Last week marked the one-year anniversary of Newspaper Death Watch, a blog I started on a whim but which has built enough readership to merit several hours of my time each week. In posting more than 150 entries over the last year and reading many times that many articles, I’ve learned a few things that I thought I’d share on this anniversary.

The catalyst for this blog was an essay I wrote nearly two years ago in which I predicted that the newspaper industry was about to undergo a business implosion that would be stunning in its speed and scope. I wasn’t by any means the first person to predict the collapse of the industry, but I was probably one of the few to foresee how fast it would occur.

That’s because I’ve followed the high tech industry for more than 20 years and repeatedly seen successful, stable businesses come apart at the seams when their environment changed: Digital Equipment, Compaq, Novell, WordPerfect, Wang Laboratories, Cullinet Software, Lotus, Silicon Graphics, and many others. It wasn’t a stretch to see two years ago that the same pattern was occurring in the newspaper business. The environment for publishers was changing in ways that would make their value proposition irrelevant very quickly. Demographic trends all pointed in that direction.

What went wrong

The inevitability of the industry’s self-destruction seems clear now, so there’s no news in that. But how could a business that was so stable and profitable for 150 years go into such a rapid tailspin? Two stories from the past year offered great insight into that question: Outgoing Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger’s farewell piece from the end of 2007 and Eric Alterman’s thoughtful analysis from the March 31, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.

Steiger’s piece was memorable for the stories it told about the excesses of the post-Watergate period. He remembers, for example, how one top editor put the kibosh on a proposal to tighten the belt by eliminating first-class travel for reporters. “I like flying first class,” Steiger quotes the man as saying with a smile. “You’re setting a bad example.” He also recounts internal struggles that occurred when newspapers went online, struggles that no doubt held back these papers from making the bold moves they needed to insure their survival. Steiger’s piece makes it clear that newspapers fumbled the opportunity to get out front of the Internet by focusing too much on protecting their print franchises.

Alterman notes the changes that occurred around the time of Watergate, when papers began to shed their partisan past and reposition themselves as impartial (read: bland) recorders of history. The scramble to win Pulitzers and duplicate the Washington Post‘s Watergate success resulted in millions of dollars being flushed on large Washington bureaus and expensive overseas correspondents. Basically, newspapers lost touch with their local constituencies and began writing for other journalists more so than for their readers.

Alterman also documents another ominous trend that began in the 1970s: the rise of the “insider journalist.” As reporters gained celebrity, their access to the great and powerful became a status symbol amongst their peers. Powerful people knew this, and they learned to exploit their access to leading journalists for their own gain as well. Readers weren’t served by any of this, and as the journalism world became clubbier during the 1980s and 1990s, the reading public lost interest.

This culminated in embarrassments like the Jayson Blair scandal and subsequent fallout in which a number of high-profile columnists at newspapers around the country lost their jobs. It was the low point of modern journalism: the profession had sunk so far that facts no longer mattered; if a reporter said something was true, then it must be true. Who had time to fact-check, anyway? There were gala dinners to attend and golf dates with a CEO.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Meanwhile, newspaper executives knew full well what was going on around them. Circulation began sliding in the mid 1980s and demographic trends made it clear that young people didn’t read newspapers. A few papers saw catastrophe coming and made the leap to national circulation. They will survive the carnage.

The rest were addicted to the healthy and predictable profit margins of their business. Executives knew they were over-exposed to advertising from the shrinking department store industry and that their classified ad franchises were horribly vulnerable to online competitors. But why do anything? Their investors were fat and happy and there was no need to rock the boat.

This complacency is common in industries on the brink of collapse. IBM averaged $8 billion in annual profits during the decade before it lost $8 billion and nearly went out of business. Big companies often enjoy their most profitable years just before the undertow of market change sucks them under.

Watergate’s sad legacy

It’s too late for the newspaper industry to save itself. The average regular newspaper reader is 55 years old. Fewer than one in five people under the age of 25 ever reads a newspaper. They’re not going to start reading one now.

Reading accounts of the industry’s mistakes, I’ve become increasingly convinced that Watergate was the worst thing that ever happened to the newspaper industry. It transformed the role of the reporter from anonymous scribe to media celebrity. It distracted editors from the needs of their readers and diverted investment from productive local channels into wasteful global folly. For almost 30 years, the industry got away with these mistakes because it was the only game in town. Had executives acted a decade ago to dominate the online age, they might have saved themselves. But in this day of blogs, Wikipedia and Craigslist, newspapers don’t have a compelling value proposition.

