60 Employees Retiring from Post-Dispatch – STLtoday, Sept. 28, 2007
“Editor Arnie Robbins said, ‘I’m sad that we’re losing colleagues that have such wisdom and institutional knowledge. But I’m convinced that we will continue to produce strong journalism with a strong public service mission.'”

How to Survive Newspaper Layoffs – eHow.com
[Erin Auerbach offers some tongue-in-cheek advice for journalists who have to prepare for the grim layoff reaper. – Ed.]

Express-News offers worker buyouts – MySA.com, Oct. 17, 2007 Annotated
“The newspaper’s goal is to eliminate 40 to 50 positions ‘through a combination of incentives and a hiring freeze,’ Express-News President and Publisher Tom Stephenson said in an e-mail to employees. The Express-News has between 1,000 and 1,100 employees”

‘Journal Sentinel’ Slashes Workforce By 35 to 50 – Editor & Publisher, Oct. 2, 2007

[That’s 3.5% of the workforce, which isn’t exactly a “slash.” Voluntary severance being offered. Layoffs only if absolutely necessary. – Ed.]

Flint Journal offering employee buyouts – ABC12.com, Oct. 15, 2007 Annotated

“‘I think what’s going to happen is the Flint Journal will go toward free lancers and a lot of times there might not be people who have a personal stake in the community, so some of the stories aren’t going to be as powerful.’

“A similar buyout offer is being made to employees of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News, a sign the newspaper business — especially in Michigan — is hurting.

“‘There’s a real struggle with newspapers right now,’ Zacks said. ‘Obviously the Internet — especially with my generation — is becoming the primary source for gathering information.’

[As if Flint, the flat-on-its-back city spotlighted in Michael Moore’s 1989 classic Roger & Me, doesn’t have enough problems. – Ed.]

Buyouts offered to Free Press employees-memo – Reuters.com

“The Detroit Media Partnership, a joint operating agreement between Free Press owner Gannett Co Inc. and MediaNews Group, which owns The Detroit News, aims to cut 110 positions, it said in a memo to employees on Friday. ‘If the voluntary offer doesn’t result in a sufficient number of volunteers, or if in the future, economic conditions worsen, it may be necessary to consider layoffs,’ the memo said.”

Saving investigative journalism – Steve Outing

“A new non-profit group called Pro Publica is being formed to fund and produce investigative journalism projects, which it will pitch to newspapers and magazines. One of the founders is Paul Steiger, who was top editor of the Wall Street Journal for 16 years.”

Black day for hockey coverage in the Bay Area, SF Chronicle and SJ Mercury News buy out and lay off Sharks beat reporters – Julia Dominic

“The San Francisco Chronicle bought out the contract of Sharks beat writer Ross McKeon, who has been covering the team since 1991. Also, Sharks beat writer Victor Chi is on the list of 31 San Jose Mercury News employees who were laid off on Monday. Fifteen others, including soccer and boxing reporter Dylan Hernandez and photographer Meri Simon, voluntarily resigned.”

[Maybe it’s a good thing that Bay Area sports fans don’t have much to cheer about these days – Ed.]

Bear Stearns Predicts Ripple Effect of Real Estate Decline – Editor & Publisher

”Retail is going to be the most vulnerable category, since consumers will probably spend less. Florida, predicts Bear Stearns, will feel these affects more acutely. It’s expected that retail sales will drop in Q3 and as a result retailers will cut back dramatically on advertising. In Bear Stearns coverage universe, Tribune and E.W. Scripps have the most exposure to Florida and California in terms of revenue at 37% and 14%, respectively.”

[It’s beginning to look like a perfect storm for newspapers, at least in some areas of the country. Demographic shifts and online competition are combining with a softening economy to accelerate declines in advertising. This leads to layoffs, a weaker product and more reader flight. – Ed.]

Chronicle colleagues who care

[Former San Jose Mercury News staffers have set up a blog to commiserate, keep in touch and share job leads. The paper has reportedly cut its reporting staff by half from its peak. – Ed.]

The American Journalism Review writes about the newsroom of the future and offers interesting insight into some of the experiments taking place at metro dailies around the U.S. (it’s ironic that this story about next-generation publishing contains not a single hyperlink, by the way).

What’s clear from this story is that several papers are taking the bull by the horns and attempting to reinvent themselves. They’re hacking away at distinctions between print and online staffs, stressing speed over analysis, streamlining editorial hierarchy and trying to think of themselves as multimedia publishers. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution actually went so far as to require half the editorial staff to apply for new positions. This can’t be easy for anyone.

