Gatehouse Media and The New York Times Co. have settled an inane lawsuit over Boston.com’s use of RSS feeds and story fragments from Gatehouse publications. You can read the muddled settlement term here (courtesy of Jeff Jarvis) and a very good analysis by Mark Potts here. It’s a good thing this suit didn’t go to court because it would have distracted both litigants – not to mention a few dozen journalism bloggers – from more important issues.

The conventional wisdom is that Gatehouse shot itself in the foot in this case by suing to end a practice that was driving traffic to its own websites from a much more visible competitor. In our opinion, Gatehouse had a legitimate gripe, but its mistake was paying lawyers to deal with a problem that could have been easily – and more beneficially – solved with technology. Basically, Gatehouse missed the opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade.

Instead of issuing a cease-and-desist, Gatehouse could have simply intercepted any traffic referred from a Boston.com URL and redirected it to a landing page. That page could have been used for anything Gatehouse wanted, such as a subscription promotion or even a redirect to the home page of the publication being linked to. Any 12-year-old can program a Web server to do this. So it’s perplexing why Gatehouse would want to bring in expensive and clueless attorneys to craft a solution that is so convoluted that no one will even pay attention to it two years from now.

Gatehouse actually had legitimate concerns about Boston.com’s use of its headlines and story summaries. The Boston Globe, which is Boston.com’s parent, was arguably compensating for its own cutbacks in suburban coverage by harvesting the work of a competitor. The problem is that challenging that practice legally is like trying to boil the ocean. Linking and summarizing are so intrinsic to the Web that legal action would be unenforceable and horribly expensive.

Had the suit actually gone to trial, everyone from the ACLU to the Electronic Frontier Foundation would have weighed in with an opinion and Gatehouse would have spent millions of dollars it doesn’t have to fight a battle that is probably costing its newspapers at most a few thousand dollars a year in lost revenue. It’s good that the Times Co. decided to just cave and settle. The agreement does no real harm to Boston.com and gives a few Gatehouse executives satisfaction. The only people who win are – ugh – the lawyers.

There’ll Always Be a France

People who think the U.S. government should subsidize newspapers might want to keep an eye on what’s happening in France, where the government has stepped up its financial support of the beleaguered newspaper industry. The French government already subsidizes newspapers to the tune of $360 million a year and now it will throw another $260 million in the annual kitty in the form of increased government ad spending and an unusual promotion that will give every 18-year-old a free newspaper subscription, presumably until he or she is no longer 18.

Keep in mind that France is about as much like the US as Mars is like the Earth. The French economy is highly regulated and the 35-hour work week is almost a state religion. The difference in perspective is well represented by this quote from President Nicolas Sarkozy: “It is the state’s primary responsibility to respond to an emergency, and there is an emergency caused by the impact of the collapse of advertising revenue.” Nevertheless, it’ll be interesting to see if government subsidies have any uplifting effect whatsoever on the French newspaper business, which appears to be in even worse shape than ours. We’re not betting on it.

Miscellany

Martin Langeveld has a terrific post at the Nieman Journalism Lab about why newspapers should get into social networking. Unfortunately, only about 10% of newspaper websites are doing anything in this area, according to one study. That’s puzzling, since newspapers can connect with their audiences geographically, which is something very few Web properties can do.  We’ve wondered why sites like Going.com exist when newspapers are naturals to provide these location-based linkup services. Langeveld suggests that publishers are still having trouble shifting from the role of oracle to that of facilitator. The idea of enabling conversations instead of dominating them is still foreign. He’s probably right. See his post for an impressive list of links to resources that help explain how social media can help build community.

When Journal Register Co. bagged out of Connecticut earlier this month, one layoff victim decided to do something. Melissa Marinan, who sold advertising for JRC’s Imprint chain for 18 years, raised money from her dad and started her own local weekly called The Valley Press. She even recruited the former editor of the Imprint newspapers and hired a full-time reporter. Marinan will take care of selling advertising. The first issue of the free paper hits residents’ mailboxes on Feb. 5.

Reed Business Information is cutting about 7% of its workforce. The company publishes Variety and Publishers Weekly magazines, among others.

Thank you, Tim Windsor. The respect is mutual.

And Finally…

Nigeria’s Vanguard newspaper reported matter-of-factly that police in Lagos implicated a goat (left, although not the actual goat in custody)  in an attempted auto theft, saying that one of the thieves transformed himself into the animal in an attempt to avoid arrest. The thief was apprehended nonetheless, and now will either have to change back to a person or a spend the rest of his life in the, um, pen. If you don’t believe us, this story has been carried on hundreds of news sites. Oops, Gatehouse, there are those headlines and summaries again.

You can skip roughly the first 1,500 words of Jon Austin’s lengthy essay on The Rowdy Crowd and jump right to the nut graph about micropayments. This otherwise rambling opinion piece makes a persuasive case that the news business can create a viable economic model by charging small amounts for each item of content a reader consumes. We’re not talking 25 cents here; we’re talking ¼ of a cent. The technology actually exists to charge very small amounts for very focused transactions, Austin writes, and the newspaper industry could be the first with sufficient motivation to make the system work.

