The R.I.P. column just got one name longer.

The Rocky Mountain News, a Denver institution for 150 years, will publish its last issue tomorrow.  A three-month long effort to sell the property yielded only one nibble, and the prospective buyer backed away quickly after learning that it would cost about $100 million “just to stay in the game,” said Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of E.W. Scripps Co. “The industry is in serious, serious trouble,” he told staffers assembled in the Rocky‘s newsroom (above, Rocky Mountain News photo).

The news came as no particular surprise, given that the deadline set by Scripps in December was drawing near and no buyers had announced their intentions.  In a Web 2.0 twist, staffers live blogged the meeting. Staffers will be paid through April 28.  The newspaper had 220 newsroom employees as of early December. No word yet on how many will lose their jobs. Meanwhile, tomorrow’s issue will no doubt be a collectors item.

More as the analysis and eulogies rush in. (Thanks to Robert Alexander for the tip)

New York’s Hudson Valley is edging perilously close to a news blackout. Just a week after Journal Register Co. pulled the plug on a phalanx of weeklies in the area and the weekly Ulster County Press shut down, two daily newspapers said they will reduce frequency from seven to five days a week. The Catskill-based Daily Mail and Hudson Register Star will publish their final Sunday editions this weekend. Beginning next week, the Sunday and Monday papers will be replaced by a weekend edition published on Saturday. That issue will have all the usual Sunday features, including coupons, USA Weekend and Sudoku. Thank God they kept Sudoku.

Cost savings drove the decision, said Publisher Roger Coleman in a prepared statement. “This schedule will also enable us to produce the most compelling, useful local newspaper that fits the community’s lifestyle and support level,” he added, vacuously.

There was no word on possible layoffs. As befits the leader of an organization dedicated to serving to the public’s right to know, neither Coleman nor officials at the company’s parent organization returned a reporter’s calls.

Outgoing USA Today Editor Says Don’t Be So Glum

Ken Paulson is on his way out as editor of USA Today for a new job as president and chief operating officer of the Newseum. He gives an interview to Forbes that’s filled with USA Today-like sound bites. The newspaper industry isn’t in as deep trouble as people think it is, Paulson says. Rather, it’s in a transition. “Home Depot is in the midst of massive layoffs, but nobody’s writing off hammers,” he says, using a rather odd analogy.

Paulson has some interesting perspective on USA Today‘s steady performance in a turbulent industry. The paper’s basic four-section architecture and design principles haven’t changed in 24 years. He sees peril in major redesigns at some Tribune Co. papers. “It’s just important not to risk alienating readers who will read you until their dying day,” he says.

He also explains how USA Today broke new ground in the use of anonymous sources. Reporters are no longer permitted to keep sources confidential from their editors. Read Jack Shafer’s tap dance on this issue to see why this is a great policy. Paulson even suggests, tongue in cheek, that USA Today pioneered the fundamentals of Web page design. Reading this engaging and insightful interview, you get the sense that one of the reasons USA Today has held up so well is Ken Paulson.

Miscellany

The New York Times Co. suspended its dividend, citing the need to conserve cash. The move is mainly adding insult to injury, since the Times Co. already slashed the divided from 23 cents to 6 cents last November.

Lee Enterprises has managed to push back some of its debt obligations for a couple of years. In a series of complex negotiations, the company deferred payments on some of its debt until 2012, significantly reducing its short-term obligations in exchange for much bigger payments in the future. The announcement lifted Lee’s stock, but the moves amount to shuffling around existing debt rather that reducing it. Alan Mutter explains.

“It’s not so much … a desire to make a lot of money, but it’s just a desire to not get ourselves into such a hole … that we can’t come out of it.”   Those were the blunt words from Paul Smith, president of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette Inc., as its flagship paper announced plans to cut 60 jobs, or about 4.5% of the workforce. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette is the largest newspaper in the state, employing about 1,300 people. Give the publisher credit, though.  These are the first publicly announced layoffs the Democrat-Gazette has had since the industry crisis began

And Finally…

It had to happen.  As the number of layoffs at America’s 500 largest companies nears half a million, several blogs have started to tote up the gloomy numbers. They include The Layoff List, Layoff Blog, Jobless and Less, The American Lawyer Layoff List (lawyers are people, too, we think), and the TechCrunch Layoff Tracker. Most were born late last fall. Let’s hope they live short and brutish lives.

