Newspaper layoffs are now being paired with salary cuts as publishers seek to avoid running up even larger body counts. McClatchy’s announcement early this week that it will cut 1,600 jobs is already claiming victims at the publisher’s largest papers.

The Miami Herald will eliminate 175 jobs and cut the pay of salaried employees by 5% to 10%. The publisher will also require one-week unpaid furloughs beginning in April. The cuts include 33 full-time and eight part-time newsroom positions. Altogether, the move slashes 19% of the Herald‘s workforce. Other cost-cutting mesures include leasing some of the paper’s office space, cutting trim size and eliminating an international edition. McClatchy put the Herald up for sale in December, but there have been no reported takers so far.

Another McClatchy paper, the Kansas City Star, will cut its workforce by 15%, or 150 employees, in line with corporate guidelines. Pay will also be reduced by between 5% and 10% and management bonuses will be eliminated. With the latest cuts, the Star will have hacked 325 jobs over the last nine months, or about a quarter of its workforce.

Two weeks ago, the Denver Post lost its biggest competitor. Now it’s picked up the printing work for a nearby daily. The Fort Collins Coloradoan said it will outsource printing and delivery to the Denver Newspaper Agency starting May 12 and lay off 48 people. The agency was created to handle business operations for the Post and the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News. The Coloradoan said the speed of the agency’s new presses will enable it to move printing operations 50 miles away and still maintain current delivery schedules.

The union representing employees at the Modesto Bee just voted to accept a pay reduction, but the paper will lay off 11 employees anyway. It could have been worse: Management was ready to cut 10 more jobs without union concessions. Wages for surviving employees will be cut by between 2% and 10% and employees may also be required to take one-week unpaid vacations later this year. The nearby San Luis Obispo Tribune will lay off three employees at the end of the month and cut four more positions as it outsources some financial functions to the Fresno Bee. The cuts will reduce the workforce to 163 people, down about 17% from a year ago.

Members of the California Media Workers Guild, Local 39521 could vote as early as today on contract concessions intended to keep the San Francisco Chronicle afloat – at least for now. The provisional agreement reached late Monday involves terms that are usually antithetical to labor unions. Basically, management will get the authority to lay off employees without regard to seniority. Other concessions include reductions in vacation time and leave, expansion of the work week from 37.5 hours to 40 and expanded management ability to subcontract work. The Chronicle has put a gun to the union’s head, saying it would need significant concessions just to keep the paper operating. Even then, owner Hearst Corp. is on record saying that more than 30% of Guild-represented employees will be let go. The tentative contract provides for two weeks’ pay for each year of service for laid-off workers.

The Twitter microblogger who goes by the handle @themediaisdying comes out of the shadows to write about opportunity in the industry. If you care about the future of media, you need to follow Paul Armstrong’s tweets. His opinion piece in BusinessWeek is quite the contrast to his online persona. “Nothing has gone ‘wrong,’ per se,” he writes. “It is simply a changed balance of power. Creator and consumer are no longer tied to the other.” Armstrong says mainstream media can carve out a profitable place in the new world by focusing on what readers want rather than what they can deliver.  “Media, get into our daily routines any way you can and make sure you stay there,” he writes. “Once there, cultivate additional income through advertising that adds to, rather than detracts from, the reason we came to you.” It all sounds good, but the devil is in the details. Even if media organizations can reinvent themselves as reader-driven entities, it’s unlikely most can do it amid the current environment of cutbacks and despair. But we surely appreciate the message of hope.

Newspapers continue to struggle with the paradox of skyrocketing popularity of their product while their their business model crumbles.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) has released new Nielsen Online data for January that shows nearly a 12% year-over-year increase in monthly unique audience for newspaper Web sites. That’s “the highest for any month since NAA began tracking these numbers in 2004,” according to a press release.

Also up (year-over-year): Unique audience (11%), reach (7%) and page views (15%). Here are all the numbers. No doubt the Presidential inauguration and the cratering economy had a lot to do with growth, but the trajectory is still impressive.

Meanwhile, layoffs are running well ahead of last year’s pace, half the newspaper holding companies in America are in or near bankruptcy and Time magazine just published its list of The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America. We can’t remember a greater disconnect in any industry between product success and business failure.

The NAA’s announcement comes during the association’s MediaXChange conference going on in Las Vegas. We were surprised to learn about this event since we had managed to overlook it entirely until the press release showed up this week. The program looks to be focused on the right things: mobile, monetization, metrics, models and so on. Keynoter was Tony Hsieh, the Zappos CEO who has become a bit of a Twitter icon.

