It looks like 2009 will be a make-or-break year for many media companies, thanks to an advertising climate the some forecasters are predicting will the worst in generations.
Media economist Jack Myers is predicting an “advertising depression,” says Dow Jones. “Myers, a longtime industry consultant who runs JackMyers.com, is now forecasting an unprecedented three straight years of declines in advertising and marketing spending in the U.S. starting this year,” the wire service says. “To put that in perspective, the industry hasn’t suffered even a two-year spending decline in advertising since the 1930s.” The result will be a “massive shakeout” in industries that depend on advertising for their livelihood. Myers expects advertising spending in the U.S. to call 2.4% this year, 6.7% next year and 2.3% in 2010. His forecast roughly agrees with estimates by Publicis Groupe. The downturn will make it more difficult for media companions to effect the transformations that are necessary to survive in the customer-driven marketing environment of the future.
Meanwhile, Barclays Capital expects domestic ad spending to drop 10% next year, which is dramatically worse than performance during both the 1991 and 2001 recessions. The forecast is a substantial revision of Barclays’ prediction just two months ago that next year’s decline would be a less-drastic 5.5%. The investment bank sees trouble in the local advertising industry, which is often seen as the best hope for newspaper salvation. Local spending, which makes up some 39% of the $252.1 billion U.S. ad market, will fall 12.2% in 2009, while national spending will drop 8.4%. Barclays forecast that local ad spending would decline an additional 1.4% even when the broader market recovers in 2010. The one positive note: Internet advertising should increase 6.1% in 2009 and 12% in 2010, but that segment will still account for just 10% of ad spending next year.
Given those forecasts, it’s not surprising that asset values have tanked. “Some 30 US newspapers are up for sale…but few buyers have emerged in spite of rock bottom prices,” notes the Financial Times. Valuations have fallen by at least half compared to their highs and signs that the advertising environment is worsening aren’t helping, the paper says. To illustrate the degree of loss in asset values, the Boston Globe was valued at $650 million by a consortium of buyers just two years ago. Today, the value of the Globe and the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette combined is just $120 million. In fact, The New York Times Co.’s most valuable New England asset may be its equity stake in the Boston Red Sox. It was worth about $135 million before the financial crisis hit. And that’s without Mark Teixeira.

Some Good News, Too

While admitting that 2009 will be a mostly crummy year for the economy, Poynter Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds sees reasons to believe better days are ahead. For one thing, oil is comparatively cheap right now and the price of paper is coming down. While you shouldn’t get comfortable with short-term trends in these commodities, at least they are two fewer factors weighing on the industry. The buyouts and layoffs of 2008 will show also benefits in 2009 as newspapers remove those costs from their books. And there are promising signs in newspapers’ online activities that may broadly benefit the industry. Edmonds is careful to hedge his bets, but he wants to exit the year on a positive note.

Cuts Take Toll on Quality

Print editors are accustomed to getting letters from readers taking them to task for erroneously saying the California Gold Rush started in 1845 instead of 1848 and  concluding, “Shoddy fact-checking like this makes me skeptical of anything you report in your journal.” Editors usually laugh off these missives, but with readers enjoying a bounty of choice these days and freely publishing their own critiques, the gaffes caused by overworked news staffs potentially become more damaging. Detroit NASCAR Examiner Josh Lobdell points out three major errors in a Detroit News story and questions how a newspaper in the Motor City can do such a shoddy job of covering motoring. The Sunday Business Post of Ireland restates almost verbatim what we suggested 2 1/2 years ago: that the cycle of cutbacks will lead to inferior products that people won’t want to read, which will harm circulation and lead to more layoffs. You don’t cost-cut your way to leadership.
If errors are your thing, read Craig Silverman’s year-end column in the Toronto Star about the worst publishing gaffes of 2008. Our favorite is the AP’s reference to Joseph Lieberman as a “Democratic vice-presidential prick.” There are plenty more on Silverman’s awesome blog, Regret the Error. Be sure to read his annual celebration of the worst errors and corrections in the media, an award he calls the Crunks. One of the best has to be this front page of northern New England’s Valley News, which actually managed to misspell its own name on its front page one day.

Report: Newspaper Sites Embrace Web Tools

The Bivings Group examined the websites of the 100 top U.S. newspapers to see what they’re doing with the Internet. While a few activities have changed little over the last year (RSS, reporter blogs and video), there have been striking increases in the use of some features:

• Fifth-eight percent of newspaper websites post user-generated photos, 18% accept video and 15% publish user-generated articles.  That’s way up from the 24% that accepted such material in 2007.
• Seventy five percent now accept article comments in some form, compared to 33% in 2007.
• Facebook-like social networking tools are beginning to gain traction, with 10% of newspapers now using them, or double last year’s figure.
• Three-quarters list some kind of most-popular ranking, such as most e-mailed or most commented. Just 33% had that feature in 2006.
• You can now submit articles to social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us at 92% of newspaper sites, compared to only 7% in 2006.
• Only 11% of websites now require registration to view full articles, compared to 29% last year.
• Other stats: 57% have PDF editions, 20% have chat, and 40% offer SMS alerts.

Don’t strain your eyes: Click the image below for a larger version. More charts and data is in the summary report.

Miscellany

Journal-Register has reportedly closed a chain of Connecticut weeklies. The North Haven Courier reports, “On Dec. 18, members of [the Shore Line and Elm City Newspapers, a weekly newspaper chain in the shoreline and Greater New Haven area] were notified they had been laid off…The affected papers include the North Haven Post, the East Haven Advertiser, the Branford Review, the Shore Line Times of Guilford and Madison, the Clinton Recorder, and the Pictorial Gazette and Main Street News in Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Essex, Deep River, Chester, Lyme, and Old Lyme…Joyce Mletschnig, who until Thursday was the Pictorial Gazette’s associate editor, said that their newspapers would be shut down.”

The Seattle Times is asking about 500 non-unionized employees to take a week’s unpaid vacation in order to avoid more layoffs. Employees can take the seven days off at any time over the next two months. Management at the Times, which has cut 22% of its staff this year, may believe that further layoffs will undermine quality to too great a degree, so it’s getting creative with strategy.

Russ Smith has some good quotes in a piece on Splice Today about what he believes is the inevitable demise of print newspapers. Smith, 53, is an unabashed newspaper fan but he’s noticed that even his contemporaries are dropping their print subscriptions or not noticing when the paper no longer arrives on the doorstep. He also notices that his kids and their friends are just as well-informed about current events as he, a counter to the conventional wisdom that young people don’t read. Smith boldly predicts that The New York Times will be sold by the end of 2009, with Rupert Murdoch on the short list of likely buyers. On the other hand, Murdoch may be content simply to let his nemesis fade away.