Micropayments were an idea that came out of the early Internet. The idea was that electronic networks removed so much cost from a transaction that it was theoretically possible to conduct profitable exchanges at prices of as little as a few cents. The cell phone companies have been doing this for years by debiting transactions against a buyer’s phone bill. Now Apple is selling iPhone software applications for as little as 99 cents. It’s not a big step from there to ask readers to pay a few pennies to get an article they can’t find anywhere else. People are already comfortable with carrying around their Starbucks and McDonald’s cards and charging small transactions against them. Why can’t the same thing work for information?

The Economist suggests a similar idea in a short column that suggests that consumers may be more willing to pay than one would think I they didn’t have a choice. “Few people would have guessed how much British viewers would be prepared to pay to watch televised football matches—which used to be on free-to-view channels—before Mr Murdoch’s satellite television bought up the rights and began charging,” says the unnamed editorialist. The piece also quotes Los Angeles Times editor Russ Stanton, saying that the paper’s online revenues now pay for the entire print and online editorial staff, a claim we hadn’t seen before. This makes print officially a loss leader at the LA Times.

It seems to us that micropayments are worth another look. If a consortium of publishers could agree to share the costs and to firewall some of their content this way, the technology just might have a chance to generate a meaningful revenue stream for publishers whose local content is truly exclusive.

Le Lockout

“Photographers and journalists at the paper make an average salary of $88,000 for a 30-hour week. Editors make an annual average salary of $125,000. Employees are entitled to four to six weeks of annual vacation paid at time-and-a-half.” Sound like paradise? Actually, the union is pretty unhappy with the state of affairs at Le Journal de Montreal and a contract dispute with management led to a lockout over the weekend. Management charges that the union refuses to negotiate a contract in good faith,  and this has frustrated modernization efforts. Union leaders charge that parent company Quebecor Media’s plans to merge Le Journal’s online presence with the media conglomerate’s other holdings will debase the quality of journalism. We can’t remember a newspaper union ever making that a bargaining issue before, particularly at a time of crisis.

Miscellany

Writing on the Knight Digital Media Center, David Westphal suggests that newspapers could tap into foundation grants to shore up their investigative journalism practices. Noting that the Knight Foundation recently gave $5 million to 21 civic foundations for projects that sounded strikingly like local news operations, Westphal suggests that public/private partnerships could enable newspapers to tap in to grants made to local civic organizations and fund projects that would be otherwise unsustainable. It turns out that philanthropies aren’t as resistant to the idea as you might think. Westphal quotes sources at the J-Lab at American University saying the lab has already funded 120 pilot projects with mainstream news organizations. He also quotes the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors saying the idea deserves discussion.

A couple of big asset deals may be about to go down. PaidContent.org reports that The New York Times Co. is close to selling 19 of the 25 floors of its new headquarters building in Manhattan to an investment management firm. We weren’t even aware that there were any investment management firms left. The deal would reportedly have W.P. Carey & Co. buying the space and leasing them back to the Times. In a sign of how screwy the real estate business is, the Times Co. would retain ownership of the six floors it doesn’t occupy. PaidContent also says Tribune Co. is mulling a $900 million offer for the Chicago Cubs from the Ricketts family. The offer is the best of the three Tribune has received. Even if it’s successful, approvals and financing could take months.

Tim Windsor, who’s newly blogging at Nieman Journalism Lab, points us to a veteran journalist with the delightfully ethnic name of Gina Chen who’s got a terrific how-to blog called Save the Media. Gina exhorts journalists to dive in and start using tools like Facebook and Twitter. She also offers advice to make those tools a little less intimidating. Her plain-talk style is easy to read and she understands the journalist’s perspective. She joins our blog roll and we recommend you bookmark her site.

The Port of Belfast, Northern Ireland, is bullish on newspapers. Or at least bullish on newsprint. It will spend £4.5 million (about $6.1) expanding its paper and newsprint handling facilities. “From nothing just ten years ago, paper imports are now an important part of the port’s diversified trade base,” said the port’s chief executive.

Terence Walsh of the Frederick (Md.) News-Post gets caught up in Obamania, asserting that the new president “has inspired more people, especially young people, to pay attention to the world around them and serve their communities than any politician in recent memory.” He believes this is a rare opportunity for newspapers to reassert their value to young people who are newly energized to learn about the world around them. We hope he’s right, thought ungluing young people’s eyes from their Facebook news feed might be a bigger task than editors imagine.

Class act: The weekly Town Meeting of Elk Rapids (Mich.) shut down after more than 30 years last week. It announced its closure in a two-sentence ad on page 2 of its final edition: “Today marks the final issue of the Town Meeting. We appreciate your loyalty over the 30-plus years the Town Meeting has served your community.”

And Finally…

Chris Freiberg started a Facebook group asking people to buy a newspaper on Groundhog Day (Feb. 2) as a way of showing support for the industry. He invited 600 friends and word-of-mouth has since swelled acceptance to more than 14,000 people. It’s a nice endorsement for a beleaguered industry, but you do have to read some of the raw and funny wall posts.

It looks like a chain of Connecticut newspapers that were just days from closure will continue publishing under the guidance of a New Englander. Longtime newspaper executive Michael E. Schroeder (left) has bought the group that includes the Bristol Press, the New Britain Herald and three nearby weeklies. Schroeder was most recently publisher of BostonNOW, a free daily with a promising future that abruptly closed under unusual circumstances last spring. Schroeder was previously with Newsday. There’s no word on what he plans to do with his new possessions, but the papers will continue to publish on their current schedule for now. “We look forward to building upon the rich history of these properties,” reads Schroeder’s quote from the press release.

