“Gannett Co., the largest U.S. newspaper publisher by circulation, reports earnings on Thursday, kicking off what is expected to be the ugliest quarter in recent memory for the industry,” says The Wall Street Journal in a blunt assessment of the coming earnings season. USA Today is expected to take it on the chin when Gannett announces its results. Forthcoming numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations are expected to show a six-month decline of about 100,000 in USA Today‘s 2.3-million circulation, largely as a result of lower occupancy in hotels.  Free hotel distribution accounts for more than half of the paper’s 2.3 million circulation.

Adding to USA Today‘s woes is Marriott’s decision to make room delivery of newspapers optional. Citing environmental concerns, the hotel chain said it will now offer guests a choice of papers or no paper at all, if they so choose.  Declining readership was also a factor in the decision, which will reduce daily circulation by about 50,000 across the US.  One quarter of travelers didn’t even crack open the newspaper that was delivered to their doorstep, a spokeswoman said.

Ugly Spat Over LA Times‘ Front-Page Ad

An internal battle of the Los Angeles Times over the publisher’s decision to run a front-page ad resembling news story highlights growing tension between editors and publishers as the industry revenue woes deepen.  The ad ran last Thursday below the fold in a position and typeface that some people believe could be mistaken for a news story (left). Charles Apple has an image of the entire front page. In an interview with TheWrap, LA Times executive editor John Arthur called the ad “horrible” and “a mistake.” However, the VP for entertainment advertising at the paper said Arthur’s boss, editor Russ Stanton, “approved both advertorial units.”

Not so, says Stanton, who told the Times’ own reporter that the ad ran over his objections. “There is not an editor in this nation — including me — who really wants to see something like that on the front page of his or her publication,” Stanton said. Publisher Eddy Hartenstein said he made the decision to run the ad because of the perilous financial situation at the newspaper. “I’m just trying to keep the lights on here, folks,” he told an angry newsroom last week.

Barriers to front-page advertising have been falling recently as publishers struggle to get creative. The New York Timesshattered tradition in January with a front-page strip ad for CBS and the Boston Globe followed suit just two weeks later.

Miscellany

Newspaper executives like to point out that their total readership — including the Web — is bigger than ever.  However, online ad revenue is still growing more slowly than the market as a whole, according to Alan Mutter.  The most alarming recent statistic: “Interactive revenues for newspapers dropped by 1.8% in 2008 to $3.1 billion at the same time overall online ad sales in the United States surged 10.4% to a record $23.4 billion,” Mutter writes. What’s more, newspapers’ online ad revenues today are 13.3% of the overall market, the lowest share ever.  Mutter suggests that the culprit is newspapers’ practice of up-selling print advertisers with discounted online campaigns, a strategy that grows weaker as print sales decline.  Publishers need to develop sites that look more like the Web and less like digital versions of their print products, he advises.

The Chicago Tribune is cutting another 20% of its already depleted newsroom staff. The paper didn’t say how many employees are left in the newsroom, but there were about 440 as of the most recent layoffs in February. The paper is also reorganizing some production groups, merging copy editing, page design, graphics, imaging and some photo editing into a single department.

Writing on Slate, Jack Shafer takes on joint operating agreements as the great sucking sound that weakened the newspaper industry.  “The tragedy of the joint operating agreements is that instead of making the stronger paper stronger, the arrangement tends to weaken it,” he says, pointing to the San Francisco Chronicle as the poster child example. “Had the Chronicle and the Examiner been forced to compete on the business side in 1965 instead of to collaborate, a clear victor would have a fighting chance at surviving in today’s environment.” Instead, the Chronicle was forced to support the weaker Examiner to the point that both papers were worse off.

The Gannett-owned Observer & Eccentric Newspapers will cease publication of five print and Web editions of the Eccentric chain in suburban Detroit on May 31. Gone are the Birmingham, West Bloomfield, Troy and Rochester editions of the Eccentric. Two other newspapers will be merged into the South Oakland Eccentric, serving nearby communities. The consolidation will result in the loss of 44 jobs.

The Huffington Post has published a terse set of editorial guidelines, demonstrating that the standards being applied to citizens journalists don’t differ all that much from those practiced by mainstream media.

And Finally…

Is that a penguin on the telly? Well, a few penguins, actually, but click the image to see the truly awesome spectacle of what happens when penguins congregate. This is one of the photos on Incredimazing, a website devoted to collecting bizarre images submitted by people like you and me. If you want to scramble your brain, check out the M.C. Escher car.

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.

McClatchy Co. CEO Gary Pruitt addressed the Newspaper Association of America’s annual convention on Monday. Here are his remarks, courtesy of the NAA.
Each year at McClatchy’s shareholders meeting, we conclude with a video highlighting the work of our photojournalists over the past year. I pick a song that I think speaks to the year and we set the photographs to the music. This year, I wasn’t sure which song to choose. I like the Rolling Stones, and they have several songs that fit our current economic environment:

• “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” of course. But also consider …
• “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”
• “19th Nervous Breakdown”
• “Shattered” and
• “Gimme Shelter”

But I really don’t feel fatalistic. I speak to you this morning with a strong sense of resolve and hope. We have a serious fight on our hands, but I believe we are up to it. So I thought it more appropriate to select a battle song for this year’s video – the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to be specific – as we fight to ensure that truth does indeed go marching on. See what you think …. (Plays DVD)