Raleigh News & Observer Staff Writer Mark Schultz writes with passion about why he got into newspapers and why they’re still relevant. His best line comes in an account about interviewing a woman in her trailer home in Mexico: “We enter people’s lives for an hour and ask for instant intimacy.”

The Knoxville News Sentinel has apparently managed to avoid the carnage that has devastated many of its brethren. In an upbeat column plainly titled “News Sentinel is NOT going out of business,” Editor Jack McElroy pays homage to owner E.W. Scripps Co. for shrewdly diversifying its revenue stream and not loading up on debt. He also says the News Sentinel wisely diversified into TV and specialty publishing to insulate itself from the newspaper advertising downturn. Critics naturally accuse the paper of selling out to political interests.

The New York Times will launch “Instant Op-Ed” next month in a bid to compete with instant cable television analysis. The Web feature will post immediate expert viewpoints on breaking news, according to Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal.

And Finally…

The Baltimore Sun’s John McIntyre asked readers to contribute the best line heard in the workplace. They come through with some winners. Our favorite: “Yeah, he thinks he’s God’s gift to sliced bread.”

It looks like 2009 will be a make-or-break year for many media companies, thanks to an advertising climate the some forecasters are predicting will the worst in generations.

Media economist Jack Myers is predicting an “advertising depression,” says Dow Jones. “Myers, a longtime industry consultant who runs JackMyers.com, is now forecasting an unprecedented three straight years of declines in advertising and marketing spending in the U.S. starting this year,” the wire service says. “To put that in perspective, the industry hasn’t suffered even a two-year spending decline in advertising since the 1930s.” The result will be a “massive shakeout” in industries that depend on advertising for their livelihood. Myers expects advertising spending in the U.S. to call 2.4% this year, 6.7% next year and 2.3% in 2010. His forecast roughly agrees with estimates by Publicis Groupe. The downturn will make it more difficult for media companions to effect the transformations that are necessary to survive in the customer-driven marketing environment of the future.

Meanwhile, Barclays Capital expects domestic ad spending to drop 10% next year, which is dramatically worse than performance during both the 1991 and 2001 recessions. The forecast is a substantial revision of Barclays’ prediction just two months ago that next year’s decline would be a less-drastic 5.5%. The investment bank sees trouble in the local advertising industry, which is often seen as the best hope for newspaper salvation. Local spending, which makes up some 39% of the $252.1 billion U.S. ad market, will fall 12.2% in 2009, while national spending will drop 8.4%. Barclays forecast that local ad spending would decline an additional 1.4% even when the broader market recovers in 2010. The one positive note: Internet advertising should increase 6.1% in 2009 and 12% in 2010, but that segment will still account for just 10% of ad spending next year.

Given those forecasts, it’s not surprising that asset values have tanked. “Some 30 US newspapers are up for sale…but few buyers have emerged in spite of rock bottom prices,” notes the Financial Times. Valuations have fallen by at least half compared to their highs and signs that the advertising environment is worsening aren’t helping, the paper says. To illustrate the degree of loss in asset values, the Boston Globe was valued at $650 million by a consortium of buyers just two years ago. Today, the value of the Globe and the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram & Gazette combined is just $120 million. In fact, The New York Times Co.’s most valuable New England asset may be its equity stake in the Boston Red Sox. It was worth about $135 million before the financial crisis hit. And that’s without Mark Teixeira.

Some Good News, Too

While admitting that 2009 will be a mostly crummy year for the economy, Poynter Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds sees reasons to believe better days are ahead. For one thing, oil is comparatively cheap right now and the price of paper is coming down. While you shouldn’t get comfortable with short-term trends in these commodities, at least they are two fewer factors weighing on the industry. The buyouts and layoffs of 2008 will show also benefits in 2009 as newspapers remove those costs from their books. And there are promising signs in newspapers’ online activities that may broadly benefit the industry. Edmonds is careful to hedge his bets, but he wants to exit the year on a positive note.

Cuts Take Toll on Quality

Print editors are accustomed to getting letters from readers taking them to task for erroneously saying the California Gold Rush started in 1845 instead of 1848 and  concluding, “Shoddy fact-checking like this makes me skeptical of anything you report in your journal.” Editors usually laugh off these missives, but with readers enjoying a bounty of choice these days and freely publishing their own critiques, the gaffes caused by overworked news staffs potentially become more damaging. Detroit NASCAR Examiner Josh Lobdell points out three major errors in a Detroit News story and questions how a newspaper in the Motor City can do such a shoddy job of covering motoring. The Sunday Business Post of Ireland restates almost verbatim what we suggested 2 1/2 years ago: that the cycle of cutbacks will lead to inferior products that people won’t want to read, which will harm circulation and lead to more layoffs. You don’t cost-cut your way to leadership.

If errors are your thing, read Craig Silverman’s year-end column in the Toronto Star about the worst publishing gaffes of 2008. Our favorite is the AP’s reference to Joseph Lieberman as a “Democratic vice-presidential prick.” There are plenty more on Silverman’s awesome blog, Regret the Error. Be sure to read his annual celebration of the worst errors and corrections in the media, an award he calls the Crunks. One of the best has to be this front page of northern New England’s Valley News, which actually managed to misspell its own name on its front page one day.

Report: Newspaper Sites Embrace Web Tools

The Bivings Group examined the websites of the 100 top U.S. newspapers to see what they’re doing with the Internet. While a few activities have changed little over the last year (RSS, reporter blogs and video), there have been striking increases in the use of some features:

• Fifth-eight percent of newspaper websites post user-generated photos, 18% accept video and 15% publish user-generated articles.  That’s way up from the 24% that accepted such material in 2007.
• Seventy five percent now accept article comments in some form, compared to 33% in 2007.
• Facebook-like social networking tools are beginning to gain traction, with 10% of newspapers now using them, or double last year’s figure.
• Three-quarters list some kind of most-popular ranking, such as most e-mailed or most commented. Just 33% had that feature in 2006.
• You can now submit articles to social bookmarking sites like Digg and del.icio.us at 92% of newspaper sites, compared to only 7% in 2006.
• Only 11% of websites now require registration to view full articles, compared to 29% last year.
• Other stats: 57% have PDF editions, 20% have chat, and 40% offer SMS alerts.

Don’t strain your eyes: Click the image below for a larger version. More charts and data is in the summary report.