Selling Local

Steve Outing has a dozen tips for how newspaper companies can make money. Some are amplifications of his earlier ideas and a few are brand new. Two themes run throughout: create lots of niche products and learn to sell them that way.

It’s the latter theme that doesn’t get as much press as it should. Newspaper industry pundits tend to focus a lot on what needs to be fixed on the editorial side of the house (still plenty) but we don’t read that much about ad sales. While admitting that he’s an editorial guy, Outing addresses that issue repeatedly.  Success in the emerging hybrid print/online world demands that ad sales staffs be able to sell targeted advertising aimed at niche interests. This is antithetical to many print sales veterans, who have grown up in a world that demands skill at selling 26-time print schedules to large department stores and cell phone companies.

This is a problem for newspaper companies.  In our own experience working at an Internet publisher a decade ago, we found that sales reps recruited out of the print world were often disasters at online sales.  They didn’t understand how to define the value of niche markets and they sometimes appeared to believe that signed contracts in the few hundreds or thousands of dollars was beneath them.  Yet this is the only way that advertising works online.  The most successful print refugees often came from the classified sales field, where success was all about closing lots of small deals.

Outing’s recommendations deserve careful consideration, as do most of his ideas.  What he doesn’t address in this column is the thorny issue of how to equip a generation of sales reps with a whole new set of skills.  In our experience, it’s difficult at best and often impossible.

Shooting Holes in “Hyper-Local”

Last month, we reported on new Gallup research that shows the Internet closing the gap with local newspapers as people’s preferred news source. Now David Sullivan of “That’s the Press, Baby” has taken Gallup’s own numbers and sketched out a counter-intuitive case that newspaper readership is actually stable or growing among the young people who are widely believed to be abandoning the medium. What’s more, he makes an argument that readers are gravitating to national news and not to the hyper-local content that’s frequently held out as the industry’s salvation.

A big factor could have been last year’s election, Sullivan posits. People just couldn’t get enough of news from the campaign trail, which is too bad because local newspapers were busily paring back national coverage in the name of being more local. There’s no question that national newspapers saw the least erosion in circulation during the last year. Could it be that hyper-local isn’t a obvious as solution as it seems? We weren’t able to give Sullivan’s number-crunching adequate scrutiny, but his logic looks sound. Please have a look and post your comments here.

Here Comes Shirky

If you haven’t read any Clay Shirky, you’re in for a treat. The NYU adjunct professor and author of Here Comes Everybody has a chat with the Guardian about the future of media that yields several fine quotes:

• Newspapers “were such a good idea for such a long time that people felt the newspaper business model was part of a deep truth about the world, rather than just the way things happened to be.”
• “The 500-year-old accident of economics occasioned by the printing press – high upfront cost and filtering happening at the source of publication – is over. But will The New York Times still exist on paper? Of course, because people will hit the print button.”
• “Imagine only having one browsing copy of every book in a bookstore. You could say ‘Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers looks good’, and out pops a brand new copy. Why does a bookstore or a publisher have to be in the shipping and warehousing business?”

Layoff Log

• The Springfield (Mass.) Republican plans to cut 22 full-time and 14 part-time positions, although the cutbacks won’t affect news or sports staffing. There was also some good news for the Republican: it will soon begin printing the Record-Journal from nearby Meriden, Conn.  Apparently, the Connecticut paper’s 30-year-old presses were no longer up to the task. The bad news: the Record-Journal is eliminating 24 full-time and 32 part-time jobs.
• The Wyoming Tribune Eagle revealed that it has cut 14 positions in the past year, but didn’t say how many people it employs. Two more were laid off this week.
• Oklahoma’s second largest newspaper will lay off 28 employees, 26 of them in the newsroom. The Tulsa World said the cuts amount to about 5% of the workforce.
• The Anchorage Daily News is shrinking and re-sectionalizing to accommodate smaller issue sizes. Here’s Editor Patrick Dougherty’s super-nice explanation.

Miscellany

Expect many more papers to follow the lead of Detroit’s Free Press and News this year. Hernando Today, a daily produced by The Tampa Tribune, will cut back to five days later this month by eliminating its Monday and Tuesday editions. Founded as a weekly in 1981, Hernando Today went daily in 1996. It covers Florida’s Hernando County.

Detroit-area writer Dave Hornstein has an interesting history of the newspaper wars – or lack thereof – in Detroit. The miserable condition of the two dailies in that city is largely self-inflicted, as Hornstein tells it. The killer was a bitter battle between newspaper management and labor unions that led to a lockout, large circulation declines and $500 million in losses in the late 1990s. Add to that a couple of ownership changes and major modifications to the joint operating agreement and you have two organizations that were severely weakened when the recession hit. Under those circumstances, it’s not surprising that Detroit was the first city to swallow the bitter pill it did last month.

 Richard Pachter says the new book, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, is well worth a read. The inside scoop on what went on with Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal acquisition is worth the price of admission (a modest $19.77 on Amazon) and the reviewer praises author Michael Wolff for maintaining balance in a book about a man who inspires strong opinions from both fans and foes. Interesting tidbit: while Murdoch’s Fox News is often criticized for its right-wing slant, the media mogul’s Sky News network in the UK has a liberal tone. Murdoch is politically conservative, but his current wife has broadened his thinking.

