Two new entries in the almost-but-on-second-thought-no front: Google considered buying a newspaper but decided against it. Eric Schmidt tells the Financial Times that “There is a line and we’re going to stay on our side of it.  We have done well by letting content people creating great content in their own way.” He also says Google has no interest in buying The New York Times, but says David Geffen would make a great owner.”

Schmidt, whose company is often reviled as the great Satan by newspaper publishers, says that the loss of smaller papers come in particular is a tragedy. “The reporting that keeps the mayor honest is going to be gone and I don’t know what to do about that,” he says.

Without explicitly stating that newspapers should become nonprofits, Schmidt implies that the model has appeal. “Newsgathering and profitability model has always been an uncomfortable relationship,” he says. But he dismisses the idea that nonprofit is a panacea. “I don’t know how to solve the problem taking for-profit structures and transitioning them to a nonprofit world without some very generous person between,” he says. But that’s not going to be Google.

There’s a 10-minute video at the link above. If you think Schmidt is some kind of business velociraptor, watch the vid.  He has a Ph.D. in engineering, is thoughtful and contemplative and is also flat-out brilliant.

Also in the might-have-been category, the Washington Post‘s two managing editors told visitors to an online chat last night that the Post considered expanding its distribution base into Baltimore, where the Sun is hemorrhaging, but decided against it. “The best and most cost effective way to get us in Baltimore is either online or through a Kindle subscription,” they wrote as one. “We have indeed evaluated whether it makes economic sense for us to sell subscriptions in the Baltimore area and determined that the math doesn’t work in our favor.”

Miscellany

That’s all she wrote for the Tucson Citizen. A last-ditch attempt attempt by the Arizona attorney general to save the newspaper failed when U.S. District Judge Raner C. Collins said the AG had failed to show that violations of antitrust laws or of the Newspaper Preservation Act had occurred. Quoting verbatim: “While regrettable that the Citizen‘s illustrious legacy must come to end, it can not be said at this time, the decision to close the Citizen involves an anti-trust violation. The Court can not say at this point in time that there is a violation of the Newspaper Preservation Act,” wrote the judge, who definitely should hire one of the Citizen‘s laid-off copy editors.

The Federal Trade Commission will hold a series of workshops entitled “Can News Media Survive the Internet Age? Competition, Consumer Protection, and First Amendment Perspectives” beginning on September 15. From the release: “The workshops will consider a wide range of issues, including possible business and non-profit models for news organizations, the role of targeted behavioral and other online advertising, whether additional, limited antitrust exemptions may be necessary under these unique circumstances, and the implications of online news for both copyright protection and the availability of broadband access.”

The Associated Press is offering a novel buyout program: employees get $500 for every year of service but their pension benefits are increased to 14% to 16% above that which they would normally receive. The plan is clearly aimed at older employees. Applicants must be at least 55 years of age with at least 10 years of AP service and the combination must add up to 75.

Latest layoffs totals, from Erica Smith’s Paper Cuts blog:
Salt Lake Tribune: 3
Raleigh News & Observer: 31
Durham, N.C. Herald-Sun: 7
Detroit Newspaper Partnership: 150
Baton Rouge Advocate: 49
Honolulu Advertiser: 15

And Finally…

From the Columbia Journalism Review: “Stephen Colbert weighed in on future of journalism right now, taking a side in the debate over the role of print: ‘Newspapers are an important part of our lives, not to read, of course, but, when you’re moving you can’t wrap your dishes in a blog.'”

Gawker’s Ryan Tate takes issue with the conventional wisdom that bloggers can’t be depended upon to cover local government.  Keying off of David Simon’s testimony before Congress this week, Tate tells of his experience as a reporter in Oakland, Calif. pounding a local beat. “I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as ‘gadflies’ – deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived,” he writes.

Tate makes an important point that’s been largely missing from the debate over the value of bloggers.  The conventional wisdom is that these newfangled Internet publishers like to lounge in their pajamas all day and spout off about the news reported by the hard-working journalists who get paid to sit in boring local government meetings and pore over boring documents.  No one in their right mind would do this kind of work without pay, the wisdom goes, so the decline of newspapers is the loss of an essential public service.

The flaw in this argument is that it assumes that no one cares about local government or will bother to waste time learning how it works.  But our experience is somewhat different.

Engaged Citizens

Drop by any meeting of your local town government and you’ll find concerned citizens sitting in the cheap seats, watching intently what’s going on.  What motivates these people?  Usually, it’s passion for the topics  being discussed.  Whether it’s an increase in property taxes, a school bond, a new sewer project or a prohibition against walking dogs on the town common, citizens do come out to learn about issues that matter to them.

All of these people are, broadly defined, potential bloggers.  Maybe their tools of choice don’t look like this one, but their desire to communicate is no less powerful than anybody else’s.  Some may choose to use a listserv or e-mail list.  They may tweet their opinions or share them on talk radio.  But they have opinions to share and facts to convey.

Check out a list of bloggers in the borough of Brooklyn as noted in the blog rolls on Brooklyn Heights Blog and A Brooklyn Life.  These people write about all sorts of things: local arts, events, politics, schools and community organizations. They’re not journalists, but they have a lot to contribute to a public discussion and they observe things at a level of granularity that few newspapers could ever match.

The twist is that every one of them has an opinion.  Their “coverage” is filtered through the lens of their biases, which is uncomfortable for people who are accustomed to just-the-facts reporting.  The flipside is that these people collectively gather far more information than news organizations ever could.  With dozens of bloggers covering the borough of Brooklyn, can you really make the argument that citizens have less news available about the their community today than they did five years ago?

The challenge for news organizations is to develop new ways to synthesize and make sense of this deluge of information.  Instead of assigning a reporter to cover city council meetings, it might be easier to set up a webcam and let citizens watch the proceedings themselves.  Local bloggers can be co-opted to contribute to a news aggregation site in exchange for traffic.  Journalists can be retrained to filter and interpret information and validate it against the video captured by the webcam. Coverage of events can be surrounded by opinion about what actually happened.

News organizations were created to serve a public that was starved for information.  Today, the equation has flipped.  We are drowning in information.  The new role of journalists will be to simplify and contextualize.  They’ll be serving a different need, but a need that’s no less pronounced than the one they served previously.

Kindle to the Rescue

The newest port in a storm for the embattled newspaper industry is Amazon’s Kindle, a $500 handheld device that can store thousands of books and periodicals while retaining some of the look and feel of traditional print.

