The Columbia Journalism Review explores the changes at The Wall Street Journal that have made it an enigma among US newspapers. In an atmosphere of decline and panic, the Journal is growing both print and online subscriptions. While its advertising revenue has suffered along with the rest of the industry’s, there is a sense that this paper is doing something right. It’s “moving the needle,” as journalist Liz Featherstone notes at the outset of her 3,300-word analysis.

Moving the needle is apparently a sore spot at the Journal. Some people see the phrase as a euphemism for dumbing down the content, and their opinion has some merit. A 3,300-word analysis like Featherstone’s would have a tough time getting in the paper these days. Featherstone counted a dozen stories of over 2,000 words in the front section during a one-week period in 2007. In a more recent comparison, that total had dwindled to three. Instead, the Journal has got reporters chasing news in general and The New York Times in particular. Stories are shorter, reporters are running from press conference to press conference and the Journal no longer seems to regard its mission as being to explain capitalism. Instead, it’s becoming a hard news-driven international wire service with a specialty in business topics.

Reader Focus

Under new editor Robert Thomson (left, WSJ photo), the paper has become more focused on giving his readers what they want, even if that isn’t what the journalists like.  Featherstone snagged an interview with Thomson, who refers disdainfully to some newspapers as being written more for journalists than for their readers.  The reference is clearly to the Journal itself.

Thomson sees today’s constantly distracted, media-agnostic reader as needing quick information delivered in plain language.  Some see this approach as a heretical rejection of the principles of legendary editor Barney Kilgore, who guided the paper for 27 years and who oversaw its meteoric growth.  But others believe Thomson is simply staying true to Kilgore’s principles of giving readers what they want, rather than what journalists think they need.

The Journal story isn’t a simple one.  While Rupert Murdoch has clearly put his stamp on the organization he acquired for more than $5 billion nearly two years ago, fears that he would meddle with the paper’s editorial voice haven’t materialized.  Murdoch has also proven to be strikingly eager to support editorial quality, such as when he personally stepped in to prevent the government of China from denying a visa to a Journal Beijing reporter.

Many journalists have found themselves at odds with the new direction of the paper and have left with thinly disguised disgust.  But others are fully on board with management’s efforts to make the Journal more relevant to its audience in an effort to insure its long-term vitality.  This story is a balanced account of a journalistic institution in the midst of a transition that has torn at the fabric of its organizational values but that is clearly succeeding in the marketplace. For better or for worse.

Miscellany

There are limitations to how far one should go in giving readers what they want, of course.  The Chicago Tribune apparently stepped over that line recently with an experimental project initiated by the marketing department to seek feedback on stories that hadn’t yet been published or even fully reported. A group of reporters didn’t like this idea one bit, and 55 of them signed an angry e-mail in protest. Editor Gerould Kern quickly backtracked, issuing a statement calling the experiment “a brief market research project that tested reader reaction to working story ideas.”

The Trib went too far, says Newsosaur Alan Mutter, but the fundamental idea has merit.  Mutter sees nothing with using a little market research to shape content, even if it’s only keeping an eye on the most e-mailed stories. He relates the practice of one South American newspaper that posts stories to a website as soon after they clear editing but before they appear in print.  Editors then monitor online activity through the evening and take reader interest into account in laying out pages.

The rule of thumb with buyouts is to take them early because the terms get worse as time passes. Now we’re seeing news organizations do away with severance packages entirely. It happened at the Reading Eagle last week, where 52 staffers were shown the door with just two weeks of health insurance coverage to tide them over. One of the laid-off employees had been with the paper for 45 years.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal just laid off 19 newsroom people without any severance, according to one of the victims, who contacted us.  What they did get was instructions on how to tap into their Guild Retirement Income Plan at a penalty of 10% plus tax withholding at 20%.  Or laid-off employees could elect a lump sum payment from the plan, which would lead them with retirement annuities of less than $10 a month, in some cases. “Will that even pay for a prescription for ‘sugar diabetes’ medicine?” the former employee asks. “I’m in my 40s but everybody over 65 in my family has the ‘sugar diabetes,’ as we call it here in the South.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has been hemorrhaging readership, has got a clever new campaign to promote coziness within the newspaper. Called “Unplug. It’s Sunday,” the promotion positions “the old-school Sunday newspaper as a refuge from the constant buzzing and beeping of smart phones, instant messages and e-mail that marks the modern workweek,” according to a short article in AdWeek. We think it’s a great idea.

And Finally…

Does Lindsay Lohan really look like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings trilogy? You decide. TotallyLooksLike.com will help you make the decision. The site has scores of photo pairs contrasting well-known celebrities with other figures who bear a striking resemblance to them, although we’re sure the likeness wasn’t intentional. Does Mary Kate Olson Totally Look Like Ozzy Osbourne? We didn’t think so till we saw the two in their separated-at-birth photo. See for yourself. You’ll be sharing the images with your friends within minutes. We guarantee it. Use Facebook.

You could do a lot worse than spend the next 20 minutes reading Jason Pontin’s prescription for saving print media on MIT’s Technology Review.  Pontin, a veteran magazine editor and reporter, avoids the hysteria, hand-wringing and quick-fix thinking that has dominated arguments over newspapering’s future to argue that the process of “fixing” the print media model will be long and agonizing but ultimately worthwhile.

Keying off of Clay Shirky’s widely circulated essay that basically forecasts the death of print media as we know it, Pontin suggests that a backlash against media anarchy will occur. Internet purists who believe that millions of citizen publishers will upend mainstream media are overlooking the value of that journalism, he argues. The voice of the people can and should be heard, but there will also be a role for those who have the skills to pick through the details, weigh the evidence and offer an impartial perspective.