The NAA’s website for the event still betrays a certain clueless about the ways of the Internet, though. It’s positively hostile toward search engines and its blogs lack the essential element of the blogosphere: links. Here’s a short tutorial on why links are important. If you want to do a crash course in search optimization and online promotion, drop us a line.

Miscellany

Lots of colleges and universities now give away materials from past courses as a way of promoting the quality of their curricula. Online Degree World has a nice list of 100 Free Open Courseware Classes on Journalism, Blogging and New Media. This is the future, right? So what are you waiting for? College courses for free!

That’s the headline that appeared atop this paid opinion (PDF) in the San Franciso Examiner last Friday, urging public action to save the Chronicle. The author, who identifies himself as Delfin Virgil, evokes images of William Randolph Hearst and historic photos of guys with suits and mustaches to argue that the Chron is an institution that belongs to the people and it should be given over some group unspecified group of citizenry to keep it alive.

The South Wales Echo just launched a new design with an edgy grunge video that “manage[s] to make the newspaper seem really cool,” according to Charles Apple. He’s got a link to the 1:43 clip or you can see it on YouTube. Learn from this.

And Finally…

Two gems from Erica Smith:

Former Journalist Christopher Ave has written a song called the Copy Editor’s Lament (The Layoff Song), celebrating the contributions of the many copy editors who are being cast aside as news organizations shift to blog-style journalism:

AP Stylebook is my bible,

Helps me stop the suit for libel,

But nothing ensures my survival now…

I don’t know what what I’ll do,

Now that I am through,

Killing my last adjective.

When not writing songs Ave is the political editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Erica also offers her favorite selection from someecards:

Delivering on promises it made last month, McClatchy Co. said it plans to cut 1600 jobs, or 15% of its workforce, and lower salaries across the board.  The cuts will be made through attrition, consolidation, outsourcing and layoffs.  Chief executive Gary Pruitt is taking a 15% pay cut and all executives are forgoing 2009 bonuses.

McClatchy had announced plans to cut up to $110 million in expenses last month, but didn’t provide details.  The company already cut 10% of its workforce late last year. The 15% figure is a goal and the job of deciding where to cut will be left up to individual newspapers within the company’s portfolio.

If you’re likely to be caught up in the McClatchy layoffs – or anybody else’s, for that matter – now’s a good time to head over to Recovering Journalist Mark Potts’ website for his 10 Tips For Suddenly Unemployed Journalists.

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…

The Associated Press wraps up the debate over public and non-profit funding for newspapers, concluding that the economics could work for a few large players but not for most metro dailies. The New York Times would need an endowment of about $5 billion to sustain its current newsgathering operation, for example. The more promising and popular approach is a targeted for-profit model like MinnPost.com and investigative journalism foundry GlobalPost.

The latter example is particularly interesting because GlobalPost was founded as a nonprofit but switched to a for-profit model after potential donors demanded too much accountability. The venture later raised $8 million from individual investors.

Steven Coll, former managing editor of the Washington Post and now president of the New America Foundation think tank says some big paper is going to go the endowment route eventually and “is going to have an advantage.” However, the piece also points out that the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, has had to lay off 30% of its staff, just like everybody else.

”Why a once-profitable industry suddenly seems as outmoded as America’s automakers is a tale that involves arrogance, mistakes, eroding trust and the rise of a digital world in which newspapers feel compelled to give away their content,” writes the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, in a tight summary of the last 50,000 or so words posted to this blog.

Final day at the Rocky Mountain News

Kurtz uses last week’s closing of the Rocky Mountain News as a jumping-off point to tap into the industry’s angst over What Went Wrong. The story sheds little new light on the problem or the solutions but sums up the issues and possible solutions so much more succinctly than self-important opuses like the one last week in the New Republic. And it has a striking quote from Joshua Micah Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo (TPM) is often held up as an example of the focused model that may replace sprawling daily newsrooms. “If all the big papers disappeared right now and we replaced them with 50 TPMs, it wouldn’t come close to doing the job,” says Marshall, who employs just six people. “But we’re in a broader transformation where models like ours and others are going to evolve that can fill the void.”

TechDirt’s Mike Masnick rants about what he sees as the absurdity of newspapers’ plans to charge for content. He’s especially put out that Newsday, which has poor audience affinity to begin with, should lead the way. Charging for access to news websites isn’t just dumb, it’s arrogant, he says. Newspapers “always made their money selling the attention of their community to advertisers. But when they treat that community with contempt at the very same time that the community has many other options, it should be no surprise that the community goes away.” Masnick sees no chance for pay walls to work out. If anything, it will only accelerate the emergence of free alternatives.