Miscellany

Journal-Register has reportedly closed a chain of Connecticut weeklies. The North Haven Courier reports, “On Dec. 18, members of [the Shore Line and Elm City Newspapers, a weekly newspaper chain in the shoreline and Greater New Haven area] were notified they had been laid off…The affected papers include the North Haven Post, the East Haven Advertiser, the Branford Review, the Shore Line Times of Guilford and Madison, the Clinton Recorder, and the Pictorial Gazette and Main Street News in Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Essex, Deep River, Chester, Lyme, and Old Lyme…Joyce Mletschnig, who until Thursday was the Pictorial Gazette’s associate editor, said that their newspapers would be shut down.”

The Seattle Times is asking about 500 non-unionized employees to take a week’s unpaid vacation in order to avoid more layoffs. Employees can take the seven days off at any time over the next two months. Management at the Times, which has cut 22% of its staff this year, may believe that further layoffs will undermine quality to too great a degree, so it’s getting creative with strategy.

Russ Smith has some good quotes in a piece on Splice Today about what he believes is the inevitable demise of print newspapers. Smith, 53, is an unabashed newspaper fan but he’s noticed that even his contemporaries are dropping their print subscriptions or not noticing when the paper no longer arrives on the doorstep. He also notices that his kids and their friends are just as well-informed about current events as he, a counter to the conventional wisdom that young people don’t read. Smith boldly predicts that The New York Times will be sold by the end of 2009, with Rupert Murdoch on the short list of likely buyers. On the other hand, Murdoch may be content simply to let his nemesis fade away.

Raleigh News & Observer Staff Writer Mark Schultz writes with passion about why he got into newspapers and why they’re still relevant. His best line comes in an account about interviewing a woman in her trailer home in Mexico: “We enter people’s lives for an hour and ask for instant intimacy.”

The Knoxville News Sentinel has apparently managed to avoid the carnage that has devastated many of its brethren. In an upbeat column plainly titled “News Sentinel is NOT going out of business,” Editor Jack McElroy pays homage to owner E.W. Scripps Co. for shrewdly diversifying its revenue stream and not loading up on debt. He also says the News Sentinel wisely diversified into TV and specialty publishing to insulate itself from the newspaper advertising downturn. Critics naturally accuse the paper of selling out to political interests.

The New York Times will launch “Instant Op-Ed” next month in a bid to compete with instant cable television analysis. The Web feature will post immediate expert viewpoints on breaking news, according to Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal.

And Finally…

The Baltimore Sun’s John McIntyre asked readers to contribute the best line heard in the workplace. They come through with some winners. Our favorite: “Yeah, he thinks he’s God’s gift to sliced bread.”

Don’t forget to take our poll: Will the Detroit Experiment Succeed?

Writing in Fortune, Richard Siklos has the most perceptive analysis of the Tribune Co. ownership picture we’ve seen. Siklos scores Sam Zell for his hubris and for characterizing his company as employee-owned when the only votes that counted were his and those of the former shareholders who approved the transfer of Tribune shares to a toothless employee stock option plan. What happens to those employee-owners now, Siklos asks? Barring an unlikely market turn, they’ll lost most or all of their investment, leaving them just with their 401(k) holdings. In all fairness, Sam Zell also stands to lose his investment, Siklos points out, although we doubt they’re stocking up on the macaroni & cheese at the Zell mansion. This brief, insight-packed piece ends by speculating that Tribune Co. will emerge from bankruptcy with about a $4 billion valuation. At that price, Zell may actually be tempted to put in some more money. Eeek!

2009 Forecasts Offer Little To Smile About

Researchers quit using euphemisms to describe the industry’s troubles some time ago. Now they vie to see who can come up with the strongest adjectives. “Terrible” is how Kubas Consultants describes the newspaper ad revenue outlook for 2009 after surveying 400 newspaper executives. The report offers a “very negative outlook” because a “disaster area” is looming in employment classifieds. Seemingly at a loss for more superlatives, the report summarizes: “the severity of expected declines is remarkable.” All this for a forecast of a 9.1% decline in revenues in 2009, which would actually be less than the 2008 wreckage to date. It’s the cumulative effect that invokes shock and awe, though. “If Kubas’ predictions for 2009 come to pass, by the end of next year, newspapers will have lost about 30% of their total revenues in four years,” says MediaPost. This story has no hope in it. If you’re hoping for a nice weekend, read something else.

Scribes Sum Up Industry Woes In Painful Detail

“Across the U.S., more than 30 papers are up for sale, but there are no buyers,” sums up a long piece from Britain’s Independent that’s kind of a Wikipedia entry for newspaper industry turmoil. Regular readers of this blog and others like it won’t find a lot of new information in Stephen Foley’s 1,900-word opus, but the piece is a nice digest of the events of 2008.

Particularly notable is its description of the travesty that was Sam Zell’s purchase of Tribune Co. just 19 months ago. Foley dug up some choice Zell boasts about how his deal didn’t require the stars to line up perfectly in order to succeed, while Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal acquisition did. Fast forward to today and look who’s laughing. The Journal‘s circ is holding steady and Murdoch is actually investing in the paper while Tribune Co. is in court receivership. “Sam Zell is a demonstration of the proposition that a group of people that knows nothing about the newspaper business going in, is unlikely to be successful,” says Poynter’s Rick Edmonds in the story’s best quote.

Solutions? Sadly, the piece turns up nothing new, other than the idea of putting some papers into a not-for-profit trust, as the St. Petersburg Times has done. The nonprofit ideas may have some merit, since profits won’t be an issue before long, anyway. Why not call a spade a spade?

Maybe it’s because the new year’s drawing close, but this is certainly the week for epic analyses of the state of the industry. The Toledo Free Press kicks in a rambling 1,700-word essay with lots of facts but little new perspective. And the headline, “Changing media landscape causing problems, new opportunities in Toledo and nationwide,” appears to have been written by a search engine.

The story has one great quote, though, from FOX Toledo’s President/General Manager Ray Maselli in response to a question about recent layoffs: “We are adjusting to the needs of our environment and re-engineering the way we do business. WUPW’s ongoing investments in operational efficiency as well as our commitment to serving viewers and advertisers with optimal products and services are effectively positioning us as a more diversified, multi-media news organization.” We think “investments in operational efficiency” is the best euphemism for “layoff” we’ve seen all year.

Plain Dealer Kicks Laid Off Employees When Down

The 2008 Conflict Avoidance Trophy goes to the Cleveland Plain Dealer for the surreal way in which it handled the layoffs of a dozen people. Management turned an already unpleasant task into a humiliating water torture for the entire staff and then kicked the sacked employees when they were down.

Cleveland Scene has the details. As we noted earlier, the Plain Dealer staff was told not to come in to work until after 9:30 a.m. on Dec. 2. Laid-off employees were notified by phone. So if someone didn’t call to say you were out of a job, you were expected to come in to the office. And smile, dammit! As if that wasn’t bad enough, management arranged for laid-off employees to clean out their desks on a Saturday morning and to enter the building from the back where they would attract the least attention. “For some, decades of service ended like a protected, shameful secret,” writer D.X. Ferris sums up.