The problem isn’t that those people are needed; Pontin rightly points out that demand for news content has never been higher.  Rather, the business model must change to make professional news organizations viable. Nevertheless, print publishers will have to endure quite a bit of pain to get there.  Among other things, they must:

• Shrink circulations to profitable levels and don’t give away free the stuff that people pay for;
• Offer a wide range of subscription options, making it easy for people to receive information in whatever frequency, format and volume they choose;
• Don’t fixate on platforms. Deliver information through whatever media or channels readers choose;
• Get together and settle on some reliable and comparable audience metrics. Fifteen years into the Internet revolution, for example, we still can’t agree on what constitutes an online “reader.” This lack of standardized metrics frustrates advertisers and undermines the quality of the numbers that publishers do provide;
• Shrink editorial departments to levels that can be supported by revenue. Yes, it’s going to hurt and yes, you’ve got to do it.
• Give readers what they want, even if it isn’t what journalists think they should get. The days of force-feeding the audience what editors thought was good for them are over. Deal with it.

There’s lots more.  The piece starts off looking like it’s going to be a defense of the status quo but ultimately delivers a thoughtful and practical proscription for change.

Best line: “As I rose through the editorial ranks of various magazines, I was encouraged to cultivate a mild contempt for readers.”

As negotiations with the Boston Globe‘s unions continued past a midnight deadline, The New York Times Co. filed notice with the federal government today of its plans to shut down the paper in 60 days. Such notice is required under federal law, but the filing of a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification statement doesn’t require the Times Co. to go through with its threats. The Globe unions called the move a negotiating ploy. The Times Co. says it is ready to go ahead and file a binding plant-closing commitment with the state today.

Tense negotiations continued through the weekend, with the Guild saying its offer exceeds the goals set by the Times Co. and the Times Co. raising the stakes even further by admitting that it had made a $4 million accounting error that would require the union to dig even deeper for cuts. The Boston Herald quotes a union official alleging that most of that oversight is actually bad-faith bargaining. Whatever happens, union officials said, expect large layoffs at the Globe. No one seems to think the Times Co. intends to carry through on its threats to shutter the 137-year-old paper, but it’s virtually certain that whatever Globe survives this negotiation process will be far smaller and weaker than the one that has dominated New England for decades. We’ll keep an eye peeled today, but you’ll probably find out quicker from Romenesko.

In Iowa, a Blueprint for Change

They’re shaking up the traditional newspaper model in eastern Iowa. Mark Potts sums up a blueprint for reinvention by the designated change agent at the Cedar Rapids Gazette that outline a vision of the publisher as a center of information, commerce and community. It isn’t about publishing, Steve Buttry says. “We need to become the connection to everything people and businesses need to know and do to live and do business in Eastern Iowa.” He goes on to list the many ways in which the publisher can expand its franchise, from delivering up-to-the-minute Twitter feeds to enabling visitors to buy concert tickets directly from its event listings page.

The part that will rub traditionalists the wrong way is Buttry’s vision of a new approach to revenue in which journalists will be just as responsible for the financial well-being of the company as sales reps. The wall between advertising and editorial is considered no man’s land in most newspaper companies, but Potts praises Buttry for having the courage to envision an alternative. Publishers can position themselves as intermediaries between their audience and local merchants and extract a small fee for enabling transactions. There is nothing dirty about thinking about the financial health of one’s employer. In fact, this economy doesn’t permit the luxury of old silos. Read Potts’ synopsis of how one news organization is changing the way it perceives its business. Read the entire 38-page blueprint document here if you want details.

Conde’s Outlook: Nasty

How bad is it in the upscale lifestyle magazine market? “Wired magazine posted a 57% drop in ad pages in the first quarter, while ad pages at fashion magazines W and Lucky were down more than 40% and 35%, respectively, for the quarter. Architectural Digest‘s ad pages were down 47%,” reports The Wall Street Journal in an article about Conde Nast’s decision to pull the plug on Portfolio magazine after only two years. The numbers make it clear why the decision was necessary: despite its paid circulation of nearly 450,000, Portfolio‘s ad pages were down 61% in the first quarter. The highly visible publication was launched with fanfare and an all-star lineup of journalists two years ago, entering the market dominated by Forbes and Fortune. However, luxury advertising has fallen off the table during the recession and Portfolio was still working off its startup costs. Advertising revenues would have to increase significantly in 2010 to support the business plan, and that just wasn’t going to happen. Some observers think the flight of luxury advertising from upscale magazines could be permanent.

It’s going to get worse, says MarketWatch’s John Friedman. In a short video clip, he says the business publishing market is over-populated and under-advertised. Every business magazine, even the most venerable titles, is vulnerable in an ad downturn like this one.

The J-School Paradox

The Capital Times of Madison, Wisc. Writes about the astonishing surge in journalism school enrollments. “According to an annual enrollment survey done by the University of Georgia, there were 199,711 undergraduates enrolled nationwide in journalism and mass communication schools in
2007 — a jump of 41.6 percent from 1997,” reporter Todd Finkelmeyer writes. “Meanwhile, a recent article on Forbes.com noted that journalism schools at Columbia University, the University of Maryland and Stanford University saw significant spikes in applications this past fall — 30 percent, 25 percent and 20 percent, respectively.”