Steve Yelvington has created The Shutdown List, an interactive timeline of newspaper closures. The site appears to be more of a programming exercise than an actual tracker, but it’s a lot slicker than our lousy RIP list to the left. You can submit your own candidates for inclusion.

Last month we told you about new Gallup research that showed the Internet is fast closing the gap with local newspapers as the number one news source in the US. Now Pew Research says the lines have crossed. The survey of 1,489 adults found that 40% said they get most of their national and international news online, compared with 35% who rely primarily on newspapers. Television continues to the number one choice, at 70%. Among people under 30, however, the Internet is now just as popular as television for news. In fact, among that age group, the Internet’s role as a primary news source jumped from 34% to 59% in just 15 months, a leap that suggests that these results might be an aberration. We’ll know soon. Pew conducts the survey roughly once a year. There’s also information about the top news stories of 2008, a list dominated by economic issues.

A Public Utility

Should newspapers get a government bailout? One Connecticut lawmaker says yes. Frank Nicastro of Connecticut’s 79^th Assembly district is worried that Journal Register Co. will carry out its threats to shutter the Bristol Press and he’s asking the state for loans, tax breaks or anything else that will save the daily. The Press reportedly has just 11 days to live.

Nicastro’s campaign has fueled an ongoing debate over whether newspapers are entitled to the same government support as airlines, banks and the automobile industry have received. Some people say newspapers are an essential public utility that a democracy can’t afford to lose. Others think the market will find a way to provide this service one way or the other. Almost everyone admits there’s a conflict-of-interest question when a government funds its own watchdog, kind of like letting the banking industry regulate itself. We have an opinion, but we’d like to hear yours, so we made this into a poll question. Cast your vote in the sidebar widget to the right.

A Different Kind of Death Watch

“My beat at The Globe and Mail is the dead,” writes Sandra Martin, in a quote that already goes on our short list for best of 2009. That’s only one of many good lines in her superbly written piece on the craft of obituary writing, one of the least understood and most often satirized disciplines in journalism.

Martin is the Toronto Globe and Mail‘s chief obituary writer and she really, really likes the job. So do a few hundred other people who make up the Society of Professional Obituary Writers (SPOW) (“The first time I Googled the society’s acronym, I came up with ‘sex position of the week,'” Martin comments in another of the 3,700-word essay’s good lines). This fun and fact-filled feature touches on some of the profession’s stickier issues, such as how to balance facts about the deceased’s sexual escapades with the need to avoid angering grieving relatives or how to tell a person you’re interviewing them for their own obituary. She also describes the nightmare all obituarists face: what to do when someone dies suddenly and you’ve got nothing prepared on them.

Martin’s words are relevant to the topic of newspaper survival. She cites Northwestern University research that found that obits were “important” to 45 per cent of readers and “very important” to an additional 12 per cent. That wouldn’t surprise the people at Eons, a social network for baby boomers. They discovered that death notices quickly became the most popular features on their site, which is why they launched Tributes.

Obituary writing isn’t morbid, Martin notes. Rather, it is “about life; death is merely the occasion to set the subject into context.” Read this delightful story and you’ll probably agree that this beat has plenty of, er, life to it.

Miscellany

The Kansas City Kansan will end an 87-year print run on Wednesday when it ceases twice-weekly publication and goes online-only. The Kansan was once the only daily newspaper serving Kansas City, Kan. The revamped website will invite lots of reader contributions through photo-sharing and blogs. Half the staff will be cut. That’s four people. (via Todd Epp).

“Newspaper stocks fell an average of 83.3% in 2008 – twice the fall of the S&P 500 – wiping out $64.5 billion in market value, according to Alan Mutter’s Newsosaur blog.” Want more stats like that? Jeff Jarvis has assembled a few and is asking for more contributions.

John Schrag of the Forest Grove (Ore.) News-Times resists the urge to wring his hands and instead gives specifics on how staff cutbacks are affecting city-hall reporting. This column manages to be both opinionated and dispassionate, documenting with examples how citizens are less informed about their government because reporters aren’t there to sit through the boring meetings. Bloggers, Schrag writes, “may show up in Salem, but I doubt they’ll be posting reports about the Banks Budget Committee or the county’s Joint Watershed Commission.” True that.

Editor & Publisher‘s Mark Fitzgerald lists his choices for the top 10 industry quotes of 2008. Many relate to the stocks of major companies becoming worthless. And Christopher Wink posts some gems in his Twelve months of top journalism blog posts in 2008.

Terrible financial results barely merit a mention any more, other than the fact that each month or quarter seems to be worse than the one just preceding it. Media Post reports ad revenues fell 22.4% at McClatchy in November and publishing revenues were down 17.9% at Media General. The sole bright spot: online revenue was up over 7% at both companies.

Swift Communications has cut staff at its Western Slope newspapers in Colorado and closed some weekly papers. Unspecified cutbacks were made at the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, Aspen Times and Grand Junction Free Press. The company shuttered the weekly Carbondale Valley Journal, Leadville Chronicle and the Spanish-language La Tribuna based in Glenwood Springs.