Ferris showed up in the P D parking to try to interview the sacked employees but they told him to bug off. That’s not surprising under the circumstances: People with some of the most well-recognized names in Cleveland being hustled out the back door so no one would have to witness their shame. It doesn’t get much more humiliating than that.

Miscellany

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has laid off 39 employees at the newspaper and affiliated community publishing group as part of an ongoing plan to cut staff by 10% before the end of the year.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is offering a buyout package to all 200 of its Guild employees. Management said the offer is being made to avoid layoffs, which is management shorthand for saying there are probably going to be more layoffs.

We were interviewed by freelancer Michelle Rafter for her blog WordCount – Freelancing in the Digital Age (freelancers need all the support they can get these days). The focus was on community news, which is a mixed bag of an industry these days. While it seems that big publishers like Gannett and Journal Register can’t be bothered with community newspapers at the moment, some of the most innovative work is actually going on there.

Faced with devastating cuts to their arts coverage, the Dallas Morning News and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram have teamed up to share reporting resources, according to a local blog called Art&Seek. The deal means that some local music and theatre will continue to get newspaper coverage that would have otherwise been lost, but some members of the arts community also fear that the loss of competing perspectives will put too much influence in the hands of too few critics.

An expected write-down at Lee Enterprises could force the troubled owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other newspapers into default on $306 million in debt, the St. Louis Business Journal reports.

Last month we told you about Helium, a citizen journalism site that’s seeking to partner with newspapers to provide what is essentially high-quality blog content. Now the Lawrence (Mass.) Eagle-Tribune has become Helium’s second customer. The paper will use Helium’s writer’s marketplace to find and contract with local stringers “who are compensated for contributing articles on a variety of topics ranging from wedding planning tips to great day trips with your kids, to seasonal gardening advice and concert reviews.” While this isn’t exactly hard-hitting journalism, it is going to cost the Eagle-Tribune a lot less than paying professional writers.

And Finally…

If the rapidly developing world of social media has you feeling dazed and confused, you’re not alone. There are so many new websites and so little time to drink them all in. Boston interactive agency Overdrive Interactive is trying to help with Social Media Map, a visual guide to the most essential social media resources that resembles a really dense version of the New York City subway system. You can download the clickable PDF here.

We really must get back to our day job at some point, but this is too damned interesting. We spent the early morning hours scouring our favorite blogs for reaction to yesterday’s blockbuster announcement in Detroit. There was plenty:

Mark Potts likes the Detroit model in concept, saying it could be a test bed for other innovative Gannett micro-destinations like MomsLikeMe and Metromix. But he stresses that the Detroit consortium needs to move with speed and agility to launch new services and not spend too much time fretting about how save print. “As of this week, Detroit may be the nation’s most interesting laboratory for online news,” he writes.

Steve Outing is more pessimistic. While he applauds the reduction in home-delivery frequency, he thinks charging for the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday editions is a bad idea and that the “digital replica” of the print editions is badder. He’s also disappointed there wasn’t more vision outlined around a mobile strategy. And he thinks the whole plan will be tweaked pretty quickly as reality sets in. He’s probably right.

Poynter Media Business Analyst Rick Edmonds has an exceptionally cogent and impartial analysis of Detroit Media’s chances of success. He notes that daily newspapers typically derive as much as half their ad revenue from Sunday editions and then spread the costs across the rest of the week. The gamble in Detroit is that reader flight precipitated by these changes won’t cancel out the cost-saving benefits.

Newspaper executives have been talking about this idea for five years, but no one has done anything with it because of the much-feared-but-never-tested theory that you don’t mess with the daily news habit. Now Detroit has no choice, and if they can pull it off, they’ll set a course for the entire industry. Edmonds likes their chances. And he adds, perceptively, “An upside is that if readers and advertisers mostly accept the change, that could pave the way to a full flip to online-only several years hence.”

Speaking of the daily news habit, Mark Potts leaves no question about where he stands. “Oh, puh-leeze,” he writes in response to an unnamed Gannett executive’s paean to the virtues of dailiness. “That thinking…is proof that newspapers are still living a fantasy that their products are the centers of their customers’ news and information universe…

It’s simply not that reducing home delivery will drive readers to other sources of news: They’re already there! They’ve been making the switch for years, relying more on the Web…”

BTW, The Detroit Free Press live-blogged the press conference. And you can watch all 42 minutes of it here.

And finally, why aren’t there any female newspaper pundits? Suggestions are welcome.

Miscellany

Canada’s largest newspaper publisher is cutting 10% of its workforce. Sun Media will eliminate 600 positions and restructure its operations in western Canada, Ontario and Quebec. The reasons are all the usual ones everyone else cites. As Mark Hamilton has pointed out, Canada has about one-tenth the population of the US, which should give you an idea of how big this cutback really is.

Veteran newspaper publisher Martin Langeveld has several predictions for 2009. On the whole, he sees newspapers’ prospects improving after a dreadful start. Among his more notable forecasts:

• No other newspaper companies will file for bankruptcy.
• Some major dailies will switch their Sunday package fully to Saturday and drop Sunday publication entirely.
• At least 25 daily newspapers will close outright
• A reporter without an active blog will start to be seen as a dinosaur.

And this one that we didn’t get at all. Please to enlighten:

• Some innovative new approaches to journalism will emanate from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

From the AP: “The American Society of Newspaper Editors scheduled an April vote in Chicago to become simply the American Society of News Editors. Under the proposed changes, which require membership approval, editors of news Web sites also would be permitted to join, as would leaders of journalism programs.” Jeff Jarvis chuckles.

The Portland Oregonian will stop delivering to homes, stores or news boxes in the Eugene-Springfield area, which is the second largest metro region in the state. So it’s not really the Oregonian so much any more, is it?

The daily weekly Bristol Press in Connecticut will fold in mid-January if a buyer can’t be found. Owner Journal-Register Co. is shopping it and 11 other central Connecticut weeklies. The company shuttered three Philadelphia-area weeklies last week.

Did you know that the Washington Post‘s newsstand price has more than doubled in the last year? It’s true.

“What’s your favorite 21^st-century newspaper innovation?” asks Slate’s Jack Shafer at the tail end of a rather dour essay on the industry’s lack of innovation. His candidates: “The incredibly clever and useful” New York Times Reader, the Times‘ Open API program, the Big Picture at the Boston Globe and Adrian Holovay’s EveryBlock.com. Send him your nominations slate.pressbox@gmail.com.

