The business media is in self-flagellation mode and with good reason. Editors are beginning to pick up the pieces and wonder how they managed to miss the biggest economic story of the last 50 years. Liberal commentators are having a field day.

Did the media blow it in failing to predict the financial crisis? Eric Alterman sums up a variety of perspectives and suggests that the real problem with US financial journalism is that at some point journalists stopped treating their audience as consumers and started treating them as investors.

Insiderism, the cult of personality and a lopsided emphasis on stock market performance created an oversimplified view of the financial world that led readers to believe that that super executives could defy gravity. The result was business sections running flattering profiles of people like Countrywide Financial’s Angelo Mozilo (right) even as those executives were driving their companies into the ground.

Alterman quotes a report from the UK’s POLISMedia: “If journalists see themselves mainly or merely as serving the market or investors, they may be less effective in their watchdog role…. Ultimately, do journalists have a broader professional duty to ensure that corporate malpractice comes to light, or is their role merely to provide whatever their readers want?”

He also points to an even more damning account in Mother Jones by former Wall Street Journal reporter Dean Starkman and bluntly titled “How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?”  Starkman was a member of the financial press corps that transformed itself from loyal opposition to chummy insider as the bubble grew. “I rode in black cars, lunched at all the places you read about, and more than once flew across the country to report a 1,200-word story,” he writes.

Reporters and the subjects of their reports both benefited from the Wall Street boom, creating little incentive for either side to end the party. The result was a rash of glowing coverage of larger-than-life executives and very little investigation into what they were executing. Starkman (left) pays homage to “The Reckoning,” a 1990 Wall Street Journal account of the devastating human toll of a corporate leveraged buyout. “It is safe to say that that piece, which tied the Safeway LBO to workers’ suicides, heart attacks, and more, would never be proposed, let alone published, today,” he writes.

He’s also blunt in attacking the formulaic executive profiles that conferred a god-like aura on corporate executives while paying scant attention to the underlying rot in their businesses. “Personality profiles, critical as they may be, are comfortably within the narrowing business-press discourse. Plus they’re a lot easier, and less risky, than investigations-and it’s that part of business journalism that has been allowed to wither,” Starkman writes, quoting Fortune‘s Katie Brenner.

Ultimately, insiderism ruins objectivity. “Increasingly, business coverage has addressed its audience as investors rather than citizens, a subtle but powerful shift in perspective that has led to some curious choices,” Starkman writes, citing as an example the Journal‘s claim that borrower fraud was a big part of the subprime financial mess when no such evidence existed.

Much attention is being focused on the damaging impact of layoffs on newspapers’ watchdog role. Reading these two pieces, one gets the sense that in the case of the financial press at least, the watchdogs were inside snuggled comfortably at the feet of their masters.

Layoff Log

Three dozen employees of the Buffalo News have accepted a generous buyout offer of a minimum $60,000 cash payment, but that’s still not enough. The Berkshire Hathaway-owned newspaper may need to cut another 21 jobs. That would be about 6.5% of the company’s 900-person workforce.

The Wichita Eagle is one of McClatchy’s top-performing newspapers, so it only has to lay off 5% of its workforce.

The Fargo-Morehead (N.D.) Forum is eliminating 25 more full-time jobs on top of the 21 it cut last month. Altogether, that amounts to 19% of its 240-person workforce. The neighboring Grand Forks Herald is cutting eight jobs and will end publication of an advertorial supplement.

The Toledo Newspaper Guild is pleading with management of the Toledo Blade not to lay off as many as 60 more people. The newspaper laid off 23 people in December, mostly in the newsroom. The new cuts could amount to as much as 14% of its remaining 425-person workforce.

Newspapers continue to struggle with the paradox of skyrocketing popularity of their product while their their business model crumbles.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) has released new Nielsen Online data for January that shows nearly a 12% year-over-year increase in monthly unique audience for newspaper Web sites. That’s “the highest for any month since NAA began tracking these numbers in 2004,” according to a press release.

Also up (year-over-year): Unique audience (11%), reach (7%) and page views (15%). Here are all the numbers. No doubt the Presidential inauguration and the cratering economy had a lot to do with growth, but the trajectory is still impressive.

Meanwhile, layoffs are running well ahead of last year’s pace, half the newspaper holding companies in America are in or near bankruptcy and Time magazine just published its list of The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America. We can’t remember a greater disconnect in any industry between product success and business failure.

