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.

The New York Observer has an excellent piece about the gallows humor that set in at The Wall Street Journal during the Murdoch negotiations. Journalists are a cynical bunch, of course, so it’s not surprising they saw the worst possible outcome of the deal and also invented some of the cleverest sarcastic devices to describe it. The question is whether this will be a watershed event in journalism. Murdoch properties aren’t known for editorial excellence so much as for sensationalism and right-wing politics. While the Journal has always been politically conservative, it has never let its editorial page openly influence its news coverage. Will all that change under Murdoch?

To read the Observer piece, you’d think the reporters at the Journal are all about to abandon ship, but my experience is that journalists generally see most glasses as half empty to begin with. If there are large-scale defections at the paper, it will become apparent over a period of 12-18 months. If that happens, it will be interesting to see what new management comes in to run the newsroom and whether the Journal‘s austere, highly formatted news pages begin to change. That’s what makes this a potential watershed. If the Journal loses the reputation for editorial excellence that it has enjoyed for some 50 years, we will all be the worse for that.

From a story in Editor & Publisher:

Just 13% of the 1,100 U.S. adults surveyed in June and July said the occupation of journalist had “very great prestige,” while 16% said it had “hardly any prestige at all.” The plurality of respondents, 47%, grudging conceded there was “some prestige” in being a journalist. Contrast that to America’s most prestigious occupation, firefighter. Fully 61% of those surveyed said that job had “very great prestige.”

I guess journos have a reputation for starting fires, but these days people are more interested in putting them out. Thanks, Jayson Blair!

NowPublic.com said it raised $10.6 million in venture capital and that more than 100,000 people have submitted material to its citizen journalism site. Other ventures that have gained traction include Korea’s OhMyNews, iBrattleboro.com and Northwest Voice.

Citizen journalism is the future of news. While I don’t think we have any idea what the newspaper (or site) of the future will look like, there’s no question in my mind that it will incorporate many voices from people who aren’t professional journalists. The companies that are experimenting with citizen journalism right now are taking the very first steps in sculpting this future. Most probably won’t make it, but it’s interesting to watch the ideas unfold. The Institute for Interactive Journalism has an informational site about this topic.

Eugene Robinson has an insightful and engaging column in The Washington Post today about Rupert Murdoch’s bid for The Wall Street Journal. “Take it!” he advises the newspaper’s owners. If they hold out for a white knight, he argues, some cosmetics or packaged foods billionaire who doesn’t know the first thing about newspapering will end up with the goods. Whatever you want to say about Murdoch, he knows and loves newspapers. However, he also thinks it’s his right as an owner to meddle in editorial content, Robinson notes, ominously.

The column is worth reading just for the wonderful analogies:

“Rupert Murdoch tries to buy the Wall Street Journal, and the reaction is as if Lord Voldemort had made an above-market offer for Hogwarts.”

And this one:

“My friend Harold Evans, who once edited the Times of London under Murdoch’s ownership, wrote in a critical book that ‘Murdoch issued promises as prudently as the Weimar Republic issued marks.'”

Highlights from today’s e-mail newsletter:
Report: Young Adults Avoiding Newspapers — and Other News Outlets – E&P’s take on the Shorenstein study referenced earlier on this blog adds the interesting stat that only 9% of teenagers say they read a daily paper. Among people over 30, that figure is four times as high.
Scripps Makes It Official: ‘Cincy Post’ Folding With End Of JOA – No surprise apparently, as circulation had dropped a stunning 85% since the JOA was signed 30 years ago.
Pioneer Press Editor Won’t Rule Out More Cuts in ’07 – A Minnesota fixture for decades, the paper has cut nearly 20% of news staff in a little more than a year and may cut further. Quoting E&P: “If the predicted 15 newsroom employees leave through this buyout, that will mean the news staff had shrunk from 202 before the 2006 buyout down to 165 at the end of the latest one. When asked if a third buyout is more or less likely before the end of 2007, Fladung said, ‘I am not into predicting the future. I sure hope it is less likely.'”

The Trib covers its own no-doubt controversial decision to publish front-page ads in this balanced piece of reporting. The Wall Street Journal’s earlier move to put ads on page one no doubt will open the floodgates to others, as that prime property commands the highest advertising rates. The question editors are asking is whether this is opening a Pandora’s box? But as the dean of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism is quoted as saying in this story, “The alternative is no newspaper, and I’m happy to make that trade-off.”

Poynter Institute’s Roy Peter Clark writes about what he calls the “Big Lie.” It’s the story being told by many newspapers these days about how budget cuts and layoffs will make them better, stronger, more innovative, faster on their feet. Why can’t they be honest with their readers and tell them that these cuts are hard to accept but that the paper has dealt with adversity before and survived, and it can survive this challenge, too? Tell positive stories about adversity and achievement, he says. Readers want more positive stories.

While I’m not so sure I agree with that last point, Clark is dead on with his comments about newspapers’ reluctance to be straight with readers about their own woes. Dennis Earl comments upon the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s decision to bury news of its own layoffs in a trend piece on hard times in the industry. How hypocritical is it of newspapers to crusade for truth and clarity on the one hand and then cover up their own bad news on the other?

The Harvard Crimson remarks upon new research showing that “only one in 20 teens and one in 12 young adults say they read the newspaper on close to a daily basis.” The research was published by the Kennedy School of Government’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

The survey of 1,800 young Americans also found that young people are more likely to get news by word of mouth and with very limited depth and perspective. They’re also likely to click or channel-surf away from news after seeing the headlines. They retain few details.

Perspective and depth have always been the value that newspapers provided to news coverage, but young people are clearly rejecting choosing not to consume it. In a world that’s awash in information and which constantly whipsaws and distracts us with headlines, how are we going to create a culture that values insight and analysis? Who’s got the time for that?

Eric Deggans of TampaBay.com points out the absurdity of newspapers’ coverage of their own struggles, noting that journals that aspire to complete truth and transparency obfuscate when it comes to documenting the layoffs and budget cuts that plague them today. He notes that the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and Tampa Tribune are among the Florida papers facing layoffs in markets where population growth is booming.