To no one’s great surprise, the San Francisco Chronicle has joined the endangered species list. The paper has been hemorrhaging money almost since the day Hearst Corp. bought it in 2000, culminating in an astonishing $50 million loss last year. Yesterday, Hearst used blunt language in announcing that a “significant reduction in the number of unionized and non-union employees” was needed to keep the paper viable. If expenses can’t be brought into line, Hearst said it will put the paper up for sale and close it if necessary. The company is in the middle of a 100-days campaign to right itself, an initiative that includes putting the Seattle Post-Intelligencer up for sale.

The Chron is northern California’s largest newspaper, with a paid weekday circulation of 339,430, but it also sits in one of the most new-media-savvy places in the world. The Bay Area tech crowd is accustomed to getting news on BlackBerries and iPhones, Craigslist is a local institution and Google is revolutionizing the advertising business just down the peninsula. As the severely weakened San Jose Mercury-News can attest, Silicon Valley is a tough place to be a conventional media company. And there’s no Herb Caen any more.

Alan Mutter, who used to work at the Chron, runs the numbers. He estimates the paper will have to cut nearly half of its 1,500 employees to reach break-even levels. He also speculates on the possibility that MediaNews Group, which owns a portfolio of smaller newspapers across the state, could ride to the rescue. Hearst and MediaNews have been cozy since Hearst helped the company fund a deal to buy the Merc and the Contra Costa Times. If you want to understand this story, read Mutter.

A lot of people have seen this coming. Mutter has been predicting disaster for the Chron for years. BusinessWeek‘s Jon Fine picked the Chronicle as a likely candidate to exit print more than 18 months ago. The paper has reportedly shed half its editorial staff since 2000 and is looking at cutting half of what’s left. In our travels, we’ve observed that the Chron was long an anachronism for its sophisticated audience: a tired-looking, weakly written broadsheet that actually published some sections on green paper until a few years ago.

The Chronicle joins a long line of endangered US dailies, including the Post-Intelligencer, Rocky Mountain News, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Miami Herald, Tucson Citizen and Newark Star-Ledger. All have been put up for sale or pulled back from the bring in recent months. Given the drumbeat of bad news about the economy, it’s likely that the endangered species list will get longer as the year drags on. (hat tip: Richard Dooling)

Over on the other side of the country, the Providence (R.I.) Journal is reportedly getting ready to lay off 100 people as part of a bigger cost-cutting initiative by parent A.H. Belo. The ProJo reported a total staff size of about 700 last October, when it laid off 25 people. That was down nearly 40% from its peak. This new round of cuts will raise that number to about 50%.

Wrapping up the bad news parade, the publisher of the Cedar Rapids Gazette said it will cut 100 jobs. The publisher blamed a combination of the region’s devastating 2008 floods and the souring economy for the layoffs, which amount to about 16% of total staff.

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.

The dominoes are beginning to fall. Hard on the heels of Journal Register’s bankruptcy filing this weekend, Philadelphia Newspapers LLC filed chapter 11 on Sunday. The publisher of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News indicated that its assets and liabilities are both about $500 million and that it needs court protection to restructure its debt. “Our operations are sound and profitable,” said CEO Brian Tierney. It’s the debt that’s the problem.

Philadelphia Newspapers is the fourth newspaper company to file for bankruptcy since December, following in the path of Tribune Co., the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Journal Register.

So what happens now? Bankruptcy isn’t a death sentence. On the contrary, it can be the breath of life. Most major US airlines have declared bankruptcy at some point, some of them more than once. Bankruptcy gives a business the opportunity to shed debt and unprofitable operations, work out a sustainable business model and start life over.

This doesn’t come without cost, however.  Many executives exit the scene and the company lays bare its financial records for the public to see.  The business effectively loses control over its own operations, ceding oversight to a court which must approve nearly every management move that’s relevant to the business.  Bankrupt companies have almost no credit worthiness, meaning that they must learn to live within their means, which isn’t a bad thing.  Assets are often sold to pay off creditors.  With the market for newspaper companies in its current condition, however, it’s more likely that unprofitable operations will be shut down. Business continues pretty much as usual until the courts work out a plan.

Given the volume of bankruptcies currently choking the US courts, it’s likely that it will be many months or even years before these troubled businesses emerge from Chapter 11.  And the carnage isn’t likely to end here.  According to Alan Mutter’s Default-O-Matic, at least four other newspaper chains – including GateHouse, McClatchy, Media News and Morris Publishing – are in junk bond territory, which means they are at risk of default. More dominoes are likely to fall.