The reason publishers are swarming the Kindle is because of evidence that consumers will do something with it that they don’t do with their desktop computers: pay subscription fees.  It’s not surprising that leading publishers like The New York Times and the Washington Post are syndicating their content through Amazon at fees of up to $14 per month. Both papers have announced programs to offer discounted Kindles to paying subscribers. The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News are investigating ways to deliver devices from Plastic Logic of Mountain View, Calif. that offer a similar experience.

Is the Kindle the salvation for the industry?  Not at $500, it isn’t. As long as Amazon premium-prices the device, the market will be limited to no more than about 5 million US users, according to Forrester Research. Most people aren’t ready to pony up that kind of money for a device that can easily be left in the back pocket of an airline seat, as happened to Sara Nelson, editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly last year.

But don’t expect these prices to hold.  At this point, Kindle has the market mostly to itself, but a slew of competitors are on the horizon. As Moore’s Law kicks in, expect prices to drop to the sub-$100 range within two to three years.  Big publishers are doing the right thing to prepare themselves for mass-market digital reading devices, which could replace laptop computers over time.  By not making the mistake of giving away their content for free on the Kindle, they can avoid the mess that has devalued their current online content.

Miscellany

If anyone thought the purchase of the San Diego Union-Tribune by an equity investment firm would save the company from major layoffs, their hopes have been dashed by news that Platinum Equity plans to lay off 192 employees — or about 19% of the U-T‘s workforce — over the next couple of months. The announcement came just three days after Platinum Equity completed its purchase of the paper from the Copley Press.  Once the new owners, who are self-described turnaround specialists, dig into the property they just acquired, more layoffs will probably follow.

Rupert Murdoch wants to start charging for access to the newspapers owned News Corp., apparently in the belief that subscribers to the New York Post are just like subscribers to The Wall Street Journal. Good luck with all that.  The Boston Globe is also looking into micropayments as a way to extract revenue from readers of its popular Boston.com website, reveals Globe publisher P. Steven Ainsley in an interview that is otherwise unremarkable.

Murdoch, who has been pessimistic about the economy for months, now says things are getting better. This week he declared that “it is increasingly clear that the worst is over,” and that “revenues are beginning to look healthier.” You wouldn’t know that from quarterly earnings just reported by Gannett, McClatchy and Lee Enterprises, but in all fairness, those are backward-looking indicators.

The New York Times Co. and the largest labor union at the Boston Globe came to terms early this morning, agreeing to substantial pay cuts and modifications to controversial lifetime employment guarantee provisions that had previously blocked progress.

Details weren’t released, but negotiators emerged from 10 hours of talks at around 3 a.m. to say that a tentative deal had been reached that would achieve the $10 million in cuts the Globe had asked the Newspaper Guild to make. The union represents about 700 Globe employees, including newsroom staff. The proposed agreement will be submitted to Guild membership for approval on Thursday. Until then, the terms are secret.

Although it’s hard to speculate about just what concessions the union agreed to, the timing indicates that the union buckled under intense pressure. The NYT Co. made its “last best offer” on Tuesday to the Newspaper Guild: a huge 23% pay cut. The union’s most recent proposal was for concessions amounting to about a 5% pay cut, along with changes to benefits plans. The fact that the two sides bridged the gap so quickly and that the union agreed to modify the lifetime employment guarantees indicates that the NYT Co. had the upper hand in negotiations. The Guild had repeatedly called negotiations over the guarantees “a nonstarter.”

Ouch

This deal is going to hurt at the rank and file level. A $10 million cut spread across 700 employees amounts to about $15,000 per person. Assuming that the average Guild member makes about $100,000 a year in fully loaded compensation (wages and benefits), that nets out to a cut of about 15% per person. The union proposal had sought to concentrate those cuts in benefits programs paid to current and retired employees. Management, however, wanted to see wages slashed. Its message was clear: current and future employees of the Boston Globe shouldn’t expect to make nearly as much money as they have in the past.

Even with the $20 million in concessions the Globe‘s seven unions have made, there’s still a big gap in the math. The NYT Co. has said that the Globe is on track to lose $85 million this year, which means that the paper must cut another $65 million in expenses – or find a comparable amount in revenue – to break even. The gap between the necessary expense reductions and the relatively modest cuts agreed upon so far indicates that the Globe‘s problems are far from over.

As negotiations with the Boston Globe‘s unions continued past a midnight deadline, The New York Times Co. filed notice with the federal government today of its plans to shut down the paper in 60 days. Such notice is required under federal law, but the filing of a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification statement doesn’t require the Times Co. to go through with its threats. The Globe unions called the move a negotiating ploy. The Times Co. says it is ready to go ahead and file a binding plant-closing commitment with the state today.

Tense negotiations continued through the weekend, with the Guild saying its offer exceeds the goals set by the Times Co. and the Times Co. raising the stakes even further by admitting that it had made a $4 million accounting error that would require the union to dig even deeper for cuts. The Boston Herald quotes a union official alleging that most of that oversight is actually bad-faith bargaining. Whatever happens, union officials said, expect large layoffs at the Globe. No one seems to think the Times Co. intends to carry through on its threats to shutter the 137-year-old paper, but it’s virtually certain that whatever Globe survives this negotiation process will be far smaller and weaker than the one that has dominated New England for decades. We’ll keep an eye peeled today, but you’ll probably find out quicker from Romenesko.

In Iowa, a Blueprint for Change

They’re shaking up the traditional newspaper model in eastern Iowa. Mark Potts sums up a blueprint for reinvention by the designated change agent at the Cedar Rapids Gazette that outline a vision of the publisher as a center of information, commerce and community. It isn’t about publishing, Steve Buttry says. “We need to become the connection to everything people and businesses need to know and do to live and do business in Eastern Iowa.” He goes on to list the many ways in which the publisher can expand its franchise, from delivering up-to-the-minute Twitter feeds to enabling visitors to buy concert tickets directly from its event listings page.

The part that will rub traditionalists the wrong way is Buttry’s vision of a new approach to revenue in which journalists will be just as responsible for the financial well-being of the company as sales reps. The wall between advertising and editorial is considered no man’s land in most newspaper companies, but Potts praises Buttry for having the courage to envision an alternative. Publishers can position themselves as intermediaries between their audience and local merchants and extract a small fee for enabling transactions. There is nothing dirty about thinking about the financial health of one’s employer. In fact, this economy doesn’t permit the luxury of old silos. Read Potts’ synopsis of how one news organization is changing the way it perceives its business. Read the entire 38-page blueprint document here if you want details.