The NAA’s announcement comes during the association’s MediaXChange conference going on in Las Vegas. We were surprised to learn about this event since we had managed to overlook it entirely until the press release showed up this week. The program looks to be focused on the right things: mobile, monetization, metrics, models and so on. Keynoter was Tony Hsieh, the Zappos CEO who has become a bit of a Twitter icon.

The NAA’s website for the event still betrays a certain clueless about the ways of the Internet, though. It’s positively hostile toward search engines and its blogs lack the essential element of the blogosphere: links. Here’s a short tutorial on why links are important. If you want to do a crash course in search optimization and online promotion, drop us a line.

Miscellany

Lots of colleges and universities now give away materials from past courses as a way of promoting the quality of their curricula. Online Degree World has a nice list of 100 Free Open Courseware Classes on Journalism, Blogging and New Media. This is the future, right? So what are you waiting for? College courses for free!

That’s the headline that appeared atop this paid opinion (PDF) in the San Franciso Examiner last Friday, urging public action to save the Chronicle. The author, who identifies himself as Delfin Virgil, evokes images of William Randolph Hearst and historic photos of guys with suits and mustaches to argue that the Chron is an institution that belongs to the people and it should be given over some group unspecified group of citizenry to keep it alive.

The South Wales Echo just launched a new design with an edgy grunge video that “manage[s] to make the newspaper seem really cool,” according to Charles Apple. He’s got a link to the 1:43 clip or you can see it on YouTube. Learn from this.

And Finally…

Two gems from Erica Smith:

Former Journalist Christopher Ave has written a song called the Copy Editor’s Lament (The Layoff Song), celebrating the contributions of the many copy editors who are being cast aside as news organizations shift to blog-style journalism:

AP Stylebook is my bible,

Helps me stop the suit for libel,

But nothing ensures my survival now…

I don’t know what what I’ll do,

Now that I am through,

Killing my last adjective.

When not writing songs Ave is the political editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Erica also offers her favorite selection from someecards:

Spain’s El Mundo newspaper has an article about the Death Watch that has received some notice in the Spanish speaking world, including Cuba and Argentina. We wish our Spanish was better, but we think they’re mostly saying the same thing.

We thought you might like to see the text of the e-mail interview with El Mundo correspondent Carlos Fresneda that formed the basis of this story. As always, your comments are welcome.

How do you feel when you read about events such as the end of the Rocky Moutain News? Which newspapers will survive in the US?

The closure of the Rocky Mountain News left me feeling sick because we are seeing institutions of knowledge collapse before our eyes. The vital public service that these newspapers provide is being lost and, for the moment, there is nothing to replace them.

I believe a few national dailies will survive, among them The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. These papers made the transition to national distribution a decade ago and that will serve them will. The need for newspapers will not disappear, but the economic model of regional dailies is no longer sustainable. Papers that do not count their national circulations in the one million range will not be able to command the advertising fees to keep them alive. However, there will be a place for some print properties and a few will remain to fulfill that need.

Do you think that something like this could happen in Europe?

It depends on the location. Areas of Europe that are well wired for the Internet and have robust wireless infrastructures, like the Nordic region, will probably see the need for newspapers decline more quickly than those that charge high fees for Internet access or do not have affluent populations. Eastern Europe, in contrast, will probably be a fairly robust market for newspapers for some time. Some cultures are also more invested in the newspaper model, as is the case in the UK. In general, Europe will discard print newspapers more slowly than the US because traditions are more embedded and, in some cases, government subsidies will keep print publications afloat. France is an example of that.

Will more newspapers follow The Wall Street Journal model and charge for their content on the Web?

They will try but mostly they will fail. Readers aren’t accustomed to paying the costs of news, even in the print model, where the cost of a newspaper to a reader is trivial compared to the cost of producing it. Newspapers may be able to generate some revenue from subscription fees but not enough to support their operations at their current size.

Will “micropayments” be the solution for some of them?

The only way a micropayment model can flourish is if there is a broad-based campaign by journalists, public officials and celebrities to promote it. This is the model that is creating a viable paid-content model in the recording industry. There must be a public education campaign to convince the public that a vital information source is threatened and that it must be supported. Perhaps these organizations can steal a lesson from the music industry by giving away their content free on their website but charging for downloads to a Kindle. If readers perceive the value, they’ll pay. However, I think it’s unlikely that the news industry can muster enough support to make such a campaign successful.

The new generations of reader is used to getting information for free. Will these people be willing to pay for high quality journalism?