Public Service Mandate

I came to newspapers not as a journalist or a businessman but as a First Amendment lawyer from Berkeley, California. So as you might expect, I’m passionate about free speech and a free press. I believe in the idea – and the ideal – that newspapers should provide high quality public service journalism so that the public can fully participate in democracy. This is not just some abstract concept. There is emerging empirical evidence to support the important relationship between democracy and the press.
A study published in The Journal of Law, Economics and Organization in 2003 looked at the per capita circulation of newspapers in different countries around the world and among the states in our own country. The study found that the lower the circulation, the greater the political corruption. Of course, the First Amendment isn’t a business model. Making the case that we’re important to society – proving it, even – does not guarantee our success. It just means the stakes are high. It is up to us to devise a business model that will sustain quality, public service journalism.
Our critics and the naysayers aren’t going to do it. This is the challenge before us. So while there were easier times to lead newspapers, there has never been a more important time.
Future generations will judge how we do. Or, as Abraham Lincoln said so eloquently in 1862 during an even more historic fight: “We can not escape history … The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation.”

Competitive History

I think history has much to teach us. As Mark Twain said, “History may not repeat itself but it does rhyme a lot.” Newspapering, for much of its history, was a fiercely competitive, rough-and-tumble, dog-eat-dog, low-margin business.
Consider The Sacramento Bee. In the first 30 years of its life, from 1857 to 1887, 80 newspapers came and went in the Sacramento market. That was a tough business. The number of daily newspapers in the United States peaked in the early part of the 20th century. There have never been more newspapers before or since.
Not coincidentally, that same time period witnessed the birth of a new medium — commercial radio. First radio and then television emerged, taking share from existing media, namely newspapers. Many people predicted newspapers would go out of business – and many did. So many, in fact, that by the second half of the 20th century, all but the largest cities in the United States had only one daily newspaper. And then a funny thing happened. Those successful, scrappy, surviving newspapers got rich because there was no other print or classified advertising competition. It’s a noteworthy paradox that the development of radio and TV ultimately led to the enrichment of newspapers.
For the first time in the history of newspapers, profit margins exploded and newspapering became an easy and lucrative business. Warren Buffett once said: “You want to invest in a business that even your stupid cousin could run, because one day he will.” That was the newspaper business in the second half of the 20th century. As newspapers’ profit margins grew, so did their cost structures. Ah, but we were so much older then; we’re younger than that now.

New Disruption

The Golden Age of newspapering wasn’t to last. With the maturation of the Internet over the past decade, a new medium has emerged, a virulent competitor again taking advertising share from all existing media, especially share of classified advertising. The Internet’s impact has been particularly disruptive at large metro papers with their higher cost structures and greater dependence on classified advertising.
Some of our critics seem to think newspapers were blindsided by the Internet’s potential impact. But we deserve credit for the considerable progress we’ve made online. The U.S. newspaper industry generated $3 billion in digital revenue last year. At McClatchy, 15% of our advertising revenue today comes from online.
McClatchy, a company founded before the advent of electric lights, will generate nearly $200 million dollars in digital revenue this year at a higher profit margin than our print business. Our digital revenue and online audience grew by double digits last year and, we operate the leading local internet business in each of our daily newspaper markets.
None of which is to say this transition is easy or that we haven’t made mistakes along the way. Secular transitions are always disruptive and painful for all media — what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called “the creative destruction of capitalism.”

Working On It

My point is that newspaper companies, to varying degrees, were working their way through it, difficult as it was. The game-changer was the arrival of the deepest and most painful recession in generations. It’s the combination of the secular shift and the cyclical downturn that has created a very real crisis for newspapers.
Many of our critics conflate the secular and the cyclical. They see the revenue declines brought about by the recession as proof we can’t weather the secular transition. This leads to the wrong, but increasingly popular conclusion, that there’s no viable future for newspaper companies.

Absolutely we’ve got a future. But just what does it look like and how do we hurry up and get there? Alan Kay, the visionary computer scientist, once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” That’s where we are today. It’s up to us to invent that future.
There is no silver bullet. There are no easy answers. And, sadly, as we have seen already, not every newspaper will make it. But here is what I see going forward:

Reinvention

Print remains viable now and into the future. Most newspapers today are profitable even in the depths of this crippling recession. More than 100 million adults in the United States read a printed newspaper every day – more than watched the Super Bowl. As troubled as the U.S. economy is, if 100 million consumers want and use something, that product usually doesn’t go away.
Sixty-one percent of 18 to 34-year-olds read a newspaper in an average week. So much for the notion that younger people don’t read newspapers.
Despite all these positives, newspapers alone are not enough. Our future depends on becoming successful hybrid media companies – fully engaged and vested in digital publishing and digital platforms as we have been historically with print. This isn’t breaking news. In the month of January, 44 percent of all U.S. internet users visited a newspaper website. And audience growth at newspaper websites is outpacing overall U.S. internet audience growth.
So we’ve been moving in this digital direction for some time – but we need to accelerate the pace and sharpen our focus. We need to establish our brands and offer our services on many different platforms. We need to leverage social media, mobile technology and the web’s interactivity as our communities and customers change how they acquire and share information.
This economic downturn makes it difficult to take risks, but we need to experiment smartly and partner where it makes sense. We need to learn from our mistakes, adjust and move on. Let’s listen to our audience and our advertisers – not conventional wisdom.

