Read All About It – The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 28, 2007

[As Wall Street Journal Deputy Managing Editor Paul E. Steiger prepares to step out the door, he pens a thoughtful and dispassionate retrospective on what calls “the collapse of metro newspapers’ business model.” The 40-yet newspaper veteran chronicles the rise of the dominant media companies in the 60 and 70s that led to the post-Watergate “golden age of journalism.” He also tells of some of the spending excesses of that time that may have created too high a comfort level at the dominant dailies.

You’ll find some tidbits about the internal struggles at the Journal during the early days of the Internet. Steiger’s also right in pointing out that most newspapers’ early online efforts were half-hearted and unoriginal. This is ultimately a narrative on the industry’s decline, not an opinion piece about what should be or what should have been. In that respect, it’s frustrating to read. One would hope that a veteran with Steiger’s perspective would offer some opinon about what the industry should do, but he mainly sticks to the story line. In closing, however, he notes that he’s leaving the Journal to head up a small online investigative reporting group funded by two philanthropists. Perhaps his transition to the digital world is the most telling statement of all. – Ed.]

Switching sides – San Francisco Bay Guardian, Dec. 27, 2007
[A Bay Area alternative paper chronicles the diffusion of laid-off journalists into public relations jobs. While many are working for politicians and state agencies, some are in moving into the commercial sphere as well. Will the spinmeistering profession benefit from the addition of more seasoned journalists to the corps? – Ed.]

Seattle Times publisher hints at deep cuts – Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Dec. 27, 2007
“In his e-mail, [Seattle Times Publisher and Chief Executive Frank ] Blethen said revenue from print ads will be down by about 9 percent in 2007, with a similar decline expected in 2008. For combined 2007 and 2008, print revenue losses will be about $33 million, he said. In 2000, the paper booked $270 million in ad revenue, while in 2007, it fell below $200 million, he said. ‘Our Seattle Times newspaper losses for the decade will exceed $40 million — a staggering number,’ he wrote.”

U.S. media face troubling 2008 – Toronto Globe and Mail, Nov. 26, 2007
“Experts say advertisers need to remain competitive in a tighteningmarket while keeping costs down, making them likely to boost spending in areas more directly linked to commerce, such as Web search queries. That would benefit companies like Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. But television networks like CBS or NBC and Web companies like Yahoo Inc. that rely on brand advertising could suffer.”

MediaPost Publications – Age, Income of Magazine Readers Edge Up – 10/31/2007 Annotated

Online, Newspaper Audiences Up, But Revenue Growth Slows – MediaPost, Nov. 1, 2007 Annotated

Don’t count newspapers out yet – CNN Money, Oct. 22, 2007 Annotated

‘Newsweek’ Gets New Execs, New Look – MediaPost, Oct. 31, 2007 Annotated

Golin Harris CEO Fred Cook gave this quote from a Chicago Sun-Times columnist, whom he preferred not to identify, in a session at the PRSA International conference today: “Newspapers aren’t dying. Our readers are.”

Dark day at the BBC as staff learn their fate – The Independent, Oct. 18, 2007

Big Weeklies Sputter, Smaller Pubs Soar – MediaPost, Sept. 04, 2007

[It’s not a good time to be a broad, general-purpose magazine. Time and Newsweek circulation is trending steadily down, while U.S. News’ numbers are falling precipitously. Meanwhile, Europe’s The Economist and The Week are growing nicely.

What’s strange about all this is that both of the European magazines publish longish, weighty and thoughtful articles. Since the USAToday-ization of the media began in 1984, conventional wisdom has been that the only way to keep readers was to lighten, shorten, colorize and sap editorial content of as much depth as possible. Now it appears that growth is shifting to publications with some gravity. Maybe we’re beginning to lose our appetite for cartoon infographics? – Ed.]

Morgan Stanley Sells Entire New York Times Stake – Bloomberg, Oct. 17, 2007

Alan Mutter offers a letter from a former newspaper owner who explains why he no longer reads the newspaper he once published. The essay tugs at your heartstrings just a little. This guy loved newspapering, but years of union intransigence, executive stubbornness and relentless competition from new media sapped his energy. Recently, his old paper called to offer a year’s subscription for $15.99. Sounds like desperation.

Note his comments about the early days of the Web, and how newspaper owners blew off online publishing as being, at best, a value add. Successful institutions rarely see the competitors that displace them until it’s too late. They’re far too wrapped up in their own success. The comments offer another interesting anecdote on that topic.

Recent headlines:

Post-Dispatch offers more early retirement – “Calling 2007 a ‘difficult year for the newspaper industry,’ the St. Louis Post-Dispatch said yesterday it will offer employees early retirement packages. The offer comes less than two years after about 130 employees, including about 40 in the newsroom, retired early…[the publisher said] ‘This is a great market. Our actions now will enable us to face 2008 and beyond in a much better position.'”

Sadly, no. Early retirement incentives don’t solve a systemic problem where costs are wildly out of synch with future revenues. This is putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.