And Finally

Mark Hamilton pointed us to this cool mashup of the most e-mailed stories from newspapers around the English-speaking world. MostEmailedNews.com is one of those forehead-slappingly simple ideas that you wish you had thought of. It’s the work of a Brooklynite who calls himself Tim Brennan. It consists of only two pages at this point, but who knows where Mr. Brennan will take it. Check it out and give him some link love.

We could almost see the collective eyes rolling in the newsrooms of the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press today as the newspapers’ holding company announced a “bold transformation” that will cut home delivery to three days per week and move the bulk of editorial content online.

The press release from Detroit Media Partnership described the move as “a sweeping set of strategic and innovative changes designed to better meet advertiser and reader needs,” although the reader benefit of delivering fewer issues wasn’t clearly articulated.

It has always struck us as odd that newspapers, whom we count on to cut through the hyperbole of press releases, can sling it with the best of them when their own business is involved.  For a more balanced perspective, read the account in the Detroit News. The comments from Free Press editor Paul Anger also convey a sense of resignation about the shift.

Newsosaur Alan Mutter wastes no time poking holes in the announcement, quoting a former executive saying that the pullback was the only alternative to shutting down the two dailies.  The move is historically notable in light of the fact that the News was once the largest afternoon newspaper in the nation.

Martin Langeveld is generous in calling the pullback “not the best solution…it keeps in place two separate press runs on most days while failing to differentiate the two papers more clearly. And implementation will be a nightmare, I’m afraid,” he says, shrewdly.

Editorial Departments Intact

About 200 people will lose their jobs, or less than 8% of the combined workforce. Cutbacks in the editorial department will be minimal because of the need to maintain “vigorous newsgathering operations and editorial voices,” according to the News account.  Most of the cuts will presumably come in production and operational departments.

Next to scaling back frequency, the most controversial aspect of the restructuring plan will likely be the introduction of a light version of both newspapers to be sold exclusively at newsstands on days when the full edition isn’t published.  Industry sources estimate that less than 40% of the circulation of both newspapers comes from newsstand sales, a fact that raises questions about how advertisers will be charged for running there. On Monday holidays, print circulation may fall close to zero.

A daily electronic edition will also be introduced for people who want to do their printing at home. “These are exact copies of each day’s printed newspaper and can be easily navigated and printed from readers’ computers,” the press release says. This means that the $170 million printing plant that the newspapers built in 2005 will now be nearly idle four days a week while printing is outsourced to the readers.  There is no research we’re aware of that supports the assumption that readers are interested in printing their own newspapers.

Cultural Challenge

The gutsiest dimension of the plan is the commitment to move much of both papers’ newsgathering operations online.  This recognizes the unstoppable forces that are transforming newsgathering organizations around the world.  As we reported here this morning, new Gallup research shows that 31% of US adults now consult the Internet daily for news while 40% read a local newspaper.  The trend lines, however will clearly cross sometime in the next five years, making the Internet the most important news source among US adults.  Only 22% of adults under 30 read a local newspaper daily, Gallup reported

The biggest challenges of all will be cultural.  Newspapers often give lip service to the importance of their websites, but stories still abound about resistance from ink-stained veterans who can’t accept the possibility that a screen can be as important a medium of news delivery as a printed page.  Detroit’s newspapers will now have to compete on foreign turf, adapting their products to the standards and cultural practices of the bloggers that so many of them hate.  It will be interesting to see if the reporters and editors can learn to thrive in a medium that has done them so much damage.

No doubt there will be lots of analysis and reaction to follow. We see that Gannett Blog has logged 70 comments in the first four hours. We’ll keep an eye out. In the meantime, we couldn’t help taking a snapshot of the ad that appeared on the Detroit News‘s account of today’s announcement.  Perhaps a cleansing is exactly what’s needed.

Gallup has issued its bi-annual report on news consumption trends, and all mainstream media are down with the exception of cable news and the Internet. The most striking finding is the percentage of people who say they consult the Internet for news every day: up 9% in two years to 31% today. The percentage has more than doubled in the last five years. Meanwhile, the percentage of people who consult a local newspaper every day has dropped from 54% in 1999 to 40% today.

For newspapers, the demographics are a horror show:

% of respondents who get their news every day from each source, by age group:

The statistics point to a continuing trend that has been hammering the newspaper industry: Young people don’t read newspapers.  Meanwhile, Internet consumption is up across the board as people increasingly demand that news be delivered whenever they want it and wherever they happen to be.

Glimmer of Hope at the Rocky

E.W. Scripps says “a handful” of people have asked to look at the books of the Rocky Mountain News, a Denver institution that the company recently put up for sale. A spokesman said no one has yet offered to buy the troubled newspaper and that there’s no guarantee that the people who have asked to see the financials will be granted that access. However, the tire-kicking does indicate that not all hope is lost.  Employees at the Rocky are trying to rally readers to their cause.  A few of them have launched a site called I Want My Rocky to highlight the paper’s importance to the community and statements of support that have come in from readers. Thank God for WordPress.

Meanwhile, MediaNews CEO and Denver Post publisher Dean Singleton is wasting no time in taking advantage of his possible monopoly position. He’s told unions to reopen negotiations with an eye toward cutting $20 million in costs. The request came a day after Moody’s downgraded almost $1 billion of MediaNews debt out of fear of default. The Newspaper Guild represents 730 employees at The Post and the agency that administers the Post’s joint operating agreement with the Rocky.

Miscellany

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is making its third round of job cuts in two years, eliminating 56 full-time and 100 part-time jobs in the circulation unit. The paper’s circulation has dropped 13.6 percent in the last year, according to the Audit Bureau of Control.

McClatchy’s November ad revenues were down 22% on an eye-popping 41% decline in classified advertising. E&P has the ugly breakdown: automotive advertising down 42.9%; real estate down 45.8%; and employment down 58.6%. We can’t remember any publisher reporting this kind of catastrophe over the last two years.  Other trauma: retail ad revenue off 17.6%, national advertising down 33.2% and direct marketing off 16.8%. CEO Pat Talamantes said the declines were “in line with recent ad trends,” which has us wondering what other publishers are going to report.

The Tampa Tribune is blaming a rival newspaper for spreading rumors that it plans to exit the print business.  In a co-bylined Sunday editorial, executive editor Janet Coats and publisher Denise Palmer said the rumors originated in the subscription sales department of competitor St. Petersburg Times. Coats and Palmer said the Times was taking advantage of its status as a privately owned company to position recent layoff reports at the Tribune as evidence that the paper would soon cease print operations.  The rumor was also reported in the Tallahassee Democrat. Going on the offensive, Coats and Palmer claimed that the Tribune actually published more editorial pages than its rival in the first 10 days of December and that its willingness to report news of its own layoffs was in the best journalistic tradition that its rival has so far skirted.  The publisher of the St. Petersburg Times countered, “Our circulation is growing nicely, and we’re very happy to have many readers in the Tampa Bay region.”