Transform the Business

The same technology that challenges us on the revenue side offers savings on the expense side through centralization, collaboration and outsourcing. We must continue to shed those legacy, 20th century, monopoly cost structures that weigh us down, limit our flexibility, jeopardize our health.
Think of the newspaper company of the future as an athlete – lean, fit and trim, yet muscular where we need to be. We need to ensure strength in our newsrooms and advertising sales staffs – our two most powerful assets, our core competencies and our social responsibility. Even today, with all the downsizing across our industry, we have the largest newsgathering operations in our markets by far. No other local media outlet is as well equipped to produce and deliver the high value, premium local content that’s growing our total audience in print and online. And we know that audience growth remains the best predictor of long-term success for any medium.
While we’ve done a good job growing audience, we need to do a better job of leveraging our sales forces. We must empower our sales staffs to sell our full portfolio of print and digital products – giving them the right tools, training and incentives. Also, think of the possibilities of harnessing that large, local sales staff to sell on behalf of others and share revenues. The untapped potential of local digital advertising in each of our markets is why internet giants like Yahoo and Google seek partnerships with newspapers. We need to mine that local digital revenue stream. We can’t afford to fumble the opportunity.
Lastly, we need to accept the reality that we’re in a tougher, more competitive business, now and forever. Ours is a business that’s still viable and vital – just with a smaller margin for profits and a smaller margin for error. Let’s appreciate how lucky we are to work in the media business in this critical time of transition. Our actions count. No unbearable lightness of being here. The ball is in our hands and the game is on the line.

I’d like to leave you this morning with a bit of inspiration from Bob Dylan and his song “Silvio.” Although written more than 20 years ago now, I think Dylan’s lyrics speak to the newspaper industry today:

Stake my future on a hell of a past
Looks like tomorrow is coming on fast
Ain’t complaining ’bout what I got
Seen better times, but who has not?

Vanity Fair uses a lot of words to describe Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. in its 11,000-word profile of the New York Times Co. chairman, but “complex” isn’t one of them. That isn’t to say that Sulzberger isn’t bright. It’s just that he appears to be ill-suited to cope with business problems that are swamping executives with far more business savvy and seasoning.

Mark Bowden’s profile is sympathetic, even moving in places, but it won’t put shareholders of the New York Times Co. at ease. Sulzberger, who is the fourth member of his family to run the company, is clearly a hard-working, well-meaning, engaging man. When he assumed stewardship of the company in the late 1990s, he saw his job as being to keep the ship on course. That worked well until tectonic shifts began reshaping the business began around 2001. Since then, we get the sense that Sulzberger has been way out of his league.

“The Sulzbergers embody one of the newsroom’s most cherished myths: Journalism sells,” Bowden writes. “But as a general principle, it simply isn’t true. Rather: Advertising sells, journalism costs.” The Sulzberger family has always operated on the principle that investing in a quality product will lead to business success, and Sulzberger has perpetuated that value in the face of recent overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Throughout his 20-year tenure at the Times, he has concentrated his investments in traditional media like the Boston Globe while demonstrating almost blithe ignorance of the changing publishing landscape.

Agnostic = Indifferent

Bowden homes in on Sulzberger’s famous quote that he is “platform agnostic.” Agnosticism implies lack of commitment, but it also reveals a basic misunderstanding of new media. “When the motion-picture camera was invented, many early filmmakers simply recorded stage plays, as if the camera’s value was just to preserve the theatrical performance and enlarge its audience,” Bowden writes. “The true pioneers realized that the camera was more revolutionary than that. It freed them from the confines of a theater.” So it is with newspapers today. The issue isn’t the platform, but rather the basic approach to news. The Times’ traditional top-down style is less and less meaningful to an audience that wants diversity and immediacy and online revenues simply won’t support a large, vertically integrated organization.

The Times Co. has made a few spot investments in Internet ventures like About.com and its website is arguably the best (and most well-trafficked) of any newspaper in the world. However, these times demand reinvention of the business and the Vanity Fair piece implies that Sulzberger is not the guy to do it. In contrast, it singles out Rupert Murdoch as the company’s most dangerous competitor and potential acquisitor.

Described as a “lightweight” and even “goofy” at one point, Sulzberger is clearly a nice and likable guy but not one given to tough decisions. He is a fan of pop psychology team-building exercises, even though they make his hard-bitten managers groan. And he is prone to risk avoidance. Bowden describes one management offsite exercise in which executives played a game that challenged them to decide between safe choices and higher risk but potentially more rewarding long shots. An employee who had witnessed many groups play the game observed, “This is the most conservative group I have ever seen.”

The Vanity Fair piece doesn’t attempt to cast any new light on the problems facing the newspaper industry; it’s a profile of the man who is perhaps under more pressure than anyone to come up with a solution. This is a complex profile of a man who doesn’t sound very complex. That can’t be good news for the Times.

Miscellany

The Associated Press, which has drawn much scorn from newspapers for its licensing terms, is cutting prices again. At its annual meeting in San Diego, the news cooperative announced $35 million in rate assessment reductions for 2010 on top of $30 million it made this year. The service also said members can now cancel their membership with one year’s notice instead of two. The AP also threatened to “pursue legal and legislative actions” against websites that don’t license news content and that it would track news distributed to members to see if it’s being misused. The AP may be in a better position than any of its member news outlets to actually enforce such a policy and it has the clout to put together a consortium of members to charge for news access if the law permits it.

The AP’s Canadian counterpart, called the Canadian Press, is laying off 25 people, or about 8% of its workforce. The service has been the victim of withdrawals by two of Canada’s largest publishers.