Layoff Log

• Two large upstate New York publishers are taking the ax to their payrolls. The Albany Times Union needs to cut its costs by 20% in order to stay viable, said Publisher George Hearst III. Employing blunt language, Hearst said the cuts were needed or the paper would be at risk. “The very survival of our enterprise hinges upon cost-cutting that must include the departures of people who are part of this company,” he said. While no numbers were mentioned, the paper’s total employment of 453 indicates a forthcoming reduction of about 90 jobs. Hearst called the advertising slowdown unprecedented. “I’ve been here two decades and I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
• The Buffalo News plans to lay off 52 employees if union negotiations fail to achieve a breakthrough, says WKBW-TV. The station got hold of a memo publisher Stan Lipsey that lists 33 layoffs in circulation, eight each in editorial and classified advertising, two in accounting and one in marketing. The paper also extended a buyout offer that so far has had only lukewarm acceptance. While Guild negotiations continue, the paper has taken other cost-cutting measures, including a wage freeze for non-union employees and closing the Niagara County bureau. The newsstand price was also increased to 75 cents.
• The Columbus Dispatch will lay off 45 people by April 3, citing an advertising slowdown. “We avoided staff reductions as long as possible long after many other news organizations took such action,” Publisher John Wolfe said, adding that readership is holding up pretty well but advertising is way down.
• The Sacramento Bee will lay off 25 to 27 employees, but only if the Newspaper Guild agrees to a set of cost reductions that include pay cuts of up to 6 percent, limitations on vacation time and other sacrifices. If the union doesn’t agree, 11 additional newsroom jobs could be cut. The union represents 268 of the Bee’s 1,126 full- and part-time workers.
• The Wilmington (N.C.) Star News says it will outsource the printing of the newspaper to a company that has not yet been named. Nearly 40 full-time workers in the mail room and press room could be laid off as a result.
• The Bellingham (Wash.) Heraldis cutting 10 staff positions and reducing remaining workers’ salaries by up to 5%. A similar tack is being taken by the Myrtle Beach Sun News, which will cut 20 jobs, reduce the length of the work week and cut pay for all salaried employees.

Miscellany

The Salt Lake Tribune has so far managed to avoid layoffs, but its decision to cut a half page of op-ed material nevertheless drew cries of outrage from readers. Columnist Vern Anderson asks readers to keep it all in perspective. Circulation has held steady, but the situation in the industry is “somewhere between grim and dire.” Everyone is cutting back, he says.

Last Friday’s final edition of the Rocky Mountain News ”sold like wildfire,” according to an article in India’s Sify News. “Some buyers who succeeded in getting a copy wasted no time reselling them on eBay. Multiple copies of the paper were posted to the online auction house, with prices ranging from a penny to $14.99.”

And Finally…

Former San Franciso Examiner Editor Phil Bronstein identifies the one person who deserves the blame for the newspaper industry’s troubles: It’s him. Bronstein contributes a wry, Web-savvy and ultimately engaging insider’s perspective on the sequence of events that began in 1992 when he saw his first Web page and culminated last week with a colleague slumped in his chair muttering, “I thought I had this job till I retired.” Having read what sometimes feels like hundreds of angry screeds by resentful editors over the last two years, we were refreshed to find a refugee who’s managed to keep some perspective on it all and even find some humor. We guess we live on what Bronstein calls the “scold side” of the business.

Someone was going to have to step up and reverse the tide of free content, but Newsday?. Owner Cablevision Systems Corp. announced that it’s going to start charging for access to the newspaper’s website and transform it into a “locally focused cable service,” whatever that means. There were few details, but comments from Cablevision executives imply that the revamped Newsday.com will be packaged as a value-added service for cable customers. Ken Doctor thinks the idea is daffy in light of the fact that the average visitor to Newsday.com spends just four-and-a-half minutes there every month.

But Mark Cuban thinks this is a great idea. The Web 1.0 entrepreneur, who made billions on Broadcast.com, says newspapers should package up their website offerings as a subscription and sell it to cable owners, who will build it into their service fees right next to the Golf Channel. Who’s going to notice an extra 25-cent monthly fee for The New York Times after all? Probably no one, but we question whether a quarter a month from even 100 million subscribers is going to fund the Times’ sprawling news operation. Smaller dailies would see a tiny fraction of that bounty.