The story goes on to quote several bright-eyed J-school students who aren’t at all worried about the 15,000 or so journalism jobs that have disappeared over the last 18 months. They believe that a market for quality reporting will always exist and hope that by the time they graduate, the jobs will be there. Professors are quoted saying that journalism teaches critical thinking, an essential skill that can serve a young person well in any profession. It appears that the University of Wisconsin at Madison is ahead of the curve, having revamped its journalism program nearly a decade ago to accommodate multiple media. Ironically, the Capital Times itself exited the print business more than a year ago and has been publishing solely online since then.

Miscellany

The Baltimore Sun laid off 30% of its newsroom last week with the cuts hitting disproportionately hard on senior editorial staff. About one third of those laid off were editors and managers, Editor & Publisher reports. They included both top editorial page editors. Newspaper Guild officials said the moves appeared to be part of a realignment of the news operation toward “multi-platform content,” whatever that is. A reduction of that size could presage a reduction in print frequency along the lines of what the two Detroit dailies are doing. The Sun has the handicap of competing against the Washington Post and other smaller dailies just to the south.

Canada’s National Post will suspend Monday publication during the summer in a cost-cutting move. No layoffs are planned.

The Reading (Pa.) Eagle laid off 52 people, or about 12% of its workforce.

The company that publishes the Vancouver (Wash.) Columbian has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but the issues apparently revolve around real estate investments and not business losses at the newspaper. The Columbian will continue to publish during reorganization.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett reads five newspapers every day, but he wouldn’t buy one at any price. “They have the possibility of going to unending losses…I don’t see anything on the horizon that causes that erosion to end,” says Bullett, who owns the Buffalo News and a piece of the Washington Post Company. He doesn’t intend to sell those ownership stakes, but he isn’t expanding them, either.

And Finally…

The New York Times has two stories that illustrate the severity of the industry’s crisis. It tells of  Todd Smith, a reporter for the Suburban Journals chain of newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises, who was shot while on the job last year. That’s a pretty big sacrifice to make for one’s employers, so “On April 15 of this year, when Mr. Smith was called to a meeting at the Suburban Journals…he wondered if the staff had won an award for coverage of the massacre. Instead, he learned that he and several others were being laid off,” Richard Perez-Pena writes. The story also tells of Paul Giblin, a reporter for the East Vallely Tribune whose work won a Pulitzer Prize two weeks ago. Giblin was laid off last year and now works at a startup online news organization.

This afternoon I hosted a presentation in San Francisco on the topic of “World Without Media: What Will Fill The Void?” along with online journalism and social media expert JD Lasica at the New Communications Forum. Here are the slides from the talk. You can also read tweeted comments here.

Some of journalism’s most prestigious brands took it on the chin in the new round of circulation figures released this morning by the Audit Bureau of Control. Collectively, the 395 newspapers reporting numbers experienced a 7% year-over-year decline, with some of the worst declines occurred at big-city titles in the Northeast.

There was little good news, except for The Wall Street Journal‘s continued gravity-defiance. The paper squeaked out a .61% circulation gain and is now more than twice as large as The New York Times.  Some other troubled papers, like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, also showed only minor declines in the most recent six months.

USA Today, which has managed to maintain relative stability in previous reports, fell with a thud, dropping almost 7.5%.  Marriott Corp.’s recent decision to stop delivering the paper to hotel guest rooms won’t affect the numbers until the next reporting period

These figures shouldn’t be taken as a snapshot in time but rather as a trend. Newspaper circulation falls for all sorts of reasons, including voluntary cutbacks by publishers.  Trends become evident only over multiple reporting periods. With that in mind, the titles listed below have to be considered the most at risk, since they have shown average declines in the double digits over the last two reporting periods.

Miscellany

Jeff Jarvis asks journalists to focus on where they add value and to stop doing everything else. “If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it,” he writes. Jarvis cites the example of TV reporters dashing from place to place to tape standups in front of iconic institutions. They’re not reporting, they’re simply relating commodity information in a contextual setting. Why are TV stations spending money on this?  “When we cut out all the incredible waste – those standups and rewrites and frills and blather – and when we have an ecosystem that rewards unique value, as the internet does, then I think we could end up with more journalism, more reporting,” Jarvis says.

Robert Picard tweaks bankrupt newspaper companies for paying large executive bonuses, calling the argument that said such payments are necessary to retain good people “hollow.” Few people are leaving good jobs in a time when nobody’s hiring, Picard writes. Bankruptcy is a time to restructure, not just get out from under your obligations. The good news: Picard believes “Most newspapers… are surviving the downturn and will be serving their communities for many years.”

The Springdale (Ark.) Morning News has laid off nine newsroom workers and an unspecified number of employees in other groups, reports in its newsroom, in addition to cuts in other departments within the paper, reports KSFM television. The paper will also reduce its size and page count. The station’s spare report is typical of those we see on TV websites. If most of these stations didn’t have newspapers and wire services feeding them copy, they wouldn’t have any news at all.

The Los Angeles Daily News laid off at least four more newsroom employees, according to a blog maintained by its Newspaper Guild chapter.

Boston Globe unions staged a rally last Friday to save the paper, which faces a shutdown decision at the end of this week. Speeches by union members were reminiscent of the greatest Samuel Gompers oratory, only the problem is that the Globe‘s parent is flat on its back. Cutting executive pay isn’t going to close an $85 million profitability shortfall.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reached agreement with the union representing 300 newsroom workers that gives the publisher $1.7 million in cost relief. The deal includes a 3% cut in base wages, a 30% cut in merit pay, two days of unpaid furlough in each of the next two years, a freeze in some pensions and a reduction in severance.