Newsosaur Alan Mutter is so fed up with people dancing on the graves of newspapers that he is banning newspaper-bashing comments from his blog. He can’t resist offering one last example, though.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel laid off 26 full-time and five part-time employees and proposed a third round of buyouts aimed at cutting newsroom staff.

And Finally…

Is this how you’d like your typical reader portrayed? It’s an ad created by the North Carolina Press Association to urge citizens to fight legislation which would allow local governments to post public notices on the Web instead in local newspapers. We don’t know about you, but the ad seems to imply that newspaper readers are old and technophobic (courtesy McClatchy Watch).

Two numbers stood out in Friday’s shocking news that the New York Times Co. was threatening to shut down the Boston Globe: $85 million and 450. The first number is the amount of money the Globe is expected to lose this year without union concessions. The second is the number of employees at the paper who have lifetime-employment contracts. All of those people should be very nervous right now.

The Times Co., which is groaning under $1.1 billion in debt, wants the unions to give up $20 million in concessions or face closure of the 137-year-old Globe, which has dominated the news business in Boston for more than 30 years. Given the size of the projected loss this year, $20 million seems like a modest amount. This would indicate that the Times Co. threat is merely posturing, as Alan Mutter argues. But ultimatums appear to be working in San Francisco, where the union just voted 10-1 to give the Chronicle broad authority to lay off employees without regards to seniority as well as to cut vacation time and extend working hours. The Chronicle and the Globe have similar audience characteristics.

The brass ring for Times negotiators has to be the 450 Globe employees who work under lifetime job guarantees. We knew such guarantees existed, but we hadn’t seen a count of the number of employees who have them until this past Friday; they comprise nearly a third of the unionized workforce. It’s hard to imagine any company handing out promises of that kind, but the Globe did that in 1993, when the economy was emerging from recession and businesses were being conservative about guaranteeing anything. Such management hubris testifies to the dominance the Globe enjoyed at the time over the Boston market, where its only competition is the working-class Herald and a string of suburban dailies.

We live in Globe country and can testify to the paper’s reach in the affluent suburbs. Drive through a quiet subdivision on any Sunday morning and the Globe is the paper you see in the driveways of the $700,000 homes. However, the tech-savvy Boston audience is also more open than most to online alternatives, which is perhaps one reason Boston.com is the sixth largest newspaper website while the Globe reported a circulation decline of more than 10% last November on top of an 8.3% decline six months earlier.

If the 450 employees each cost $100,000 on a fully loaded basis, that’s $45 million in annual costs over which management effectively has no control. We don’t have to comment on the lack of motivation that guaranteed employment must instill in a heavily unionized environment. If we were Times Co. management, though, we’d probably aim the first few blows of the ax directly at that soft middle.

The Globe covers its own news with reaction from community members ranging from fry cooks to U.S. Senators.

College student Adam Sell, who has interned at the Globe for two years, sent us a link to a Flickr photostream he created of the closing of the Globe‘s NorthWest bureau 10 days ago.

Miscellany

Two central Pennsylvania newspapers that have published separately with a single weekly combined edition will join forces on a permanent basis at the end of June. The Intelligencer Journal and Lancaster New Era will be published Monday through Saturday mornings with combined news and features operations but separate editorial pages.  The merger will result in the reduction of 60 full-time and 40 part-time positions, or about 20% of the workforce. Management said the combined circulation of 229,500 has been growing but that the economics of the publishing industry demands changes.

Publishers who are struggling with solutions to the revenue problem, none of them very appetizing, might want to look to Europe for inspiration. The big German publisher Axel Springer just reported record profits and is looking to expand overseas, possibly into the US.  Norway’s VG Nett charges citizens for access to its news through a cable TV subscription fee. And a group of papers in Belgium joined forces to force Google to remove their content from its search results. All in all, some papers in Europe are doing just fine, thanks to tight government partnerships and creative approaches to revenue

The Detroit Media Partnership, which publishes the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, has closed a deal with Plastic Logic to distribute the Plastic Logic Reader under purchase or lease to subscribers of the Detroit dailies as an alternative to paper delivery.  The reader is the size of an 8.5 x 11-in. pad of paper, weighs less than many print magazines and sports a touch-screen interface.

With the Minneapolis Star Tribune in bankruptcy, employees have started a grass-roots effort to save the paper. A group has launched a Facebook group (1,280 members, but only one discussion post since Jan. 17), a website (inactive as of this morning) and plans to hand out paper hats and scorecards at the Twins’ home opener. It’s probably going to take more than that.

If you like Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper, you probably won’t after reading this egotistical, self-indulgent monument to himself. If this is how newspaper columnists regard their own celebrity, it’s no surprise readers are turning elsewhere. But there are a couple of good anecdotes that illustrate how divorced these scribes are from their readers.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt will keynote the Newspaper Association of America national convention in San Diego this week. Schmidt, who is often considered the great Satan by newspaper publishers, has nevertheless been a vocal proponent of the need to help the industry.  It should be an interesting encounter. Schmidt is scheduled to speak on Tuesday at 10 a.m. PDT. You can listen to his remarks live. NAA will offer a moderated “Cover it Live” discussion on its PressimeNow! blog, where visitors can pose questions, share their thoughts and get live reactions from attendees.

The Sun-Times Media Group is considering ending publication of some of its suburban newspapers as it struggles to emerge from its recently declared bankruptcy.