There will be public funding models like National Public Radio’s that will have some success applying public support to worthy news organizations. However, I doubt that individual readers will be willing to pay enough to cover more than a small amount of the operating costs of conventional newspapers. A few organizations may survive on public funding and philanthropy, but the vast majority of daily newspapers will not be able to sustain themselves under that model.

What will happen to investigative journalism?

In the short term, a lot of investigative journalism will disappear. However, I believe a new style will emerge over time that leverages increased public access to government documents and the work of individual “whistle blowers”  to fulfill many of the same objectives of investigative journalism. New-journalism organizations like Talking Points Memo actually recruit their readers to assist in the reporting process by scouring public documents and fact-checking information. In a world in which everyone is a publisher, some new models of investigative journalism will emerge that harness the work of individual citizens.

Will the new model of journalism using reader-generated content reach the same quality and level that “old school” journalism?

It won’t have the finish and polish of professional journalism and it won’t be nearly as well packaged, but the new model could be richer in many ways because so many people will be involved in the “reporting” process. There will also be new aggregators emerging online that gather the work of citizen journalists and package it professionally.

What is the future of the journalist? Will we be mostly self-employed and will the lack of funds eventually affect the quality of our work?

Journalists will need to think more about their personal brand than the brand of the publication they work for. Many more of them will be freelancers in the future, but they can still make a good living by selling their services to various outlets and by publishing in multiple media. They will need to be more specialized in focus but more generalized in terms of the media they use (text, audio, photo, video).

What is the future of weekly and monthly magazines?

That depends greatly on the audience. Computer displays can’t match the visual quality of a printed page and will never match the tactile quality. Magazines that deliver high visual quality to discerning audiences – high-end travel and lifestyle publications, for example – may do very well for a long time. Those that mainly deliver news will be under more pressure. Magazines with large newsstand circulations will probably do better than those that deliver principally through the mail because people are accustomed to reading them when out of the home. However, mobile news services may blunt much of this advantage over time. I think Brides magazine has a long life in print ahead of it. I’m not sure The Economist does.

Should we blame publishers for the current crisis in the same way US car makers are being blamed for not seeing their problem coming?

Journalists aren’t responsible for this crisis. The business executives who failed to understand changes in their audiences that were apparent a decade ago deserve most of the blame. They considered the Internet to be simply another distribution medium for their printed products and they failed to adapt their services for the unique characteristics of the Web. They also failed to adjust their sales models to target small and local businesses. They placed their bets on classified and department store advertising, and as those revenue sources were taken away or went out of business, they had nothing to fall back upon. Even more damaging was the consolidation spree of the last 10 years that plunged many publishers into heavy debt. Most of them will never recover. The burden of debt service handcuffs them from making meaningful change in their business.

Industry watchers are applying some mathematical discipline to various proposals to bail out the newspaper industry.

Mark Potts buries a hatchet in the idea that paid subscriptions are the salvation of the newspaper industry. Hauling out the spreadsheet, he suggests that the $10 million a good-sized daily could realize from selling 500,000 subscriptions at $20 each would be substantially offset by advertising revenue declines triggered by reductions in website traffic. Some people estimate that pay walls could cut page views by up to 90%, effectively obliterating that revenue stream. And charging a higher price will only drive traffic lower. Potts says newspaper owners aren’t doing nearly enough to optimize their online ad revenue streams. They should focus on selling ads to local businesses and shift from a reliance on traditional big display ad campaigns.

Taking a more expansive view, Ken Doctor handicaps the odds of various rescue strategies, ranging from pay walls to cable bundling to government handouts. The best bets are Cablevision’s idea of bundling Newsday into cable subscription fees and Hearst’s plan to distribute free wireless e-readers, both of which he rates at 2-1 odds. But even those have major downsides. The longshot: charging for premium content. Newspapers just don’t have the goods, Doctor says. Odds: 4-1.

Down and Out in Denver and San Francisco

If you want detailed background on what exactly happened in Denver prior to the Rocky Mountain News‘s closure last week, read this interview with David Milstead, the Rocky columnist and business reporter who broke scoop after scoop about the behind-the-scenes machinations. At nearly 5,200 words, the transcript is of epic proportions, but interested readers can learn about why Scripps chose to be the bad boy to abandon Denver, Media News CEO Dean Singleton’s’ decision not to buy the paper, the emergence of a possible buyer late in the process, the mood in the Rocky newsroom after the closure was announced and the possibility that Milstead’s critical reporting denied him a job at the rival Denver Post.