The New York Times Co. is sticking by its May 1 deadline to gain $20 million in cost-saving concessions from Boston Globe unions or shutter the paper. That doesn’t mean the Globe would close next Friday, but owners would make the decision then. Expect this one to go down to the last minute.

The Boston Globe has a story explaining its much-maligned lifetime job guarantees. The deals negotiated 15 years ago have become a hot potato as Times Co. has threatened to close the Globe unless $20 million can be cut from the expense line. The story has some interesting background on how guarantees grew out of management’s successful efforts to seize control from the unions more than 30 years ago.

Guarantees are almost unique to the newspaper industry, having first been negotiated in the 1960s when automation was threatening to put compositors and pressmen out of work. Publishers figured they could offer lifetime employment to people whose jobs were threatened and still make more money because the productivity benefits of automation were so great.

Another interesting motivation was the effect of automation on strikes. “The US newspaper industry averaged 30 to 40 strikes a year in the 1960s,” the Globe says, quoting industry analyst John Morton. “Now, they are rare. The last major newspaper strike occurred in Seattle in 2000.”

Of course, what seemed like a good deal at the time has become an anchor around some publishers’ necks as guarantees have limited their flexibility to manage expenses. In a similar move, the steel industry negotiated generous pension and health care benefits with its unions in the 1960s and 70s. Thirty years later, companies found themselves spending twice as much to pay retired employees as they paying productive workers.

Trouble in Paid Content Land

New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger vowed to stay the course during a shareholder meeting earlier this week.  He defended the Times Co.’s commitment to editorial quality and the validity of the advertising model, yet he hinted that other options were on the table. “”We continue to take a fresh, hard and deep look at various subscription, purchase and micropayment models,” he said.

Sulzberger may want to consider the experience of INDenver Times, a startup staffed mostly by members of the failed Rocky Mountain News. We told you about them on Monday, including their plans for an ambitious paid subscription model that includes “direct, real time conversations with our editors and writers…from 10 am to 5 pm every weekday.” Well, not so fast. INDenver Times just announced that it didn’t meet the 50,000-subscriber threshold it needed to pursue its novel business model and so won’t be going ahead with paid subscriptions.  The announcement was murky on whether INDenver Times will go ahead at all. Various spokespeople talked around the importance of journalism but didn’t say whether that would include an ongoing commitment to this venture.

Miscellany

The Wall Street Journal carried this front-page banner headline week: “Computer Spies Breach Fighter-Jet Project.” The Journal doesn’t run many banner headlines, so this must be a big deal, right?  Actually, apparently not.  As Slate’s Jack Shafer explains, the breach in question poses no significant threat to the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet program. It amounts to theft of a maintenance manual. “The Chinese now know how many miles the F-35 can fly before its timing belt must be replaced, its oil changed, and its tires rotated,” he explains. Shafer also documents the putdowns from by Journal rivals Washington Post and New York Times, which both gave the story barely passing mention in their own pages.  He also points to a recent piece in The Nation, intriguingly titled “Has the ‘Journal’ Lost Its Soul?” However, The Nation‘s servers appear to be down this morning, no doubt the victim of a Chinese hacker attack.

We’ll be watching with one sleepy eye next week as Sen. John F. Kerry holds hearings in Washington on the financial problems facing the newspaper industry. The fact that there is no support at any level of government for a bailout of the industry doesn’t faze Kerry, who appears to be more interested in appeasing the editors at the Boston Globe who have endorsed him for many years.

Forecasting Media’s Future

Also next week, we’ll be speaking in San Francisco on the topic of “World Without Media: What Will Fill The Void?” along with online journalism and social media expert JD Lasica at the New Communications Forum. This general session presentation begins Tuesday at 4:00.  Click on the logo at left for a discount. Get an even bigger discount by registering with code SNCR New Communications Forum is one of the best social media events of the year. whoIts organizer, the nonprofit Society For New Communications Research has assembled a faculty of leading new-media thinkers who reserve some of their best stuff for the biannual conferences.  Take a look at the agenda and see what we mean.

We’ll also be leading a panel on Wednesday on the topic of “Media in Transition: The Future of News in a Democratized World” at the co-located Inbound Marketing Summit. The three panelists are all newspaper industry veterans who have successfully made the jump to the digital world: Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat, Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher and Ken Doctor of Outsell. Click the image at right and use code VIPS50 to get half off the conference fee.

And Finally…

Nicholas Carr points us to a site maintained by one Timothy McSweeney, which is one of the funniest – and by that we mean “most droll” – online outposts we’ve encountered in some time – and by that we mean days.  Check out the syllabus for an “Internet-Age Writing” class. A snippet:

“Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t!”

And also: “Students will work to make their blogging more vivid using the fundamentals of the craft, such as imagery, foreshadowing, symbolism, and viral paparazzi photos of celebrity nip slips.”

The New York Times Co., which is struggling just to hold its business together, reported a loss in the first quarter as advertising revenues dropped a sickening 27%. The only good news is that the company delayed some debt payments and the CEO said there are signs that ad spending might increase in the third quarter.

The company’s performance dramatically undershot Wall Street estimates, where analysts were expecting a loss of 3 to 6 cents a share. The actual operating loss was 34 cents. Even online revenue, which was traditionally been a bright spot, was down 5.6%.

Media General also disappointed the few analysts who continue to follow the company, reporting an operating loss of 77 cents a share on an 18% drop in revenue. One analyst had pegged the likely loss at 5 cents a share on revenues of $180 million. Actual sales were a little under $160 million.