A.H. Belo Corp., owner of the Dallas Morning News and three other daily newspapers, will cut employee salaries next month and suspend a retirement supplement to pension plan participants next year. Cuts will range from 2.5% to 15%, depending on an employee’s salary. The company’s CEO will also take a 20% cut in pay.

Last month we told you about St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Christopher Ave’s use of song to lament the layoffs of newspaper copy editors. Now, 26-year old Berkeley musician named Jonathan Mann has joined forces with the staff of the East Bay Express to come up with a solution to newspapers’ business problems. You have to wait to the end to hear it, but the three minutes are time well spent.

Asserting that the collapse of mainstream media demands the same urgency as “the threat of terrorism, pandemic, financial collapse or climate change,” two authors of a forthcoming book called Saving Journalism propose massive government intervention in the journalism crisis. Writing in the liberal journal The Nation, John Nichols and Robert McChesney say the recent debates over micro-payments and nonprofit funding is all well-intentioned, but these rescue scenarios don’t address the serious structural problems the US media faces. In essence, the public watchdog function is vanishing with nothing to replace it.

Media Post chart

This trend isn’t new; cost-cutting in the newsroom began in the 1970s when media tycoons began to form quasi-monopolies under the umbrella of government protection. Today, the media is a pathetic shadow of its former self, doing “almost no investigation into where the trillions of public dollars being spent by the Federal Reserve and Treasury are going but spar[ing] not a moment to update us on the ‘Octomom,'” the authors write.

Government already subsidizes media to the tune of tens of billions of dollars annually through mailing discounts, government advertising, monopoly broadcast, cable and satellite licenses and copyright protection. However, private interests have taken advantage of those subsidies to create wealth, and in the process are destroying the services they provide the public, Nichols and McChesney assert.

And they get specific about what needs to be done:

• Eliminate postage for periodicals that get less than 20% of their revenues from advertising;
• Give all Americans an annual tax credit for the first $200 they spend on daily newspapers or online sources that meet certain quality criteria;
• Allocate funds to enable every middle school, high school and college to have a well-funded student newspaper, a low-power FM radio station and accompanying substantial websites.

Face it: The old system is collapsing and won’t be resurrected, they say. We are entering a world in which government abuse and corporate greed will run rampant because no one is watching over the abusers. The business media completely misled the public about what was happening in Iraq and completely missed signs of financial disaster. And that was before 20,000 more journalists lost their jobs.

Although you need to take the left-wing source into account, this article is a pretty compelling argument for government intervention.  It is particularly chilling in its description of the impact that media cutbacks have already had on the public’s ability to understand the financial crisis and its own legislators’ actions.  The authors maintain that the estimated $20 billion cost of their proposal is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount being spent on the financial bailout.  The stretch may be in equating the urgency of the two problems.

Uphill Climb

Stewart: Millennials' Cronkite?

The Nation will have a battle convincing a skeptical American public that government support is the answer. Recent data from Rasmussen Reports paints a picture of a public that is largely disengaged from traditional media institutions while increasingly deriving its news from entertainment. A telephone survey of 1,000 Americans early this month found that 30% overall read a daily newspaper, but among respondents under 40, that percentage was only half as large. The survey also showed that newspaper websites have less “stickiness” than a product that arrives at the front door each day. Only 8% of US adults say they read their local paper’s website every day.

Meanwhile, one-third of Americans under 40 say Comedy Central’s Daily Show and Colbert Report are replacing traditional news outlets, which is slightly more than the 24% of Americans overall who think this is true. And there’s a popular opinion that this is a  good thing. “Thirty-nine percent of adults say programs of this nature are making Americans more informed about news events, while 21% believe they make people less informed,” the report says. Interestingly, Democrats are much more inclined to share this positive view than Republicans, by a margin of 48% to 28%.

Miscellany

The New York Times Co. imposed temporary 5% pay cuts for most employees in hopes of avoiding cuts to the newsroom staff.  Nevertheless, the Times also laid off 100 people in its business operations and said it would reduce freelancer spending and possibly consolidate some sections.  The pay cuts are subject to union agreement. Times management threatened to lay off 60 to 70 people out of its 1,300-person news staff if the union doesn’t concur.  The Times Co. cited an overall drop in advertising revenue of 13.1% in 2008 and 17.6% in the fourth quarter.  The pay reductions were described as temporary.  Salaries will revert to their previous level next year unless economic conditions improve fail to improve.  The company has already laid off more than 500 people this year.

The recession has clearly taken hold in the advertising business and the result is likely to be “the closing of more big regional daily newspapers and bankruptcy declarations from even more big publishers,” according to Media Post. Fourth-quarter 2008 results were a disaster, and that’s coming on top of two years of declines that seemed to get worse with each quarter. Newspaper classified advertising fell 39.2% overall in the quarter, with job-recruitment advertising plunging nearly 52%. Perhaps more ominous is that online revenue at newspaper sites was off  8% in the quarter, although online advertising is weak across the board right now.

The Rockingham News of southern New Hampshire has just published its final edition, and the weekly that has served the region for more than 40 years offers quite a lesson in its own history. Aubrey Bracco must have interviewed a couple of dozen local residents to get their recollections of what the paper meant to them, and he pens a loving and informative farewell.

Mike Hughes, president and creative director at the Martin Agency, pens an impassioned plea to his colleagues to support newspapers with their advertising dollars. “Our industry needs newspapers — but just as important, so does humankind,” he writes.  So stop following the latest trend and putting your advertising in the trendiest places.  “How many agencies aren’t selling newspaper advertising to their clients as hard as they should? It’s time for a wake-up call.” It’s an invigorating argument until you read the bio and see that Hughes’ employer is the “agency of record for the Newspaper Association of America.”