Cablevision is no doubt regretting that it ever even heard of Newsday. It paid what is now considered to be a vastly inflated $650 million for Newsday last year. Yesterday, it wrote down $402 million of that cost, pushing itself into the red for the quarter.

Bay Area Agonizes Over Chronicle Woes

New American Media samples the opinions of editors from the ethnic press from around the Bay Area about the impact of the possible closure of the San Francisco Chronicle. The consensus is that it’s very bad news. Many community papers look to the Chron to provide basic city news coverage while their journals pick up the local and ethnic angle. With no major daily in town, editors also wonder how the Bay Area media that’s left is going to keep informed. TV and radio stations, in particular, rely on the daily newspaper to feed them local stories. Most of them are hurting too much to have any hope of filling in the gap that will be left if the newspaper disappears.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle‘s unions are meeting with management about how to achieve the $50 million in cost savings needed to keep the paper afloat. But even massive layoffs don’t solve this structural problem: It costs $10 to produce and deliver a $2 Sunday paper, according to Mother Jones.

By the way, Mark Potts has a great post about the lamentable state of the Chron‘s website as well as the uninspiring condition of newspaper websites in general. He hits the nail on the head in observing that newspaper owners believed from the very beginning that their websites should mimic their newspapers. This completely overlooked the fact that people using browsers have a lot more options than people using newspapers. So why include international news in a local website? He also notes that newspaper home pages are a cacophony of information that confuse and even alienate readers who can easily go somewhere else. Since most people arrive at them via Google anyway, wouldn’t it make more sense to focus the experience on a simplified and more focused individual article page?

Layoff Log

• With the loss of 100 more jobs, including 30 in the newsroom, the Hartford Courant will have effectively cut its news staff by over 40% over the past year. The latest round of layoffs includes shutting down the Courant‘s Washington bureau and reducing the size of its state capitol reporting team by half. The newsroom will be trimmed to 135 people, down from 235 just a year ago.
• Layoffs of 18 more people at the Memphis Commericial Appeal bring to 130 the number of jobs cut since last June, or at least we think it does. We told you that the paper announced 27 layoffs in November, but this Employment Spectator story says the actual number was 57. We agree that 55 people were furloughed last summer, only we reported the news in June while the Employment Spectator says July. The Commercial Appeal definitely employed 700 people before all this cutting began.
• The Augusta (Me.) Chronicle is laying off across “a variety of departments,” according to a statement so devoid of detail that it could have been written in haiku.
• The Buffalo News is considering layoffs because not enough people have taken up management on a buyout offer that includes a lump sum payment of at least $60,000. Go figure.

Miscellany

As part of its exit from the Rocky Mountain area, E.W. Scripps will transfer its 50% stake in the Boulder Camera to MediaNews Group, owner of the Denver Post. The move further consolidates MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton’s hold on the Denver-area news market. Singleton said nothing will change for now, but the company will share some content between the Post and the Camera and will also seek to “create new synergies.” In other words, expect layoffs.

Peter Chianca, a managing editor at GateHouse Media New England, writes a touching elegy for his hometown weekly newspaper, the Putnam County Courier. It was one of scores of local weeklies shuttered by the dying Journal Register Co. two weeks ago. While few people outside of Carmel, N.Y. probably even noticed the loss, Chianca tells of the vital role community weeklies play in doing a thankless task: “keep[ing] people informed about the things that are important to them when they get home at night.”

New York’s Hudson Valley is edging perilously close to a news blackout. Just a week after Journal Register Co. pulled the plug on a phalanx of weeklies in the area and the weekly Ulster County Press shut down, two daily newspapers said they will reduce frequency from seven to five days a week. The Catskill-based Daily Mail and Hudson Register Star will publish their final Sunday editions this weekend. Beginning next week, the Sunday and Monday papers will be replaced by a weekend edition published on Saturday. That issue will have all the usual Sunday features, including coupons, USA Weekend and Sudoku. Thank God they kept Sudoku.

Cost savings drove the decision, said Publisher Roger Coleman in a prepared statement. “This schedule will also enable us to produce the most compelling, useful local newspaper that fits the community’s lifestyle and support level,” he added, vacuously.

There was no word on possible layoffs. As befits the leader of an organization dedicated to serving to the public’s right to know, neither Coleman nor officials at the company’s parent organization returned a reporter’s calls.