Conde’s Outlook: Nasty

How bad is it in the upscale lifestyle magazine market? “Wired magazine posted a 57% drop in ad pages in the first quarter, while ad pages at fashion magazines W and Lucky were down more than 40% and 35%, respectively, for the quarter. Architectural Digest‘s ad pages were down 47%,” reports The Wall Street Journal in an article about Conde Nast’s decision to pull the plug on Portfolio magazine after only two years. The numbers make it clear why the decision was necessary: despite its paid circulation of nearly 450,000, Portfolio‘s ad pages were down 61% in the first quarter. The highly visible publication was launched with fanfare and an all-star lineup of journalists two years ago, entering the market dominated by Forbes and Fortune. However, luxury advertising has fallen off the table during the recession and Portfolio was still working off its startup costs. Advertising revenues would have to increase significantly in 2010 to support the business plan, and that just wasn’t going to happen. Some observers think the flight of luxury advertising from upscale magazines could be permanent.

It’s going to get worse, says MarketWatch’s John Friedman. In a short video clip, he says the business publishing market is over-populated and under-advertised. Every business magazine, even the most venerable titles, is vulnerable in an ad downturn like this one.

The J-School Paradox

The Capital Times of Madison, Wisc. Writes about the astonishing surge in journalism school enrollments. “According to an annual enrollment survey done by the University of Georgia, there were 199,711 undergraduates enrolled nationwide in journalism and mass communication schools in
2007 — a jump of 41.6 percent from 1997,” reporter Todd Finkelmeyer writes. “Meanwhile, a recent article on Forbes.com noted that journalism schools at Columbia University, the University of Maryland and Stanford University saw significant spikes in applications this past fall — 30 percent, 25 percent and 20 percent, respectively.”

The story goes on to quote several bright-eyed J-school students who aren’t at all worried about the 15,000 or so journalism jobs that have disappeared over the last 18 months. They believe that a market for quality reporting will always exist and hope that by the time they graduate, the jobs will be there. Professors are quoted saying that journalism teaches critical thinking, an essential skill that can serve a young person well in any profession. It appears that the University of Wisconsin at Madison is ahead of the curve, having revamped its journalism program nearly a decade ago to accommodate multiple media. Ironically, the Capital Times itself exited the print business more than a year ago and has been publishing solely online since then.

Miscellany

The Baltimore Sun laid off 30% of its newsroom last week with the cuts hitting disproportionately hard on senior editorial staff. About one third of those laid off were editors and managers, Editor & Publisher reports. They included both top editorial page editors. Newspaper Guild officials said the moves appeared to be part of a realignment of the news operation toward “multi-platform content,” whatever that is. A reduction of that size could presage a reduction in print frequency along the lines of what the two Detroit dailies are doing. The Sun has the handicap of competing against the Washington Post and other smaller dailies just to the south.

Canada’s National Post will suspend Monday publication during the summer in a cost-cutting move. No layoffs are planned.

The Reading (Pa.) Eagle laid off 52 people, or about 12% of its workforce.

The company that publishes the Vancouver (Wash.) Columbian has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but the issues apparently revolve around real estate investments and not business losses at the newspaper. The Columbian will continue to publish during reorganization.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett reads five newspapers every day, but he wouldn’t buy one at any price. “They have the possibility of going to unending losses…I don’t see anything on the horizon that causes that erosion to end,” says Bullett, who owns the Buffalo News and a piece of the Washington Post Company. He doesn’t intend to sell those ownership stakes, but he isn’t expanding them, either.

And Finally…

The New York Times has two stories that illustrate the severity of the industry’s crisis. It tells of  Todd Smith, a reporter for the Suburban Journals chain of newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises, who was shot while on the job last year. That’s a pretty big sacrifice to make for one’s employers, so “On April 15 of this year, when Mr. Smith was called to a meeting at the Suburban Journals…he wondered if the staff had won an award for coverage of the massacre. Instead, he learned that he and several others were being laid off,” Richard Perez-Pena writes. The story also tells of Paul Giblin, a reporter for the East Vallely Tribune whose work won a Pulitzer Prize two weeks ago. Giblin was laid off last year and now works at a startup online news organization.

Some of journalism’s most prestigious brands took it on the chin in the new round of circulation figures released this morning by the Audit Bureau of Control. Collectively, the 395 newspapers reporting numbers experienced a 7% year-over-year decline, with some of the worst declines occurred at big-city titles in the Northeast.

There was little good news, except for The Wall Street Journal‘s continued gravity-defiance. The paper squeaked out a .61% circulation gain and is now more than twice as large as The New York Times.  Some other troubled papers, like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, also showed only minor declines in the most recent six months.

USA Today, which has managed to maintain relative stability in previous reports, fell with a thud, dropping almost 7.5%.  Marriott Corp.’s recent decision to stop delivering the paper to hotel guest rooms won’t affect the numbers until the next reporting period

These figures shouldn’t be taken as a snapshot in time but rather as a trend. Newspaper circulation falls for all sorts of reasons, including voluntary cutbacks by publishers.  Trends become evident only over multiple reporting periods. With that in mind, the titles listed below have to be considered the most at risk, since they have shown average declines in the double digits over the last two reporting periods.

Miscellany

Jeff Jarvis asks journalists to focus on where they add value and to stop doing everything else. “If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it,” he writes. Jarvis cites the example of TV reporters dashing from place to place to tape standups in front of iconic institutions. They’re not reporting, they’re simply relating commodity information in a contextual setting. Why are TV stations spending money on this?  “When we cut out all the incredible waste – those standups and rewrites and frills and blather – and when we have an ecosystem that rewards unique value, as the internet does, then I think we could end up with more journalism, more reporting,” Jarvis says.

Robert Picard tweaks bankrupt newspaper companies for paying large executive bonuses, calling the argument that said such payments are necessary to retain good people “hollow.” Few people are leaving good jobs in a time when nobody’s hiring, Picard writes. Bankruptcy is a time to restructure, not just get out from under your obligations. The good news: Picard believes “Most newspapers… are surviving the downturn and will be serving their communities for many years.”

