Gallup has issued its bi-annual report on news consumption trends, and all mainstream media are down with the exception of cable news and the Internet. The most striking finding is the percentage of people who say they consult the Internet for news every day: up 9% in two years to 31% today. The percentage has more than doubled in the last five years. Meanwhile, the percentage of people who consult a local newspaper every day has dropped from 54% in 1999 to 40% today.

For newspapers, the demographics are a horror show:

% of respondents who get their news every day from each source, by age group:

The statistics point to a continuing trend that has been hammering the newspaper industry: Young people don’t read newspapers.  Meanwhile, Internet consumption is up across the board as people increasingly demand that news be delivered whenever they want it and wherever they happen to be.

Glimmer of Hope at the Rocky

E.W. Scripps says “a handful” of people have asked to look at the books of the Rocky Mountain News, a Denver institution that the company recently put up for sale. A spokesman said no one has yet offered to buy the troubled newspaper and that there’s no guarantee that the people who have asked to see the financials will be granted that access. However, the tire-kicking does indicate that not all hope is lost.  Employees at the Rocky are trying to rally readers to their cause.  A few of them have launched a site called I Want My Rocky to highlight the paper’s importance to the community and statements of support that have come in from readers. Thank God for WordPress.

Meanwhile, MediaNews CEO and Denver Post publisher Dean Singleton is wasting no time in taking advantage of his possible monopoly position. He’s told unions to reopen negotiations with an eye toward cutting $20 million in costs. The request came a day after Moody’s downgraded almost $1 billion of MediaNews debt out of fear of default. The Newspaper Guild represents 730 employees at The Post and the agency that administers the Post’s joint operating agreement with the Rocky.

Miscellany

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is making its third round of job cuts in two years, eliminating 56 full-time and 100 part-time jobs in the circulation unit. The paper’s circulation has dropped 13.6 percent in the last year, according to the Audit Bureau of Control.

McClatchy’s November ad revenues were down 22% on an eye-popping 41% decline in classified advertising. E&P has the ugly breakdown: automotive advertising down 42.9%; real estate down 45.8%; and employment down 58.6%. We can’t remember any publisher reporting this kind of catastrophe over the last two years.  Other trauma: retail ad revenue off 17.6%, national advertising down 33.2% and direct marketing off 16.8%. CEO Pat Talamantes said the declines were “in line with recent ad trends,” which has us wondering what other publishers are going to report.

The Tampa Tribune is blaming a rival newspaper for spreading rumors that it plans to exit the print business.  In a co-bylined Sunday editorial, executive editor Janet Coats and publisher Denise Palmer said the rumors originated in the subscription sales department of competitor St. Petersburg Times. Coats and Palmer said the Times was taking advantage of its status as a privately owned company to position recent layoff reports at the Tribune as evidence that the paper would soon cease print operations.  The rumor was also reported in the Tallahassee Democrat. Going on the offensive, Coats and Palmer claimed that the Tribune actually published more editorial pages than its rival in the first 10 days of December and that its willingness to report news of its own layoffs was in the best journalistic tradition that its rival has so far skirted.  The publisher of the St. Petersburg Times countered, “Our circulation is growing nicely, and we’re very happy to have many readers in the Tampa Bay region.”

The New York Times‘s David Carr says newspapers have found an unlikely ally in besieged Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. According to a criminal complaint filed by the United States attorney, Blagojevich was obsessed with negative coverage by the Chicago Tribune, which has been campaigning for his impeachment.  The governor allegedly threatened to withhold financial support for the Tribune unless the newspaper fired certain editorial writers. There is no evidence that the newspaper complied.  Carr says the revelations about the Blagojevich’s criminal activities come at an odd time, given that the Tribune Company declared bankruptcy just one day before the scandal broke. “In a city and state where corruption is knit into the political fabric, a solvent daily paper would seem to be a civic necessity,” Carr writes. “But if another governor goes bad, what if the local paper were too diminished to do the job?”

The Financial Times profiles, New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., questioning whether he has the will and stamina to persevere through the industry downturn. “If the future of America’s newspaper business rests on one individual, it is on the 57-year-old former reporter,” the FT says. “Yet the fourth-generation family proprietor, who became publisher in 1992, is looking increasingly besieged.” You can say that again.  The Times Company has over $1 billion in debt. It has been forced to consider asset sales and taking on even more debt to meet its obligations. The company was forced to cut its dividend by 74% last month, which the FT notes is “equivalent to [Sulzberger] asking his relatives to take an $18 million-a-year pay cut.” Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch has made no bones about his intentions to take on the Times directly. All this is a heavy burden to bear, the story says, noting that Sulzberger’s legendary father, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, displayed  backbone that has so far not been evident in his offspring.

More bad news for the Associated Press.  The UK’s Guardian newspaper is reporting that Reuters and the Capitol Hill journalism boutique The Politico are teaming up. “The initiative will mean that more than 120 Washington-based journalists will be reporting full-time for Reuters and Politico by the time president-elect Barack Obama takes office in January,” says the Guardian, which has telegraphed its own intentions to enter in the US market. The Politico has been one of the few bright spots in American journalism this year, having signed up more than 100 newspapers for its Washington news service.  Meanwhile, the AP has been under siege for its controversial fee structure and has recently lost some prominent subscribers.