And Finally…

Here are the results of our recent query about the drama in Detroit. Thanks to everyone who voted. We’re trying out a new polling app in the sidebar to the right and will keep plugging away till we find one that we like. Suggestions are welcome:

Note: An earlier version of this story was erroneously headlined “Survey Says Web is #1 News Source.” A reader pointed out that television still holds the top spot.

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

Creative Solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brave New World

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

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

Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for its coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys. The New York Times account pointed to the difference between the new breed of online reporting and traditional print journalism. Chief among them is the involvement of readers in the process. Editor Joshua Micah Marshall has even been known to give “assignments” to his readers, asking them to comb through official documents.

Gutsy Moves

Monitor Editor John Yemma

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

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

Land of the Rising Seniors

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

Just Plain Fun

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

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

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

Creative Solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brave New World

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

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

Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for its coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys. The New York Times account pointed to the difference between the new breed of online reporting and traditional print journalism. Chief among them is the involvement of readers in the process. Editor Joshua Micah Marshall has even been known to give “assignments” to his readers, asking them to comb through official documents.

Gutsy Moves

Monitor Editor John Yemma

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

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

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

Land of the Rising Seniors

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

Just Plain Fun

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

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

We sorted through our 147 entries of 2008 to come up with the stories that surprised us, delighted us or made us shake our heads in disbelief. We’ll present them as a series of posts over the next few days in hopes that you’ll find them to be as memorable as we did. Happy New Year!

Management Ineptitude

The Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote a case history for the how not to handle a layoff. Staff were told not to come in to work until after 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 2. Laid-off employees were notified by phone. Those who didn’t get a call were expected to promptly come to the office. Management then arranged for laid-off employees to clean out their desks on a Saturday morning and to enter the building from the back where they wouldn’t attract the attention.

In March, Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell was caught on video telling one of his reporter employees, “F**k you.” He muttered the comment under his breath at the end of a response to an Orlando Sentinel’s reporter’s pointed question about how newspapers can thrive by giving readers what they want when all readers want is stories about puppy dogs.

The Chinese Daily News had to pay $5.2 million for allegedly forcing reporters to file five stories a day and to rush between news conferences and interviews. Ad quotas were unreasonably high and production workers were forced to labor nonstop. Reporters testified that they had to work six days a week, 12 hours a day, but weren’t able to complain because of pressure and the culture of intimidation.

Several publishers chose Valentine’s Day to announce major layoffs.

The Denver alternative weekly Westword reported that staff members of the Longmont, Colo. Times-Call newspaper were invited to the publisher’s holiday party – as parking valets. Staffers reportedly earned what they got for their day jobs, only they spent their time parking the cars of rich people in attendance.

Los Angeles Times publisher David Hiller hatched a plan to move the paper’s monthly magazine completely under the control of the advertising department without telling the newspaper’s editor. Hiller reportedly hired a new editor and planned to replace the magazine’s entire nine-person editorial staff without telling anyone on the editorial side. Hiller resigned a few weeks later.

In June, Tribune Co. launched a campaign to measure journalist productivity by the number of column inches of copy they produced. Noting that Los Angeles Times reporters turn out about one-sixth as many column inches as their counterparts in Hartford or Baltimore, Tribune COO Randy Michaels issued a warning to writers and editors. “When you get into the individuals, you find out that you can eliminate a fair number of people while eliminating not very much content,” he said.

Slate’s Jack Shafer analyzed the use of anonymous sources by major newspapers. He created a few Google Alerts to look for words like “anonymity” and then looked at the stories to see if the secrecy was warranted. In most cases, he found that that the anonymous quotes were either obvious, self-serving or contributed nothing to the story.

Killing the Host

The Newspaper Guild in Honolulu printed up 100,000 cards for readers can send in to cancel their subscriptions in event of a strike. The thinking was that it was better to take down the Advertiser and cause a whole lot more people to lose their jobs than to have 54 employees treated unfairly.

The union at the Los Angeles Times mounted a campaign to drive out of existence the dwindling number of businesses that advertised in the paper because it said the Times wouldn’t negotiate in good faith.

Oh-Oh

A Google search bot triggered a 75% plunge in shares of United Airlines over the weekend when it assigned a Sept. 6, 2008 date to a six-year-old story about United Airlines’ bankruptcy filing.

Editors at the Wine Spectator bestowed a coveted Award of Excellence on a non-existent restaurant. The prank was dreamed up by Robin Goldstein, who concocted a fake website with recipes from an Italian cookbook and a reserve wine list “largely chosen from among some of the lowest-scoring Italian wines in Wine Spectator over the past few decades.”

The Tampa Bay Tribune quickly backtracked on a series of design changes as some 300 readers canceled subscriptions and more than 3,000 called or wrote e-mails of protest. “Turns out, we had really disrupted the way people communicate with each other in the morning,” said executive editor Janet Coats.

The San Francisco Examiner caught a delivery man for the Palo Alto Daily Post apparently stealing copies of the Examiner as he delivered his own newspaper. When confronted and asked to open his trunk, the man had more than 1,000 copies of the rival newspaper stashed there.

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a contest for the best reader-submitted video opposing Sam Zell’s proposal to sell naming rights to the Chicago Cubs. The winner was a college student who interns at the rival Tribune. The Trib had some fun with winning its rival’s contest in this clip, which also includes the winning video.