Writing on Mashable, Woody Lewis lists five ways newspapers can embrace social media more effectively. He notes that The New York Times now has an application programming interface that third parties can use to access its content from their programs. This is a cool idea. He also says partnerships with strong technology partners are a good idea.

Jay Rosen lists a dozen articles about journalism that he really thinks you should read, although we can’t fathom his top pick: Paul Starr’s laborious New Republic epic. Many of the others are excellent, though, and a few we hadn’t seen before.

And Finally…

We were thrilled to be included among the “Death of Newspapers” bloggers cited by Paul Dailing in Huffington Post. We agree with him that our self-absorbed, righteously indignant, told-you-so attitude is crap and that we have no answers to the problems facing the industry. We encourage you to boycott our book (available in fine bookstores everywhere) in support of his position. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

Representatives from a Who’s Who of major newspapers will gather on Saturday for a daylong event in Washington focused on finding new revenue solutions to the newspaper crisis.

Calling itself Revenue Two Point Zero, the group says it’s fed up with all the talk and  is going to focus on solutions.  “We reject the belief that media companies should pursue models based on pay-for-content plans or philanthropy,” the group’s manifesto says.  “Instead, we believe the best hope for media companies to make money is the old-fashioned way — by earning it from advertising.”

The group has several examples of how it hopes to do this, including mobile advertising, better classifieds and a stronger appeal to small businesses.  About 20 representatives of major publications will be there, and the Society for News Design has joined the parade. A post on the society’s blog asks people to volunteer criticism, comments and inspiration in the spirit that “everyone in the industry agrees that radical changes needed.”  You can follow the action via tweets from Logan Molen, VP of Interactive Media at the Bakersfield Californian. He’s at rev2oh.

New Ideas

Speaking of Bakersfield, the Californian is the lead in a BusinessWeek story about how newspapers are trying to develop new revenue streams.  In an industry where nearly everyone is sinking, the Californian is actually growing.  One of the secrets is Baktopia.com, an online social network aimed at young people that publishes the best of the Web in print.  “Advertisers pay full rate,” says the company’s digital products manager.

The story further talks about the Californian‘s launch of Printcasting.com, a Web venture that lets anybody create a digital magazine.  The best stuff is turned into a print publication supported by advertising. Money in print? It’s true.

The rest of the BusinessWeek article mainly covers companies and technologies we’ve written about here before, including blog aggregator Outside.in, micro-payments start up Kachingle and community content provider Helium.  Almost no one quoted in the article is actually making much money with these ventures, but at least they’re thinking differently. That counts for a lot these days.

Seattle Times Still In Deep Weeds

You’d think the closure of its largest rival would be a boost to the Seattle Times, but Seattle’s other paper is still struggling to make ends meet. That news comes from Doug Henderson, an economist with the Joint Council of Teamsters No. 28, who was allowed to have a look at the paper’s financial data available as part of the owner’s request to slash 12% of its workforce. Henderson said that despite having already laid off 25% of its employees, the Times‘ “financial status is still serious” and it “needs to consider either selling off some operations or shutter some. However, with the economic climate being in utter chaos, the opportunity to sell any type of operation is very slim.”

The news should come as no surprise to surveyors of the Seattle scene. The Times‘ financial position is so perilous that many people were surprised when it was the Post-Intelligencer that  pulled the plug. The Blethen family, which owns the Times, has been unable to sell a money-losing chain of newspapers in Maine. Less than three months ago, Senior Vice President Alayne Fardella admitted that the company’s situation is “dire,” and added that “It has been and continues to be a long and difficult fight for our survival.”

Miscellany

News & Observer Publishing Co. said it will lay off 27 people in the Raleigh News & Observer newsroom, reduce wages and implement unpaid furloughs as part of an overall reduction of  11 percent of its work force, or 78 people. Management added that the N&O will also “increase cooperation with the Charlotte [Observer] newspaper and will speed its transition to a narrower format to save on production costs.” Both the Raleigh and Charlotte papers are owned by McClatchy. The local ABC affiliate has a news story about the N&O’s problems bluntly titled “N&O struggles to survive.”  Says reporter Larry Stogner: “No one wants to talk about when the ax will fall again – and on whose neck.” Managing Editor John Drescher says a subscription model to the paper’s website is under consideration.

Former Flint Journal reporter Jim Smith said last week that publishers at the Flint Journal, Bay City Times and Saginaw News were are expected to call together their staffs this week to announce:

• They’ll reduce the publishing schedule to three days a week: Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday;
• They won’t honor a “lifetime” employment pledge of parent companies Newhouse Newspapers and Booth Newspapers;
• An unspecified number of layoffs;
• Reduced pay and benefits for remaining employees;
• Consolidation of printing and copy desk functions and content-sharing among the three titles.

No word yet on whether Smith is right.

And Finally…

We don’t know who’s behind Criggo.com – the owner’s name is disguised and the site is registered to a fax number in Los Angeles – but we hope he or she never stops tending the site. Even as classified advertising has shriveled, newspaper ads continue to deliver a seemingly unending stream of entertaining and bizarre humor. Very often, what’s funny isn’t the double entendres or typos; it’s in the fascinating stories that must underly these truncated missives to the world. Aren’t you just dying to know what’s going on behind closed doors at the house that placed this ad?