The New York Times‘s David Carr says newspapers have found an unlikely ally in besieged Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. According to a criminal complaint filed by the United States attorney, Blagojevich was obsessed with negative coverage by the Chicago Tribune, which has been campaigning for his impeachment.  The governor allegedly threatened to withhold financial support for the Tribune unless the newspaper fired certain editorial writers. There is no evidence that the newspaper complied.  Carr says the revelations about the Blagojevich’s criminal activities come at an odd time, given that the Tribune Company declared bankruptcy just one day before the scandal broke. “In a city and state where corruption is knit into the political fabric, a solvent daily paper would seem to be a civic necessity,” Carr writes. “But if another governor goes bad, what if the local paper were too diminished to do the job?”

The Financial Times profiles, New York Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., questioning whether he has the will and stamina to persevere through the industry downturn. “If the future of America’s newspaper business rests on one individual, it is on the 57-year-old former reporter,” the FT says. “Yet the fourth-generation family proprietor, who became publisher in 1992, is looking increasingly besieged.” You can say that again.  The Times Company has over $1 billion in debt. It has been forced to consider asset sales and taking on even more debt to meet its obligations. The company was forced to cut its dividend by 74% last month, which the FT notes is “equivalent to [Sulzberger] asking his relatives to take an $18 million-a-year pay cut.” Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch has made no bones about his intentions to take on the Times directly. All this is a heavy burden to bear, the story says, noting that Sulzberger’s legendary father, Arthur Ochs “Punch” Sulzberger, displayed  backbone that has so far not been evident in his offspring.

More bad news for the Associated Press.  The UK’s Guardian newspaper is reporting that Reuters and the Capitol Hill journalism boutique The Politico are teaming up. “The initiative will mean that more than 120 Washington-based journalists will be reporting full-time for Reuters and Politico by the time president-elect Barack Obama takes office in January,” says the Guardian, which has telegraphed its own intentions to enter in the US market. The Politico has been one of the few bright spots in American journalism this year, having signed up more than 100 newspapers for its Washington news service.  Meanwhile, the AP has been under siege for its controversial fee structure and has recently lost some prominent subscribers.

Newspapers continue to retreat from print rather than surrender.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the big announcement expected tomorrow from Detroit’s two major metro dailies will be a major pullback from home delivery on all but the three most lucrative days of the week: Thursday, Friday and Sunday. This means that for the nearly 300,000 home subscribers to the News and the Free Press, the ritual of the morning newspaper will cease to exist.

The Journal says parent company Detroit Newspaper Partnership plans to instead produce a scaled-back print edition for newsstand sale on the four least profitable days of the week and direct readers online for expanded coverage. Significant job cuts are expected, but the editorial operations will probably be affected least because of the need to maintain a vigorous online news service.

However, the risky maneuver may ultimately be a disservice to the two troubled newspapers. Quoting the Journal:

Curtailing home delivery would bring the Detroit papers much needed savings, but would also carry considerable risk. At a time when newspapers are fighting to retain readers, steering those readers online instead of delivering their paper to the door could cause them to lose the habit of reading a paper daily.

Pundits largely agree. Chicago Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal calls the plans “less a bold innovation than a Hail Mary pass.” He suggests that a reduction in subscriptions “won’t driver readers to the online product but rather to other ways to get their news.”

Newsosaur Alan Mutter is more blunt: “The reported plans to cut home delivery to just a few days a week…does not merely tweak the classic newspaper model. It eviscerates it, perhaps mortally.” Mutters basically agrees with one anonymous former Gannett circulation exec he quotes who argues that any strategy that breaks readers’ daily habit of picking up the morning newspaper ultimately sends them away forever. Mutter also raises questions about the logistics of transitioning a delivery force that used to operate on a full-time basis to working only part-time. It’s a good point.

The biggest question in our mind is the advisability of continuing to print a substantially smaller edition on the least profitable days of the week and then to deliver it to 65% fewer customers. Advertisers already shun Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday issues, so why give them less reason to advertise? It’s possible that this decision is a means to appease the forces within the Partnership that simply can’t accept the idea of not publishing daily. They would find considerable support among the analysts quoted here. However, appeasement could also be a deadly mistakes.

We’re not sure that audiences will have that much trouble adapting to a new publishing schedule. Today’s readers are increasingly motivated by content rather than routine. Tivo customers can tell you that they prefer to consume programming when it’s convenient for them. If audiences are already rebelling against scheduled television programming, why would they have a problem with newspapers arriving when they’re most likely to read them?

The best idea we’ve seen in that vein comes from Steve Outing, who suggests that those unprofitable issues should simply be distributed free and filled with content that appeals to the younger audience that is already inclined to go online. Young readers have shown a clear preference for the free distribution model employed by Metro as well as hundreds of alternative weeklies. If there’s so little money to be made Monday-Wednesday, why not experiment with an approach that could conceivably generate brand loyalty where none now exists?

At this point, everything is just speculation. Even if the rumors are true, some gaps still need to be filled. Among them:

• What incentives will the Detroit Newspaper Partnership offer to advertisers to run in already unappetizing daily editions that will now reach less than 40% of the full subscriber base?
• Will bulk delivery to businesses be abandoned on selected days along with home subscribers? Business subscribers are the most desirable readers a newspaper has and it would seem foolish to throw them out along with suburban doorsteps.
• How does the group plan to adjust the business model to make the smaller editions profitable? Or is that even the intent?
• With a larger part of revenues dependent upon online sales, how is the culture of the company being adjusted to optimize this revenue stream? How will sales incentives change?

There are many more. One thing’s for sure: few events in the newspaper industry this year have raised more speculation that the announcements coming out of Detroit tomorrow. Let’s hear your comments and the questions you’d like to ask the company.

Esquire‘s 75th anniversary issue in October was a media sensation for its battery-powered cover and fat ad folio. But that’s about all the men’s magazine has to crow about this year. It’s lost 14.56 percent of its ad pages this year, according to Media Industry Newsletter, and that’s on par with performance at other monthlies. Quoting:

The Atlantic is down nearly 17 percent, and Vanity Fair is down almost 15 percent…In October, Condé Nast scaled back Men’s Vogue to two issues a year, leaving the three biggest men’s fashion magazines as GQ, Details (which lost 11.49 and 6.48 percent in ad pages, respectively) and Esquire.