The Springdale (Ark.) Morning News has laid off nine newsroom workers and an unspecified number of employees in other groups, reports in its newsroom, in addition to cuts in other departments within the paper, reports KSFM television. The paper will also reduce its size and page count. The station’s spare report is typical of those we see on TV websites. If most of these stations didn’t have newspapers and wire services feeding them copy, they wouldn’t have any news at all.

The Los Angeles Daily News laid off at least four more newsroom employees, according to a blog maintained by its Newspaper Guild chapter.

Boston Globe unions staged a rally last Friday to save the paper, which faces a shutdown decision at the end of this week. Speeches by union members were reminiscent of the greatest Samuel Gompers oratory, only the problem is that the Globe‘s parent is flat on its back. Cutting executive pay isn’t going to close an $85 million profitability shortfall.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reached agreement with the union representing 300 newsroom workers that gives the publisher $1.7 million in cost relief. The deal includes a 3% cut in base wages, a 30% cut in merit pay, two days of unpaid furlough in each of the next two years, a freeze in some pensions and a reduction in severance.

The New York Times Co. is sticking by its May 1 deadline to gain $20 million in cost-saving concessions from Boston Globe unions or shutter the paper. That doesn’t mean the Globe would close next Friday, but owners would make the decision then. Expect this one to go down to the last minute.

The Boston Globe has a story explaining its much-maligned lifetime job guarantees. The deals negotiated 15 years ago have become a hot potato as Times Co. has threatened to close the Globe unless $20 million can be cut from the expense line. The story has some interesting background on how guarantees grew out of management’s successful efforts to seize control from the unions more than 30 years ago.

Guarantees are almost unique to the newspaper industry, having first been negotiated in the 1960s when automation was threatening to put compositors and pressmen out of work. Publishers figured they could offer lifetime employment to people whose jobs were threatened and still make more money because the productivity benefits of automation were so great.

Another interesting motivation was the effect of automation on strikes. “The US newspaper industry averaged 30 to 40 strikes a year in the 1960s,” the Globe says, quoting industry analyst John Morton. “Now, they are rare. The last major newspaper strike occurred in Seattle in 2000.”

Of course, what seemed like a good deal at the time has become an anchor around some publishers’ necks as guarantees have limited their flexibility to manage expenses. In a similar move, the steel industry negotiated generous pension and health care benefits with its unions in the 1960s and 70s. Thirty years later, companies found themselves spending twice as much to pay retired employees as they paying productive workers.

Trouble in Paid Content Land

New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger vowed to stay the course during a shareholder meeting earlier this week.  He defended the Times Co.’s commitment to editorial quality and the validity of the advertising model, yet he hinted that other options were on the table. “”We continue to take a fresh, hard and deep look at various subscription, purchase and micropayment models,” he said.

Sulzberger may want to consider the experience of INDenver Times, a startup staffed mostly by members of the failed Rocky Mountain News. We told you about them on Monday, including their plans for an ambitious paid subscription model that includes “direct, real time conversations with our editors and writers…from 10 am to 5 pm every weekday.” Well, not so fast. INDenver Times just announced that it didn’t meet the 50,000-subscriber threshold it needed to pursue its novel business model and so won’t be going ahead with paid subscriptions.  The announcement was murky on whether INDenver Times will go ahead at all. Various spokespeople talked around the importance of journalism but didn’t say whether that would include an ongoing commitment to this venture.

Miscellany

The Wall Street Journal carried this front-page banner headline week: “Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project.” The Journal doesn’t run many banner headlines, so this must be a big deal, right?  Actually, apparently not.  As Slate’s Jack Shafer explains, the breach in question poses no significant threat to the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet program. It amounts to theft of a maintenance manual. “The Chinese now know how many miles the F-35 can fly before its timing belt must be replaced, its oil changed, and its tires rotated,” he explains. Shafer also documents the putdowns from by Journal rivals Washington Post and New York Times, which both gave the story barely passing mention in their own pages.  He also points to a recent piece in The Nation, intriguingly titled “Has the ‘Journal’ Lost Its Soul?” However, The Nation‘s servers appear to be down this morning, no doubt the victim of a Chinese hacker attack.

We’ll be watching with one sleepy eye next week as Sen. John F. Kerry holds hearings in Washington on the financial problems facing the newspaper industry. The fact that there is no support at any level of government for a bailout of the industry doesn’t faze Kerry, who appears to be more interested in appeasing the editors at the Boston Globe who have endorsed him for many years.

Forecasting Media’s Future

Also next week, we’ll be speaking in San Francisco on the topic of “World Without Media: What Will Fill The Void?” along with online journalism and social media expert JD Lasica at the New Communications Forum. This general session presentation begins Tuesday at 4:00.  Click on the logo at left for a discount. Get an even bigger discount by registering with code SNCR New Communications Forum is one of the best social media events of the year. whoIts organizer, the nonprofit Society For New Communications Research has assembled a faculty of leading new-media thinkers who reserve some of their best stuff for the biannual conferences.  Take a look at the agenda and see what we mean.

We’ll also be leading a panel on Wednesday on the topic of “Media in Transition: The Future of News in a Democratized World” at the co-located Inbound Marketing Summit. The three panelists are all newspaper industry veterans who have successfully made the jump to the digital world: Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher and Ken Doctor of Outsell. Click the image at right and use code VIPS50 to get half off the conference fee.

And Finally…

Nicholas Carr points us to a site maintained by one Timothy McSweeney, which is one of the funniest – and by that we mean “most droll” – online outposts we’ve encountered in some time – and by that we mean days.  Check out the syllabus for an “Internet-Age Writing” class. A snippet:

“Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t!”

And also: “Students will work to make their blogging more vivid using the fundamentals of the craft, such as imagery, foreshadowing, symbolism, and viral paparazzi photos of celebrity nip slips.”

New media enterprises are rising out of the ashes of their collapsed predecessors.

Sportswriter Sam Adams is one of several INDenver Times staff who introduce the new site on video

A group of 30 former Rocky Mountain News staffers has launched INDenverTimes, a professional-looking news site that aims to cover local news, sports, business, arts and entertainment, along with “a Denver perspective on national news.” The venture will take a novel approach to subscriptions when it begins charging for premium access in two weeks. Paid subscribers will get “access to the INsider Channel where you can have a direct, real time conversations with our editors and writers…from 10 am to 5 pm every weekday.” The channel will also go live if breaking news happens at other times of the day.