Newspapers continue to retreat from print rather than surrender.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hot on the heels of the newspaper industry’s record-breaking 18.1% quarterly revenue decline, analysts are weighing in with dire forecasts and advice.

“A newspaper that cannot sell enough advertising or cut enough expenses to sustain profitable operations is not likely to make it to the other side of 2009,” writes Alan Mutter in a depressing outlook on the industry’s immediate future. While the rest of Mutter’s post isn’t as provocative as that closing statement, it provides a detailed analysis of which markets are mostly likely to see mergers or closures (Minneapolis, San Francisco, Southern California, Southern Florida) as well as markets like Chicago and Boston, where two competitors are locked in battles of mutual destruction. The most likely scenario for 2009 is that publishers will have to choose from a palette of equally distasteful cost-cutting options, and that the measures they have to take will be more drastic than the 10%-20% workforce cuts of the past year. Mutter lists voluntary pay cuts, massive outsourcing, frequency reduction and asset sales as being on the table.

Fitch Ratings might agree. Its report says several major daily papers could shut down by 2010. Speaking in that odd third-person-singular that investment companies like to use, the agency sa

ys “Fitch expects newspaper industry revenue growth will be negative for the foreseeable future,” and that credit ratings are likely to decline further. Unlike the 2001 advertising crash, this one is affecting both national and regional advertisers, the credit rating agency says. “And unlike the easy credit and lower interest rates during the 2001 ad recession, this time advertisers and consumers face a credit freeze.” The outlook for 2009? Don’t ask. Fitch expects real US GDP to drop 1.2% while inflation hovers at 2.7%.

Steve Outing has some advice for newspaper executives struggling with the reinvention question. While his E&P column isn’t as edgy as usual, his prescriptions are practical. The most counter-intuitive in our opinion: stop chasing young people. Millennials aren’t going to read newspapers, so your redesigns intended to make your print edition more appealing are going to fail. Reach out to them through their mobile devices and services that aggregate their social networks with news (he isn’t more specific about this; Facebook is a pretty big obstacle to this goal). Focus your print editions on the readers who want to read print. Yeah, they’re older, but they’re still viable. You’re going to be

managing print down for the next 15-20 years, so get used to it. And while you’re at it, start pushing those older print readers online. Make your newspaper a gateway to enhanced services on the Web. And for God’s sake, stop wasting your time on fluffy lifestyle pieces. Print loyalists want serious journalism.

Outing has some investment advice, too: hire someone to maximize online visibility through social media channels, bring in a mobility specialist and give your staff time to come up with novel ideas for reinvention. The problem, of course, is who’s got the time or money for all this? Outing doesn’t address the budget issue but then again, he’s a pundit, not an accountant.

Profiling the Provocateur

The New York Observer has a long profile of local media guru Jeff Jarvis, who perhaps vexes the mainstream media industry more than any other contrarian. That’s because Jarvis, who now teaches journalism at NYU and agitates with his popular Buzz Machine blog, is one of them. He worked at the San Francisco Examiner, New York Daily News, People and TV Guide, among other outlets, and was founding editor of Entertainment Weekly. Jarvis may understand traditional media’s pain, but he doesn’t cut the industry much slack.

He is passionate about citizen journalism and the need for media institutions to remake themselves as hubs of news, commentary and conversation among a community of people with similar interests. He has little tolerance for the go-slow mentality that pervades American newsrooms. As Jarvis sees it, the quicker we blow up the old, the quicker we can get on with the new. And he makes his points in blunt, sometimes profane language.

This has made Jarvis a hot potato for a tribe of senior editorialists who are trying to balance their respect for the man with their distaste for his revolutionary ideas. The piece quotes several of these top editors, including New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who clearly finds some of Jarvis’ ideas persuasive but is uncomfortable with his extremism. Gawker’s Nick Denton sums it up: “Of all the Internet supremacists, he is the one who has betrayed his origins in print. Of all the people who grew up in newspapers and magazines, he is the one who has most clearly abandoned them.”

Jeff Jarvis is required reading at the Death Watch and we commend him to you.

Poignant Tales From the Front Lines

Pam Podger and her husband moved from Virginia to Montana because they loved the natural beauty and the lifestyle. They took at job at the Missoulian. Nine months later, they were both laid off on the same day. More than 50 years of journalism experience was thus thrust out on the street, with two kids to care for. Podger writes in American Journalism Review of her anxiety, her fears about the future of journalism and her determination to stick it out in her new home.

Cost-cutting is robbing the public of an American institution – the editorial cartoonist. “In the past three years, around three dozen artists have been laid off, forced to take buyouts or to retire, according to the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists,” says an Associated Press piece. The story spotlights Eric Devericks, whose work is pictured above. Devericks has known nothing but success since his work was recognized with a national award while he was still in college. But rewards don’t amount to a hill of beans in an industry that’s cutting bone, so the Seattle Times laid him off effective next Friday. Next month, Devericks, his wife and three kids are “heading to southern California, where two buddies have offered Devericks a job as a business development specialist for their new industrial design company,” says the AP account. The curtain is quickly coming down on a generation of journalists who proved that the brush, as well the pen, can be mightier than the sword.

Bad news has spread across traditional media at a breathtaking rate. Fortune’s Richard Siklos ticks off some of the sorry numbers. It’s not just the newspaper industry that’s suffering.