Moody’s has downgraded Gannett Co. yet again. The agency lowered its rating of the publisher into junk territory earlier this year and has since lowered it again. Now Moody’s says Gannett may not have the necessary profits to meet the terms of one of its debt convenants. Gannett logged a 60% drop in profit on an 18% slide in revenue in its most recent earnings report.

And there are more earnings still to come.

Specialty Publishers Hold Their Own

The 10,000-circulation weekly Jackson County (Mo.) Advocate focuses on serving its own neighborhood and it’s doing just fine, thank you. Sure, its four-person staff works long hours to produce the weekly, but employees will also stop to talk with residents who stop by the office because that’s where the best stories come from. Like the local man who found an image of the Virgin Mary on a rock in his back yard. “You never know who’s going to come through the front door,” says Editor Andrea Wood, who’s interviewed in this five-minute report by local radio station KCUR. “We’ve done stories about people who had grown freakishly large pears. It’s about the community.”

Wood says the turmoil that’s killing large metro newspapers isn’t hitting hyper-local titles nearly as hard. “This industry is stable,” she says. “People use the [community newspaper] for scrapbooks. You’re never going to get that from the Internet.” Local businesses are also more stable and loyal advertisers.

The Advocate competes with the Kansas City Star, which has been cutting back local news coverage. That appears to be helping the Advocate. Circulation is growing and now tops 10,000 subscribers. The Star no longer sends reporters to cover local government meetings, leaving the Advocate as the main source of information about their community.

Further to the west, where the industry downturn has been very bad to the local newspaper industry, a veteran publisher of Chinese-language papers has actually started a new one. Brian Ho launched News for Chinese, a free monthly, just one month after the financial crisis hit. He admits that his motivations were unconventional: He got a great deal on real estate and started the business to keep the offices occupied while the market recovers. Nevertheless, local advertising has picked up nicely and, while he still isn’t making a profit, Ho says that may be in the cards. “If my newspaper can earn a small profit to support my employees, I will consider that as a success.”

Awaiting New Owner, Union-Tribune Frets About Its Politics

Alf Landon

Voice of San Diego reports on a conundrum at the Union-Tribune: it doesn’t know whether it’s conservative or liberal any more. The U-T has leaned to the right going back to 1936, when it endorsed Alf Landon for president even as Franklin Roosevelt won 62% of the vote. New owner Platinum Equity has no clear political bias. Its chief partner gave $20,000 to the McCain campaign, but the partner who has the most experience running newspapers seems to prefer Democrats. Also, Platinum is based in Los Angeles, causing some locals to worry that the owners won’t care about local politics. That could tip the balance of elections, since observers figure the newspaper’s endorsements typically deliver a 3-5% edge to candidates, who tend to be conservative. It will tip the balance even more if the new owners decide to adopt a liberal bias.

J-School Enrollments Soar As Jobs Vanish

Alana Taylor is an NYU journalism major who’s doing everything right, yet “I have no idea what I am going to do when I graduate,” she writes on MediaShift. The college junior has 4,000 Twitter followers, lots of professional connections on LinkedIn and a well-established personal brand, but the jobs just don’t appear to be out there. She interviews industry experts (including us) and gets discouraging news: working for a daily is a non-starter because many papers are going under and even the survivors aren’t paying a living wage. Starting a business is impractical in this economy. About the only hope for employment is to hook on with an Internet company and hope for the best.

Nevertheless, J-school enrollments are at an all-time high, which prompts BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy to ask “What are these people thinking?” Lacy writes on TechCrunch that her lack of journalism training made her a more successful journalist. “I don’t know how to write an inverted pyramid story or even really what that is. I do know how to write for different platforms, be scrappy and break news. I’ve had zero important alum connections and never got an internship at a big daily. And, in hindsight, that’s probably the greatest stroke of luck I could have had.”

Being free of the hidebound expectations of an irrelevant journalism style has freed her to adapt her reporting style to the new standards of the Web, she writes. In contrast, her friends who went to J-school found that the experience delivered no career value. In fact, it embedded habits that are proving to be liabilities in the free-form style of the Web.

Miscellany

This year’s Pulitzer Prize for local reporting goes to Paul Giblin (no relation), who teamed with Ryan Gabrielson for a five-part series in the East Valley Tribune about a local Sheriff’s questionable obsession with immigration enforcement. Unfortunately, the honor will be bittersweet for the Tribune, which laid off Giblin when it cut back to four-days-a-week last October. Jeff Bercovici notes the irony, and catches up with the Tribune’s publisher, who issues a rather embarrassing comment about winning journalism’s top prize:  “I don’t think [Giblin’s dismissal] diminishes at all, frankly, the excellent work they did on that project.”

Unions in San Francisco continue to strike a remarkably agreeable attitude toward Hearst’s demands that they help reduce expenses at the Chronicle by $50 million or face shutdown of the paper. The union representing delivery truck drivers agreed to let the paper cut between 90 and 100 driver positions by hiring subcontractors for home delivery. In return,  the drivers keep the right to deliver papers within the city limits. Annual savings are expected to top $5 million.

The Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise has reportedly laid off an unspecified number of employees. No word on body counts, but Gary Scott lists the names of 14 reporters and editors whom he believes got the ax.