Singleton is also at the center of a San Francisco Bay Guardian analysis of what could be done to save the Chronicle. The report documents the extreme cost-cutting campaign at Hearst Corp. which is seeking to derive half its revenue from circulation by 2011. Among the news that was buried in the announcement of the Chronicle’s for-sale offering was layoffs of more than 55% of the newsroom at the San Antonio Express-News.

The only conceivable buyer for the Chron is Singleton’s MediaNews, which has gradually bought up nearly every other newspaper in the Bay Area. However, MediaNews is unlikely to want to take on a money-losing property when it is already so highly leveraged. The story also says the Society of Professional Journalists is calling for a public discussion of the Chron‘s predicament, saying the potential loss of such a large news source is an “urgent civic challenge.”

Layoff Log

• The Fort Worth Star-Telegram will cut its workforce by 12% and enact wage reductions ranging from 2.5% to 10% on employees making more than $25,000 annually. The paper cut 18% of its workforce last year and initiated other cost-reduction efforts, including a joint distribution agreement with rival Dallas Morning News and real estate sales. In addition to the layoffs, the paper is offering buyout agreements to many of its workers.
• Canada’s largest newspaper will lay off 60 unionized workers. The cuts mainly hit the advertising department, where 38 employees, or about one quarter of the unionized staff,  got their walking papers. The leader of the Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild calls the cuts outrageous in light of the $8 to $11 million package CEO Rob Prichard is getting to step down in May.
• Having announced 60 layoffs last week, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is now requiring newsroom employees to take off one work day out of every 20. The plan applies to salaried and hourly employees who work the equivalent of a full-time schedule.
• The Myrtle Beach Sun News will cut 20 positions and reduce pay and hours for all staff.

Miscellany

The Connecticut attorney general thinks it’s pretty audacious of Journal Register Co. to pay up to $1.7 million in bonuses to 31 people when the company owes the state $21.5 million in back taxes. However, we should point out that the bonuses are tied to the achievement of cost reduction objectives.

Add The Wall Street Journal to the ranks of outlets now tracking US layoffs. Its interactive layoff tracker sorts job reductions by industry, company, date, size of layoff, percent of workforce and stock decline. The Citigroup numbers are especially ugly.

And Finally…

As journalism educators struggle with questions of how to teach students about a new media world that even they don’t fully understand, some teachers are moving forward and reshaping their programs to prepare students for a very different career track. Hanson Hosein was an Emmy-winning television news producer at NBC News before ditching the world of “big-box” media and setting out to discover how citizen publishers would change journalism. Today he heads the masters of communication program at the University of Washington, where his curriculum has created considerable debate over its rejection of traditional media models. We interview him on our MediaBlather podcast.

Click here to go to MediaBlather.

The Associated Press wraps up the debate over public and non-profit funding for newspapers, concluding that the economics could work for a few large players but not for most metro dailies. The New York Times would need an endowment of about $5 billion to sustain its current newsgathering operation, for example. The more promising and popular approach is a targeted for-profit model like MinnPost.com and investigative journalism foundry GlobalPost.

The latter example is particularly interesting because GlobalPost was founded as a nonprofit but switched to a for-profit model after potential donors demanded too much accountability. The venture later raised $8 million from individual investors.

Steven Coll, former managing editor of the Washington Post and now president of the New America Foundation think tank says some big paper is going to go the endowment route eventually and “is going to have an advantage.” However, the piece also points out that the St. Petersburg Times, which is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, has had to lay off 30% of its staff, just like everybody else.

”Why a once-profitable industry suddenly seems as outmoded as America’s automakers is a tale that involves arrogance, mistakes, eroding trust and the rise of a digital world in which newspapers feel compelled to give away their content,” writes the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, in a tight summary of the last 50,000 or so words posted to this blog.

Final day at the Rocky Mountain News

Kurtz uses last week’s closing of the Rocky Mountain News as a jumping-off point to tap into the industry’s angst over What Went Wrong. The story sheds little new light on the problem or the solutions but sums up the issues and possible solutions so much more succinctly than self-important opuses like the one last week in the New Republic. And it has a striking quote from Joshua Micah Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo (TPM) is often held up as an example of the focused model that may replace sprawling daily newsrooms. “If all the big papers disappeared right now and we replaced them with 50 TPMs, it wouldn’t come close to doing the job,” says Marshall, who employs just six people. “But we’re in a broader transformation where models like ours and others are going to evolve that can fill the void.”