Sure, online traffic is growing and online dollars are inching upward, but the top line is falling too fast. The union contracts negotiated two decades ago can’t be easily changed, the presses still need to be maintained and delivery truck drivers need to be paid. At some point during the next two years, the revenue and expense lines will cross, but there will be little left to cut without turning major metro dailies into expensive supermarket advertisers. There will be massive consolidation and a lot more layoffs.

I’ll continue to chronicle the sad decline of an American institution on this blog, but I’ll also write about some of the exciting experiments that are transforming journalism across multiple media. I firmly believe a new kind of journalism that embraces blogs, camera phones, Twitter, wikis, hyperlinks, search engines and millions of ordinary citizens will be far richer and more vibrant than the one that preceded it. We just have to clean up an ugly mess first.

More Goodwill Write-downs; Debt Burden Ties Owners’ Hands

Goodwill is becoming harder and harder to find in the newspaper business these days and recent financial moves tend to confirm that. Editor & Publisher reports that Belo and McClatchy collectively took more than $1.75B in goodwill write-downs at the end of the first quarter to recognize the lost value of their media properties. The piece goes on to look at other goodwill write-downs in recent history, including the New York Times Co.’s recognition that more than half the value of its New England properties had declined since 1993. Goodwill is just a paper loss, but it reflects a business’s recognition that the value of an asset has declined and probably won’t come back in the foreseeable future.

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Follow the Media looks at the increasingly crushing debt burden that newspapers face. As media companies went deeply into hock to finance big consolidation ventures in the 1990s, they saddles themselves with payment terms that now force them to do everything in their means just to service the debt load. The piece concludes with a description of the spiral into which the industry has fallen: “Print newspapers will continue to cut expenses, some of which we the readers will notice and some we won’t, their editorial and advertising product will continue to deteriorate, and eventually we readers will reach the point where we decide we are no longer getting our money’s worth and we all go elsewhere. The gamble for publishers is just how much deterioration we will accept before we truly abandon ship?”

Demographic Trends Headed in Wrong Direction

Another sign that newspapers have all the demographic trends going against them: MediaPost cites a comScore report that found that “18- to-24-year-olds were 38% more likely than the general population not to read a newspaper in a typical week. The 35-44 cohort were 9% more likely not to read one. The flip comes with the 45-54 cohort, which were 24% more likely than the general population to read one.” The good news is that young people who care about news are big users of newspaper websites. The bad news is that online revenues are less than 10% of sales at most big newspapers.

Zell Gets Pissed

Is Sam Zell losing it? He’s recently been quoted saying that he never expected an 18% revenue decline in one year and he’s become increasingly belligerent in his meetings with employees recently. BNet has more. By the way, have you seen the video of Zell telling one of his reporter employees, “F**k you?” It’s here on YouTube. He mutters 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.

And Finally…

Maybe it’s time to get while the getting is good? Romenesko documents a trio of retirements of veteran journalists, including:

• Palm Beach Post Publisher Tom Giuffrida;
• Austin American-Statesman Editor Rich Oppel; and
• Gannett Newspaper Division chief Sue Clark-Johnson.

And Executive Editor Joel Rawson of The Providence Journal, who announced the previous week that he’ll retire soon, says the industry’s problems are not driving him out. He’s still got his health and he wants to spend more time flying, he says. Having cut his staff by 40% over the last 19 years has nothing to do with it.

The New Yorker devotes 6,600 meticulously edited words to the impending death of newspapers, examining objectively the promise and perils of a new-media world which writer Eric Alterman sees embodied in the Huffington Post. Drawing on sources ranging from Walter Lippman to The Simpsons, Alterman concludes:

• That the death of newspapers is inevitable;
• That the model that will emerge to replace them looks strikingly like that of the newspapers of 200 years ago; and
• That our democracy is probably better off for this trend, although the plight of people in “the dark” is worse.

Here are some excerpts. Everything is elliptical:

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.”

The McClatchy Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5-billion purchase. Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year. America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared.

Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they could believe “all or most” media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago, Nearly nine in ten Americans, according to the Sacred Heart study, say that the media consciously seek to influence public policies, though they disagree about whether the bias is liberal or conservative.

Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. “People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,” she says. “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

[Huffington Post] is poised to break even on advertising revenue of somewhere between six and ten million dollars annually, according to estimates from Nielsen NetRatings and comScore, the Huffington Post is more popular than all but eight newspaper sites.