In its first month, the operation recorded 70,000 unique visitors and more than 311,000 page views, or about as much traffic as a top-500 blog. Funded by entrepreneurs Kevin Preblud, Brad Gray and Ben Ray “three Denver entrepreneurs” (we’re trying to get their names), the venture has a hybrid revenue model and has recruited an impressive list of writers and business-side executives. The site also looks clean and well-organized. Believe it or not, this venture is running on WordPress, the same content management system that powers this blog. They’re just doing a lot more with it.

Also, some former Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers have launched a nonprofit online newspaper with regional coverage. Seattle PostGlobe is basically a multi-author blog that covers news, sports, lifestyles and opinion. It’s very early-stage and looks it, but we’ll keep an eye on this bootstrapped operation as it gets its sea legs.

Street Brawl in Boston

The Boston Globe, evidently tired of all the razzing it was getting about its threatened shutdown, fires a return volley at crosstown rival Boston Herald. Weekday circulation at the Herald is off 38% in the last decade and the newsroom staff has been cut by half. Yadda yadda. What’s really interesting about this story is a comment posted by Tom Mashberg, the Herald Sunday editor who’s quoted in the piece. Mashberg reprints part of an e-mail sent to him by reporter Keith O’Brien in which O’Brien outlines plans to include Mashberg’s comments about the Globe‘s perilous situation that don’t appear in the story. He also notes that the fact that the Herald is actually profitable isn’t mentioned, either, despite a lengthy discussion about what the Herald is doing to survive. “Looks like the editors got hold of this and turned it into a hatchet job,” he says.

Jules Crittendon, a Herald editor, minces no words telling what he thinks of the Globe story and the Globe in general. “One Herald reporter is worth something like 5 to 10 Globies, for all their inflated sense of self-worth,” he writes. And he’s just getting started. Crittendon rips the Globe for a self-important attitude, lazy reporters, layers of redundant management, endless story lengths and on an on. If you hate the Globe to begin with, his blog entry will warm your heart.

The Globe‘s negotiations with its unions continue to be rancorous. The Newspaper Guild now says it will negotiate concessions related directly to cost cuts, but won’t talk about issues like the elimination of lifetime job guarantees for about 190 veterans and the end of seniority rules in layoffs. The Guild is also calling for negotiations to be performed in public and says it wants to deal directly with any potential acquirer on the cost-cut issue. The union’s defiance is a marked contrast to the relatively quick work the San Francisco Chronicle‘s unions made of Hearst’s demands to cut costs. By the way, Globe managers are feeling some of the pain, too. Bonuses have been eliminated for this year, affecting more than 200 people, including the publisher.

Government Bailout for News Infrstructure

Mark Cooper suggests a hybrid approach to saving quality journalism: a “media stimulus package” that could give new localized news services a platform upon which to build profitable businesses. ” Just as IT health and education funds seek to build a new infrastructure for public service in their areas, IT media funding can build infrastructure in the journalism space,” writes Cooper, who is a fellow at the  Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University.

Summarizing his argument on Huffington Post (a fuller discussion is here) Cooper notes that major metro dailies are being hit hardest by changes in reader and advertiser behavior because they need to be all things to all people. Although most major metros have discarded much of their national and international coverage, they’re still forced to do too much with too few resources. Shoring up these doomed businesses isn’t the answer, Cooper says. Instead, we should look to the existing media models “that are closest to the emerging citizen-media, like public governmental and educational cable channels on the TV side and low-power FM on the radio side.” These media have long been under-funded, but they have the best chance of molding their models to the new participatory journalism. As long as the US is pouring $1.6 trillion into broken banks, how about a few billion to lay the foundation for a new media infrastructure?

Uh-Oh. It’s Earnings Time

Gannett kicked off the earnings parade, which looks to be more of a funeral procession this year, announcing a60% drop in profit on an 18% slide in revenue. Bad as the numbers were, Gannett’s operating profits actually beat analysts’ expectations by a penny. They also weren’t as bad as the 30% declines expected by some analystsquoted in The New York Times last week.  Those analysts mostly agree that this is a 100-year flood for the industry with the combination of recessionary pressures, catastrophic business problems in some key advertising segments and rising paper and fuel costs sending many publishers into the red. They also agree that more papers are likely to close this year. The revenue plunge isn’t hurting small newspapers and broadcast outlets quite as hard, but even they are expecting double-digit declines.

And it isn’t just newspapers. “Magazines collectively recorded a 25.9 percent plunge in ad pages in the first quarter, with revenue falling 20.2 percent,” says Seeking Alpha’s Jeff Bercovici. ZenithOptimedia is projecting the worst declines in ad spending since it started keeping statistics in 1980: overall US spending down 8.7% with newspapers down 12% and magazines down 11%.

Miscellany

In a sign of the times, the world’s largest maker of newsprint has filed for bankruptcy protection. Abitibi-Bowater, which was formed from a 2007 merger, is struggling to pay $8.78 billion in debt. Even though the Canadian company controls 45% of the North American-based newsprint market, a steep drop in demand has slammed its business. The company has already cut paper production 25% this year. Its 25 pulp and paper mills and 30 wood products plants will continue to operate for now, but some are likely to close as part of the restructuring.

Employment levels in American newsrooms are now lower than they’ve been in more than 25 years, the American Society of Newspaper Editors reports.  The industry shed a record 5,900 jobs last year, more than double the previous record of 2,400 eliminated in 2007. Erica Smith pegs the number much higher at nearly 16,000 reported layoffs in 2008. Employment levels are now comparable to those from the early 1980s. The good news (we guess): there was a 21% rise in online-only journalists last year, to 2,300. Incidentally, the American newsroom remains mostly white: Minorities make up 13.4% of the workforce and 450 newspapers employ no minorities at all.

More people still rely on newspapers for their news than on the Internet, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Parade Publications and published by the Newspaper Project. The study of 1,004 US adults also found that 90% of Americans rely on printed or online newspapers for their news and that newspapers are the only medium used more for local than for national news. The research confirms what most people already know: newspapers are important news sources. It doesn’t cast any light on the real problem, though, which is how to create a business model for them that works.

Sam Zell now admits that his highly leveraged 2007 purchase of Tribune Co. was a mistake. For some reason, several news outlets thought this was newsworthy. Zell is always good for a quote, though: Commenting on the prospect of finding a merger partner for his bankrupt company, Zell said, “That’s like asking someone in another business if they want to get vaccinated with a live virus.”