Times are tough for broad consumer magazines. Newsweek may slash its circulation by as much as 60% in response to the high cost of production and postage, Folio magazine reports. The cuts may be as high as 1.6 million subscribers out of Newswek’s 2.6 million circulation base. Editors reportedly have Economist-envy and want to turn Newsweek into a magazine of thought leadership rather than a big old mass-market play. The Economist has a North American circulation of 714,000

Another factor in the cutbacks is that news magazines have been acquiring a much greater percentage of ‘non-renewable circ’ than they did before in order to satisfy advertiser demand. Non-renewable circ is mainly give-aways and promotions, making it expensive and less valuable that list-based paid subscriptions. Quoting:

“Such a drop in guaranteed circulation is not uncommon, particularly in the newsweekly category. Time cut its rate base by 750,000 copies in January 2007. Newsweek followed suit, dropping 500,000 copies from its circulation in November of that year.”

Fortunately, there’s Google. MediaPost says Google will create digital archives of the print editions of dozens of consumer magazines going back decades. The news comes not long after Google said it was making the entire photo archive of Life–about 10 million images–available online, including many that have never appeared in print. Google has been on a tear lately and its mission to digitize all the world’s printed content. In September, Google unveiled plans create historical archives of newspapers back to the very first print editions. Publishers are expected to make money by monetizing assets that had been all but out of reach to the public for many years.

2009 Seen Bringing New Wave of Consolidation, But Not the Happy Kind

BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine quotes newspaper executives saying that 2009 will see a fresh round of consolidation, but this one won’t be driven by visions of growth. Instead, mergers and acquisitions will be overseen by “big bankers seeking to ensure that the money they’ve lent, or at least a decent portion of it, is repaid.”

The bad news is spreading to other areas of traditional media. “Robert Coen, a senior vice-president at ad firm Magna who’s known for his ad forecasts, just predicted that local TV ad revenues will be down 9% this year and an additional 7% next year,” Fine writes. “In case you were wondering, Coen expects newspaper ad revenue to post another double-digit decline in ’09.” Ugh.

Cutbacks in Cincinnati

City Beat Cincinnati devotes an unbelievably long story to news that the Cincinnati EInquirer, the area’s only remaining daily newspaper, laid off several employees Dec. 2 and 3. At least 30 jobs were cut. That’s in addition to the voluntary severance packages that 60 staffers took in September.

In addition, the EInquirer‘s newshole will be reduced by six pages on Sundays and a total of 30 pages across the other weekdays beginning in three weeks. Editor Tom Callinan says the layoffs were concentrated among middle managers, not worker bees. “It was a personal statement that it was painful to lay off middle managers I know very well. But we did not touch one hour of reporting, even good reporters that we just hired. Good stories are our last best hope.”

Here Comes The Guardian!

Perhaps heartened by the success of the Financial Times in its cross-pond expansion, The Guardian plans to make its presence known on American shores this year. Quoting:

Tim Brooks, the managing director of Guardian News & Media said underscored the company’s commitment to continued growth in North America. “This year has seen the beginnings of serious investment in our North American presence, through the expansion of our editorial resource in Washington and the acquisition of ContentNext Media in New York and LA.”

Pulitzer Warily Embraces Online-Only Media

“Pulitzer Prizes Broadened to Include Online-Only Publications Primarily Devoted to Original News Reporting.” It’s the last part of that headline from Pulitzer press release that illustrates the conundrum the organization faces. The Pulitzer organization has been under increasing pressure to recognize the work of online-only media outlets, but doesn’t want to be swamped with entries from casual bloggers. So the organization this week, finally modified its criteria to include news organizations that don’t produce in print. The Board also decided to allow entries made up entirely of online content to be submitted in all 14 Pulitzer journalism categories.

Writing about the policy change, marketing guru Seth Godin comments:

“Tom Friedman can win a well-deserved prize for writing what is essentially a blog for the NY Times, but if he goes off on his own, he’s out. What a shame. As newspapers melt all around us, faster and faster, the people in the newspaper business persist in believing that the important element of a news-paper is the paper part.

“The opportunity…is to organize and network and identify and reward [responsible journalism] activity when it happens online. Not because the site is owned by a paper or because the founder has connections to the old media. No, because they’re doing work that matters. If I ran the Pulitzers, I’d hand out a dozen more every year to people working exclusively online.”

Miscellany

The Toledo Blade is laying off 23 people, most of them in the newsroom. The cuts are due to declining ad revenue and the newspaper’s ties to the auto industry. Assistant Managing Editor LuAnn Sharp said Wednesday that most of the layoffs will be in the newsroom. Five of the employees work part time. After the layoffs, The Blade will employ 425 companywide.

New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson says the company is ‘well-positioned to weather the challenges next year is expected to bring” and is not for sale. In preparing for a tough year, the Times Co. is mortgaging its headquarters and slashing its dividend. However, it appears that the company will at least remain viable, which can’t be said about some of its competitors.

Gannett’s chief financial officer said Wednesday that full-year 2008 revenue declined 8% and he expects headcount to continue to fall, ranging from mid- single-digit percent declines at USA Today to a mid-teen drop at Gannett’s U.K. operations. Fortunately, he also expects newsprint to decline by double-digit rates next year.

And Finally…

Sheldon Cohen sold the landmark Out of Town News kiosk in Harvard Square in 1994 after 39 years, but now he wants it back. He told Cambridge, Mass. city councilors Monday night that he has been overwhelmed by reaction to the news that the current owners decided not to renew their lease. “I’m thinking of coming back,” he said. “This is an opportunity to bring some life back to the square.” to be fair, no one has proposed tearing down the kiosk. The most likely outcome is that it ends up as a Starbucks. Despite Cohen’s misgivings, he may quickly find that there is a reason the current owners want out.  (Photo credit: Cambridge Chronicle)

As the newspaper industry winds down its worst year in history, some observers are finding hope amid the rubble.

Jonathan Zittrain points out that Twitter and Mahalo were powerful tools for documenting the crisis in Mumbai nearly two weeks ago. For many Americans, foreign news services and the BBC were all that was available to track the terrorist attacks. Few US newspapers even have stringers in Mumbai any more. Into that vacuum sprang citizen journalists with their cell phones and self-built news sites. Zittrain says he’s seen the future of news in these services. Check out the Mumbai hash on Twitter, the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks page on Mahalo and the Wikipedia entry on the Mumbai attacks.  Can you read these accounts and not believe that a new kind of journalism is being created before our eyes?

European editor Frédéric Filloux and former Apple honcho Jean-Louis Gassée meander a bit before getting to the point, but finally zero in on what’s going right in the news world. They point to The New York Times’ introduction of Times Extra as an example of how the link economy is transforming the news business. Times Extra integrates news from outside sources – including competitors – into the Times’ home page. This is a bitter pill for hyper-competitive editors to swallow, but a necessary one in the new model of news.