The blogosphere relies on its readership, €”its community, €”for quality control.

Most posts inside the [Huffington] site, however, go up before an editor sees them.

Journalism works well, [Walter] Lippmann wrote, when “it can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch.” But where the situation is more complicated, journalism “causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation.”

When Lippmann was writing, many newspapers remained committed to the partisan model of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American press, in which editors and publishers viewed themselves as appendages of one or another political power or patronage machine and slanted their news offerings accordingly.

The twentieth-century model, in which newspapers strive for political independence and attempt to act as referees between competing parties on behalf of what they perceive to be the public interest, was, in Lippmann’s time, in its infancy.

[The piece goes into an analysis of a 1920s debate between Lippman and rival John Dewey over the nature and methods of democratic discourse.]

As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected, top reporters, anchors, and editors naturally rose in status to the point where some came to be considered the social equals of the senators, [P]olitics increasingly became a business for professionals and a spectator sport for the great unwashed

The Huffington Post was hardly the first Web site to stumble on the technique of leveraging the knowledge of its readers to challenge the mainstream media narrative. For example, conservative bloggers at sites like Little Green Footballs took pleasure in helping to bring down Dan Rather after he broadcast dubious documents allegedly showing that George W. Bush had received special treatment during his service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Talking Points Memo “was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the fired U.S. Attorneys to a boil,” a scandal that ultimately ended with the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a George Polk Award for Marshall, the first ever for a blogger.

During the Katrina crisis, for example, [Talking Points Memo] discovered that some of [its] readers worked in the federal government’s climate-and-weather-tracking infrastructure. They provided the site with reliable reporting available nowhere else.

Traditional newspaper men and women tend to be unimpressed by the style of journalism practiced at the political Web sites, Real reporting, especially the investigative kind, is expensive, they remind us. Aggregation and opinion are cheap.

In October, 2005, at an advertisers’ conference in Phoenix, Bill Keller complained that bloggers merely “recycle and chew on the news,” contrasting that with the Times‘ emphasis on what he called “a ‘journalism of verification,’ ” rather than mere “assertion.”

“Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out,” Arianna Huffington protested, “In the run-up to the Iraq war, many in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, lost their veneer of unassailable trustworthiness for many readers and viewers.”

Newspaper editors now say that they “get it.” Yet traditional journalists are blinkered by their emotional investment in their Lippmann-like status as insiders. They tend to dismiss not only most blogosphere-based criticisms but also the messy democratic ferment from which these criticisms emanate. The Chicago Tribune recently felt compelled to shut down comment boards [because they] “were beginning to read like a community of foul-mouthed bigots.”

[Huffington] predicts “more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism, €”wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting, A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom, €”with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times.”

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism.

Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

In “Imagined Communities” (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel’s comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” It is at least partially through the “imagined community” of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged.

 

Honolulu Advertiser’s 600 Employees to Protest Contract Offer from Gannett – Hawaii Reporter, Feb. 19, 2008

[Demonstrating that unions are as clueless as ever, six unions that represent 600 employees at the Honolulu Advertiser are incensed at Gannett’s latest offer of a 1 percent increase in wages and a 1.5 percent bonus. Gannet is “doing great,” said Hawaii Rep. Neil Abercrombie, who evidently has not read Gannett’s latest earnings release or noticed that its stock is off 60% over the last three years. All the congressman wants is for Gannett to share some more of that bounty, since its future looks so bright. One is reminded of the UAW strikes in the 1970s, which were just what the US auto industry needed at the time. – Ed.]

[The editors at E&P should have read this story more carefully. It appears to contain good news for newspapers, but the numbers just don’t make sense. Tell me if you can untangle this:

According to new research, “the increase in the online newspaper audience is making up 28% of the losses in print readership.” Umm, what does that mean? Making up what? Circulation? Advertising revenue? It goes on to say that “from August 2004 through March 2007….online newspaper readership grew 14%.” Wow, that’s pretty pathetic, if you ask me. That would be an annual growth rate of less than 5%, which differs from all the other research that’s been done in this area. Finally, we learn that “70% of all newspaper web site visitors also read the print version.” It that’s true, it’s bad news. It indicates that newspaper Web sites are attracting mostly their own print subscribers. – Ed.]

 

‘Baltimore Sun’ Launches Youth-Oriented ‘b’ – MediaPost, Feb. 21, 2008

The Baltimore Sun is planning to launch a new free tabloid targeting younger readers called “b.” The first daily issue is set to appear on April 14. With a mix of typical tabloid fare and lifestyle content, the newspaper plans to freshen its pages by inviting readers to submit their own stories, photos and video to the newspaper and its Web site.

