Staff Reductions Taking Their Toll

The steady stream of newspaper staff and budget cuts is beginning to be felt on the street.

Politico reports on the shrinking ranks of regional reporters covering Capitol Hill – the local Regional Reporters Association’s membership has dropped from 200 to 84 in a decade – and suggests that a lot of politician shenanigans may be going uncovered thanks to the dearth of watchdogs looking out for local interests. However, the story notes that specialty newsletters and publications like Congressional Quarterly have grown their staffs and that the total size of the congressional press pool has stayed about the same as a result.

Ken Doctor notes the broad trend toward cuts in newspaper business coverage and speculates about how newspapers can maintain a foothold in this area, which is often critical for ad sales. He sees national and international organizations like Dow Jones and Reuters increasingly syndicating their coverage to smaller papers in almost pre-packaged form.

E&P Totes Up the Numbers, and They Aren’t Good

Top U.S. newspapers have lost about 1.4 million copies in daily circulation, says Editor & Publisher. Declines of 20% or more have occurred at the LA Times, SF Chronicle and Boston Globe. Only two papers covered in the report – USA Today and the New York Post – managed to increase circulation. Factors include competition from other print and online media, publisher iatives to cut discounted or free copies and the creation of a national do-not-call list.

Despair and hope

Veteran journalist-turned-academic Tim McGuire writes a remarkably somber confession on his Arizona State University blog titled “I suddenly feel a lot worse about the future of newspapers.” The catalyst was comments by Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. Hoffman apparently said that newspapers’ model of mixing profits with civic responsibility is fatally flawed. The two objectives just don’t mesh. This and other comments left McGuire, 58, feeling like he and others of his generation just don’t get the Internet enough to envision a newsroom’s future. Strong words for a man who’s supposed to be doing just that for his students. “Hoffman convinced me I’m way out of my element,” he comments.

Reid Hoffman weighs in with a lengthy comment on McGuire’s post, proposing to offer “some rays of hope.” However, there’s little hope evident in what he says.

Meanwhile, the publisher of the San Antonio Express-News exhorted his colleagues to fight the good fight at the Texas Daily Newspaper Association’s annual convention. Thomas Stephenson said that investing in digital platforms is only part of the solution. Newspapers have to earn reader loyalty and then make it easy for advertisers to reach them through whatever channels they can.

Vignettes from the field

Our RSS reader picks up occasional commentary by newspaper readers and former journalists that provide a glimpse into how the newspaper industry collapse is affecting ordinary people:

• A Bay Area book enthusiast laments the Chron’s decision to fold its stand-alone book review section into the weekly news analysis pages.
• A Twin Cities consultant lists the reasons he’s canceling his newspaper subscription. There are several. Like many readers, he simply doesn’t see much value any more. As newspapers slash costs and staff, the devaluation spiral continues. The product gets worse, which gives readers less inclination to read it.
• Mark Hamilton remarks wryly on the dubious value of incessant political polling
• Finally, the head of global public relations for Disney Parks & Resorts issues the most pessimistic forecast for the newspaper industry that we’ve heard anywhere. At about 10:20 in this podcast interview Eric Schwartzman, Disney’s Duncan Wardle states, “The printed newspaper industry has three to five years to live.” We hope his staff heard that!

Business sections feel the blow

Newspaper business sections have been hard hit by the ad downturn,

Glimmers of digital hope

The U.S. political campaign has apparently given a lift to newspaper websites, according to Media Post. Quoting: “The week ending February 23 saw visits to Web sites in Hitwise’s news and media category increase 22% compared to the same week in 2007. The upswing especially benefited Web sites for print publications, including online portals for magazines and newspapers. The New York Times Web site was the winner in the print category, taking 5% of total visits–a 50% increase in visits over last year. It was followed by People.com, with 3%, and The Washington Post, with 2%.”

Your obedient editor has been traveling for much of the last week, but the death watch doesn’t stop. Catching up on a few ongoing stories:

Zell Hell

Prescriptions for the Times

What do to about The New York Times? Big investors are ready to force change, the holding company strategy is tanking and Marc Andreesseen has launched a death watch.

Jeff Jarvis relates an intriguing reader comment suggesting survival strategies for the New York Times and the Boston Globe in “reverse syndication.” Basically, the Times sets itself up as the national newspaper of record and ditches the New York market. It syndicates its content to a network of locally-focused newspapers, which have sold off their expensive production and distribution assets and which are now essentially contract publishing operations working through a variety of media.

The former local newspaper publishers would now produce a portfolio of hyper-local publications in print and online and syndicate much of the content from other sources, including The New York Times. By selling off the expensive presses and delivery trucks (which wouldn’t be easy, BTW), they become more nimble and focused. The Times continues to deliver high-quality reporting at a high level. It’s a novel idea, though I’m not sure how the interest of quality journalism would be served. It seems that the Times would aggregate all the best reporting and the local companies would distribute variations of the Metro in their markets.

Meanwhile, Ken Doctor suggests that the Times should exit the local newspaper business.

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.]