One gets the sense from this article that a lot of ideas are being tried at the few papers that have stopped cursing the darkness and are instead trying to do something about their plight. No doubt a lot of these new avenues will become blind alleys, but at least they’re trying something.

Samuel Johnson has been quoted as saying, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It is encouraging to see some major metros concentrating their minds on the future of news. They’re the ones that will be in the best position to survive the shakeout.

Mark Glaser and Nicholas Carr have been mixing it up over the outlook for the newspaper industry and both have interesting cases to make.

In a piece on MediaShift, Glaser argues that journalism jobs aren’t going away so much as being redirected into online outlets. He cites numerous sources claiming that online reporting and production jobs are plentiful and growing. And he offers examples of newspapers that have cut staff in print while hiring online.

Carr, who’s a bit of a professional skeptic, pokes holes in Glaser’s thesis. He notes that Glaser doesn’t cite many actual numbers in his reporting (which is true) and cites many numbers of his own, including damning Bureau of Labor Statistics figures that show that employment is falling in both print and online media.

Glaser responds that it’s really, really difficult to find accurate numbers about media employment trends. He says the coverage is all focused on the bad news while the bright spots in journalism employment – including a stable-to-growing picture at smaller newspapers – is ignored. And he notes that overall job losses in newspapers are still under 10% in the last decade.

Both authors make valid points. Where I part company with Glaser is over his assertion that newspapers need to do a better job of “re-skilling” their print veterans. In my experience, the ink-stained wretches of print journalism are a notoriously stubborn lot, and few of them are willing to make the changes that are necessary to practice their craft online. Digital journalism requires a completely different approach to reporting and production. It’s unrealistic to think that a newspaper is going to wait for $100,000-a-year veteran reporter to “get it” when they can find eager young journalists who are willing to do the job for a fraction of the cost.

There’s no question that the future of newspapers is online, but the economics of that business demands that they make a wrenching transition from a high-dollar cost structure to a much smaller business. This will involve lots of layoffs, particularly of veterans. Many of these people are well-connected in the media world, and there troubles will continue to generate extensive coverage.

There will be lots of journalism jobs in the digital-media world of the future, but I expect that not many of them will be filled by the people who today are putting ink on dead trees.

Thew New York Times Co. said it plans to cut 500 jobs, including 35 positions in The Boston Globe newsroom and 45 on the NY Times editorial staff.

“Knight-Ridder Inc. yesterday said it was eliminating 100 newsroom jobs at the Philadelphia Inquirer and its sister paper, the Philadelphia Daily News, because of lower circulation and revenue. The Boston Herald this year said it was eliminating about one quarter of its newsroom staff,” said an article in the Globe.

A Globe spokesman noted that the paper still has the largest editorial staff in New England, but that’s slim consolation when your biggest competitor has just slashed a quarter of its workforce. The Globe layoffs won’t begin till October, which means the Globe has got to be one gloomy place right now.

Three recent items of note:

MediaPost reports that newspapers have a surprising new competitor in eBay. The auctioneer’s new classified advertising service, which facilitates transactions between people who live near each other, is a potentially powerful force in classified advertising, which is newspapers’ most profitable business. The article goes on to suggest that newspapers should partner with eBay, which is kind of like thanking your host for the glass of poison he’s just offered you.

The VP of Marketing at Eluma makes a case for news organizations to get local again. In an iMediaConnection opinion piece that’s otherwise a shameless pitch for his company’s products, Joe Lichtenberg cites a B&C/Magid Media Labs study of 2,000 Internet users that found that only 13% use the Web for local news. However, 60% said they’d be likely to use a local TV site for topics that include health, real estate, in-depth sports and local events. Yes, it’s all about local. Years ago, a lot of papers got New York Times-envy and decided to expand their international coverage. They’re paying for that now. The few newspapers that survive the coming nuclear winter will be those that refocus aggressively on local issues and leave White House press conferences to the AP.

Editor & Publisher, whose coverage of the meltdown of its core market has been largely uninspiring, does come through with a provocative argument by Steve Outing that newspapers should get over their obsession with objectivity. Harking back to the finest days of muckraking, Outing argues that the media’s efforts to tell both sides of the global warming issue is as dumb as telling both sides of the polygamy issue. The fact that some whackos still believe global warming is just a cyclical atmospheric change is no reason to give them equal time. Newspapers should advocate for their readers to get active and do something, Outing says. It’s interesting advice. In the new world in which everyone is an opinion writer, not having an opinion may make newspapers look clueless.