The New York Times’ Tom Zeller takes issue with Marriott’s recent decision to cut out delivery of newspapers to its hotel rooms because of environmental concerns. Assuming that guests are turning more to their laptops and PDAs for the news, Zeller wonders if the decision doesn’t actually increase carbon emissions. He finds evidence that in countries that produce most of their power from fossil fuels, a 30-minute snuggle with the newspaper is actually less damaging to the environment than a PDA power-read. Of course, you have to take into account the cost of delivery, the impact of logging trees for paper, etc. It’s all very complex.

Columnists are supposed to be controversial, and you have to give media critic and Newser exec Michael Wolff credit for stirring up controversy with his forecast that 80% of newspapers will die within 18 months. You also have to give media veteran Martin Langeveld credit for injecting reality into that outrageous comment. Langeveld pulls out his calculator and notes that for Wolff to be correct, two newspapers would have to close ever day for the next year-and-a-half. Sometimes mathematics is a great tool.

And Finally…

The 31 newly laid-off employees at the Raleigh News & Observer decided to poke some rather vicious fun at the newspaper’s owner. They mocked up a front page comparing McClatchy to the Titanic, which sank 97 years and one week ago. The parody portrays McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt as a happy-go-lucky ship captain who sees the icebergs coming but figures his ship will simply strike them a glancing blow and use the ice fragments for cocktails. “She was welded together from the hulls of several old steamships, including a leaky tub called the RMS Knight Ridder,” they write. You can download a PDF of the mock front page here.

New media enterprises are rising out of the ashes of their collapsed predecessors.

Sportswriter Sam Adams is one of several INDenver Times staff who introduce the new site on video

A group of 30 former Rocky Mountain News staffers has launched INDenverTimes, a professional-looking news site that aims to cover local news, sports, business, arts and entertainment, along with “a Denver perspective on national news.” The venture will take a novel approach to subscriptions when it begins charging for premium access in two weeks. Paid subscribers will get “access to the INsider Channel where you can have a direct, real time conversations with our editors and writers…from 10 am to 5 pm every weekday.” The channel will also go live if breaking news happens at other times of the day.

In its first month, the operation recorded 70,000 unique visitors and more than 311,000 page views, or about as much traffic as a top-500 blog. Funded by entrepreneurs Kevin Preblud, Brad Gray and Ben Ray “three Denver entrepreneurs” (we’re trying to get their names), the venture has a hybrid revenue model and has recruited an impressive list of writers and business-side executives. The site also looks clean and well-organized. Believe it or not, this venture is running on WordPress, the same content management system that powers this blog. They’re just doing a lot more with it.

Also, some former Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers have launched a nonprofit online newspaper with regional coverage. Seattle PostGlobe is basically a multi-author blog that covers news, sports, lifestyles and opinion. It’s very early-stage and looks it, but we’ll keep an eye on this bootstrapped operation as it gets its sea legs.

Street Brawl in Boston

The Boston Globe, evidently tired of all the razzing it was getting about its threatened shutdown, fires a return volley at crosstown rival Boston Herald. Weekday circulation at the Herald is off 38% in the last decade and the newsroom staff has been cut by half. Yadda yadda. What’s really interesting about this story is a comment posted by Tom Mashberg, the Herald Sunday editor who’s quoted in the piece. Mashberg reprints part of an e-mail sent to him by reporter Keith O’Brien in which O’Brien outlines plans to include Mashberg’s comments about the Globe‘s perilous situation that don’t appear in the story. He also notes that the fact that the Herald is actually profitable isn’t mentioned, either, despite a lengthy discussion about what the Herald is doing to survive. “Looks like the editors got hold of this and turned it into a hatchet job,” he says.

Jules Crittendon, a Herald editor, minces no words telling what he thinks of the Globe story and the Globe in general. “One Herald reporter is worth something like 5 to 10 Globies, for all their inflated sense of self-worth,” he writes. And he’s just getting started. Crittendon rips the Globe for a self-important attitude, lazy reporters, layers of redundant management, endless story lengths and on an on. If you hate the Globe to begin with, his blog entry will warm your heart.

The Globe‘s negotiations with its unions continue to be rancorous. The Newspaper Guild now says it will negotiate concessions related directly to cost cuts, but won’t talk about issues like the elimination of lifetime job guarantees for about 190 veterans and the end of seniority rules in layoffs. The Guild is also calling for negotiations to be performed in public and says it wants to deal directly with any potential acquirer on the cost-cut issue. The union’s defiance is a marked contrast to the relatively quick work the San Francisco Chronicle‘s unions made of Hearst’s demands to cut costs. By the way, Globe managers are feeling some of the pain, too. Bonuses have been eliminated for this year, affecting more than 200 people, including the publisher.

Government Bailout for News Infrstructure

Mark Cooper suggests a hybrid approach to saving quality journalism: a “media stimulus package” that could give new localized news services a platform upon which to build profitable businesses. ” Just as IT health and education funds seek to build a new infrastructure for public service in their areas, IT media funding can build infrastructure in the journalism space,” writes Cooper, who is a fellow at the  Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University.

Summarizing his argument on Huffington Post (a fuller discussion is here) Cooper notes that major metro dailies are being hit hardest by changes in reader and advertiser behavior because they need to be all things to all people. Although most major metros have discarded much of their national and international coverage, they’re still forced to do too much with too few resources. Shoring up these doomed businesses isn’t the answer, Cooper says. Instead, we should look to the existing media models “that are closest to the emerging citizen-media, like public governmental and educational cable channels on the TV side and low-power FM on the radio side.” These media have long been under-funded, but they have the best chance of molding their models to the new participatory journalism. As long as the US is pouring $1.6 trillion into broken banks, how about a few billion to lay the foundation for a new media infrastructure?