To no one’s great surprise, Journal Register Co. filed for bankruptcy over the weekend listing $596.2 million in assets and $736.6 million in liabilities. The company, whose stock has been trading at under one cent, has been solidly profitable recently but was unable to meet its onerous debt burden. CEO James Hall said, “Our business will continue its normal operations and we will publish content as usual throughout this process.” The company closed dozens of weekly publications just over a week ago. Alan Mutter has facts and figures.

Five New York newspapers have banded together to exchange content in the largest such arrangement since the share-nicely craze began last year. The new group includes The Record of Hackensack, New Jersey, The Star-Ledger of Newark, the Times Union of Albany, the Buffalo News, and New York Daily News, which apparently organized the party.

Members will “assist each other in gathering news, sports and features materials, giving our readers access to more and expanded content from the top newspapers in each of the respective markets,” said Marc Kramer, CEO of the New York Daily News, in a very prepared statement.

No details were forthcoming, but the group issued a press release quoting top editors at all the participating papers making head-slapping “Why didn’t we think of this earlier?” statements.

The regional consortium trend was kicked off last April, when a group of five Ohio newspapers began posting all their daily stories on a private website where editors could pick and choose whatever they wanted. The Baltimore Sun and Washington Post are among other newspapers that have banded together in this way.

There was immediate speculation that the New York consortium was an excuse to lay off more newsroom employees. However, announced cutbacks at the Ohio Five haven’t been any greater than at other newspaper companies. The handshake deal is more likely aimed at setting members free from the Associated Press, which has been an industry whipping boy for the past year because of its license fees.

We’re interested in what you are seeing. If you subscribe to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, Toledo Blade, Cincinnati Enquirer and/or Akron Beacon Journal, please leave a omment and tell us if you’ve seen any noticeable difference in quality since those papers began sharing stories nearly a year ago.

State Aid and a Posthumous Polk

Blethen - hanging on

Publishers from the state of Washington pleaded with legislators for a special tax break yesterday, saying the severe recession has dealt a body blow to their already shaky business model. “Some of us, like The Seattle Times, are literally holding on by our fingertips today,” said Times publisher Frank Blethen, who presumably was not literally holding in by his fingertips at that very moment.

Publishers appeared before the state senate Ways and Means Committee to support a bill that would give them a tax break through 2015. While the measure would cost the state about $8 billion, lawmakers appear willing to help. The bill has bipartisan support.

In an ironic demonstration of the seriousness of the problems in Seattle, the Times covered the story with AP wire copy. 

Speaking of Seattle, the Post-Intelligencer may become the first newspaper to win a major journalism award posthumously. Mark Fitzgerald reports that Eric Nalder, the P-I‘s chief investigative reporter, has won a George Polk Award for his two-part series “Demoted to Private,” about waste by government military contractors. The P-I is due to close March 15 if a buyer can’t be found, meaning that at the April 15 ceremony, the award may be bestowed on a newspaper that no longer exists.

P.S. The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild will hold a meeting next week to see if it can rustle up enough enthusiasm to initiate an employee buyout of the P-I. In more robust economic times this idea might stand a chance, but it’s hard to believe employees are going to dig into their depleted savings to buy a money-losing operation.

Miscellany

Having already laid of 12% of its staff if 2008, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is now freezing wages and may impose a one-week furlough. Print revenue was down 10.4% in the fourth quarter and “We’ve seen that deterioration accelerate in the first weeks of 2009,”said publisher Betsy Brenner.

Journal Register Co.’s mass execution of scores of weekly newspapers got little media coverage because not that many people will miss the Millbrook Round Table. But an unsigned editorial in the Odessa American delivers a poignant message about the impact a local weekly’s closure has on a community. 

A blog called Brazosport News has word that the Houston Chronicle is about to cut 10% of its staff. It even has a memo from the publisher saying so. We can find no coverage of this story anywhere else.

And Finally…

Yes we can. We just found it on Twitter. And if you came here looking for breaking news about the latest layoffs and cutbacks, you’re wasting your time. This is a daily blog, which is so last year. Instead, subscribe to The Media is Dying on Twitter. This anonymous microblogger is so speedy at documenting gloom and doom that he/she puts Romenesko to shame.  Fortunately for Romenesko, he gets more than 140 characters.

Recent news we haven’t had a chance to report.

Journal Register Co., its stock sitting at under a penny, took a machete to scores of local newspapers, putting them up for sale and threatening to close them if buyers aren’t found.  The lost include eight holdings in upstate New York: the Millbrook Round Table, Pleasant Valley Voice Ledger, Rhinebeck Gazette-Advertiser, Pawling News Chronicle, Harlem Valley Times, Hyde Park Townsman, Pine Bluffs Register Herald and Putnam County Courier. Non-news titles Weekend, Dutchess Magazine and the Hudson Valley Guide are also set to close.