Quoting Michael Nathanson, media analyst at Sanford Bernstein, Siklos notes that this is the first time in memory that a coincident election and Olympic year has been accompanied by a decline in ad spending. “Excluding Internet spending, ad spending across all traditional media in this year’s third quarter was down 8.5 per cent, the sixth consecutive quarter of declining spending,” he writes.

Siklos quotes Craig Huber of Barclays Capital forecasting that “classified advertising as a percentage of newspapers’ revenue will decline to 26 per cent in 2009 from 36 per cent in 2006. Meanwhile, newspapers’ share of total U.S. ad expenditures…will have declined to 10 per cent next year from 20 per cent in 1999.”

But it’s not just newspapers. Yahoo just reported a 64% drop in quarterly earnings. Google stock is off more than 45% and analysts are cutting their forecasts of online spending growth. The only winners at this point appear to be subscription services that derive a significant portion of their revenue from non-advertising sources. While the story stops short of pointing to a generalized decline in advertising, the numbers leave you wondering. Could it be that businesses are beginning to question the value of advertising and that those doubts are creeping into the numbers? Could be. On the other hand, it could also just be a crummy economy.

“Get Me Bangalore!”

Maureen Dowd writes about a newspaper that’s offshoring editorial content and learning to make it work. James McPherson is the editor and publisher of Pasadena Now, a small weekly. A year ago, he fired his entire editorial staff and farmed out coverage to a staff of Indian writers he recruited on Craigslist. He pays them 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.

Reaction to the idea was brutal at first, but the concept of editorial offshoring is gaining traction. Dowd counts MediaNews Group chairman Dean Singleton among the ranks of executives who have recently talked about massive offshoring to save costs. Singleton says most preproduction work for MediaNews’s California papers is already outsourced to India, which has cut costs by 65 percent.

If the idea sounds preposterous, think about it. How many people in a standard newsroom never leave the building? Any job that primarily involves computer and phone work is a candidate for offshoring. Between cell phones, webcams, virtual meetings and instant messaging, the need for face-to-face contact is diminishing to the point of irrelevance in many cases. On-site reporters will always have value, but in the future they could become a small corps of feet on the street feeding copy to a virtualized production force that is largely invisible. The compelling cost efficiencies give publishers a lot of incentive to be creative.

Ex-LA Times Editor Takes on Zell

Former Los Angeles Times editor James O’Shea comments at some length on recent statements by Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell about the failure of newspapers to listen to their customers. O’Shea has a problem with that philosophy. “If all we had to do was ask readers what they wanted in a newspaper and then give it to them, wouldn’t someone have done that years ago?” he asks? In fact, they did. “I’ve seen dozens of papers march down that road to no success.”

O’Shea agrees that journalists have done a poor job of demonstrating their value as stewards of the public trust, but he thinks that failure is actually due to their efforts to listen too closely to their customers. The conventional marketing wisdom is that readers want soft, lifestyle stories and the more we give them that pabulum, the more we undermine our value as serious journalists. “To the extent we blur the differences between these once-distinct voices with pandering coverage that resembles advertorial and not editorial we play right into this trap,” he writes.

After nearly 2,500 words of analysis, O’Shea fails to deliver a prescription for change. “Newspapers have to figure out how to deliver journalism that makes the public believe we once again are a public trust, something of value and something they won’t hesitate to pay for,” he writes. Hear, hear! How are we going to do it? O’Shea doesn’t offer any ideas. That makes this piece ultimately rather disappointing.

Miscellany

If the newspaper industry is dying, apparently no one told Saharra White. The California State University, Northridge journalism major pooled her savings and donations from friends last year to launch Say It Loud!, a newspaper for African-Americans of the San Fernando Valley. “I wanted to start the newspaper because there are black people in the Valley doing some positive things,” she says. Say It Loud! is one of about 200 black community newspapers across the US, according to the Black Newspaper Publishers Association. White says she felt the stunning election of an African-American as President demanded new media to cover the impact of the Obama administration on America’s future. She distributed the paper in print for a year, but now has gone online-only as a matter of economic necessity.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer is laying off 27 staffers by phone this morning because not enough people took the paper up on its buyout offer. In a memo yesterday, Editor Susan Goldberg told Guild local 1 employees that those selected for layoff will be notified by 9:30 a.m. Anyone who doesn’t get a call should come in to work.

The publisher of the San Jose Mercrury News has told employees to brace for more layoffs early in the new year. The company has already cut newsroom employment by 50%.

The Charleston (W. Va.) Daily Mail will switch from afternoon to morning publication, giving the city two morning papers. The Daily Mail and the Charleston Gazette will continue to compete with each other, despite the fact that they share production staffs and distribution networks. They also share about 6,000 readers who subscribe to both publications. Afternoon newspapers have all but disappeared in the US.

And Finally…

While executives and journalists fret about the implications of life without newspapers, Donna Freedman writes on MSN Money Blog about more practical matters: what’s she going to use to clean her windows?  The alarming shrinkage of daily newspapers is going to leave people with a shortage of packing material, impromptu gift-wrap and puppy-training supplies, she worries. “Without newspapers, what will I put at the front door to soak up moisture from wet shoes? To say nothing of the fact that I would no longer be able to say, ‘These are the Times that dry men’s soles,'” she groans. Several visitors pick up on the fun, offering eulogies for Sudoku puzzles lost and fish ‘n chips that lost their appeal on polystyrene platters.