The Orlando Sentinel laid off 50 people last week and didn’t announce it, according to an anonymous comment on this Chicago Tribune story. The person is right that there was no announcement, but we couldn’t confirm the layoffs.

The New York Times is cutting and consolidating some sections in order to save money. Gone are Escapes, a travel guide published on Fridays, as well as Sunday sections that only go to readers in the New York metropolitan area. They’ll be combined into a new Sunday section featuring regional information. Fashion coverage is axed from the weekly magazine and the guide to each day’s newspaper will be consolidated into a single page.

And Finally…

A reader in upstate New York reports on this example of an over-eager, and ultimately failed, Albany Times Union promotion:

I only wanted Sunday’s paper but then they started delivering Thursday and Saturday for free.

When I tried to stop the free Thursday and Saturday papers, they offered me the whole rest of the week for free. I said no, I only wanted Sunday. They said okay and for a while I only got Sunday deliveries, but then I started getting Thursday and Saturday again. I figured it had something to do with local ads on those days but it still annoyed me.

I was so frustrated that I decided to stop delivery altogether. That’s when I was told “You don’t want to put your paper carrier out of a job do you?”  And then they offered me a totally free subscription seven days a week for three months. I didn’t accept it. I just wanted them to stop delivering free papers that I didn’t have time to read and was just throwing out.

So the irony of the whole thing is that because they kept sending me free papers, they lost me as a customer.”

Editor & Publisher looks at the list of solutions being proposed to the newspaper industry’s troubles and adds a new one into the mix: the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company, or L3C. An L3C “is a corporation that qualifies as a charity under IRS rules but runs as a for-profit business,” Mark Fitzgerald explains, and it’s gathering momentum as a rescue strategy among various chapters of the Newspaper Guild.

That’s right: The Newspaper Guild may get into the business of running newspapers, if only to save its membership from annihilation. An L3C is allowed to take investments from charities and nonprofits because it has a “social benefit.” This new kind of nonprofit is now permitted in several states and the Guild “is lobbying for federal legislation – expected to be introduced later this spring – that would explicitly include newspapers among businesses that have a ‘social benefit.'”  

Apparently, the thinking is that a lot of newspapers are going to come on the market selling at pennies on the dollar this year and this new tax structure would allow owners to spread out ownership among a great many entities, including businesses like printing press makers and auto dealers who have a vested interest in maintaining the business. Foundations would also be able to treat their donations as investments that could earn a return.

Another school of thought is to tear down antitrust rules that prevent newspapers from cooperating on fixing prices, E&P says. This could be a solution to the “content wants to be free” problem: If newspaper owners can legally collude to set prices and licensing fees for their content, then they can conceivably reverse the tide and charge for their product.

One thread is clear throughout the feature, though: No one is seriously arguing that newspapers should be publicly supported like National Public Radio. The consensus among owners and even Guild officials is that these businesses must stand on their own.

BTW, this story was just put online on April 1 after first appearing in E&P‘s print edition in March.

Sun-Times Parent is Bankrupt

Sun-Times Media Group, Inc. (STMG), which operates 59 newspapers and websites, including the Chicago Sun-Times, filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday. The company has been under severe financial and competitive pressure and was weakened by a fraud scandal that landed two previous executives in jail. Chairman and interim CEO Jeremy Halbreich said the company is looking at possible asset sales and new investments, and that it has sufficient resources to work through the bankruptcy process.

The Toronto Globe and Mail looks deeper into STMG’s financial situation and the ripple effect of the 2007 fraud convictions. Last year, the company lost $344-million on revenue of $324-million, as advertising revenue fell 18 per cent in the fourth quarter and is expected to drop 30 per cent in 2009. What’s more, STMG is contractually obligated to pay the former executives’ legal costs, which total $118 million so far. To top it all off, it may face a $510 million tax obligation as a consequence of illegal deductions those executives took.

Dour Pew Report Nevertheless Offers Hope

“This is the sixth edition of our annual report on the State of the News Media in the United States. It is also the bleakest,” reads the introduction to The Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual State of the News Media report. It certainly delivers on that promise. We haven’t read all 180,000 words, nor are we likely to, but you can start with the executive summary if you want to dive in yourself.

The media overall had a terrible year in 2008 with the newspaper and magazine segments being hit the hardest and the cable TV industry providing the single bright spot. Cable networks actually increased their newsroom investments by an average of 7% during the year, with CNN adding bureaus in 10 cities. This modest growth wasn’t nearly enough to make up for the huge cost cuts in other media, though. By the end of 2008, all three TV networks had pulled their embedded reporters from Iraq. Newspaper circulations continued to decline; Sunday readership is off 17% since 2001.

The biggest disaster was in news magazines, with only one in four Americans reporting they’ve read one the day before. Time, which invented the genre, may be the only one left pretty soon, the report says.

Public trust in media dropped, but historical data shows that this trend is erratic. Interestingly, a vast majority of Americans (70%) believe the media favored Barack Obama in the most recent election. Even a majority of Democrats believe that.

Newspapers are in “free fall,” the report concludes, although “We still do not subscribe to the theory that the death of the industry is imminent. The industry over all in 2008 remained profitable,” turned in revenues of $38 billion and employed 45,000 professionals gathering and editing the news. There is reason to believe that traditional walls between online and print are falling and that newspapers are figuring out how to monetize targeted audience segments. They also appear to be much more open to working with aggregators and partners.

Still, the long-term outlook continues to be dim because of the economy, debt pressure and the unwillingness of investors to spend money in mature markets. The value that papers provide, though, is only increasing in importance. “In what traditionalists tend to dismiss as a cacophony of talking heads, celebrity infotainment, opinion-driven blogosphere exchanges and information overload, the integrity and sense-making of professionally done news should be more valuable than ever.”

The report also has an interesting section analyzing the practices and credibility of citizen media. It features an update of an earlier report that audited 64 citizen news sites. The new research should provide some comfort to established news organizations because it finds that, in general, they do a better job of incorporating citizen voices into their coverage than pure grassroots citizen operations. In particular, legacy news organizations are better at giving citizens a voice in published content and making it easy for readers to download and share information. In fact, the only area in which mainstream media’s citizen journalism ventures failed to outshine the grassroots sites was in linking to competitors’ content.

Finally, the report includes profiles of several new media ventures, ranging from NewHavenIndependent.org to MinnPost.com to GlobalPost.com.