Did The New York Times do a disservice to investigative journalism by alleging that Sen. John McCain had a romantic relationship with a lobbyist? It certainly didn’t help the cause any. The article that caused all the fuss is actually well done, for the most part. The Times went to great lengths to document irregularities in the Senator’s relationship with lobbyists, and those inconsistencies are presented with appropriate sourcing and response. Had the paper let it go at that, this would have been good journalism.

What’s incomprehensible is that the editors chose to include allegations of an affair without any incriminating evidence whatsoever, other than comments by two disenfranchised former aides who never said they had any evidence, either. Times ombudsman Clark Hoyt upbraids Bill Keller, the Times’ executive editor, for running with such skimpy information and then trying to trivialize the topic as tangential to the piece. He calls the affair allegation, “the scarlet elephant in the room.” I’ll bet Hoyt and Keller aren’t going to be seen sitting together in the Times lunchroom any time soon.

Meanwhile, LA Times columnist Tim Rutten describes how the McCain campaign brilliantly turned the Times story into a PR coup. The McCain campaign said it had its best online fund-raising day ever the day after the piece ran. The outraged reaction by right-wing talk show hosts actually seems to have helped McCain mend some fences on the right.

In an interesting piece from down under, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul Sheehan dissects the Times story sentence by sentence, showing how choice of words can influence the tone of a story without ever stating an opinion directly. It’s a clever and original analysis.

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.]

The Albuquerque Tribune, a newspaper that won a Pulitzer Prize as recently as 1994, will publish its last issue on Saturday. Circulation at the afternoon daily had dwindled from 42,000 in 1988 to just 10,000. Owner EW Scripps Co. had put the paper up for sale last August, but the only serious bidder wasn’t able to close the deal and no other interested parties emerged. Editor Phil Casaus said the last three editions will feature stories about The Tribune’s role in Albuquerque journalism. The 38 editorial staffers were informed this morning.

The Tribune was founded in 1923 and was part of the country’s oldest joint operating agreement. Under the deal, the Tribune and the Albuquerque Journal operated separate newsrooms, but combined business operations. Afternoon papers have been hit particularly hard by the advertising slowdown. BusinessWeek said there are only about 600 of them left in the U.S., down from 1,000 in 1990. See also the Reuters coverage.

Newsstand Mags Drop Circ, ‘Time’ Plummets – MediaPost, Feb. 12, 2008

[Once upon a time, a year-to-year decline of almost 20% in Time magazine newsstand sales would have been big news. Today, hardly anybody notices. Time recently redesigned to make its look less cluttered and more open, but it seens that readers prefer the dowdy old Economist – with its boring design, provocative writing and insightful analysis – over the eye candy that US publishers dangle in front of them. Time has company, BTW: Newsweek‘s newsstand sales were off 16% and U.S. News‘ were down 8%. – Ed.]

For Publisher in Los Angeles, Cuts and Worse – New York Times, Feb. 18, 2008

[The New York Times profiles the controversial publisher of the Los Angeles Times, David Hiller. His unpleasant assignment has been to make sweeping changes at the troubled west coast institution, but his style has rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Detractors call him evasive and sneaky, while supporters say he’s just carrying out a difficult job. His approach to the newsroom is viewed by some as meddlesome. Last week, he named Russ Stanton editor, the fourth person to hold that title in three years. Stanton has most recently been in charge of the LATimes.com website, which should offer some insight into what Hiller is thinking. – Ed.]

Dramatics Intesify at the New York Times – social|median, Feb. 12, 2008

[Apparently, big investors in The New York Times Co. aren’t amused at the stock’s 50% drop in value over the last four years, and they’re putting some of their people in place to change direction. The Sulzbergers aren’t going quietly, though. Jason Goldberg summarizes. – 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.]

I got a call today from a journalist who’s doing a story on the future of newspapers (does this mean the Death Watch has finally made the big time?) and he shared an interesting t dbit. He said he had contacted a prominent thought leader in the journalism field, whom I won’t name. This thought leader had said that the impending collapse of the newspaper industry was “a threat to democracy.”

Excuse me, but what? A threat to democracy? Newspapers are dying, in large part, because of democracy. The rise of citizen publishing has made it possible, for the first time, for large numbers of ordinary citizens to publish to a global audience without the intercession of media institutions. What could be more democratic than that? If Thomas Jefferson was alive today, he’d be an active blogger. Social media is the most democratic process to hit the publishing industry in 500 years.

I’m going to give the thought leader the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was referring to the decline of investigative journalism as practiced by newspapers. On that point, I’ll defer to journalism professor Steve Boriss, who argues that a lot of what passes for investigative journalism today is simply reporters acting as conduits for whistle-blowers. Those malcontents will find other outlets for their gripes, whether it be Consumerist.com or something else. I’m quite confident that the market will take care of filling the need for advocacy reporting.

I think the threat-to-democracy statement is more a function of the arrogance of traditional news journalists, who believe that a system in which a few thousand editors decide what people should know is superior to one in which many millions of citizens make those same judgments. If citizen media is a threat to democracy, I shudder to think of the alternative.