TechDirt’s Mike Masnick rants about what he sees as the absurdity of newspapers’ plans to charge for content. He’s especially put out that Newsday, which has poor audience affinity to begin with, should lead the way. Charging for access to news websites isn’t just dumb, it’s arrogant, he says. Newspapers “always made their money selling the attention of their community to advertisers. But when they treat that community with contempt at the very same time that the community has many other options, it should be no surprise that the community goes away.” Masnick sees no chance for pay walls to work out. If anything, it will only accelerate the emergence of free alternatives.

Layoff Log

• Two large upstate New York publishers are taking the ax to their payrolls. The Albany Times Union needs to cut its costs by 20% in order to stay viable, said Publisher George Hearst III. Employing blunt language, Hearst said the cuts were needed or the paper would be at risk. “The very survival of our enterprise hinges upon cost-cutting that must include the departures of people who are part of this company,” he said. While no numbers were mentioned, the paper’s total employment of 453 indicates a forthcoming reduction of about 90 jobs. Hearst called the advertising slowdown unprecedented. “I’ve been here two decades and I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.
• The Buffalo News plans to lay off 52 employees if union negotiations fail to achieve a breakthrough, says WKBW-TV. The station got hold of a memo publisher Stan Lipsey that lists 33 layoffs in circulation, eight each in editorial and classified advertising, two in accounting and one in marketing. The paper also extended a buyout offer that so far has had only lukewarm acceptance. While Guild negotiations continue, the paper has taken other cost-cutting measures, including a wage freeze for non-union employees and closing the Niagara County bureau. The newsstand price was also increased to 75 cents.
• The Columbus Dispatch will lay off 45 people by April 3, citing an advertising slowdown. “We avoided staff reductions as long as possible long after many other news organizations took such action,” Publisher John Wolfe said, adding that readership is holding up pretty well but advertising is way down.
• The Sacramento Bee will lay off 25 to 27 employees, but only if the Newspaper Guild agrees to a set of cost reductions that include pay cuts of up to 6 percent, limitations on vacation time and other sacrifices. If the union doesn’t agree, 11 additional newsroom jobs could be cut. The union represents 268 of the Bee’s 1,126 full- and part-time workers.
• The Wilmington (N.C.) Star News says it will outsource the printing of the newspaper to a company that has not yet been named. Nearly 40 full-time workers in the mail room and press room could be laid off as a result.
• The Bellingham (Wash.) Heraldis cutting 10 staff positions and reducing remaining workers’ salaries by up to 5%. A similar tack is being taken by the Myrtle Beach Sun News, which will cut 20 jobs, reduce the length of the work week and cut pay for all salaried employees.

Miscellany

The Salt Lake Tribune has so far managed to avoid layoffs, but its decision to cut a half page of op-ed material nevertheless drew cries of outrage from readers. Columnist Vern Anderson asks readers to keep it all in perspective. Circulation has held steady, but the situation in the industry is “somewhere between grim and dire.” Everyone is cutting back, he says.

Last Friday’s final edition of the Rocky Mountain News ”sold like wildfire,” according to an article in India’s Sify News. “Some buyers who succeeded in getting a copy wasted no time reselling them on eBay. Multiple copies of the paper were posted to the online auction house, with prices ranging from a penny to $14.99.”

And Finally…

Former San Franciso Examiner Editor Phil Bronstein identifies the one person who deserves the blame for the newspaper industry’s troubles: It’s him. Bronstein contributes a wry, Web-savvy and ultimately engaging insider’s perspective on the sequence of events that began in 1992 when he saw his first Web page and culminated last week with a colleague slumped in his chair muttering, “I thought I had this job till I retired.” Having read what sometimes feels like hundreds of angry screeds by resentful editors over the last two years, we were refreshed to find a refugee who’s managed to keep some perspective on it all and even find some humor. We guess we live on what Bronstein calls the “scold side” of the business.

As a public service, we staggered through The New Republic‘s 8,900-word opus about the perilous state of the newspaper industry so you wouldn’t have to. We suppose this ponderous, professorial epic is supposed to put  TNR‘s weighty stamp of legitimacy on the crisis. If you buy legendary Chicago Tribune editor Colonel Robert McCormick’s view that the greater newspaper is the one that weighs more, then this is the greatest analysis ever published.

Unfortunately, it isn’t. Lacking much insight that wasn’t stated better in Eric Alterman’s briefer and more readable New Yorker analysis of nearly a year ago, Princeton professor Paul Starr proposes that the demise of major metro dailies is a threat to democracy itself.