Vol. 1, No. 1

It isn’t a newspaper, but to millions of computer enthusiasts, PC Magazine is an institution. It led the uprising of PC-empowered office workers against corporate IT departments in the 1980s and peaked at 1.2 million circulation in the 1990s. Issue sizes once ran to 500+ pages and the magazine supported a staff of more than 300 people. Its product reviews were considered the gold standard in the industry.

So the announcement this week that PC Magazine will exit the print market and go online-only was a turning point of sorts. With circulation down by half and an advertising base that has switched its budgets almost entirely online, the move makes sense. Expect to see more tech titles follow.

Longtime tech writer David Strom and I devote 14 minutes to a eulogy and look to the future in this podcast. Strom also has his own memorial here. Former PC Mag editor-in-chief Michael Miller also has a few thoughts.

Technology media has been a leading indicator of change in other media sectors. InfoWorld was the first major tech title to abandon print and many publishers have scaled back on size and frequency to keep their ink-on-paper operations viable. Most will tell you that they run print at break-even and make all their profits online. That was apparently the situation at PC Mag. Readers of tech publications are naturally more Internet-savvy than the general population, so the shift to the Internet was evident in the tech market several years ago. Look to that market as a leading indicator of where the media in general is going.

Tough times for the Newspaper Guild are shifting the union’s strategy from organizing laborers to simply surviving. Membership is down about 17% since 1986 and 2,000 Guild members have left this year alone. In a telling move, the union recently cut back the frequency of its internal newspaper from monthly to bimonthly and moved more content online. “Right now the biggest thing you’re fighting is the overall sense of impending doom,” is the uplifting quote from new Guild President Bernard Lunzer.

It’s so bad that the Guild is now focused on helping its longtime adversaries survive. The union recently pitched in to help finance an acquisition and it has worked actively with some newspaper owners to arrange concessions that would keep the titles afloat. It’s also beginning to organize people outside of the newspaper industry, such as interpreters in California courts.

The industry’s shift to online distribution hasn’t helped the Guild. Fobes notes that “Much of its power came from its ability to seize up a paper by asking sister unions running presses to strike.” With fewer copies to print and presses to staff, that club isn’t as big as it once was.

The Associated Press will reduce it staff by 10% over the next year. The cutback of roughly 400 positions will be accomplished by attrition to the greatest degree possible, according to CEO Tom Curley, but layoffs may be necessary. The AP instituted a hiring freeze several weeks ago. The pain being felt by member newspapers has hit the AP hard and the situation has worsened as several large members have announced plans to drop the subscription service in order to save money.

Lee Abrams and friend

Conde Nast Portfolio takes a look at Tribune Co.’s much ballyhooed redesigns and finds that nothing much has changed. New looks-and-feels in Orlando and Ft. Lauderdale have barely budged circulation, which continues to fall. “We can’t find any impact from the redesign,” Norbert Ortiz, the Orlando Sentinel‘s vice president for circulation and consumer marketing, tells Portfolio.

This doesn’t bode well for recent makeovers in Los Angeles and Chicago. Experts debate whether the new designs are radical or just a new coat of paint, with the painters holding the edge: “a distraction,” says Ken Doctor; “seat of the pants” adds Alan Mutter. The story focuses on Tribune chief innovation officer Lee Abrams, who is inexplicably pictured with the cast of Blue Man Group. Abrams invented the album format that revolutionized FM radio back in the 80s, but his innovations in print have been less dramatic. “I wouldn’t call it redesign. I would call it redecoration,” says Alan Jacobson of Brass Tacks Design.

Abrams is quoted asserting that “we really had to work on reclaiming things that newspapers had traditionally owned,” from investigative reporting to election and crime coverage. Oddly, Tribune Co. has slashed editorial staff at most of its papers this year, drastically undercutting their ability to sustain provide such information.

We’ve previously shared our opinion of redesigns (“A Useless Exercise at the Wrong Time”) and see no further need to comment.

New/Old Journalism Clash in Washington Park

Mediashift tell of a new online publication at New York University that’s challenging the school’s 36-year-old campus fixture, Washington Square News (WSN). The venture was launched by three non-journalism majors who were frustrated with what they call WSN’s bland tone and faux objectivity. NYU Local, which is currently configured as a blog, takes a fundamentally different view of impartiality. “Most people who want to be objective tend to disguise their opinions,” says co-editor Lily Quateman says. “Being objective treats readers like idiots and makes them guess.”

WSN Editor-in-Chief, Adam Playford begs to differ, saying his journal will continue to report just the facts and label opinions accordingly. He also says online isn’t a major focus at WSN, which updates its website just once a day. In contract, NYU Local encourages anyone to contribute and makes it possible to do so by any means possible, including cell phone. The staff hopes to move to a social networking platform in order to further encourage community journalism. “The idea of citizen journalism is a massive misnomer,” says 20-year-old co-editor Cody Brown. “Everyone is a citizen and anyone can be a reporter. The term is patronizing.”