Sun-Times Media Group Weeklies Target Jittery ‘Daily Herald’ Employees – “In an unusual ad campaign targeting employees facing what might be the first layoffs in the newspaper’s history, the Pioneer Press group of weeklies is offering jobs to staffers of the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago.”

Kind of a good news/bad news scenario. I think it points to the growing strength of localized media. It’s actually getting cheaper to publish in print and this could lead to a resurgence of activity at town/community levels. The death of metro dailies could be accompanied by a rebirth of small-town weeklies.

AP to Shut Down Premium ‘Asap’ Service – “The Associated Press is closing down a 2-year-old premium multimedia service that emphasized nontraditional methods of storytelling, saying that it had failed to gain enough traction with newspaper clients.”

Good for AP for trying this idea, even if it didn’t play out financially. These “nontraditional” methods are the future of journalism, even if the economic model hasn’t yet evolved fully.

And finally…

At the New York Press: Layoffs, Circulation Drop, and No More Hooker Ads!– Manhattan Media, new owner of the New York Press, says it’s going to challenge the Village Voice and build a high-end audience. For starters, sex ads are gone, a move that could cost a million in lost revenue per year. Hooray for a vote of confidence in print and a decision to take the high road.

Scott Karp does the math on the lone bright spot of the newspaper economy – the growth in online business – and calculates that newspaper websites will need nearly 2 trillion ad impressions at a $30 CPM to equal their print revenue. that’s 24 times as much traffic as newspaper sites currently receive, he notes. And that’s assuming that CPMs would hold steady at $30 at those traffic levels.

The Newspaper Association of America said online advertising revenue at newspapers was up 22 percent in the first quarter. However, traffic was up only about five percent. Even if visitor growth continued at that pace indefinitely, it would be many decades before online revenue could equal print sales.

The best path for newspapers, of course, is to get away from anonymous metrics like page views and impressions and move toward an alternative model that monetizes reader engagement and contextual relevance. The trouble is that newspapers are the ultimate mass-market media vehicle. There is no historical or cultural precedent for addressing small markets, which are the most valuable ones to advertisers. The lone bright spot in the picture looks like a flashlight.

Snipping text here from a piece in Ad Age about reading habits that will go behind a paid registration wall in a couple of days:

“As new forms of media consumption, including web surfing, downloading and time-shifted TV viewing gain more of a foothold in the U.S., different generations have begun to form distinct habits. But what’s interesting is that both the old and wise and the young at heart are developing some commonalities as well, according to a new study by Deloitte.

“The consulting and advisory firm found that every generation — from young Millennials (ages 13 to 24) to Generation X (25 to 41) to Baby Boomers (42 to 60) and older Matures (61 to 75) — enjoys reading magazines. Almost three-fourths of all consumers choose to read them even though they can find the same information online. There is also a greater receptivity overall to print ads compared with internet ads, the firm found.”

This is an important point. While most major metro daily newspapers will go out of business in the coming years, lots of print properties will do just fine. Next time you’re at Barnes & Noble, visit the newsstand and look at the racks of thick magazines. There are plenty of viable business models in print. It’s just that large-circ-daily-newspaper isn’t one of them.

A journalism professor suggests that newspapers should reach out to younger readers, noting that most columnists are in their 40s and 50s. A few papers have tried this with dedicated pages or sections authored by teens, but the efforts have appeared half-hearted. My own hometown paper, The Boston Globe, has had a teens page for years, but it always struck me as looking like something designed by someone in their 40s for a teen audience. That doesn’t work.

One approach that does work was to give papers away to schools as required reading in social studies classes. For the last year, my teenage son read the Boston Herald every day because the school got the paper for free. Perhaps this is a good use for the all copies newspapers are no longer printing because of circulation declines. The marginal cost of printing extra issues and adding them to existing delivery routes is nominal. At least it gets the product in the hands of people who may be long-term readers in the future.

What’s different about the two scenarios described in these articles in BtoB Online today?

New York Times Co. earnings fall in second quarter

McGraw-Hill Q2 earnings soar.

I’d suggest that the big difference is in McGraw-Hill’s strength in vertical publishing. If you read these brief articles, you’ll see that both the Times and BusinessWeek suffered declines in print advertising. However, McGraw-Hill’s earnings were boosted by revenues in Aviation Week and other vertical publications.

This goes to the contrast between what’s happening in the newspaper world and everywhere else. Big, broad general-interest publications like newspapers — and including magazines like Time and Newsweek — are suffering from a profusion of alternative information sources. However, certain vertical industries aren’t feeling the pinch at all and are, in fact, growing.

If you pick up an issue of Cigar Aficionado or Brides magazine, you’ll see what I mean. These publications are as fat with advertising as they ever have been. In both cases, readers enjoy sitting down with an elegant print publication and leafing through it, looking at the beautiful pictures. Newspapers, with their awkward format, grainy texture and ink that rubs off on your hands, are a much less enjoyable reading experience.

Just one more reason why it’s not good to be in the newspaper business these days.