It’s a dismal day in newsland. Gannett Co. will cut 10% of its workforce, or about 3,000 jobs, by early December. The announcement – Gannett’s second major headcount reduction this year – will bring to over 15,000 the number of newspaper employees who have lost their jobs in the US alone in 2008.

In reporting sharply lower earnings on a stunning 17.7% drop in quarterly revenue, Gannett said it must cut broadly across its portfolio of 84 major daily and hundreds of local newspapers, with the sole exception of USA Today, which appeared to escape the carnage. Rather than cutting arbitrarily, the company will ask each paper to submit its own plan and then trim selectively. These aren’t buyouts but layoffs, and they come on top of the 1,000-person reduction announced in August.

Also today, Time, Inc. said it plans to cut 600 jobs, or 6% of its workforce, and restructure the company in a move to rein in its decentralized structure and improve efficiency. The layoffs will come across the range of Time, Inc. titles, although some publications will be hit more severely than others. The company will also organize its 24 magazines into three groups: news, lifestyle and style/entertainment. A New York Times report says the restructuring is intended to focus more energy on the company’s flagship brands like Sports Illustrated and Fortune, while increasing information-sharing and even bylines across publications. The company will still have 10,200 employees internationally after the cuts.

Gawker has a list of Time, Inc. layoffs and closures stretching back to 2002. The site also notes that the coincident resignation of Time publisher Ed McCarrick, a 35-year veteran, is a symbolic departure from the old-school style of publishing, in which two-martini lunches and golf courses were the principal business venues.

Analyzing the Monitor‘s Exit from Print

The New York Times offers some perspective on yesterday’s announcement that the Christian Science Monitor will broadly scale back its print operations, saying the move makes the Monitor “the first national newspaper to largely give up on print.” The Times also quotes Monitor editor John Yemma describing the move as “a new model” that few news organizations outside of the heavily subsidized Monitor could hope to attempt. Stephanie Clifford’s account also notes that Monitor circulation has dropped from 220,000 in 1970 to 52,000, making the print closure a lot easier to justify. She adds that while going online-only may seem appealing to some executives, print advertising still brings in 92% of newspaper revenue in the US.

Such was evidently not the case at the Monitor, though. Yemma is quoted as saying that advertising revenue brings in a paltry $1 million a year, compared to $9 million from subscription revenue. In fact, the Monitor already makes more money online than in print, he said. Not many newspaper publishers can say that. Another nugget: the CSMonitor.com site gets about 3 million page views a month right now, a number Yemma said he wants to increase to at least 20 million over five years.

That’s the Press, Baby! agues that had the Monitor been forced to fend for itself as a profit-making entity rather than enjoying massive subsidies from the Christian Science Church, it would have closed the print business long ago. David Sullivan also harkens back to his youth in Indiana, when two daily newspapers controlled the flow of information and told you only what served their political interests. The Monitor was an oasis of objectivity and journalistic quality in that stew, Sullivan writes, and he hopes it will continue to set a standard for rational discourse when everyone else is going crazy.

Last week, I spent a day speaking to two college classes about the changing media industry. Both groups consisted of juniors and seniors, nearly all of them majoring in public relations. These people should be heavy consumers of information, and they are. When I asked the roughly 45 students how many of them read a newspaper online every day, nearly ever hand went up. But when I asked how many subscribe to a newspaper, only a single student raised a hand.

Oh, they read newspapers. They read Metro, the local entertainment weekly, the college daily and even the major metro dailies on occasion. The difference is that they don’t subscribe. They consume information when it’s convenient to them, and so much information is being pushed at them all the time that they have plenty of choices about what to read. The concept of paying to subscribe to something is foreign to these people in their early 20s. Why pay for what you can get for free?

Some publishers may be adapting to this new reality and paring back their paid subscriptions accordingly. Back in April, the Audit Bureau of Control changed its rules to enable publishers to declare as paid circulation copies that they sold for as little as a penny. At the time, some people predicted the beginning of a new circulation war. But the opposite has apparently happened. The Wall Street Journal reports that the current trend at big papers is to manage circulation intelligently, focusing on hitting the highest-quality readers at the best time of day. The story cites the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Arizona Republic as two papers that have cut circulation to the applause of advertisers, who didn’t see much value in distributing to readers who live so far away that they would never be candidates to come in to their stores. And publishers do see growth potential in circulation of Sunday issues, which arrive when people are most receptive to reading them.

Involuntary declines, continue, though. The two New York tabloids continue to post ongoing readership losses, in part because of price increases announced earlier this year to offset the rising cost of newsprint. Fortunately, newsprint prices are stabilizing now, in large part due to decreases in demand brought about by the slowing global economy.

Pressure to Go Private

Many years ago, for reasons that are unknown to us, major newspaper publishers began reporting monthly, rather than quarterly earnings results. Today, that practice has become a millstone around the industry’s neck, casting a public spotlight on the industry’s woes with painful frequency.