Miscellany

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s buyout offer has 120 takers, which is more than was expected. As a result, the involuntary layoff total won’t be as high as many had feared. The newspaper management has been working with the union to restructure its contract. Even with the buyout, remaining employees will still see pay cuts and longer hours.

The Livingston County (Mich.) Daily Press & Argus has announced a “significant but unspecified number of layoffs” in its 95-employee workforce. Management would only say that the number was more than 10 and included Managing Editor Maria Stuart.

The Staunton (Va.) Daily News Leader will cut eight full-time employees and 15 part-timers from a workforce of unspecified size. Just one day earlier, the paper said it would outsource its printing operations to the Harrisonburg Daily News-Record. Laid-off employees include “press operators, mailroom workers and other employees charged with the production side of printing the paper every day.”

If you’re in Eugene, Oregon this afternoon, you can stop by the university at 4 p.m. and hear Boston Globe editor Martin Baron talk about the challenges facing newspapers, presumably including his own. The Globe laid off another 50 people last week.

Amid all the hand-wringing about the lack of new-media alternatives to newspapers, the online-only Huffington Post is setting up a small investigative unit to examine the nation’s economy. The news site is collaborating with The Atlantic Philanthropies and others to launch the Huffington Post Investigative Fund with an initial budget of $1.75 million and plans to hire 10 investigative journalists who will primarily coordinate work done by freelancers. “All of us increasingly have to look at different ways to save investigative journalism,” said founder Ariana Huffington (left). She added that the fund will probably hire laid-off newspaper journalists.

Everything the venture produces will be available free for any publication or website to publish. While the group’s initial focus will be on the economy, the founders intend to cover a wide range of topics over time. Content won’t reflect HuffPo’s left-leaning politics because the philanthropic funding requires a neutral perspective. Jay Rosen, who will advise the project, has more detail on his blog.

Critics find a hint of irony in Huffington’s journalism bailout plan. Joseph Tartakoff notes that “Some traditional media outlets have previously accused the HuffPo of stealing their content. The Chicago Reader, for instance, charged Huffington Post with ‘grand theft‘ after it reprinted one of the publication’s articles wholesale on its site.” HuffPo practices a new style of journalism with a small staff of reporters and links to other sources aggressively from its home page.

Jeff Jarvis likes the HuffPo idea and suggests that $1.75 million can go a lot farther than one might think. He evokes the “1% rule” of online communities, which is that 1% of the people create the content that the other 99% consume and discuss. “You need only a limited number of contributors to support great things in a gift economy. See: Wikipedia and NPR,” Jarvis writes.

John Yemma would probably agree. As his publication, the Christian Science Monitor, goes Web-mostly, the editor (right) has launched a blog that he hopes will be “a place to talk about the changes in media.” In his second entry, he compares the crowd-sourced Wikipedia model to the closed Encarta and Britannica products. “General knowledge…can’t withstand an effort that was developed specifically for the Internet and that harnesses gifted amateurs,” he writes. And he issues a warning to newspapers about putting content behind a pay wall, as Britannica and Encarta did. “The Web is its own universe with its own rules,” he writes. Such new-media thinking from a veteran print journalist indicates that the Monitor experiment will be an interesting one to watch.

Debating the Value of Newspapers to Democracy

Slate’s Jack Shafer takes a dim view of the idea that newspapers are essential to democracy. Before the current crisis, he writes, people mostly complained about the lousy job newspapers did of getting the facts straight and delivering balanced coverage. Now that the medium is failing, newspapers have been “reduced to a compulsory cheat sheet for democracy. All this lovey-dovey about how essential newspapers are to civic life and the political process makes me nostalgic for the days, not all that long ago, when everybody hated them.”

17th Century Newspaper

Shafer points out that when Thomas Jefferson said he preferred newspapers without government to government without newspapers, he wasn’t talking about the broadsheets we know today. Newspapers in Jefferson’s time were baldly partisan and often skewed the facts to suit their views. How did people figure out the truth when each journal had its own version of the truth? They triangulated, they checked other sources and they figured it out. This worked okay up until about 50 years ago, when newspapers decided to become the arbiters of truth. That’s convenient, but it doesn’t mean we can’t go back to a form that the founding fathers believed was essential to democracy.

The idea that many small contributions can out-produce a few big ones is nicely articulated by Timothy Lee on TechDirt. In order to understand how journalism can be reinvented, you need to discard the notion that only monolithic, vertically integrated organizations can cover the news. “The Internet makes possible a much more decentralized model, in which lots of different people, most of them volunteers, participate in the process of gathering and filtering the news,” he writes. “If millions of people each contribute small amounts of time to this kind of decentralized information-gathering, they can collectively do much of the work that used to be done by professional reporters and editors.”

If you’re geeky enough, you’ll recognize the open-source software model in this thinking. The most powerful force ever to come along in software development depends upon teams of loosely-organized developers each contributing a little bit of their time to building software that anyone can use for free. No, journalism isn’t software development, and there are certain practices of journalism that can’t be duplicated by a person sitting at a desk in India. However, Lee suggests that if the gadflies who already hang around city council meetings start reporting upon them on their blogs, then the community effect can take over to turn that amateur reportage into real journalism. You don’t need professional reporters for everything.

Jon Talton begs to differ. In an angry and resentful blog entry, he derides the idea that grass-roots efforts can ever replace the depth and credibility of what professional journalism organizations produce. Special interests, “will all have stronger voices for their agendas. Manias, rumors and groupthink will be more prevelant. In many localities, people will be particularly ill-informed about their government and major economic powers, pluralism will decrease and corruption will rise,” he writes. After that, we suppose, come the locusts.

Miscellany

Media General is cutting back again in Florida, saying there are no signs yet that the economy is picking up. Its Florida Communications Group cut 53 jobs, eliminated 12 vacant positions, closed two niche publications and added three more days of unpaid furlough to the 10 that employees were already required to take.

Back in the early days of the Web, some newspapers were criticized for withholding information from their websites until the stories had already appeared in print. Now that times have changed, the Minneapolis Star Tribune is being labeled a visionary for doing the same thing. The Strib has enjoyed good success online despite its small-market roots, so the paper is gambling that it can entice readers to become print subscribers by withholding some deep investigative reporting from the website. “The best of our deep, exclusive content will be available online later in the week, unless we have a compelling reason to post it sooner,” wrote editor Nancy Barnes in a letter to readers.

The Boston Herald laid off 12 people, or 6% of its workforce.