The piece, which is written by an NYU junior, highlights the push-pull taking place between old- and new-media models, even within the context of a college-age audience. The fundamental debate is over the question of whether professional reporters are better equipped to tell a story versus thousands of unknown citizens. The fact that the battle is taking place in an institution that’s training the next generation of journalists indicates that this issue will be debated for some time to come.

Layoff Log

• More layoffs are days away at the Baltimore Sun, according to the newspaper’s union. If true, the action would follow by just five months a 100-person downsizing this summer, a cutback that hit the newsroom particularly hard. No word on numbers, but the cuts are expected to be layoffs, not buyouts. The Sun employed 1,400 people before the 100-person cutback last June.
• With five more newsroom layoffs at the New Haven Register, the size of the newsroom staff will have shrunk from 110 to 65 in a decade. The five editors are part of a larger cutback of 20 people announced yesterday. The daily will also shutter Play, an entertainment-oriented weekly. More layoffs are possible in mid-January, when parent Journal Register may fall into default if it can’t make its debt payments. Earlier this week, Journal Register said it would probably close two small Connecticut dailies – the New Britain Herald and the Bristol Press – along with 11 weeklies in the state.
• As expected, the ax has fallen in Tribune Co.’s Washington bureaus. LA Observed reports that Chicago Tribune staffers John Crewdson, Bay Fang, Stephen Hedges, and Aamer Madhani were let go. Earlier eight Los Angeles Times staffers were laid off and acting Tribune acting bureau chief Naftali Bendavid left to join The Wall Street Journal.
• Newhouse is cutting deeply in Michigan. Staff at eight newspapers have been told that massive buyouts are planned and some operations will be consolidated in Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. There’s no word on numbers, but the Ann Arbor Chronicle account says nearly everyone in the newsroom has been offered a buyout. Production staff has been told that if they don’t take the buyout, they’ll have to work from the Grand Rapids office, which is 130 miles away. Papers in the group include the Grand Rapids Press, Ann Arbor News, Jackson Citizen Patriot, Flint Journal, Bay City Times, Muskegon Chronicle, Saginaw News and the Michigan Business Review. The Ann Arbor paper early announced plans to close its Ypsilanti bureau and to slash pages and sections in an effort to control costs.

Miscellany

Outsell’s Ken Doctor has some encouraging news for newspapers. “It’s a shrinking business that only looks like it is dying,” he tells Media Life. “The U.S. newspaper business will still take in some $40 billion in revenues in 2008.” Doctor believes some papers will close and many may scale back frequency in coming years in order to align expenses with smaller revenues. However, he expects the business to come back, even the devastated classified advertising business. “Forty percent of the newspaper industry is partnering with Yahoo, and we should see a good Yahoo bump in online display ads,” Doctor says. A lot of retraining will be needed, though.

Preliminary research by Middleberg & Associates and the Society of New Communications Research shows that 100% of reporters under 30 agree that new media and communication tools are valuable journalism tools. But only 40% of journalists over 50 year agree with that statement. There is no more change-averse animal than an old newsman. You can still take the survey here.

The Daily Triplicate of Crescent City, Calif. celebrates awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association by trashing the slipshod tactics most awards programs use to select winners. Its tone might sound a bit snarky, but our experience is that the point is valid.

In case you didn’t see this comment from last week, journalism professor Robert Hodierne at the University of Richmond has been commissioned by American Journalism Review “to survey folks who left the newspaper business under circumstances other than voluntary — laid off, bought out, etc. I’m spreading the word about this survey in every way I can and if you guys could help me spread the word I’d be grateful. Take the survey here.

Newspaper Death Watch editor Paul Gillin is interviewed on The Radio Ecoshock Show about what’s ailing newspapers and what will fill the gap. You can skip the description and listen to the short interview here.

Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff says the media mogul was unaware that Dow Jones had an enterprise business when he purchased the company two years ago. “He wanted the newspaper, and the fact that afterward he found himself with businesses that were rather more successful than the newspaper business, was surprising,” Wolff told a conference.

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. “We only put 20 percent of our content on the Web,” says on association executive. Of course, there’s a train wreck waiting down the line at some point, but in the meantime, publishers can plan to gracefully manage their properties into oblivion in lock-step with demographic trends.

The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild pried a nice contract settlement out of the Seattle Times: a 6% raise over two years. That money’s gotta come from somewhere, though, and staffers are bracing for an “ugly” layoff announcement in the near future.

We’re late reporting this one (little things like making a living do take their toll), but the New York Times Co. reported that profits fell 51.4% on a 14.4% decline in ad revenue in the third quarter.  Standard & Poor’s responded by lowering the company’s debt to junk bond status. Print advertising was off 18.5% and online advertising was up 10%. Online revenue now makes up over 12% of total sales at the company. The board also said it is considering writing down the value of assets in its New England Media Group, which includes the Boston Globe, $150 million. The Times Co. originally paid $1 billion for the group.

Traffic to newspaper websites was up almost 16% in the third quarter, according to the Newspaper Association of America. Page views were up 25%, making it the best quarter for newspaper website traffic since the organization began tracking those figures in 2004. Interest in the political campaigns and the ongoing turmoil on Wall Street were cited as likely drivers of the traffic surge. It remains to be seen how year-over-year comparisons will fare once the election is over.