It looks like 2009 will be a make-or-break year for many media companies, thanks to an advertising climate the some forecasters are predicting will the worst in generations.
Media economist Jack Myers is predicting an “advertising depression,” says Dow Jones. “Myers, a longtime industry consultant who runs JackMyers.com, is now forecasting an unprecedented three straight years of declines in advertising and marketing spending in the U.S. starting this year,” the wire service says. “To put that in perspective, the industry hasn’t suffered even a two-year spending decline in advertising since the 1930s.” The result will be a “massive shakeout” in industries that depend on advertising for their livelihood. Myers expects advertising spending in the U.S. to call 2.4% this year, 6.7% next year and 2.3% in 2010. His forecast roughly agrees with estimates by Publicis Groupe. The downturn will make it more difficult for media companions to effect the transformations that are necessary to survive in the customer-driven marketing environment of the future.
Meanwhile, Barclays Capital expects domestic ad spending to drop 10% next year, which is dramatically worse than performance during both the 1991 and 2001 recessions. The forecast is a substantial revision of Barclays’ prediction just two months ago that next year’s decline would be a less-drastic 5.5%. The investment bank sees trouble in the local advertising industry, which is often seen as the best hope for newspaper salvation. Local spending, which makes up some 39% of the $252.1 billion U.S. ad market, will fall 12.2% in 2009, while national spending will drop 8.4%. Barclays forecast that local ad spending would decline an additional 1.4% even when the broader market recovers in 2010. The one positive note: Internet advertising should increase 6.1% in 2009 and 12% in 2010, but that segment will still account for just 10% of ad spending next year.
Given those forecasts, it’s not surprising that asset values have tanked. “Some 30 US newspapers are up for sale…but few buyers have emerged in spite of rock bottom prices,” notes the Financial Times. Valuations have fallen by at least half compared to their highs and signs that the advertising environment is worsening aren’t helping, the paper says. To illustrate the degree of loss in asset values, the Boston Globe was valued at $650 million by a consortium of buyers just two years ago. Today, the value of the Globe and the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette combined is just $120 million. In fact, The New York Times Co.’s most valuable New England asset may be its equity stake in the Boston Red Sox. It was worth about $135 million before the financial crisis hit. And that’s without Mark Teixeira.

Some Good News, Too

While admitting that 2009 will be a mostly crummy year for the economy, Poynter Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds sees reasons to believe better days are ahead. For one thing, oil is comparatively cheap right now and the price of paper is coming down. While you shouldn’t get comfortable with short-term trends in these commodities, at least they are two fewer factors weighing on the industry. The buyouts and layoffs of 2008 will show also benefits in 2009 as newspapers remove those costs from their books. And there are promising signs in newspapers’ online activities that may broadly benefit the industry. Edmonds is careful to hedge his bets, but he wants to exit the year on a positive note.

Cuts Take Toll on Quality

Print editors are accustomed to getting letters from readers taking them to task for erroneously saying the California Gold Rush started in 1845 instead of 1848 and  concluding, “Shoddy fact-checking like this makes me skeptical of anything you report in your journal.” Editors usually laugh off these missives, but with readers enjoying a bounty of choice these days and freely publishing their own critiques, the gaffes caused by overworked news staffs potentially become more damaging. Detroit NASCAR Examiner Josh Lobdell points out three major errors in a Detroit News story and questions how a newspaper in the Motor City can do such a shoddy job of covering motoring. The Sunday Business Post of Ireland restates almost verbatim what we suggested 2 1/2 years ago: that the cycle of cutbacks will lead to inferior products that people won’t want to read, which will harm circulation and lead to more layoffs. You don’t cost-cut your way to leadership.
If errors are your thing, read Craig Silverman’s year-end column in the Toronto Star about the worst publishing gaffes of 2008. Our favorite is the AP’s reference to Joseph Lieberman as a “Democratic vice-presidential prick.” There are plenty more on Silverman’s awesome blog, Regret the Error. Be sure to read his annual celebration of the worst errors and corrections in the media, an award he calls the Crunks. One of the best has to be this front page of northern New England’s Valley News, which actually managed to misspell its own name on its front page one day.

Report: Newspaper Sites Embrace Web Tools

The Bivings Group examined the websites of the 100 top U.S. newspapers to see what they’re doing with the Internet. While a few activities have changed little over the last year (RSS, reporter blogs and video), there have been striking increases in the use of some features:

• Fifth-eight percent of newspaper websites post user-generated photos, 18% accept video and 15% publish user-generated articles.  That’s way up from the 24% that accepted such material in 2007.
• Seventy five percent now accept article comments in some form, compared to 33% in 2007.
• Facebook-like social networking tools are beginning to gain traction, with 10% of newspapers now using them, or double last year’s figure.
• Three-quarters list some kind of most-popular ranking, such as most e-mailed or most commented. Just 33% had that feature in 2006.
• You can now submit articles to social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us at 92% of newspaper sites, compared to only 7% in 2006.
• Only 11% of websites now require registration to view full articles, compared to 29% last year.
• Other stats: 57% have PDF editions, 20% have chat, and 40% offer SMS alerts.

Don’t strain your eyes: Click the image below for a larger version. More charts and data is in the summary report.

