapers arriving when they’re most likely to read them?

The best idea we’ve seen in that vein comes from Steve Outing, who suggests that those unprofitable issues should simply be distributed free and filled with content that appeals to the younger audience that is already inclined to go online. Young readers have shown a clear preference for the free distribution model employed by Metro as well as hundreds of alternative weeklies. If there’s so little money to be made Monday-Wednesday, why not experiment with an approach that could conceivably generate brand loyalty where none now exists?

At this point, everything is just speculation. Even if the rumors are true, some gaps still need to be filled. Among them:

• What incentives will the Detroit Newspaper Partnership offer to advertisers to run in already unappetizing daily editions that will now reach less than 40% of the full subscriber base?
• Will bulk delivery to businesses be abandoned on selected days along with home subscribers? Business subscribers are the most desirable readers a newspaper has and it would seem foolish to throw them out along with suburban doorsteps.
• How does the group plan to adjust the business model to make the smaller editions profitable? Or is that even the intent?
• With a larger part of revenues dependent upon online sales, how is the culture of the company being adjusted to optimize this revenue stream? How will sales incentives change?

There are many more. One thing’s for sure: few events in the newspaper industry this year have raised more speculation that the announcements coming out of Detroit tomorrow. Let’s hear your comments and the questions you’d like to ask the company.