Threatened Journalist has an uplifting story on San Diego Union-Tribune ex-pats who are doing quite nicely, thank you. One is a communications manager for the Port of San Diego, another works in media relations for the University of Southern California and a third is a Methodist minister in Mission Valley. All are wistful about their former jobs in the pressure-packed newsroom, but they say they have no regrets. The way the industry was going, there wasn’t much future in the business. The author relates other happy landings: “Former metro reporter Liz Neely just landed a job as an investigator for a law firm. Former business reporter Craig Rose is working for City Attorney Mike Aguirre. Former columnist Gerry Braun is working for Mayor Jerry Sanders. Former reporters Chet Barfield and Mark Sauer are working for Councilwoman Donna Frye. Former North County reporter Lisa Petrillo is working at Children’s Hospital. And the list go on.” So there is life after newspapers!

Cincy Navigator

Mark Glaser has an extended interview with Jennifer Carroll, Gannett’s vice president for digital content. She gives a progress report on Gannett’s Information Center initiative, a 2006 campaign to remake its 85 daily newspaper newsrooms into 24-hour digital publishing platforms. Carroll says that the programming and video skills the company has taught its journalist has led to some truly innovative coverage, like the Des Moines Register’s video/database/map mashup coverage of the Parkersburg tornadoes. Another innovation is CinciNavigator, a mass mashup created by the Cincinnati Enquirer that embeds information about local events ranging from arrests to nightclub listings on a map.

Carroll says database reporting can create a groundswell of interest that leads to improved print sales. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle found that by publishing a database on police overtime the Thursday before a Sunday print date, it created anticipation that drove the highest Sunday single-copy sales of the year.

Carroll says Gannett is hiring and expanding its commitment to digital journalism, even against the backdrop of a terrible business climate.  A few people comment on the interview skeptically, suggesting that newspapers will never be a destination for multimedia content.

Future for Journalism Bright, Just Not So Much for Newspapers

John Kirch writes about a recent panel on the future of journalism at the University of Maryland-College Park. He offers the optimistic view that that future is bright.  The comments by panelists reflect our own opinion that the best time to get into journalism is when everyone else is getting out.  The future of big branded news institutions is dim, panelists said, but journalists will still be able to survive and thrive by promoting their own brands instead of the brains of their employers.

Paraphrasing the panelists, Birch writes, “Reporters will not only have to know how to interview sources and write stories for different media platforms,…they will have to know basic business principles so that they can create individual brand names for themselves that can be used to build followings and create job opportunities.”

Knowledge of business principles goes against the grain of conventional journalism teaching, of course.  However, that doesn’t mean journalist have to sell their souls, only that they need to be able to promote themselves because they are the product.  The risk is that journalists fall back to providing only content that delivers a large audience, such as celebrity gossip. We hope to see nonprofit and public interest organizations emerge that promote content that the public needs to know about.  The difference is that the content mix will be pulled by the readers more than pushed by editors.  What that will look like is anybody’s guess.

Miscellany

Jeff Jarvis is as provocative as ever in this withering attack on a recent AJR piece by Washington Post reporter  Paul Farhi. Farhi makes the case that journalists aren’t responsible for the plunging fortunes of newspapers; a variety of competitive and demographic trends are the real culprit. Balderdash, says Jarvis. “Victimhood is an irresponsible abdication of responsibility, a surrender.” We suspect that Jarvis was trying to stir up controversy and boost attendance to his forthcoming conference more than he was trying to savage a colleague. In that respect, he was successful. There are more than 150 comments on the piece, many of them thought-provoking, and Jarvis returns to engage with his audience frequently during the debate.

While free daily newspapers have struggled in US, they’re evidently hitting a chord with the commuter set in the UK.  Brand Republic reports that free dailies given away to commuters are gaining a foothold with the younger readers, who have largely forsaken paid daily newspapers. “City AM‘s daily reach has increased from 23% in 2007 to 32% this year, while the FT’s has dipped from 22% to 20%,” writes Mike Fletcher. Metro’s circulation now tops 3 milllion across the UK and has brand extensions that offer eight different platforms for advertisers. Perhaps more importantly, the freebies have solid demographics among the up-and-coming audience of young adults. London Lite, which is published by the same company that also produces the Daily Mail and Evening Standard, counts almost 80% of its readers in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic group.

The Providence Journal will lay off 25 part-time in six full-time employees, all from its news operation.  The move leaves a news staff of 200 people and a total staff of 705 at the ProJo, down from 763 in early September.

If online competition is hitting the broadcast industry as hard as the print business, why haven’t there been more layoffs in TV newsrooms?  Here’s one explanation.

The collapse of so Wall Street firms will hit the media business hard, with newspapers taking a disproportionate share of the body blows, according to a Bernstein Research report.  The report says finance and insurance/real estate advertising makes up 21% of newspapers’ ad revenue, about double that of broadcast media and slightly more than that of online media. “History suggests that another industry will eventually fill the growth void left by the insurance/real estate and finance sectors, but the operative word is clearly ‘eventually,” wrote the report’s author, analyst Michael Nathanson.

Technorati has come out with its annual State of the Blogosphere report and some numbers are truly eye-popping. The site found blogs in 81 languages and daily posts are closing in on one million. Nearly 185 million people have started a blog (although most don’t tend them regularly). Newspapers have the bug: 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews and 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands they love or hate. Most bloggers who accept advertising make a profit. Technorati did a big survey and got comments from various media influencers. We haven’t had a chance to read it all yet, but if you’re interested in publishing, you should check it out.