Outgoing USA Today Editor Says Don’t Be So Glum

Ken Paulson is on his way out as editor of USA Today for a new job as president and chief operating officer of the Newseum. He gives an interview to Forbes that’s filled with USA Today-like sound bites. The newspaper industry isn’t in as deep trouble as people think it is, Paulson says. Rather, it’s in a transition. “Home Depot is in the midst of massive layoffs, but nobody’s writing off hammers,” he says, using a rather odd analogy.

Paulson has some interesting perspective on USA Today‘s steady performance in a turbulent industry. The paper’s basic four-section architecture and design principles haven’t changed in 24 years. He sees peril in major redesigns at some Tribune Co. papers. “It’s just important not to risk alienating readers who will read you until their dying day,” he says.

He also explains how USA Today broke new ground in the use of anonymous sources. Reporters are no longer permitted to keep sources confidential from their editors. Read Jack Shafer’s tap dance on this issue to see why this is a great policy. Paulson even suggests, tongue in cheek, that USA Today pioneered the fundamentals of Web page design. Reading this engaging and insightful interview, you get the sense that one of the reasons USA Today has held up so well is Ken Paulson.

Miscellany

The New York Times Co. suspended its dividend, citing the need to conserve cash. The move is mainly adding insult to injury, since the Times Co. already slashed the divided from 23 cents to 6 cents last November.

Lee Enterprises has managed to push back some of its debt obligations for a couple of years. In a series of complex negotiations, the company deferred payments on some of its debt until 2012, significantly reducing its short-term obligations in exchange for much bigger payments in the future. The announcement lifted Lee’s stock, but the moves amount to shuffling around existing debt rather that reducing it. Alan Mutter explains.

“It’s not so much … a desire to make a lot of money, but it’s just a desire to not get ourselves into such a hole … that we can’t come out of it.”   Those were the blunt words from Paul Smith, president of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc., as its flagship paper announced plans to cut 60 jobs, or about 4.5% of the workforce. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is the largest newspaper in the state, employing about 1,300 people. Give the publisher credit, though.  These are the first publicly announced layoffs the Democrat-Gazette has had since the industry crisis began

And Finally…

It had to happen.  As the number of layoffs at America’s 500 largest companies nears half a million, several blogs have started to tote up the gloomy numbers. They include The Layoff List, Layoff Blog, Jobless and Less, The American Lawyer Layoff List (lawyers are people, too, we think), and the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker. Most were born late last fall. Let’s hope they live short and brutish lives.

To no one’s great surprise, the San Francisco Chronicle has joined the endangered species list. The paper has been hemorrhaging money almost since the day Hearst Corp. bought it in 2000, culminating in an astonishing $50 million loss last year. Yesterday, Hearst used blunt language in announcing that a “significant reduction in the number of unionized and non-union employees” was needed to keep the paper viable. If expenses can’t be brought into line, Hearst said it will put the paper up for sale and close it if necessary. The company is in the middle of a 100-days campaign to right itself, an initiative that includes putting the Seattle Post-Intelligencer up for sale.

The Chron is northern California’s largest newspaper, with a paid weekday circulation of 339,430, but it also sits in one of the most new-media-savvy places in the world. The Bay Area tech crowd is accustomed to getting news on BlackBerries and iPhones, Craigslist is a local institution and Google is revolutionizing the advertising business just down the peninsula. As the severely weakened San Jose Mercury-News can attest, Silicon Valley is a tough place to be a conventional media company. And there’s no Herb Caen any more.

Alan Mutter, who used to work at the Chron, runs the numbers. He estimates the paper will have to cut nearly half of its 1,500 employees to reach break-even levels. He also speculates on the possibility that MediaNews Group, which owns a portfolio of smaller newspapers across the state, could ride to the rescue. Hearst and MediaNews have been cozy since Hearst helped the company fund a deal to buy the Merc and the Contra Costa Times. If you want to understand this story, read Mutter.

A lot of people have seen this coming. Mutter has been predicting disaster for the Chron for years. BusinessWeek‘s Jon Fine picked the Chronicle as a likely candidate to exit print more than 18 months ago. The paper has reportedly shed half its editorial staff since 2000 and is looking at cutting half of what’s left. In our travels, we’ve observed that the Chron was long an anachronism for its sophisticated audience: a tired-looking, weakly written broadsheet that actually published some sections on green paper until a few years ago.