 

At Annual Meeting, Lee Enterprises Claims Growing Print Readership In ‘Toughest’ Year – Editor & Publisher, Feb. 20, 2008

They appear to be doing something right at Lee Enterprises. Quoting: “[T]he reach of Lee’s print and online newspapers between October 2006 and October 2007 increased to 71% of all adults inits markets from 67%. And while the percentage of adults who read only the print newspaper remained steady at 50%, the percentage who read both print and online editions grew to 16% from 11%… Lee advertising revenue declined 1.4% in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007, compared with an industry average decline of 7.4%.”

 

Help wanted. Desperately. – Reflections of a Newsosaur, Feb. 10, 2008

[Alan Mutter analyzes the crash of the newspaper help-wanted market, which he figures has contracted 54% in the last seven years. He traces the beginning of the end to 9/11 and cites newspaper smugness over their once near-monopoly on that business. Newspapers failed to understand that readers weren’t going to go to a single destination to find jobs. Increasingly, they want the jobs to find them. Unless newspapers understand that and act quickly, he says, they’re going to lose the half of the market that hasn’t slipped away yet. -Ed.]

Bylines of Brutality – IowaHawk, Jan. 17, 2008

[Satirical reporting that is also chillingly real. The author rounds up recent incidents of criminal activity by journalists and concludes that newsrooms are at risk of becoming a “killing field.” Of course, you could conduct this exercise for lawyers, accountants or plumbers and come to the same conclusion. Best line is 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. This story is impressive for the sheer number of links to examples of real-life journalist crime. – Ed.]

What David Simon, auteur of The Wire, doesn’t (and does) understand about the newspaper business. – Slate Magazine, Jan. 22, 2008

Gutted by Money Men, Chicago Newspapers Circle the Drain – Alternet, Feb. 20, 2008

[The staff cartoonist from the Evanston Roundtable writes of the collapse of the Chicago newspaper – not just the Trib and Sun-Times, but the free weeklies and advertisers as well. Some of those alternative papers practiced pretty good journalism, she says, but everything’s now been dumbed down to reach the lowest common denominator reader. There’s an interesting observation about commuter behavior that any urbanite will value: 20 or 30 years ago, you’d get on a subway train to find a wall of newspapers. Today, it’s just people talking on their cell phones. – Ed.]

Down On The Wire – Forbes.com, Feb. 14, 2008

[With their businesses in free-fall, some newspaper publishers are beginning to question the value of the Associated Press, whose sprawling information-gathering empire is 30% funded by member newspapers. The AP charges papers an average of $143,000 a year for its services, but large-circulation titles pay more than $1 million. The Daily News recently said it would dump AP if the charges weren’t brought down, and some publishers are wondering openly whether the AP is even necessary any more, given the amount of information that is now freely available online. – Ed.]

Newspapers, Time To Disaggregate! – Media Post, Dec. 20, 2007

[This column from a few weeks back suggests that newspapers, which are about the most vertically oriented businesses on the planet, would be betfer off disintegrating and setting up their piece parts as profit-making entities in their own rights. In other words, spin the printing plant off into a business of its own with the newspaper as simply one client. It’s easier said that done (particularly when it comes to unwinding union printing contracts struck years ago) but would no doubt make the few newspapers that managed to pull it off leaner and more competitive. (Thanks to Randy Craig for the referral) – Ed.]

Nonprofit journalism on the rise – Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 12, 2008

[One possible solution to the loss of quality jouralism resulting from newspaper job cuts is an increase in activity from the nonprofit sector. This article profiles a few fledgling ventures that are offering the kind of activist investigative reporting that was once the domain of daily newspapers. There are plenty of risks in this model – sustainability among them – but philanthroy could fill some of the gaps left by dying dailies. Quoting: “There’s freedom in not having to worry about making every possible reader happy, says managing editor Roger Buoen, formerly with the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune [and now with MinnPost, a nonprofit startup]. In his previous job, his bosses were preoccupied with attracting ‘readers who don’t read the paper,’ he says. ‘If you had complicated stories, there were a few strikes against them off the bat.'” – Ed.]

What Does the Future of the Newspaper Look Like? – WebProNews, Jan. 15, 2008

[A search engine optimization expert looks at The World Association of Newspapers recent “Shaping the Future of the Newspaper” slide show and concludes that a lot of it is hooey. – Ed.]