Miscellany

Journal-Register has reportedly closed a chain of Connecticut weeklies. The North Haven Courier reports, “On Dec. 18, members of [the Shore Line and Elm City Newspapers, a weekly newspaper chain in the shoreline and Greater New Haven area] were notified they had been laid off…The affected papers include the North Haven Post, the East Haven Advertiser, the Branford Review, the Shore Line Times of Guilford and Madison, the Clinton Recorder, and the Pictorial Gazette and Main Street News in Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Essex, Deep River, Chester, Lyme, and Old Lyme…Joyce Mletschnig, who until Thursday was the Pictorial Gazette’s associate editor, said that their newspapers would be shut down.”

The Seattle Times is asking about 500 non-unionized employees to take a week’s unpaid vacation in order to avoid more layoffs. Employees can take the seven days off at any time over the next two months. Management at the Times, which has cut 22% of its staff this year, may believe that further layoffs will undermine quality to too great a degree, so it’s getting creative with strategy.

Russ Smith has some good quotes in a piece on Splice Today about what he believes is the inevitable demise of print newspapers. Smith, 53, is an unabashed newspaper fan but he’s noticed that even his contemporaries are dropping their print subscriptions or not noticing when the paper no longer arrives on the doorstep. He also notices that his kids and their friends are just as well-informed about current events as he, a counter to the conventional wisdom that young people don’t read. Smith boldly predicts that The New York Times will be sold by the end of 2009, with Rupert Murdoch on the short list of likely buyers. On the other hand, Murdoch may be content simply to let his nemesis fade away.

Raleigh News & Observer Staff Writer Mark Schultz writes with passion about why he got into newspapers and why they’re still relevant. His best line comes in an account about interviewing a woman in her trailer home in Mexico: “We enter people’s lives for an hour and ask for instant intimacy.”

The Knoxville News Sentinel has apparently managed to avoid the carnage that has devastated many of its brethren. In an upbeat column plainly titled “News Sentinel is NOT going out of business,” Editor Jack McElroy pays homage to owner E.W. Scripps Co. for shrewdly diversifying its revenue stream and not loading up on debt. He also says the News Sentinel wisely diversified into TV and specialty publishing to insulate itself from the newspaper advertising downturn. Critics naturally accuse the paper of selling out to political interests.

The New York Times will launch “Instant Op-Ed” next month in a bid to compete with instant cable television analysis. The Web feature will post immediate expert viewpoints on breaking news, according to Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal.

And Finally…

The Baltimore Sun’s John McIntyre asked readers to contribute the best line heard in the workplace. They come through with some winners. Our favorite: “Yeah, he thinks he’s God’s gift to sliced bread.”

We really must get back to our day job at some point, but this is too damned interesting. We spent the early morning hours scouring our favorite blogs for reaction to yesterday’s blockbuster announcement in Detroit. There was plenty:

Mark Potts likes the Detroit model in concept, saying it could be a test bed for other innovative Gannett micro-destinations like MomsLikeMe and Metromix. But he stresses that the Detroit consortium needs to move with speed and agility to launch new services and not spend too much time fretting about how save print. “As of this week, Detroit may be the nation’s most interesting laboratory for online news,” he writes.

Steve Outing is more pessimistic. While he applauds the reduction in home-delivery frequency, he thinks charging for the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday editions is a bad idea and that the “digital replica” of the print editions is badder. He’s also disappointed there wasn’t more vision outlined around a mobile strategy. And he thinks the whole plan will be tweaked pretty quickly as reality sets in. He’s probably right.

Poynter Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds has an exceptionally cogent and impartial analysis of Detroit Media’s chances of success. He notes that daily newspapers typically derive as much as half their ad revenue from Sunday editions and then spread the costs across the rest of the week. The gamble in Detroit is that reader flight precipitated by these changes won’t cancel out the cost-saving benefits.

Newspaper executives have been talking about this idea for five years, but no one has done anything with it because of the much-feared-but-never-tested theory that you don’t mess with the daily news habit. Now Detroit has no choice, and if they can pull it off, they’ll set a course for the entire industry. Edmonds likes their chances. And he adds, perceptively, “An upside is that if readers and advertisers mostly accept the change, that could pave the way to a full flip to online-only several years hence.”

Speaking of the daily news habit, Mark Potts leaves no question about where he stands. “Oh, puh-leeze,” he writes in response to an unnamed Gannett executive’s paean to the virtues of dailiness. “That thinking…is proof that newspapers are still living a fantasy that their products are the centers of their customers’ news and information universe…

It’s simply not that reducing home delivery will drive readers to other sources of news: They’re already there! They’ve been making the switch for years, relying more on the Web…”

BTW, The Detroit Free Press live-blogged the press conference. And you can watch all 42 minutes of it here.

And finally, why aren’t there any female newspaper pundits? Suggestions are welcome.

Miscellany

Canada’s largest newspaper publisher is cutting 10% of its workforce. Sun Media will eliminate 600 positions and restructure its operations in western Canada, Ontario and Quebec. The reasons are all the usual ones everyone else cites. As Mark Hamilton has pointed out, Canada has about one-tenth the population of the US, which should give you an idea of how big this cutback really is.