The Associated Press has a great list of “daily newspapers that have reduced publication days since last year.” In reality, many of the papers on the list were not technically dailies to begin with, but all publish at least five days a week.  It looks like Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays are the most popular days to cut.

The Houston Chronicle joins the long string of newspapers that assert their commitment to “strong watchdog journalism” while covering news of their own troubles with e.e. cummings-like simplicity. The newspaper devotes just 208 words to news that it is laying off 12% of its staff, or nearly 200 people. That’s about one word per victim. In fact, the Chronicle doesn’t even mention a body count. You have to read The Wall Street Journal account to find that number. Even the AP devotes more space to the story than the Chronicle.

We have to wonder if this is some kind of Enron hangover. Are Houston media so tired of covering bad news that they just pass along the press release without comment or question? To be fair, the Chronicle does invite reader comments on a blog and posts a single response to the many questions people submit about who exactly was let go. Still, one response from one ombudsman to news of the loss of 90 newsroom employees hardly satisfies the public’s right to know. Nor will that information be passed along to the paper’s 448,271 print readers. How do we know there are 448,271 print readers? We read the AP story. That information wasn’t in the Chronicle.

We don’t know what went on inside the walls of the newspaper yesterday, but an entry on Houston Press Blogs makes it sound positively eerie. Without citing sources, Steve Olafson reports that no upper managers were laid off but the only two women on the editorial board were. So going forward, the editorial charter of the leading newspaper serving the great and diverse city of Houston will be directed by five white guys. The paper now has practically no suburban news coverage and it laid off the reporter who’s covered NASA since the 1986 Challenger disaster.

Olafson’s most damning anecdote: “Chronicle Vice-President and Editor Jeff Cohen never came out of his office to address the staff during the day-long process of buttonholing employees to deliver the bad news. Instead, he issued a memo.”

Boston Globe Battles Rival Herald for Irrelevance

How long will the Boston Globe be around? Bloomberg says layoffs will be needed to meet the goal of a 12% newsroom staff reduction. But it’s more than that. The Globe has become an anchor around the neck of New York Times Co., which paid $1.1 billion for it and its Worcester, Mass. sister paper in 1993. Circulation and revenue losses at the Globe have far outstripped those of the Times and the only bright spot in the business is the Boston.com website. Barclay’s recently valued the Globe at just $20 million, or more than 98% less than what the Times paid for it. And it’s clear that resistance to change is a powerful force in the newsroom. We attended a meeting of the Social Media Club in Cambridge, Mass. this week at which a young Globe reporter talked about the news staff’s focus on scooping the rival Boston Herald, a newspaper that has fallen so far that a lot of people outside of downtown Boston don’t even know it’s still around. The Globe‘s issues aren’t beating the Herald, but rather staying relevant to readers who could care less about either of them.

Publisher Fights Back at Newspaper Critics

Remember Time magazine’s list of the 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America from earlier this month?  It’s a load of hooey, says Randy Siegel, president of Parade Publications in a biting commentary in Editor & Publisher. Siegel assumes that most people didn’t notice the byline on the list, which was not a Time reporter but rather Douglas McIntyre. He’s an editor at 24/7 Wall St., a website whose parent also runs a site called Volume Spike Investor, which recommends stocks that are undergoing extreme short-term volume fluctuations. “It’s a sad day when Time magazine…runs an unsubstantiated article on its website, without a single disclaimer, from Wall Street speculators who make their living peddling tips to…day-traders,” writes Siegel, who is co-founder of the Newspaper Project, a booster site for mainstream media.

Siegel doesn’t stop there when naming names.  His next target is Jeff Jarvis, the ubiquitous blogger who has long been a vocal critic of the conventional media.  Siegel credits Jarvis for being smart, but wishes the NYU professor and consultant would disclose more openly his advisory activities on behalf of companies that benefit from the destruction of the institutions he criticizes. Siegel also has some harsh words for CNN.com, which he says has covered the newspaper industry’s troubles with surprising zeal. CNN “probably would like nothing better than to see newspapers and newspaper websites fail, so their biggest competitors for audience and ad revenue would go by the wayside,” he speculates.

Miscellany

The Christian Science Monitor wraps up its 100-year run as a daily newspaper this weekend. Going forward, the thoughtful but lightly circulated journal will focus its efforts online, choosing to rely on journalism rather than video and infographics, according to editor John Yemma. He tells Media News International that the Monitor “intends to increase its page view five-fold by 2013, end its reliance on a Christian Science Church subsidy that now provides 40 percent to 50 percent of its revenues, and achieve financial sustainability by 2015.”The monitor was the first major newspaper to largely abandon the print market in favor of the Web and we wish it well.

We haven’t read any criticism of the hare-brained Newspaper Revitalization Act that’s briefer and more biting than that by Tim Windsor on the Nieman blogs. “I am immediately suspicious of any effort that has as its starting point that newspapers are precious things to be preserved, forever, like some kind of ubiquitous, everlasting Williamsburg of media,” he writes. “The worst thing that could happen would be for newspaper companies to find the means to suddenly become comfortable again.” We couldn’t have said it better and have nothing to add.

Allvoices, the community journalism project that we covered here last July, has added a feature to its website to rate the credibility of contributors. The feature is intended to address the widespread criticism that community journalism has weak quality control. The credibility meter evaluates both the content of a report and the reputation of the author on an ongoing basis as stories move through the Allvoices systems. Criteria include community ratings of the author and content, duplication with other stories and level of supporting content in mainstream media.

The Bakersfield Californian cut 12% of its staff and shook up its management ranks. The 26 positions that were eliminated include 14 in the newsroom and come on top of a 10% workforce cut in December. Management cited a 30% drop in year-over-year revenues as the culprit. The Californian, which has won some attention for its efforts to inspire reader contributions, is also establishing a high-level editorial job called vice president/content. Olivia Garcia, publisher of subsidiary Mercado Nuevo, assumes that role with Californian editor Mike Jenner reporting to her.

Gannett is telling employees to take another unpaid week off in the second quarter on top of the one they had to take off in the first quarter. The company is also temporarily cutting salaries of some high-paid employees.

And Finally…

Nineteen-year-old Dutch college student Marco Kuiper has assembled a collection of weird and wild photos from around the web going back to the middle of last year. He calls it “imagedump,” and the selections range from hysterical to disturbing to borderline obscene. They all have one thing in common: They’re fascinating to look at. Is this citizen journalism?  Who cares?  It’s funny as hell.