The Art of Link Letters – That’s the Press, Baby, Feb. 11, 2008

[David Sullivan writes of how a one-man news operation called Newzjunky is creaming its competition in Watertown, NY. Why? Economics. Newszjunky has almost no overhead, and its “content” mainly consists of links to other sources. But it’s hyper-local, with a great list of links to resources in the community. It’s also stuffed with ads. Newzjunky is one of the ugliest websites I’ve ever seen, but there is an odd appeal to its flashing, font-filled chaos. There really is something for everyone there. And its rival, the Watertown Daily Times, doesn’t know how to compete with it. – Ed.]

The True Promise of Citizen Journalism – Local Man, Feb. 12, 2008

[Doug McGill writes about what reporters can learn from citizen journalists. He makes interesting points about the dampening effect of objectivity. Reporters aren’t suppose to have opinions, yet they do, of course. Other writers have commented recently that newspapers began to separate from their readers when they adopted neutral voice and lost their personalities back in the 1960s. Some misty-eyed veterans are imagining a return to the muckraking advocacy journalism of the 1920s noting that one of the appeals of blogs is their personality. Thanks to Mark Hamilton for the link. – Ed.]

McClatchy 4Q: Another Bad Quarter – MediaPost Publications, Feb. 7, 2008
Quoting: The McClatchy Company reported weak fourth-quarter results and a discouraging outlook for 2008, joining NYTCO and Gannett, which announced their results last week.

Gannett: 4Q Rev Drops Across Media – MediaPost, Feb. 4,2008
Quoting: “Overall, the company’s earnings were $245.3 million, down 31% compared to the same period in 2006, as revenue dipped 12% to $1.9 billion. For the full year 2007, Gannett’s newspaper ad revenues sank 6.4% to $4.9 billion, as broadcasting slipped 7.7% to $789 million.

“Like other newspaper publishers, Gannett reports that the collapse of print classified advertising revenue has been joined by declines in local and national advertising, including retail. Classifieds were down 11.4%, local 3.3%, and national 11.6%”

A.H. Belo shares fall on first day – Houston Chronicle, Feb. 11, 2008
[The stock market’s newest pure-play newspaper company disappoints in its first day as a publicly traded company. “There is a certain group of investors who don’t want to own newspapers, and they don’t care about the dividend,” says one analyst. – Ed.]

Help-Wanted Index Fell 33% in Dec. – Editor & Publisher, Feb. 1, 2008
[The Conference Board’s index of help-wanted advertising in 51 major newspapers plummeted an astonishing 33% in December. However, the organization chooses to interpret the fall as a sign of an economic slowdown rather than the real reason, which is that newspaper help-wanted advertising is no longer efficient. – Ed.]

‘Denver Post’ To Cut Biz Section – Editor & Publisher, Feb. 4, 2008
[The paper says that the standalone business section had “no heft.” The merged metro/business section will run about six pages. No job cuts are planned and business coverage won’t suffer, the Post Editor said. Last months, the Orange County Register did the same thing. Businesspeople are more likely to get their information online, so it’s no surprise these are the first sections to get cut. – Ed.]

Four Top California Editors Out — More to Come? – Editor & Publisher, Jan. 28, 2008

[A procession of top editors has headed out the door at California newspapers recently, and the trend may begin spreading nationwide. The changing of the guard is perhaps due to reluctance of veteran editors to make the painful cuts that business conditions now demand. The short-term result is demoralized newsroom staffs, but this turnover may be necessary to reinvent newspapers. – Ed.]

What’s really wrong with newspapers – Rogue Columnist, Jan. 31, 2008

[Jon Talton takes a bullet list approach to describing what went wrong with newspapers. Some of his commentary is 20:20 hindsight, but there are some interesting insights here:

• Consolidation and monopolization made newspapers insular and risk-averse. Innovation doesn’t come from companies that are trying to preserve a dominant franchise;
• New ideas aimed at attracting non-readers (what some call the McPaper syndrome) distracted attention from the reporting that kept loyal readers. The result was a double whammy: those new audiences weren’t going to read anyway, and the traditional audiences became disenfranchised and left;
  
• Groupthink in top-heavy organizations created a generation of yes-men who implemented defensive strategies and didn’t question the status quote. In the 1990s, when newspapers needed bold ideas, they were being led by sheep.
  

Check out the lively discussion that follows. This blog post touched a nerve. – Ed.]