Meanwhile, The Politico, which is one of the more promising Web-only journalism ventures, is expanding. It will add employees, grow circulation of its Washington-area newspaper and and print more often. The staff will be expanded to at least 105 from its current 85. Circulation of its Capitol Hill newspaper will be increased 20% to 32,000 and a Monday issue will be added. All this will happen after the election, which is The Politico’s busiest season, but officials said there’s going to be plenty of news to keep people busy. Also, they expect to reach profitability next year, far ahead of schedule.

And perhaps there’s gold in them thar websites. BIA Financial Network and Borrell Associates have a new study that estimates that newspaper websites are the most lucrative local media around, with valuations of the largest properties reaching $450 million. That makes local alternatives like TV and radio small potatoes in comparison. “Given their growth potential, the value multiples of media Web sites may be 2 to 4 times that of the core business,” the BIA president is quoted as saying. The study also praises the strong cash flow at media websites. The problem is that growth is slowing. BTW, the $450 million number is only for the largest properties, so don’t get too excited. We estimate the market value of Newspaper Death Watch is about $1.23.

Miscellany

In the department of publishers that still don’t get it, we’d like to include The American Scholar, which publishes a provocative list of “12 Questions about the future of journalism” by Bill Kovach without offering visitors a way to respond. Um, guys, that’s part of the problem.

In chaos, there is opportunity, or at least that’s what Michelle Rafter says. She points to new launches at Slate, The Wall Street Journal, Silicon Valley Insider and Forbes as evidence that there’s opportunity in business journalism right now. Just make sure you get cash up front.

Death is good business, it seems. Tributes.com, which runs obituaries and related memorial messages, is teaming up with The Wall Street Journal to create a print counterpart to the website. For $80, you can buy a listing on Tributes.com where you can post photos and memories of a departed loved one. Now, for an additional $250, you can run your message in a dying medium, too. Tributes is a startup that was spun out of Eons, a social network for the over-50 crowd. Both are the brainchildren of Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor.

In the 80s, New York City brought us the Village People. Now it brings us TimesPeople. That’s The New York Times‘ new social network. “TimesPeople provides NYTimes.com readers with a way to share their thoughts and recommendations about The Times‘s content with other readers, making their public activities on the site more open,” says a company press release. Apparently you can only share your thoughts about Times content, not anybody else’s, which we suppose makes sense. You can also see the most recommended articles. The Times is a latecomer to the social networking world, trailing The Wall Street Journal by a whole eight days.

Scott Karp analyzes Matt Drudge’s influence and concludes “It’s the Links, Stupid.” The action in online publishing is in filtering and linking, not corralling your audience, he says. Drudge is successful because he tells cable TV and radio reporters what’s important and that shapes their daily broadcasts. Newspapers, in contrast, tend to tell people only what’s important in their pages on any one day, and that’s far less interesting to readers than a guide to that vast Worldwide Web. “In the web media era, when all news content is accessible by anyone, anywhere in the world, and no news brands no longer have a monopoly over news distribution, the power of influence lies in the ability to FILTER the vast sea of news,” he writes.

Layoff Log

• The Anchorage Daily News is reducing its staff by about 10%, laying off 13 employees and holding another dozen positions vacant.
• The Raleigh News & Observer has started making cuts after only 16 newsroom employees accepted a buyout offer. Its editorial cartoonist, a 33-year veteran, and ombudsmen will be cut back to part-time but their jobs won’t be eliminated.
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is going to buy out or lay off workers unless it gets concessions from its unions. Between 10 and 20 Teamsters will lose their jobs, according to a union spokesman, but that’s just the beginning. The paper’s Ohio parent has been losing money for years and is threatening to sell its Pittsburgh property.
• As if the Seattle Times Co. didn’t need more headaches, now the truck drivers are threatening to strike. About 70 truckers could walk off the job on Oct. 21 in protest over the company’s bid to outsource its trucking to Penske Logistics.
• Threats by the publisher of the Newark Star-Ledger to close the paper if cost-cutting goals can’t be met have apparently put a bee in the Jockey shorts of the local union. The union representing 400 mailers at the paper agreed by a 10-1 margin to a three-year wage freeze and buyouts of a quarter of its members. The Star-Ledger is still looking to buy out another 200 of its 750 full-time nonunion employees.

Investors were all aflutter at the news late last week that Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim had purchased a 6% interest in The New York Times Co. Slim, whom Forbes estimates to be the world’s second richest man behind Warren Buffett, has made his fortune principally by buying low and selling high. It helps that he owns one of the world’s largest privatized monopolies, Telefonos de Mexico, which he acquired in 1990.

Shares of NYT jumped nearly 15% on Thursday on the news, helped by Slim’s statement to reporters that his interest in the publisher was “purely financial.” Are newspaper stocks finally going to be perceived as the bargain investors believe them to be? Probably not, argues The Wall Street Journal‘s Martin Peers. Writing in Thursday’s “Heard on the Street” column, Peers notes past failures by investors who tried to wrest control of the Times company from the controlling Ochs/Sulzberger family. He also brings up Slim’s $2 billion bet on failed retailer CompUSA as an example of the billionaire’s fallibility. Finally, he points to the lofty price/earnings ration of the NYT Co. – more than 20 right now – as reason to “see Thursday’s pop in Times stock as a selling opportunity.”