They also point to two other recent announcements – the success of The Politico’s new wire service and Huffington Post’s $25 million capital infusion – as evidence that there’s plenty of life in the news business, just not in the old news business. “The Internet economy is moving in the right direction,” Filous writes. These stories, “provide evidence of…progress. Similar news organizations are bound to find sustainable business models.”

If you run a newspaper, you might consider hiring Gordon Borrell for your next team-building event. Check out these quotes and paraphrases attributed to the founder of research firm Borrell Associates in Investor’s Business Daily (lightly edited):

• “We’re confident it’s near a bottom, and there will be a rebound.”
• Newspaper companies have plenty of growth ahead for their Internet businesses — albeit with hard work… Newspapers are planning for exponential growth from the Web — in some
• Local advertising, which newspapers are best positioned to capture, will grow 47% this year to $12.9 billion.

These optimistics comments come on top of recent news that advertising on newspaper websites declined 3% in the third quarter of 2008, indicating that the one business that should be growing is actually shrinking. They are also rather oddly juxtaposed with the chart at right. We hope Borrell is correct, but his comments shouldn’t be cause for complacency.

Miscellany

Disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich allegedly pressured the Chicago Tribune to fire Deputy Editorial Page Editor John McCormick and other unnamed editorial board members in exchange for getting state funding that would grease the wheels for Tribune Co. to sell the Chicago Cubs. We suspect this story might have something to do with it. We also marvel that the great state of Illinois could elect a marvel of leadership like our President elect and a scumbag like Rod Blagojevich to office at the same time.

The Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch is laying off 18 employees while the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News will collectively cut 35 jobs, reports Editor & Publisher. No word on what percentage of their respective workforces the cuts represent. The Philadelphia layoffs will concentrate in the newsroom, however.

Self-described troglodyte Ted Venetoulis is still interested in buying the Baltimore Sun. Or maybe the 72-year-old investor is just looking to get his name in the paper. See for yourself. The Baltimore Business Journal reports that Venetoulis and a group of anonymous investors are still looking at possible acquisition of the Sun from its troubled Tribune Co. parent, but a lot has to be worked out first, including assessing the future of the newspaper industry itself. Venetoulis admits that he hasn’t looked at the Sun’s financials, that he wouldn’t want to pay too much and that he’s going to watch Tribune Co.’s bankruptcy closely. It’s too early to tell. Which makes us wonder why the BBJ committed 500 words to this meaningless story.

The Christian Science Monitor sums up the troubles plaguing the industry. This story doesn’t break a lot of new ground, but we couldn’t resist mentioning it because we’re quoted there.

And Finally…

The Daily Show analyzes the decline of newspapers in its own inimitable style.

And from Rob Tornoe, cartoonist at The Politicker:

We’re anticipating that the R.I.P. column to the left could get quite a bit longer in 2009, and it’ll probably start with the Rocky Mountain News. The venerable Denver newspaper (at 149 years, it is said to be the longest-running business in Colorado) was put up for sale last week by E W Scripps. No one, however, thinks Scripps will find a buyer. If so, the Rocky will close around mid-January.

Buyers won’t surface because, as Wayne State University’s Ben Burns says in a colorful quote in the rival Denver Post, it would be like “buying an anchor that’s already been thrown overboard.”

Except it would be more like being chained to that anchor. The Rocky is on track to lose $11 million this year and no one is forecasting a revival of the advertising market until at least the third quarter of 2009. Any buyer would also assume a 50% share in the Denver Newspaper Agency, a joint venture set up in 2001 to operate both the Rocky and the Post in such a way that both papers can survive. The Agency is now losing money and its governance structure makes it difficult for any buyer to make changes without going through approvals and competitive disclosures.

The most likely buyer would be the Post, but quotes by Publisher Dean Singleton last week left little doubt about that possibility: “We wish Scripps well as it leaves the Denver newspaper market,” wrote Singleton in a letter to employees. Why would Singleton want to buy the Rocky, anyway? It’s cheaper and easier to let the paper fail and then pick up whatever assets and people the Post needs to fill in the gaps. There would also be less likelihood of an antitrust challenge under that scenario.

The Rocky employs 220 people in the newsroom, all of whom will lose their jobs if the paper fails. The paper has a rich journalistic tradition, including two Pulitzer Prizes as recently as 2006. People aren’t exactly dancing in the streets at the Post, however. As columnist William Porter notes, “I feel like I did upon hearing an old adversary was terminally ill: bad for him and bad for myself, because in butting heads we somehow made each other better.”

It seems oddy fitting, by the way, that one of the Rocky‘s recent Pulitzers was for a photo essay called “The Final Salute.” As of this morning, there are nearly 300 comments on the story on the Rocky website about the sale.

Politico Reports Strong Response to New Wire Service

Attempting to exploit newspapers’ frustration with the Associated Press, CNN has stepped into the breach with its own international news network. But the cable company may face some unexpected competition: The Politico. The Washington-based boutique news service, which specializes in Capitol Hill coverage, has signed up 67 newspapers for its news service over the last three months. They include the Arizona Republic, Des Moines Register, Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Philadelphia Inquirer, as well as all 27 dailies owned by Advance Publications. Several of its new clients are in dire financial circumstances and have cut back upon or eliminated their Washington bureaus. That makes Politico’s value proposition compelling. As we’re written before, The Politico continues to be an example of how specialized journalism can fill the gap left by broad-based media titans in an era of micro markets.

Miscellany

• Newsday will slash 100 jobs, or about 5% of its workforce, in its third headcount reduction of the year. According to a report on Newsday.com, “In the newsroom, the photo operation would be restructured with 20 photographers told to reapply for new positions. Also impacted would be three sports columnists and a reporter-researcher in the Albany bureau.” Most open positions will also be eliminated. Newsday has cut 250 jobs this year, or about 9% of its staff.
• MediaPost’s Media Daily News runs the summary numbers and they’re ugly (right). Gannett has cut headcount from 41,000 in 2000 to about 29,000 today. Tribune Co. is down 30% to 18,000 people. The New York Times Co.’s workforce is about 26% smaller than it was in 2000. McClatchy has reduced its workforce by more than the number of employees it picked up with the acquisition of Knight-Ridder in 2006. In all, the big newspaper publishers have cut more than 25% of their staff in the last eight years, and there are few spots on the horizon that indicate that employment might come back. By the way, Erica Smith’s Paper Cuts layoff tracker puts total 2008 US newspaper layoffs and buyouts at 15,153 and counting.
• A dozen Baltimore Sun employees have left the company and three were laid off in the first announced job reductions since the paper’s 100-employee blood bath in August.