NYTimes ad sales fall 13% – Financial Times, Jan. 31, 2008

[Despite the plunge in sales, the company actually swung to a profit in the quarter. Nevertheless, the Times says it plans to cut about $200 million in expenses in 2008. – Ed.]

What’s Needed in 2008: Serious Newsroom Cultural Change – Editor & Publisher, Jan. 2, 2008

[E&P columnist Steve Outing asks his network of contacts what they would want him to do if he could wave a magic wand and solve their problems. Many responded that they’d like to see him change the culture in newsrooms, which is still hopelessly focused on turning out the “daily miracle.” Quoting:

“The feeling in newsrooms, especially among the people on the new-media side, seems to be that there are an awful lot of people within rganizations that aren’t on board with a vision of changing for the future…implementation is being slowed by many people in the organization — including mid-level managers — who still don’t buy into the idea that a total transformation of the news organization is necessary…

“get everyone involved in using new forms of digital media. Imagine if everyone in your news organization maintained a blog, an active page on Facebook, and participated in other innovative new media forms (e.g., Twitter). By actually living the digital life and embracing it (even if you’re forced to by your boss), you’ll better understand how the modern consumer interacts with media and news.

“MySpace has well over 100 million users; Facebook has 59 million active users. With that kind of mainstream acceptance, it’s unconscionable for journalists not to participate in that online environment.

“Howard Owens, director of digital publishing at Gatehouse Media, asked for this: ‘Reporters and editors would take seriously their roles as community conversation leaders, concentrating on getting it right on the web first — web-first publishing, blogs, video, participation — and using the print edition as a greatest hits,promote the web site vehicle. Old packaged-goods-thinking about the newsPAPER would disappear overnight.’

“The feeling in newsrooms, especially among the people on the new-media side, seems to be that there are an awful lot of people within organizations that aren’t on board with a vision of changing for the future.”

Record Year For Online Newspapers – eMarketer, Jan. 28, 2008

Average monthly unique visitors to US newspaper sites increased 6% in 2007 to 60 million. Almost 40% of active US internet users visited a newspaper site during the fourth quarter.

Jon Talton takes a bullet list approach to an analysis of what went wrong with newspapers. Some of his commentary is 20:20 hindsight, but there are some interesting insights here:

• Consolidation and monopolization made newspapers insular and risk-averse. Innovation doesn’t come from companies that are trying to preserve a dominant franchise;
• New ideas aimed at attracting non-readers (what some call the McPaper syndrome) distracted attention from the reporting that kept loyal readers. The result was a double whammy: those new audiences weren’t going to read anyway, and the traditional audiences became disenfranchised and left;
• Groupthink in top-heavy organizations created a generation of yes-men who implemented defensive strategies and didn’t question the status quote. In the 1990s, when newspapers needed bold ideas, they were being led by sheep.

Check out the lively discussion that follows. This blog post touched a nerve.

There are signs that the industry is trying to reinvent itself, or at least complain more vociferously about the forces that are marginalizing it.

What’s Black & White And Spread All Over? – MediaPost, Dec. 10, 2007
[A study commissioned by the newspaper industry finds that newspaper readers are more likely to be influencers than non-readers. The results really aren’t surprising. In percentage terms, twice as many people over the age of 60 read daily newspapers as under the age of 30. Given that newspaper readership increases with age, it’s not too much of a stretch to believe that older people would be more influential in purchasing decisions than kids. You can also assume that people who can afford a subscription to a newspaper are somewhat more affluent than those who rely solely on the Web. It’s hard to tell; the rather skimpy 10-slide presentation on the NNN’s site gives no demographic breakdown. – Ed.]

Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky, ajc.com, Dec. 13, 2007
[The author calls for “citizen journalism” to be regulated and/or certified. The scenarios he outlines to support his case are valid. Unfortunately, professional journalists aren’t licensed or certified, so the idea that ordinary citizens should be subjected to some kind of review process rings pretty hollow. -Ed.]

Local Papers’ Web Scramble – WSJ.com, Dec. 18, 2007
[Newspapers are rapidly losing market share in the one market in which they should have a significant edge: local advertising. In 2007, for the first time, pure-play Web companies had a larger share of local advertising than newspapers. In just three years, newspapers’ overall share of that market is down from 44% to 33.4%. This is largely newspapers’ own fault. Instead of investing in local sales staff over the last decade, they have mainly focused on trying to sell more high-margin national display advertising. Meanwhile, pure-play Web companies swooped in and took their market share. -Ed.]