Veteran newspaper publisher Martin Langeveld has several predictions for 2009. On the whole, he sees newspapers’ prospects improving after a dreadful start. Among his more notable forecasts:

• No other newspaper companies will file for bankruptcy.
• Some major dailies will switch their Sunday package fully to Saturday and drop Sunday publication entirely.
• At least 25 daily newspapers will close outright
• A reporter without an active blog will start to be seen as a dinosaur.

And this one that we didn’t get at all. Please to enlighten:

• Some innovative new approaches to journalism will emanate from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

From the AP: “The American Society of Newspaper Editors scheduled an April vote in Chicago to become simply the American Society of News Editors. Under the proposed changes, which require membership approval, editors of news Web sites also would be permitted to join, as would leaders of journalism programs.” Jeff Jarvis chuckles.

The Portland Oregonian will stop delivering to homes, stores or news boxes in the Eugene-Springfield area, which is the second largest metro region in the state. So it’s not really the Oregonian so much any more, is it?

The daily weekly Bristol Press in Connecticut will fold in mid-January if a buyer can’t be found. Owner Journal-Register Co. is shopping it and 11 other central Connecticut weeklies. The company shuttered three Philadelphia-area weeklies last week.

Did you know that the Washington Post‘s newsstand price has more than doubled in the last year? It’s true.

“What’s your favorite 21^st-century newspaper innovation?” asks Slate’s Jack Shafer at the tail end of a rather dour essay on the industry’s lack of innovation. His candidates: “The incredibly clever and useful” New York Times Reader, the Times‘ Open API program, the Big Picture at the Boston Globe and Adrian Holovay’s EveryBlock.com. Send him your nominations slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

And Finally

Mark Hamilton pointed us to this cool mashup of the most e-mailed stories from newspapers around the English-speaking world. MostEmailedNews.com is one of those forehead-slappingly simple ideas that you wish you had thought of. It’s the work of a Brooklynite who calls himself Tim Brennan. It consists of only two pages at this point, but who knows where Mr. Brennan will take it. Check it out and give him some link love.

We could almost see the collective eyes rolling in the newsrooms of the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press today as the newspapers’ holding company announced a “bold transformation” that will cut home delivery to three days per week and move the bulk of editorial content online.

The press release from Detroit Media Partnership described the move as “a sweeping set of strategic and innovative changes designed to better meet advertiser and reader needs,” although the reader benefit of delivering fewer issues wasn’t clearly articulated.

It has always struck us as odd that newspapers, whom we count on to cut through the hyperbole of press releases, can sling it with the best of them when their own business is involved.  For a more balanced perspective, read the account in the Detroit News. The comments from Free Press editor Paul Anger also convey a sense of resignation about the shift.

Newsosaur Alan Mutter wastes no time poking holes in the announcement, quoting a former executive saying that the pullback was the only alternative to shutting down the two dailies.  The move is historically notable in light of the fact that the News was once the largest afternoon newspaper in the nation.

Martin Langeveld is generous in calling the pullback “not the best solution…it keeps in place two separate press runs on most days while failing to differentiate the two papers more clearly. And implementation will be a nightmare, I’m afraid,” he says, shrewdly.

Editorial Departments Intact

About 200 people will lose their jobs, or less than 8% of the combined workforce. Cutbacks in the editorial department will be minimal because of the need to maintain “vigorous newsgathering operations and editorial voices,” according to the News account.  Most of the cuts will presumably come in production and operational departments.

Next to scaling back frequency, the most controversial aspect of the restructuring plan will likely be the introduction of a light version of both newspapers to be sold exclusively at newsstands on days when the full edition isn’t published.  Industry sources estimate that less than 40% of the circulation of both newspapers comes from newsstand sales, a fact that raises questions about how advertisers will be charged for running there. On Monday holidays, print circulation may fall close to zero.

A daily electronic edition will also be introduced for people who want to do their printing at home. “These are exact copies of each day’s printed newspaper and can be easily navigated and printed from readers’ computers,” the press release says. This means that the $170 million printing plant that the newspapers built in 2005 will now be nearly idle four days a week while printing is outsourced to the readers.  There is no research we’re aware of that supports the assumption that readers are interested in printing their own newspapers.

Cultural Challenge

The gutsiest dimension of the plan is the commitment to move much of both papers’ newsgathering operations online.  This recognizes the unstoppable forces that are transforming newsgathering organizations around the world.  As we reported here this morning, new Gallup research shows that 31% of US adults now consult the Internet daily for news while 40% read a local newspaper.  The trend lines, however will clearly cross sometime in the next five years, making the Internet the most important news source among US adults.  Only 22% of adults under 30 read a local newspaper daily, Gallup reported

The biggest challenges of all will be cultural.  Newspapers often give lip service to the importance of their websites, but stories still abound about resistance from ink-stained veterans who can’t accept the possibility that a screen can be as important a medium of news delivery as a printed page.  Detroit’s newspapers will now have to compete on foreign turf, adapting their products to the standards and cultural practices of the bloggers that so many of them hate.  It will be interesting to see if the reporters and editors can learn to thrive in a medium that has done them so much damage.

No doubt there will be lots of analysis and reaction to follow. We see that Gannett Blog has logged 70 comments in the first four hours. We’ll keep an eye out. In the meantime, we couldn’t help taking a snapshot of the ad that appeared on the Detroit News‘s account of today’s announcement.  Perhaps a cleansing is exactly what’s needed.