This is not a new opinion, although Starr does cite research that supports the idea that communities without active news organization tend to suffer from more government corruption and less accountability.

Two teams of researchers found “a very strong association: the lower the free circulation of newspapers in a country, the higher it stands on the corruption index. Using different measures, they also find a similar relationship across states within the United States: the lower the news circulation, the greater the corruption,” he writes.

This isn’t startling news, but the 2003 and 2006 studies cited lend some factual support to an emotional issue. It’s one of the few bits of new information in the whole sprawling opus.

Polarizing Forces

Starr’s sole original insight is that growing polarity between populations that  are “in the know” and those that choose to ignore the news leads to partisanship, which is in turn reflected back by the media.

“The viewers who gave up news for entertainment tended to have little or no attachment to party, while the news junkies tended to be strong partisans–and so the audience for news has become more partisan than it used to be. Cable news programs with a sharp ideological slant have responded to this shift, and perhaps contributed to it,” the author states.

It’s a good point, but we wonder why it takes so long to make it.

Starr concludes that a public funding model is the only likely solution to the news industry’s crisis, an idea that has been pretty thoroughly eviscerated by people with spreadsheets. He observes, correctly, that the critical public service that newspapers have traditionally delivered as a loss leader thanks  to their enormous profitability is probably lost forever. He’s right that the efficiency of the Internet is not always a good thing, but he gives only scant attention to the new models that are succeeding while casually discarding wonders like Wikipedia as a mere rehash of information reported by journalists. How myopic.

TNR also thumbs its nose at emerging media outlets by failing to provide a single hyperlink in its nine-screen report. Perhaps this was merely oversight or a shortcoming of technology, but the omission appears to say, “Screw you, Internet. Here’s the self-contained first and last word on the topic, which is how God intended journalism to work.” Hyperlinking is an essential value of online communications and the failure to give readers the means to educate themselves about anything that wasn’t touched by New Republic editors appears clueless at best and arrogant at worst.

Someone was going to have to step up and reverse the tide of free content, but Newsday?. Owner Cablevision Systems Corp. announced that it’s going to start charging for access to the newspaper’s website and transform it into a “locally focused cable service,” whatever that means. There were few details, but comments from Cablevision executives imply that the revamped Newsday.com will be packaged as a value-added service for cable customers. Ken Doctor thinks the idea is daffy in light of the fact that the average visitor to Newsday.com spends just four-and-a-half minutes there every month.

But Mark Cuban thinks this is a great idea. The Web 1.0 entrepreneur, who made billions on Broadcast.com, says newspapers should package up their website offerings as a subscription and sell it to cable owners, who will build it into their service fees right next to the Golf Channel. Who’s going to notice an extra 25-cent monthly fee for The New York Times after all? Probably no one, but we question whether a quarter a month from even 100 million subscribers is going to fund the Times’ sprawling news operation. Smaller dailies would see a tiny fraction of that bounty.

Cablevision is no doubt regretting that it ever even heard of Newsday. It paid what is now considered to be a vastly inflated $650 million for Newsday last year. Yesterday, it wrote down $402 million of that cost, pushing itself into the red for the quarter.

Bay Area Agonizes Over Chronicle Woes

New American Media samples the opinions of editors from the ethnic press from around the Bay Area about the impact of the possible closure of the San Francisco Chronicle. The consensus is that it’s very bad news. Many community papers look to the Chron to provide basic city news coverage while their journals pick up the local and ethnic angle. With no major daily in town, editors also wonder how the Bay Area media that’s left is going to keep informed. TV and radio stations, in particular, rely on the daily newspaper to feed them local stories. Most of them are hurting too much to have any hope of filling in the gap that will be left if the newspaper disappears.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle‘s unions are meeting with management about how to achieve the $50 million in cost savings needed to keep the paper afloat. But even massive layoffs don’t solve this structural problem: It costs $10 to produce and deliver a $2 Sunday paper, according to Mother Jones.

By the way, Mark Potts has a great post about the lamentable state of the Chron‘s website as well as the uninspiring condition of newspaper websites in general. He hits the nail on the head in observing that newspaper owners believed from the very beginning that their websites should mimic their newspapers. This completely overlooked the fact that people using browsers have a lot more options than people using newspapers. So why include international news in a local website? He also notes that newspaper home pages are a cacophony of information that confuse and even alienate readers who can easily go somewhere else. Since most people arrive at them via Google anyway, wouldn’t it make more sense to focus the experience on a simplified and more focused individual article page?