While reporting on the latest round of earnings declines, James Erik Abels of Forbes begins to ponder the once-imponderable: maybe it’s time to think about the end of the newspaper industry. The business model isn’t viable any more, Abels says, and the recession will hit hard at its base of local advertisers. The piece suggests that the pressure of earnings comparisons is only making matters worse by publicizing the industry’s problems. That’s one reason some equity managers are encouraging owners like the Sulzbergers to take their companies private: it enables them to restructure outside of the glare of publicity.

Newspaper brands have considerable value, which is one reason some private investors are lining up to buy them, Abels says. Relaunched with smaller staffs and more nimble businesses, newspapers would have a leg up on online startups because of their reader loyalty. It’s just that the process of getting to that smaller staffing model is to difficult to manage in public view.

Superblogger Robert Scoble has a proscription for the newspaper industry: experiment a lot and do it quickly. Scoble thinks every reporter should have a camera phone that’s capable of taking high-quality video images and should be able to broadcast events in real-time just like television does. He also says people who think quality journalism is dead should look at TalkingPointsMemo, Pro Publica and Topix, which are building profitable businesses based upon good reporting. He also says keep an eye on Spot.us, a startup that will fund journalism based upon the stuff people want to read.

Layoff Log

• Having recently extracted major union concessions by threatening to go out of business, The Newark Star-Ledger rewarded its staff by eliminating 40% of their jobs. Most of the reductions will be achieved through buy-outs, though, and management had told the unions back in August that it needed substantial cuts to keep the paper viable. Huffington Post says the actual newsroom losses will be closer to 45% of the 334 editorial employees. The magnitude of the cutback is impressive eye-popping at a time when most newspapers are still trimming around the edges. However, the publisher said it believes the Star-Ledger can return to profitability when the changes are complete.
• Speaking of trimming around the edges, A.H. Belo is doing everything it can short of layoffs to tighten the belt. The suffering publisher announced it will freeze salaries, reduce employee retirement contributions, suspend its dividend, trim capital spending and lower the fees it pays to its board of directors. The company also renegotiated its deal with creditors. “It’s probably not going to get better until 2010, if then,” says industry analyst John Morton., a newspaper industry analyst in Maryland.
• As LA Observed predicted last week, the Los Angeles Times laid off 75 journalists, or about 10% of newsroom staff. That comes on top of 150 job cuts in the newsroom this past summer. The site has the dour memo from Editor Russ Stanton.
• Randy Turner is the latest blogger to point out the contradiction of newspapers reporting everyone else’s layoffs but burying their own. He cites the Joplin Globe, a Missouri paper that he says laid off 15 staffers last week but has said nothing about it since. And he provides a laundry list of layoffs at other local businesses that the Globe has covered in recent months.

The Online Journalism Blog has been running the results of a survey of journalists about the impact of new media on their profession. In its fifth installment, the site asks how “blogging has affected what happens after news is ‘published/broadcast.” To their credit, journalists are going with the flow. “After the story goes up, instead of moving onto the next idea I’ll spend time answering reader questions and comments,” says a 26-year-old Australian journalist, reflecting the words of several colleagues. As we’ve noted in past entries, the Web has flipped the model of publishing. In the old days, publishing was the end of a process; today, it’s the beginning. Once a story is published, it’s subject to enhancement, analysis, commentary and updates. Journalists need to be ready for the likelihood that they may be called upon to revise and develop a story long after it’s been published. It’s the Wikipedia model gone mainstream. Stories never die as long as there’s some who’s still interested in them.

Columnist Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee laments the loss of veteran reporters from Capitol Hill bureaus. While he’s impressed that some smaller papers have kept their Washington corps intact, he says the survivors miss the expertise of people like recently retired San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Ed Mendel, who had more than 30 years of experience covering the budget. The Capitol press corps is a group of friendly competitors, Walters notes. The most experienced members are the first to have their heads on the chopping block because of their high salaries. But those veterans are also the ones who raise the level of performance for everyone else on the Hill. Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope in cases like that of the UCLA daily newspaper reporter who “blew the lid off insider dealing at the School of Dentistry, which was giving coveted orthodontics residencies to major donors and their relatives.”

The Baltimore Sun’s John McIntyre sounds off on the increasingly popular option of outsourcing editing tasks to offshore body shops. “Imagine…that General Motors and Ford, fighting desperately to reverse their plummeting sales and stock values, concluded that it would be smart to save money by eliminating the quality control function. Think they’d wind up selling more cars?” he asks. There is truth in his argument. Recall the last time your call to customer service was answered by someone with an Indian accent. Was that a more positive experience than speaking to someone who shared your culture and values? Maybe it was. We’re just saying… We’re reminded of an item we posted last week about an experiment at the UK’s Sunday Express, which has started letting some reporters post their stories directly to print, leading to some horrific gaffes. Newspaper credibility is at an all-time low in the US. Tolerating typos, inconsistencies and stupid mistakes won’t make them any more credible.