In Connecticut, the condemned include the Bloomfield Journal, the Shoreline Times, Pictorial Gazette, Branford Review, Clinton Recorder and East Haven Advertiser. Michiganders will no longer have the Elk Rapids Town Meeting, the Petoskey Citizen-Journal and the Northern Star. MediaPost also reports that the Grand Traverse Insider, the Leader and Kalkaskian , the Antrim County News and the Petoskey-Charlevoix Star are closing.

The city of brotherly love lost the Northeast Philadelphia Breeze, the News Gleaner, the Olney Times, the Germantown Courier, and the Mount Airy Times Express. Elsewhere in Pennsylvania, Hershey lost its Chronicle.

Journal Register hasn’t yet declared bankruptcy, but it has already missed debt payments and is considered the next was likely candidate for Chapter 11.

Two Idaho newspapers are scaling back their production schedules to save money.  The eastern Idaho Post Register will eliminate its Monday edition and publish six days a week.  The publisher said the move will help the company avoid layoffs.  Also, earlier this month the Rexburg (Id.) Standard Journal said it would scale back to three days a week from five.

Layoff announcements at the Los Angeles Times have reportedly been delayed until tomorrow.  Rumors are that about 70 newsroom staffers will be let go.

The Los Angeles Daily News has reportedly laid off eight copy desk staffers . The paper is also reportedly considering moving the entire copy desk to MediaNews offices in the San Gabriel Valley.

The Kansas City Star writes about the growing crisis in the broadcast industry, where the advertising slump is expected to hit hard this year.  Television outlets, in particular, depend heavily upon automotive advertising. The crisis in the automobile industry may reduce revenues as much as 30% this year, according to some estimates. The problems don’t strike at the public’s right to know as badly as newspaper layoffs do because TV and radio stations generally employ a much smaller news staffs.

If you’re considering a career shift, read about the experience of Michael Precker: Columbia J-School grad, foreign correspondent, Dallas Morning News feature writer, Pulitzer Prize nominee and now strip club manager. Three years ago, Precker found he was losing interest in his journalism job and a chance meeting with the owner of a local strip club gave him an opportunity to jump.  Now he runs all operations at the Lodge, an upscale topless establishment. Check out the clever video ads on the site.

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]

It’s the pit of winter and the economy is stuck in molasses, yet the tone in the newspaper business has turned brighter. The few publishers who aren’t weighed down by crushing debt are talking tough and a paid news model is getting renewed attention.

Charlie Rose convenes a panel of industry notables, including The Wall Street Journal‘s Robert Thomson, Time‘s Walter Isaacson and New York Daily News owner Mortimer Zuckerman, who provides comic relief (See “And Finally…” below). The issue is “The Future of Newspapers,” and Poynter has thoughtfully provided a transcript.

Thomson’s comments are the most insightful. He hits the nail on the head with his description of Google as the great leveler: “Google is great for Google, but it’s terrible for content providers, because it divides that content quantitatively rather than qualitatively.” He also has razor-sharp criticism for editorial arrogance. “There’s a great tendency for journalists to be high and mighty, and to underestimate the intelligence of readers. And I think one of the reasons they’re losing readers is for that very reason.” And he says the Journal now “loves” the paid-subscription model it considered abandoning only about a year ago.

Everyone marvels at the new Amazon Kindle (right) and declares that it may be the last chance to create a reader-funded news model. Isaacson says the challenge for newspapers is to “prevent us from giving it away for free on the Kindles…just like we gave it away for free on the Web. We’ve got one more shot at it… Let’s make some really cool…applications we can…actually charge for.”  Tom Foremski and Greg Sterling both have interesting comments on the roundtable.
Watch the video here:

Making the Case

The New York Times has an op-ed by Eduardo Porter that argues that no other entity can take newspapers’ place. Citing numerous historical precedents, he argues that populations with an active media enjoy higher voter turnout, better government services and a higher standard of living. “During the Great Depression, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration doled out more money in counties with more radios,” he writes, in just one example. “Today, Hispanic voter turnout is higher, relative to the non-Hispanic vote, where there is a local Spanish-language TV station.” He also says television has been cited as an important factor in declining voter turnout beginning in the 1950. Porter’s use of these distant mirrors is novel, but his assumption that it takes a newspaper for a population to achieve these benefits is a bit of a stretch.