This remarkable exercise in community journalism from last June just came to my attention from reading Jay Rosen’s PressThink post. Working from a terse report by the Greensboro News & Record of layoffs of 41 of its own employees (why are newspapers so timid about covering their own bad news?), Ed Cone decided to let the people affected by the layoffs tell their own story.

And they did. As you can see from the frequent updates to Cone’s original post, affected staff members named names, told of the subdued atmosphere in the newsroom and fretted about the future. Some of their comments are touching. This account certainly adds depth and clarity to the unspecific report from the newspaper itself.

But I guess Ed Cone shouldn’t be taking seriously. After all, he isn’t a “journalist.”

Jay Rosen at PressThink has amassed an interesting list of triumphs of citizen journalism that he plans to post in response to Michael Skube’s rather self-righteous essay on the difference between bloggers and journalists.

The debate over whether bloggers are journalists strikes me as pointless because it’s so subjective. Wikipedia defines “journalist” as “a person who practices journalism, the gathering and dissemination of information about current events, trends, issues and people.” But is a person who contributes an essential fact or perspective to a story also practicing a form of journalism? For that matter, isn’t Wikipedia acting in a journalistic capacity with coverage of events like the Crandall Canyon mine disaster?

Earlier this year, CNN and other major news organizations turned to bloggers and camera phone users to help with coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. Was it wrong to rely on these eyewitnesses because they weren’t professional journalists? Does someone have to carry a press card to contribute meaningful reporting?

This is a debate over terminology that is increasingly meaningless in a new world in which everyone is a publisher. Yes, news organizations will always have a vital role to play in disseminating credible, balanced, well-researched information, but individual citizens and groups of people who choose to act as journalists should also be heard. Ultimately, the checks and balances of a free debate will expose inaccuracy and bias. Shouldn’t the decision about what constitutes “journalism” be left up to the person who consumes the information?

“Newsosaur” Alan Mutter writes of an interesting phenomenon that takes place in the blogosphere and which may be indicative of how little newspapers understand the culture that exists there.

He notes how a single link from a blog called Small Dead Animals drove more than 1,000 visitors to his blog in a single day. Meanwhile, mentions of his blog in several major newspapers and magazines over the previous week drew hardly any visitors at all.

Mutter suggests that this is because Small Dead Animals is a creature of the Web, which it very much is, while the mainstream media sites are trying to transplant their standards of professional publishing to a medium that doesn’t care much about them. Essentially, newspapers are republishing columnists and op-ed contributors as bloggers, but aren’t changing the style or tone of what they say, and that’s going to fail in the blogosphere.

I think it’s an excellent point. I’m still amazed that, more than a decade into the Internet revolution, many newspapers still don’t include hyperlinks in the stories that they post online. Not only is this a disservice to the reader, but it makes them look aloof and clueless, which is not something newspapers can afford to be any more.

Robert Scoble told me last year that a tech company had relayed to him that a single mention on his blog had driven more than 1,400 visitors to the company’s site. In comparison, a much longer article in an industry trade publication had delivered no traffic at all. I suspect that the cult of personality around Scoble has a lot to do with that. Walt Mossberg could probably wield that much influence in the blogosphere, but precious few other journalists could.

Is this a problem for newspapers? I think so. If all your growth is going to come online and if the community you’re trying to engage perceives you as an outsider, I don’t see how that serves your interests. The American public already sees the news media as biased, inaccurate and uncaring. So why take that unpopular formula and transplant it online?

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune is the latest casualty of the overall decline of newspaper advertising. The paper, which is one of several in south Florida owned by The New York Times Co., will consolidate several offices and lay off an unspecified number of people.

While shutting down one of its regional print editions, “[T]he Herald-Tribune will start new interactive Web sites geared toward allowing the public to share their news, photos and videos.” Hmmm. Photo- and video-sharing might have been interesting two years ago, but it’s very me-too today. And what’s this about “share their news?” Is this a citizen journalism experiment?

Mark Hamilton notes the difficulty newspapers have reporting this kind of bad news about themselves. It is indeed a fine line to walk. While the reporters and editors no doubt have strong opinions about this story and its importance, they also have a responsibility to their readers to keep it in context and to report it straight. The WSJ’s coverage of the Murdoch takeover is particularly challenging in that respect.

It’s interesting to see the paper deciding to scale back on local coverage in favor of big features. In my opinion, local newspapers will be the big growth area in the business in coming years. Who needs another food section? But perhaps the economics just didn’t work here.