Tech Publisher Bucked Trend, Cashed in With Print

In the publishing market for technology enthusiasts, print has almost evaporated. That’s what makes O’Reilly Media’s Make magazine so remarkable. Make was launched well after the destruction of the technology print media had already begun. The publishers thought there was value that print brought to their target audience of tinkerers that couldn’t be reproduced on a Web page. Not that the Internet isn’t important. In fact, most of Make‘s circulation development has been done on line. The publication also hosts a series of popular fairs where readers show off their inventions. But in a market that has largely turned up its nose at print, Make is a notable – and profitable – exception.

In this podcast, publisher and editor Dale Dougherty tells of the counter-intuitive wisdom that led to the creation of the Make brand. The speech is only 17 minutes long, but it will remind you of the value that print still brings to the publishing equation when applied sensibly.

Rx for Newspaper Websites

Mark Potts has a set of idea for fixing newspaper websites that are well worth reading. Potts recently wrapped up an engagement with Philly.com in which he says staff attempted to break the mold with some success. What is the mold of newspaper websites? Too much information crammed into too little space and surrounded by blinking banners ads. This is a legacy of the print mentality, Potts writes. Why do newspapers still organize everything by news/features/sports/metro/arts when they don’t have to be tied to such rigid structure on the Web? And what’s with all the banner ads, which are the least effective form of online advertising? Why not do more with targeted text ads and search? Again, the legacy mentality favors display ads, he says.

Potts recommends that publishers take more risks and look at the example of the online pure-plays for inspiration. Web publishers think nothing about launching mobile services, for instance, and if the gamble doesn’t pay off, they just shrug. Newspaper publishers, on the other hand, research any new initiative to death and then finally launch something that’s uninspired and late. Classified ads are dead, Potts says. Deal with it. And newspaper sites still aren’t local enough. Aggregate and outsource content to readers. Lively debate ensues in the comments section.

Easy Come, Easy Go

Novato, Calif.’s hometown newspaper since 1922 is no more. The Advance shut down last week, citing the usual factors: tough economy, stiff online competition, spiraling costs. The paper hadn’t made a profit in nine years. An unbylined announcement ticks off a list of investments and innovations the Advance undertook in an effort to stay afloat – adding staff, sectionalizing and boosting circulation among others – but the efforts were fruitless. The paper’s demise apparently wasn’t for lack of quality. It won the California Newspaper Publishers Association’s highest award four consecutive years through 2006.

Meanwhile, the state with the toughest economy in the nation saw the launch of a new title. The successful Florida Weekly will come to Naples on Oct. 2. The lifestyle-oriented tabloid covers news, arts and entertainment, dining, regional business, and real estate. The original Florida Weekly of Ft. Myers has a readership of 50,000, according to Editor & Publisher. Naples Florida Weekly will be distributed through more than 500 newsstands and by mail.

Miscellany

Tragedy in San Francisco: the long-suffering Chronicle yesterday published obituaries for several of its Sunday comics. Among the deceased are Mister Boffo, the Fusco Brothers, Brevity, Tokyopop and Sherman’s Lagoon. Dilbert is also moving. The decision was guided by more than 13,000 responses to a poll conducted this summer. “We know that readers feel strongly about comics,” an unnamed Chron editor writes. Indeed they do.

The Bowling Green Daily News is an afternoon daily that has adopted a “print first” strategy. Its audience isn’t terribly Internet-savvy and the afternoon publishing schedule limits its timeliness. What’s more, the paper is still growing revenue. The managing editor sees no reason to favor a website because print pays the bills. Moreover, the capital investment required to launch a competing website and put a staff in place is prohibitive, he says. He is on drugs.

The Sacramento Bee is cutting staff by 7% on top of an earlier round of cuts in June. This time, a buyout offer enticed 87 people to leave the company, including 23 newsroom employees. The editorial department had been largely spared from the June round of cuts, but the reduction took a bigger toll, with the features department along losing 11 people. Bee executives said they didn’t know if more cutbacks would be needed.

Gannett Blog reports on an innovative idea by the Pensacola News Journal: it’s distributing newsstand copies with a distinctive front page. The idea is to attract the generally younger group of readers that buys newspapers on impulse. Single-copy sales are about 18% of the Pensacola paper’s circulation, according to Gannett Blog. Commenters generally approve of the idea.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram plans to sell its 88-year-old headquarters building at the northwest corner of Seventh and Taylor streets. Its 184,000 sq. ft. are simply more than the shrinking newspapers needs, the publisher says.

The Rushville (Inc.) Republican joins the ranks of newspapers that are cutting out Monday editions. The move will save enough money to enable the paper to avoid layoffs, at least for now.

And Finally…

While strolling through Pet Rock 2008, the annual festival in east-central Massachusetts that brings hundreds of dog owners together in a celebration of their pooches, we were struck by the old cliche that dog owners and their pets frequently look alike. We started snapping examples where we thought this  was true. While the cliche is by no means universally valid, there are some striking similarities in some cases. Just for fun, here are a few examples. Do you have any of your own? Send us a link to the online photos or post them in the comments section and we’ll add them to our Flickr slideshow.