The former CEO of Cox Newspapers makes a plea for embattled newspaper companies to fight back. Jay Smith retired eight months ago, just as the walls were beginning to cave in, and he recently joined with three top executives from the business to talk about the industry’s plight. “Their passion and enthusiasm contrasted with…the bleak forecasts for newspapers,” he writes. “Their voices have not been heard much, but they should be.” In particular, “Donna Barrett, who runs the 140 newspapers of Birmingham, Ala.-based CNHI Inc., says nothing in the financials of her company resemble the gloom and doom she reads about.” And the publisher of Parade magazine says he’s still delivering a convincing ROI to advertisers.

Smith is right that these publishers aren’t being heard, and why not? If CNHI is bucking the industry trend, we’d think the Newspaper Association of America would be parading her around like a football hero. It’s odd that those individuals are so quiet when their business is under such siege.

Speaking of sieges, check out the comments at the end of this piece. They’re typical of the reactions we see to published commentaries on the industry’s future: political bashing of the media by both left- and right-wing ideologues accusing newspapers of liberal or conservative bias. This response is so common that we wonder if it’s a coordinated campaign. The comments invariably have nothing to do with the original commentary. They seem designed to spread some kind of agenda. Does anyone have a theory as to why this criticism turns up with such mind-numbing frequency?

But Will They Pay?

Eric Alterman, who penned last spring’s riveting account of the newspaper industry’s problems in The New Yorker, updates the scene in a shorter account on The Nation. Unfortunately, he has no better ideas for saving the industry than anyone else. Alterman recaps the solutions that have been proposed, ranging from micropayments to charitable support, and finds them all wanting. And he points out that the core news section of the typical major metro daily is the part most at risk. “Ironically, it is the sections of the paper most crucial to informed democratic discourse that are in danger of disappearing,”Alterman writes. “Sports news, entertainment news, health news, fashion, celebrity and style reporting will always be with us in one form or another, because they are such delightful places to advertise.” In contrast, no one wants their ad to appear next to a story about an airplane crash.

Writing on Nieman Journalism Lab, Matthew Ingram basically agrees. Ingram recaps the recent debate and says there’s no way readers are going to pay the freight. “Newspapers have never been paid directly by readers for the news,” he writes, adding that subscription and or newsstand fees cover, at best, a few pages worth of production cost. “What newspapers need to do is find ways of creating content that is more valuable than the perishable daily news.” Ah, but that is the problem. No one short of a few specialized publishers has figured that one out.

Miscellany

Three weeks after it pulled the plug on a print advertising program, Google has cancelled a second offline initiative. Google Audio Ads was the second leg of the stool that Google was building to support its expansion into offline advertising. Like Print Ads, the program was meant to upsell airtime to search advertisers. However, the radio industry never much took to the idea, seeing it as a way to commoditize its business. Only one major station owner, Clear Channel Radio, signed on to the program and many smaller networks gave Google the cold shoulder. The search giant still has a similar program to sell television ads and analysts say that one probably isn’t going away soon. About 40 people will lose their jobs.

Have you tried the The New York Times’ new article skimmer? We just did and pronounce it cool. The as-yet-unnamed service (though we like “skimmer” just fine) attempts to recreate the experience of scanning a printed newspaper on a computer screen. Each “page” includes a tiled assortment of summaries and sections slide pleasingly into place. Coolest feature: “Instead of displaying dates, articles gradually fade as they get older,” says a post on the Times‘ First Look blog. ReadWriteWeb notes that it would be nice if you could read the articles in the same interface. But first things first. This is a nice new idea.

And Finally…

Is Mortimer Zuckerman losing it? Or perhaps the collapse in value of his Manhattan real estate holdings has addled his mind just a bit. In this exchange from the Charlie Rose interview referenced above, Zuckerman oulines his plans to turn around the Daily News through the addition of color:

I committed to the new presses out of sheer passion 18 months ago…They will dramatically increase our revenues, because we’ll have all color, and this will increase our advertising revenues, and it will also increase our circulation, because it will be a completely transformed visual product.

The Daily News is one of the last newspapers to go to color. Printing in color isn’t helping anyone right now. But just wait a few years and Zuckerman’s daughter will figure out the solution:

I own The Daily News and I’m determined to keep The Daily News going because my daughter, who is 11, is now committed to be the next publisher…She’s agreed. She liked the working conditions. She liked the demands.

Rose comments, delicately, “Most people would hear you say that, and they would say, you know, he doesn’t — with all due respect, you don’t get it.”