Clay Shirky takes us back 500 years to reflect on the revolution that’s going on right now. Everyone who wonders “What will become of journalism when newspapers are gone?” should read this superbly voiced essay by the author of Here Comes Everybody. The piece has racked up 225 comments and trackbacks just over the weekend, and there will be many more.

To sum up Shirky’s case:  The game is over for newspapers. Nothing can save the business, so it’s pointless to try. We’re in the middle of a revolution and revolutions are uncomfortable things because “The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”

His distant mirror is 16^th century Europe, when the printing press was beginning to lift the world out of the Dark Ages. As translations of the Bible into languages other than English began to threaten the church-dominated world order, everyone frantically searched for assurance that the old institutions would be preserved. This applied even to disrupters like Martin Luther,  who insisted he wasn’t creating a schism in the church even as he was inventing Protestantism.

“And so it is today,” says Shirky, fast-forwarding. “When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution…They are demanding to be lied to.”

Revolutions are messy things because old institutions have to be destroyed before new ones are put in place. We’re witnessing the destruction now but we have no idea what will grow out of the rubble. And that’s scary.  “The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case,” Shirky writes. The only certainty is that the newcomers will be more specialized, distributed and democratized than the old, vertically integrated institutions.

We won’t say Clay Shirky puts our minds at ease, but he at least points out that we have come this way before and that everything turned out pretty well in the long run. All we have at this point is faith and optimism.  The sooner we can turn our attention from salvaging the unsalvageable to inventing the future, the sooner we can get on with the rebuilding.

Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard columnist Bob Welch should read Shirky’s essay. So should Mark Willes, former publisher of the Los Angeles Times and now head of Deseret Management Corp., who’s quoted in this Salt Lake Tribune story remarking “[I]f we’re going  to have all the things I think are central to having a civilized society and a successful society, [newspapers] must grow.”

Union Grants Broad Concessions to San Francisco Chronicle Management

Their collective backs against the wall, members of the Northern California Media Workers Guild voted 10-1 to give the San Francisco Chronicle broad authority to lay off employees without regards to seniority as well as to cut vacation time and extend working hours. The union, which represents 483 employees at the Chron, had little choice. Owner Hearst Corp. has threatened to close the entire operation without major concessions. Even so, Hearst is still likely to lay off 150 Guild workers.

Union members took consolation in the fact that that figure is one-third less than the 225 jobs Hearst originally threatened to eliminate. The Guild was also able to secure a decent severance package for laid-off employees. However, members will pay more for health benefits, lose 25% of their vacation and work longer hours. The Mercury News story notes that Hearst had threatened to make “most” of the 225 threatened job cuts in the Chron‘s 260-person newsroom. This seems incredible, since a cutback of that magnitude would leave less than 200 reporters covering the entire Bay Area. That may still be the case after the anticipated layoffs happen. Hearst is also eliminating 100 unionized pressroom jobs after it outsources printing to a Canadian contractor in June.

How to Save the Classified Advertising Business

Christopher Ryan and Steve Outing propose some head-slappingly simple ideas in their “Classifieds Manifesto.” So why aren’t more newspaper companies following them?

Newspapers can still have important and profitable classified advertising businesses, the authors say, but first they have to stop thinking about classifieds as agate type on a page. Craigslist has won that battle, so newspapers have to change the rules of the game.

Why not open a used-car lot for your auto clients? Or create a division that helps realtors sell homes? And while you’re at it, reinvent the way you present information. Craigslist is butt-ugly, man. Use tables and icons and easily navigable ways to get readers to the stuff they want to buy. And while you’re at it, get a video camera out to those properties that realtors are trying to sell and give them a hand.

There are a bunch of other smart and simple ideas in this essay. Send the URL to the head of your classified advertising group.

Miscellany

Mark Potts totes up the market capitalizations of the publicly held newspaper companies in the US and comes to a striking conclusion: Their combined value is just $1.3 billion, or a little more than what The New York Times Co. paid for the Boston Globe alone ($1.1 billion ) in 1993. This same group of companies was worth over $7 billion just six months ago. And speaking of the Globe, Potts says Barclays recently valued the paper at just $20 million.

McClatchy Watch is reporting that the Kansas City Star could announce a layoff early this week that’s larger than the newspaper’s last three layoffs combined. This rumor is a little confusing, however, since the Star announced plans to cut 15% of its workforce just last week.

Owners of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and its pressmen’s union have reached agreement on a set of union concessions involving layoffs, wage cuts, health care premium increases and staffing reductions. No details were released pending a vote by members on the agreement this week.

McClatchy Watch is reporting that the Kansas City Star could announce a layoff early this week that’s larger than the newspaper’s last three layoffs combined. This rumor is a little confusing, however, since the Star announced plans to cut 15% of its workforce just last week.

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.

Several outlets are reporting that Hearst has contacted a handful of journalists at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to make “provisional offers” of jobs at a much smaller, online-only version of the newspaper. It’s not known what the provisions are, but it looks like Hearst still hasn’t made up its mind whether to go through with the project. The P-I is hanging by a thread. Tomorrow will be the 60^th day since Hearst’s January 9 announcement that the paper would either shutter its print operations or close entirely if a buyer isn’t found.

If the P-I continues online, it looks to be as a dramatically leaner operation. Metro reporter Hector Castro, who says he rejected the Hearst offer, told the P-I‘s Dan Richman that the offer “increased his health insurance cost, cut his salary by an unspecified amount, offered to match his 401(k) contributions, required him to forgo his P-I severance pay, reduced his vacation accrual to zero and required him to give up overtime.” Welcome to the Internet, Hector.