The Chronicle joins a long line of endangered US dailies, including the Post-Intelligencer, Rocky Mountain News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Miami Herald, Tucson Citizen and Newark Star-Ledger. All have been put up for sale or pulled back from the bring in recent months. Given the drumbeat of bad news about the economy, it’s likely that the endangered species list will get longer as the year drags on. (hat tip: Richard Dooling)

Over on the other side of the country, the Providence (R.I.) Journal is reportedly getting ready to lay off 100 people as part of a bigger cost-cutting initiative by parent A.H. Belo. The ProJo reported a total staff size of about 700 last October, when it laid off 25 people. That was down nearly 40% from its peak. This new round of cuts will raise that number to about 50%.

Wrapping up the bad news parade, the publisher of the Cedar Rapids Gazette said it will cut 100 jobs. The publisher blamed a combination of the region’s devastating 2008 floods and the souring economy for the layoffs, which amount to about 16% of total staff.

Five New York newspapers have banded together to exchange content in the largest such arrangement since the share-nicely craze began last year. The new group includes The Record of Hackensack, New Jersey, The Star-Ledger of Newark, the Times Union of Albany, the Buffalo News, and New York Daily News, which apparently organized the party.

Members will “assist each other in gathering news, sports and features materials, giving our readers access to more and expanded content from the top newspapers in each of the respective markets,” said Marc Kramer, CEO of the New York Daily News, in a very prepared statement.

No details were forthcoming, but the group issued a press release quoting top editors at all the participating papers making head-slapping “Why didn’t we think of this earlier?” statements.

The regional consortium trend was kicked off last April, when a group of five Ohio newspapers began posting all their daily stories on a private website where editors could pick and choose whatever they wanted. The Baltimore Sun and Washington Post are among other newspapers that have banded together in this way.

There was immediate speculation that the New York consortium was an excuse to lay off more newsroom employees. However, announced cutbacks at the Ohio Five haven’t been any greater than at other newspaper companies. The handshake deal is more likely aimed at setting members free from the Associated Press, which has been an industry whipping boy for the past year because of its license fees.

We’re interested in what you are seeing. If you subscribe to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, Toledo Blade, Cincinnati Enquirer and/or Akron Beacon Journal, please leave a omment and tell us if you’ve seen any noticeable difference in quality since those papers began sharing stories nearly a year ago.

State Aid and a Posthumous Polk

Blethen - hanging on

Publishers from the state of Washington pleaded with legislators for a special tax break yesterday, saying the severe recession has dealt a body blow to their already shaky business model. “Some of us, like The Seattle Times, are literally holding on by our fingertips today,” said Times publisher Frank Blethen, who presumably was not literally holding in by his fingertips at that very moment.

Publishers appeared before the state senate Ways and Means Committee to support a bill that would give them a tax break through 2015. While the measure would cost the state about $8 billion, lawmakers appear willing to help. The bill has bipartisan support.

In an ironic demonstration of the seriousness of the problems in Seattle, the Times covered the story with AP wire copy. 

Speaking of Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer may become the first newspaper to win a major journalism award posthumously. Mark Fitzgerald reports that Eric Nalder, the P-I‘s chief investigative reporter, has won a George Polk Award for his two-part series “Demoted to Private,” about waste by government military contractors. The P-I is due to close March 15 if a buyer can’t be found, meaning that at the April 15 ceremony, the award may be bestowed on a newspaper that no longer exists.

P.S. The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild will hold a meeting next week to see if it can rustle up enough enthusiasm to initiate an employee buyout of the P-I. In more robust economic times this idea might stand a chance, but it’s hard to believe employees are going to dig into their depleted savings to buy a money-losing operation.

Miscellany

Having already laid of 12% of its staff if 2008, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is now freezing wages and may impose a one-week furlough. Print revenue was down 10.4% in the fourth quarter and “We’ve seen that deterioration accelerate in the first weeks of 2009,”said publisher Betsy Brenner.

Journal Register Co.’s mass execution of scores of weekly newspapers got little media coverage because not that many people will miss the Millbrook Round Table. But an unsigned editorial in the Odessa American delivers a poignant message about the impact a local weekly’s closure has on a community. 

A blog called Brazosport News has word that the Houston Chronicle is about to cut 10% of its staff. It even has a memo from the publisher saying so. We can find no coverage of this story anywhere else.

And Finally…

Yes we can. We just found it on Twitter. And if you came here looking for breaking news about the latest layoffs and cutbacks, you’re wasting your time. This is a daily blog, which is so last year. Instead, subscribe to The Media is Dying on Twitter. This anonymous microblogger is so speedy at documenting gloom and doom that he/she puts Romenesko to shame.  Fortunately for Romenesko, he gets more than 140 characters.