Uh-Oh. It’s Earnings Time

Gannett kicked off the earnings parade, which looks to be more of a funeral procession this year, announcing a60% drop in profit on an 18% slide in revenue. Bad as the numbers were, Gannett’s operating profits actually beat analysts’ expectations by a penny. They also weren’t as bad as the 30% declines expected by some analystsquoted in The New York Times last week.  Those analysts mostly agree that this is a 100-year flood for the industry with the combination of recessionary pressures, catastrophic business problems in some key advertising segments and rising paper and fuel costs sending many publishers into the red. They also agree that more papers are likely to close this year. The revenue plunge isn’t hurting small newspapers and broadcast outlets quite as hard, but even they are expecting double-digit declines.

And it isn’t just newspapers. “Magazines collectively recorded a 25.9 percent plunge in ad pages in the first quarter, with revenue falling 20.2 percent,” says Seeking Alpha’s Jeff Bercovici. ZenithOptimedia is projecting the worst declines in ad spending since it started keeping statistics in 1980: overall US spending down 8.7% with newspapers down 12% and magazines down 11%.

Miscellany

In a sign of the times, the world’s largest maker of newsprint has filed for bankruptcy protection. Abitibi-Bowater, which was formed from a 2007 merger, is struggling to pay $8.78 billion in debt. Even though the Canadian company controls 45% of the North American-based newsprint market, a steep drop in demand has slammed its business. The company has already cut paper production 25% this year. Its 25 pulp and paper mills and 30 wood products plants will continue to operate for now, but some are likely to close as part of the restructuring.

Employment levels in American newsrooms are now lower than they’ve been in more than 25 years, the American Society of Newspaper Editors reports.  The industry shed a record 5,900 jobs last year, more than double the previous record of 2,400 eliminated in 2007. Erica Smith pegs the number much higher at nearly 16,000 reported layoffs in 2008. Employment levels are now comparable to those from the early 1980s. The good news (we guess): there was a 21% rise in online-only journalists last year, to 2,300. Incidentally, the American newsroom remains mostly white: Minorities make up 13.4% of the workforce and 450 newspapers employ no minorities at all.

More people still rely on newspapers for their news than on the Internet, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Parade Publications and published by the Newspaper Project. The study of 1,004 US adults also found that 90% of Americans rely on printed or online newspapers for their news and that newspapers are the only medium used more for local than for national news. The research confirms what most people already know: newspapers are important news sources. It doesn’t cast any light on the real problem, though, which is how to create a business model for them that works.

Sam Zell now admits that his highly leveraged 2007 purchase of Tribune Co. was a mistake. For some reason, several news outlets thought this was newsworthy. Zell is always good for a quote, though: Commenting on the prospect of finding a merger partner for his bankrupt company, Zell said, “That’s like asking someone in another business if they want to get vaccinated with a live virus.”

The Orlando Sentinel laid off 50 people last week and didn’t announce it, according to an anonymous comment on this Chicago Tribune story. The person is right that there was no announcement, but we couldn’t confirm the layoffs.

The New York Times is cutting and consolidating some sections in order to save money. Gone are Escapes, a travel guide published on Fridays, as well as Sunday sections that only go to readers in the New York metropolitan area. They’ll be combined into a new Sunday section featuring regional information. Fashion coverage is axed from the weekly magazine and the guide to each day’s newspaper will be consolidated into a single page.

And Finally…

A reader in upstate New York reports on this example of an over-eager, and ultimately failed, Albany Times Union promotion:

I only wanted Sunday’s paper but then they started delivering Thursday and Saturday for free.

When I tried to stop the free Thursday and Saturday papers, they offered me the whole rest of the week for free. I said no, I only wanted Sunday. They said okay and for a while I only got Sunday deliveries, but then I started getting Thursday and Saturday again. I figured it had something to do with local ads on those days but it still annoyed me.

I was so frustrated that I decided to stop delivery altogether. That’s when I was told “You don’t want to put your paper carrier out of a job do you?”  And then they offered me a totally free subscription seven days a week for three months. I didn’t accept it. I just wanted them to stop delivering free papers that I didn’t have time to read and was just throwing out.

So the irony of the whole thing is that because they kept sending me free papers, they lost me as a customer.”

News University kicks off another another series of journalism training courses this week with the first in its  Social Networks webinar series. I’m pleased to present the first event, Social Networks: The New Architecture of the Web, on Tuesday, Apr. 14, 2009. The series is developed with the Knight Digital Media Center, a partnership of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. I’ll be partnering with JD Lasica on other programs in the series.

This webinar-based program is intended to brief  news editors on the emerging tools and tactics of social media as they wrestle with thhe challenges of creating reader communities. We’ll look at both the content and revenue sides. My second presentation, in fact, is Social Networks: New Revenue for News Organizations, on June 16, 2009.

The cost of each webinar is a modest $24.95. In addition to the webinars, there will be assignments and group projects that can help you better understand how to build social networks and deliver new products and revenue. Come join us!

Eric Alterman (right) lays waste to the value of political endorsements, which news organizations would have to sacrifice if they took public money. Who cares? asks Alterman, calling endorsements a “near total anachronism” in a world in which readers have so much choice of information.  Endorsements haven’t been meaningful in a long time, say Alterman, journalism scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s conclusions in a 2004 study that “The direct effect of editorials does not appear to be significant…” So why is this such a hot potato in the public funding issue? The loss of the power to endorse candidates is often cited as the primary barrier to a public-funding solution for dying newspapers. In fact, endorsements work against news organizations, Alterman argues. “What endorsements do…is convince readers that the news they receive is being colored by bias expressed on its editorial pages.” And that perceived bias is a much bigger threat than endorsements that the public largely ignore. Alterman admits, reluctantly, that public funding may be the only approach that keeps journalism in the public interest alive. So get over the issue of taking sides in political debates.