Because Hearst has apparently clamped a gag order on employees it has approached about the new venture, Richman resorted to asking everyone in the office if they had been contacted by the company. He found about 20 people who responded “no comment.” This roughly matches anonymous estimates that the online P-I would have a staff of about 20. None of the copy editors, editorial writers, designers or sports or features writers declined to comment, indicating that those functions are considered extraneous by Hearst, at least for the moment. We’ll no doubt hear something more substantive this week as the deadline arrives.

The P-I is already acting like it’s over as evidenced by this memorial section on its website.

Boston Globe on Horns of Layoff Dilemma

The Boston Globe, which actually gave some employees lifetime job guarantees back in the early 90s, is struggling to figure out how to implement a layoff of 50 newsroom employees without letting go of some of its best people. The problem is that the Newspaper Guild contract specifies that layoffs need to be conducted on the basis of seniority. This visionary concept now leaves the Globe on the horns of a dilemma: some of its most productive and promising young reporters may have to be laid off so that overpaid veterans in cushy jobs can be kept on board. The Boston Phoenix names names. There’s a buyout offer on the table but it’s apparently getting only lukewarm interest because no one wants to be unemployed in this crummy economy. So the Globe will probably have to make involuntary cuts. Management is allowed to circumvent the seniority rule under special circumstances, but it must justify each and every exception and could be subject to grievances in each case.

What Went Wrong at Journal Register

The Albany Times Union has few kind words for the basket case that is Journal Register Co. Formed from the wreckage of Ingersoll Publications in 1990, JRC remained a relatively small Michigan-based chain under five years ago, when it went on a buying spree that created a 300-title empire. However, it took on way too much debt in the process, particularly in light of its concentration in the recession-prone state of Michigan. JRC has crashed and burned in spectacular fashion over the last couple of years. Its model is pretty roundly hated by the journalists who have worked there: cut costs to the bone and maximize profits. Yet did you know that even as it languishes in bankruptcy, Journal Register still makes a profit? It’s just not enough of a profit to service its huge debt load.

Layoff Log

• Editor & Publisher wraps together two layoff notices in one: Guild members at the Fresno Bee will vote tomorrow on a new management proposal to cut wages by up to 6%. If the union doesn’t agree, management is threatening to reduce newsroom staff by up to 29%. And the Fort Worth Star-Telegram is reducing its workforce by 12% and cutting wages in line with parent McClatchy Corp.’s cost-reduction targets. The Associated Press has more on the Star-Telegram cutbacks. The company is also offering a buyout to most of its 1,000 employees. It already cut 18% of it staff last year.
• We’ve frequently chided newspaper publishers for championing the public’s right to know while burying their own bad news in layers of vagueness and doublespeak. But we certainly can’t say that about the Tri-City Herald of Washington state. Its recent announcement of a wage reduction and other cost cuts offers bountiful detail about everything from ad:edit ratios to the size of its biggest advertiser contracts. There’s even a reference to mileage reimbursement expenses.
• Blogger Gary Scott reports on layoffs at the Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise. He’s got names, too: 20 of them.
• The Winnipeg Free Press laid off five people, eight if you count early retirements.
• The Columbus Dispatch reportedly used e-mail to notify 45 employees that they were being laid off.

Miscellany

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has proposed that state public transportation projects should be advertised on the Internet instead of newspapers. The proposal is buried in a big transportation bill now before the legislature. The governor’s office says it’s just trying to save money. Government contract notices have long been an annuity revenue stream for newspapers, which benefit from laws in many states that require them to be published in local dailies.

The image at left accompanies a short story about layoffs at the Buffalo News that appears on the website of a local television station in Rochester, N.Y. The uncaptioned image has no “alt” text and is named “jobcuts2009-03-02.” We wonder if these are escaping employees of the Buffalo News captured on infrared camera, the ghosts of former journalists or perhaps managers striding decisively toward the future. Your interpretations are appreciated.

Los Angeles Times Columnist David Lazarus says the solution is for big newspapers to band together and deliver services as a package for $10 a month, just like HBO. “I read a half-dozen or so newspapers online every day. Right now I pay nothing for their output. Would I be willing to pay the equivalent of several lattes at Starbucks monthly for the same privilege? Absolutely,” he says. “Like I say: fixable.” At least it’s fixable if your entire audience is people like David Lazarus.

The University of Arkansas Traveler has a short profile of Erica Smith, whose Paper Cuts layoff tracker has become the unofficial statistician for industry cutbacks.

There appears to be a run on journalistic self-indulgence today as newsroom veterans tell their readers about what a great job they’re doing in the apparent self-deception that readers give a hoot: Here and here.

And Finally…

One of our favorite new Internet companies is someecards.com, a distributor of online greeting cards that bear delightfully cynical, snarky and even obscene messages.  Someecards is to greetings what Despair is to motivational posters: an irreverent stick in the eye of an industry that suffers from unbearable cuteness. Now someecards has launched a user-generated companion site, yourecards.com, where visitors can work from a collection of templated illustrations to create their own bizarre messages.  A sampling:

• “The fact that you thanked Hugh Hefner, and not your family, in your barmitzvah speech was highly inappropriate.”
• “Here’s hoping your new music degree will get you a better Mcjob.”
• “Sorry that restricted number I ignored was your one call from prison.”

Who says user-generated content doesn’t have a future?