Layoff Log

• With the loss of 100 more jobs, including 30 in the newsroom, the Hartford Courant will have effectively cut its news staff by over 40% over the past year. The latest round of layoffs includes shutting down the Courant‘s Washington bureau and reducing the size of its state capitol reporting team by half. The newsroom will be trimmed to 135 people, down from 235 just a year ago.
• Layoffs of 18 more people at the Memphis Commericial Appeal bring to 130 the number of jobs cut since last June, or at least we think it does. We told you that the paper announced 27 layoffs in November, but this Employment Spectator story says the actual number was 57. We agree that 55 people were furloughed last summer, only we reported the news in June while the Employment Spectator says July. The Commercial Appeal definitely employed 700 people before all this cutting began.
• The Augusta (Me.) Chronicle is laying off across “a variety of departments,” according to a statement so devoid of detail that it could have been written in haiku.
• The Buffalo News is considering layoffs because not enough people have taken up management on a buyout offer that includes a lump sum payment of at least $60,000. Go figure.

Miscellany

As part of its exit from the Rocky Mountain area, E.W. Scripps will transfer its 50% stake in the Boulder Camera to MediaNews Group, owner of the Denver Post. The move further consolidates MediaNews CEO Dean Singleton’s hold on the Denver-area news market. Singleton said nothing will change for now, but the company will share some content between the Post and the Camera and will also seek to “create new synergies.” In other words, expect layoffs.

Peter Chianca, a managing editor at GateHouse Media New England, writes a touching elegy for his hometown weekly newspaper, the Putnam County Courier. It was one of scores of local weeklies shuttered by the dying Journal Register Co. two weeks ago. While few people outside of Carmel, N.Y. probably even noticed the loss, Chianca tells of the vital role community weeklies play in doing a thankless task: “keep[ing] people informed about the things that are important to them when they get home at night.”

The New Republic devotes 3,400 words to an examination of The Politico, a beltway publishing phenomenon that is upending the balance of media power on Capitol Hill. The piece implies that the Politico is not a place where aging reporters go to live off their reputations. It’s a pressure-cooker environment fueled by the constant drive to be first with everything and to win the attention of broadcast outlets. Witness its Politico44 diary, which documents the activities of the Obama administration literally minute by minute.

Politico’s 60 reporters file their first stories of the day by 8 a.m. and carry tech gear that makes it possible for them to post from anywhere, including a city bus. Stories are written and formatted to be read on a BlackBerry. Speed is essential. Politico aims to be first with every story and it has scored some notable exclusives, including last fall’s scandal about the price of Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.

Worked to Exhaustion

Reporters are handsomely paid but worked to exhaustion. The piece relates the story of one Politico staffer starting his daily column as other reporters covering the Hillary Clinton campaign where shuffling off to bed after a long day. Journalists are encouraged to promote their own stories. A staff of three publicists spend their days sending links to political bloggers to do just that.

The goal is not just to be first, but also to the influence of the media.  Political strategy is to be the number one source of breaking news for the cable networks that cover Washington on almost a 24/7 basis.  It is making rapid gains against the Washington Post, which initially offered to incubate the startup before alternative funding sources emerged.

Started by two ex-Washington Post editors and funded by media mogul-to-be Robert Albritton, The Politico is upsetting the applecart in Beltway journalism. On Capitol Hill, it’s considered a must-read. However, it’s earned its share of critics among mainstream media, who sniff that The Politico is too quick to go with gossip in the absence of facts.

The Politico makes most of its revenue from a print edition that recently expanded to five days a week, but Allbritton says he’s preparing for the day when print is out of the picture and The Politico makes its money online. Those preparations are going pretty well; Allbritton said the operation could turn a profit in six months. “We’re way ahead of budget…It wouldn’t surprise me if the profit this year would count in the millions of dollars.”

Blogger’s Growing Influence Doesn’t Faze Gannett

Gannett Blog's Hopkins

Dow Jones profiles Jim Hopkins, the man behind the popular Gannett Blog. Hopkins took a buyout from Gannett a little more than a year ago and has been living on severance, savings and the kindness of visitors ever since. He hopes to generate about $6,000 per quarter in advertising and donations revenue. At 100,000 page views a month, the site has impressive traffic for one about such a specific topic.

Gannett Blog is a great example of how blogs have changed corporate communications. In this case, the chief source of information about a company is outside its own walls, yet Gannett continues to ignore Hopkins. That only magnifies curiosity about the blog and boosts its visibility, not to mention its word-of-mouth popularity among disenfranchised employees. Gannett spokeswoman Tara Connell is quoted as saying that Hopkins doesn’t want to hear the company’s side of the story. “Since that’s a frustrating process with him, we try to keep it to a minimum.”