Salon.com offers similar hope in profiles of several nonprofit organizations that are struggling to get by. It profiles Voice of San Diego, MinnPost.com and ProPublica, which are three startups producing quality journalism on a shoestring budget.  Each has a somewhat different revenue model, with ProPublica existing largely at the behest of philanthropic funding while Voice of San Diego and MinnPost.com have hybrid models that include advertising, reader subscriptions and foundation support.  All three operations have had some notable successes, but the journalists who work there admit that the working conditions are demanding.

Joel Kramer, the editor and CEO of MinnPost, works without a salary and one of his reporters, Jay Weiner, traded in an $80,000-a-year job with a pension, health insurance, vacations and overtime at the Minneapolis Star Tribune for a post that pays about $700 for a 60-hour work week, with no benefits. Weiner’s motivations are altruistic. “I am so happy to not be at the newspaper,” he says. “We’re growing, there is freedom, we’re all involved in a product that we really want to make as good as possible.”

It’s exhilarating stuff, but even the leaders of these fledgling organizations admit that a publicly funded model is not the solution for big newspapers. “”Tell people to send us money,” says Kramer, in a plea that’s only half in jest.

Bostonians Confront a Globe-less Future

With its liberal bias and nudge-nudge political insiderism, the Boston Globe has long been a lightning rod for criticism in New England. But with the region now facing the prospect of losing its largest daily newspaper, people of all political stripes are rushing to its side. Bloggers rallied last week to think up ideas to rescue the paper, which the New York Times Co. has threatened to close in a few weeks if the unions don’t make dramatic concessions.

More than 20 prominent Boston bloggers rallied last week to voice their support for the Globe (we can’t find an organizing body, but Beth Israel Deaconess CEO Paul Levy lists the participants), debating ideas ranging from public funding to subscription fees. Everyone seems to agree that local ownership is a necessity, particularly since so many local institutions have been swallowed by out-of-town owners in recent years.

The problem is that no one knows of any local investors who are willing to put up the money. There were rumors of a consortium organizing to buy the Globe back from the Times Co. a few years ago, but that talk ended when the newspaper industry tanked.

The Times Co.’s demands are rankling Globe unions. Management has reportedly asked Teamsters Local 1, which represents about 250 full- and part-time mailers, for $5 million in concessions, or about $20,000 per person. Demands include a 25 percent wage cut, near-virtual elimination of company healthcare contribution, elimination of sick and holiday pay and the end of lifetime job guarantees enjoyed by about 145 mailers. This is on top of concessions by the mailers two years ago that cut average pay by about $10,000.

Meanwhile, Globe writers are doing a little rallying of their own. Columnist Scot Lehigh asked  readers last Wednesday to weigh in about the paper’s future and hundreds of them did, most with positive comments, he says. In fact, “I was surprised by how many subscribers said they’d pay more – some substantially more – for home delivery if it would help save the paper,” Lehigh says. They may soon get their wish. The Globe hiked its newsstand price by up to 40% last week. Many people also said they’d be willing to pay a fee to use Boston.com, the Globe’s successful Web venture.  Lehigh thinks that’s a great idea: “It’s time we gave them the chance,” he concludes.

It’s a nice thought, but a subscription scheme would probably go the way of Times Select before too long. The problem is, as Alan Mutter phrased it in our recent interview, “Giving away all this content for free was the original sin.” Boston.com is the sixth largest newspaper website on the Internet, which is an accomplishment, since the newspaper is only the 14^th largest in the US. Imposing a pay wall would send traffic down 90%. The Globe would then have a lot of explaining to do to advertisers. The flight of ad dollars would probably more than cancel out the reader revenue.

And then there’s the demographic elephant in the corner. Speaking to a class of University of Massachusetts students and administrators last week, we asked how many had read a printed newspaper within the last 48 hours. Out of approximately 45 people in attendance, five hands went up. Four of them belonged to people over the age of 35.

Hyper-Local Startups Gaining Traction

Neighborhood-based online news startups are proliferating, says The New York Times in a story that profiles three of them. Among the new entrants are EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch. Funding models range from angel investment to foundation grants but each startup agrees that geographic relevance is core to the news.

EveryBlock uses human editors to gather links to news stories and combine them with material posted by the burgeoning number of neighborhood bloogers. Patch pays journalists in each town it covers to attend school board meetings and interview people in coffee shops. Outside.in scans articles and blog posts for geographical cues and organizes the content by community.

They’re hoping to tap into a local online ad market that Kelsey Group estimates will double to $32 billion by 2013. Small business advertising needs are still being served predominantly by the Yellow Pages, making this the great frontier of online advertising.

The story questions whether the collapse of local newspapers will also kill off these startups, but EveryBlock’s Adrian Holovaty says, “In many cities, the local blog scene is so rich and deep that even if a newspaper goes away, there would be still be plenty of stuff for us to publish.”

Miscellany

The publisher of the Palm Beach Post won’t win many friends in the blogosphere with statements like, “The only information on the Internet worth reading for hard news is produced by news agencies like ours.” But that’s not surprising, considering his newspaper is “your ticket to democracy… Seventy-five cents a day is a small price to pay for freedom.” Or hyperbole.