But Gannett doesn’t have to engage with Hopkins. Blogs have a feature called comments that enables visitors to state their opinions directly, without a media filter. If Gannett would start engaging with readers through comments, it would win sympathy just for listening, regardless of whether Hopkins agreed or not.

There’s plenty of evidence that engagement works.  About 18 months ago, Dell Computer reversed its practice of ignoring blogger commentary and adopted a new policy of responding to each and every post, whether positive or negative. The initiative reduced negative commentary from 50% to 20% in a little less than a year. For businesses have good reasons for doing what they do, engagement is always a better strategy than avoidance. Gannett still doesn’t get it.

Miscellany

It’s the middle of winter and nerves are fraying up in Canada. Quebecor Media has locked out 253 employees at its flagship paper, the Journal de Montréal. Employees there “have refused to accept cuts to benefits, a longer workweek for no extra pay and a loss of journalistic independence over the paper’s content,” writes Lyle Stewart, who admits that he is affiliated with the newspaper’s union. And he thinks the Montreal Gazette may not be far behind. “Unionized workers there recently rejected a contract offer that would have eliminated several positions and offloaded the editing of the paper to a centralized office in Hamilton, Ontario.”

If you wonder why you haven’t read more about this, all we can say is how’s your French?

Tim Burden has assembled an impressive timeline of quotes about the micropayments debate. His discussion thread begins last Dec. 20 with a post by Joel Brinkley and goes for exactly two months. He hits all the high points we’ve seen. It’s a great running script of this tortuous debate and we hope he updates it from time to time.

The Yakima (Wa.) Herald-Republic says business isn’t bad, it’s making money and the layoff of four to six employees – or less than 3% of the workforce – is a response to general economic pressure. In fact, the company just signed a deal to print the 5,800-circulation Ellensburg Daily Record.

The Daytona Beach News-Journal laid off nine more staff members, bringing to 185 the number of employees it has furloughed in the last eight months. That’s 25% of the workforce. Commenters weigh in with the usual collection of politics-laden diatribes, making us wish they was a way to lay off them.

And Finally…

TJ Sullivan has posted an online petition calling upon newspaper companies to wall off their Web sites to non-paying subscribers for one week in July. He posts an extended explanation of his thinking on LA Observed. Lots of people have blogged about the petition over the last two weeks, yet it has garnered less than 200 signatures. It’s not such a bad idea, but maybe the sheer impracticality of it is inspiring ennui.

Many visitors to this website also frequent Reflections of a Newsosaur, a blog written by Alan Mutter, who is “perhaps the only CEO in Silicon Valley who knows how to set type one letter at a time.”

Mutter was a reporter and editor at major metro dailies for 20 years before transitioning to a successful career as a technology CEO in Silicon Valley. His blog combines an executive’s financial acumen with a journalist’s inquisitiveness. Newsosaur offers insight on the media industry’s financial condition that you just can’t get anywhere else. Not surprisingly, it is one of the top 10,000 blogs worldwide, according to Technorati.

Mutter particularly enjoys challenging conventional wisdom with mathematical fact. Early this week he poked holes in the recent excitement over micropayments by creating a likely revenue scenario. Using The New York Times as a subject, he concluded that micropayments would bring in less than $4 million a year, or enough to pay about 2% of its staff.  For small papers, they would amount to beer money. Pundits have come to rely on Mutter for reality checks like that.

Knack for Numbers

His financial analyses are his signature item. Mutter sounded the alarm about the newspaper industry’s growing debt load more than four years ago, and he has methodically documented the damaging role that debt has played in limiting the industry’s options. His Default-O-Matic documents the financial viability of major players, giving early warning of who’s likely to be next off the cliff.

A complete financial restructuring of the industry is likely, Mutter says. Debt has painted publishers into a corner and many will have no choice but to walk away from their obligations and let the banks and investors sort it out. It’s not that the core business model is so bad, he says. It’s that their financials stink.

Having reader Newsosaur for a couple of years, we thought it would be interesting to find out more about the person behind it. So we called up Alan Mutter and spent an hour on the phone with him. Our complete, lightly edited interview is below for you to stream or download.

Show Notes

Download the interview (right-click and save)

Stream the interview:[audio:Alan_Mutter_NDW_Interview.mp3]