The anonymous blogger at Newspaper Biz says the trend toward big newspapers cancelling their AP subscriptions is the road to mutual suicide. Now’s the time for newspapers to leverage the AP’s status as a cooperative to fight mutual foes like Google, which make money by stealing content, he argues. We’re not so sure a lot of newspaper publishers would agree.

Huffington Post’s Jack Myers reports on recent comments by TiVo president Tom Rogers to a group of TV executives in which he predicted that the coming implosion of TV advertising will make the newspaper industry crisis look like child’s play. “Probably two-thirds of homes or more that advertisers care about reaching will be fast forwarding the majority of television ads,” he said. With 3.5 million DVRs in the market today, Rogers should know. He says there are plenty of ways advertisers can reach DVR users, such as presenting messages when a viewer is about to delete a program or – horror of horrors – actually producing messages that viewers want to consume. Not surprisingly, he believes TiVo can be their ally because the service, which has been one of the worst things ever to happen to the television industry, knows so much about viewer behavior. He also quoted The New York Times as saying that actual TV viewership is 40% to 60% higher for some programs when DVR viewership is factored in.

The accountants taketh away, but they also giveth back. This quarter, the giving was to McClatchy, which swung to a profit of $4.2 million because of an accounting change. A year ago, the company lost $1.3 billion in the same quarter, also because of bookkeeping gymnastics. The most telling number is in the revenues: down 16%.

The Waterloo Courier will move printing operations to a bigger press in Cedar Rapids, causing the layoff of 52 employees at its current printer. The news was reported in the fifth paragraph of a story titled “Courier moves printing operations” next to an enormous photo of an unidentified balding man. Please post a comment naming this person if you can, because his forehead overwhelms the lead. Also note the many comments that have already been posted on the story, most of them savaging the Courier for moving jobs out of town. It appears that deliver is already a problem in Waterloo, and most commenters can’t believe the 50-mile truck ride will improve things, particularly in snow.

The Dayton Daily News will lay off less than 10% of its 120-person workforce. Specific numbers weren’t released pending union negotiations.

The Los Angeles Times hasn’t formally announced a new round of layoffs, but LA Observed says the axe has already fallen selectively. The website posts a memo from the head of circulation reading, “Yesterday was a tough day . . . 31 of our co-workers are no longer part of the circulation team.” There are rumors of much bigger cuts coming. The site also reports that Sam Zell is sniffing around the Orange County Register and the San Diego Union-Tribune, apparently believing that his employees’ retirement funds aren’t yet leveraged enough.

Unlike many newspapers, the Death Watch functions as a nonprofit (although, in the recent words of Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Robert Thomson, the same thing could be said about many newspapers these days), so an extremely busy week has forced us to pull back on updates.  Here are a few recent items we’ve noticed.

WNYC’s On the Media has an audio interview with Lee Abrams, Chief Innovation Officer at Tribune Co. Abrams addresses the widespread perception that he is, well, a little crazy. Are you slightly unhinged? the radio station asks? “Maybe, if that’s what it takes,” Abrams responds. He also praises some advertising sections for being readable and useful and chides journalists for not accepting that fact. And he’s surprised that papers like the Chicago Tribune don’t promote more forcefully the fact that they have reporters on the ground in placed like Baghdad.

“I’ve never seen an industry more negative,” Abrams says, citing a Tribune editorial that called the paper’s recent makeover nothing more than a campaign to publish on the cheap. “That’s typical of the whole newspaper businesses’ point of view. I’ve never seen an industry more negative in articles like that…If [the industry] was in free fall, you’d think they’d be trying more things.”

Abrams has been more outspoken recently.  He was at the Dow Jones/Nielsen Media & Money Conference this week, where he tweaked one of Tribune Co.’s South Florida properties for running stories that even the reporters agreed were boring.  Abrams also challenged what he called the myth that staff cuts cheapen content and he called the idea of a government bailout for the industry “terrible. Newspapers would then focus on this ultra-elite point-five-percent and create these papers that are just unreachable to a mass audience,” he said.

Robert Thomson, the Wall Street Journal’s managing editor, seems to agree.  “Part of the problem is… you had a journalistic culture which was very self-indulgent, self-reverential and self-referential.  It wasn’t referring to reader’s interests’ but more to journalistic self-devotion,” he told the crowd.

Gawker’s Nick Denton says The New York Times is planning 20% staff cuts in the newsroom, with the feature sections and magazine staffs to absorb the brunt of the hit.  He doesn’t quote any sources, though.

The 120,000-circulation Winnipeg Free Press will be on an erratic publishing schedule for a while after 1,000 employees walked off the job on Monday, demanding a new contract.  The union is asking for a 3% increase on a multi-year contract.  Publisher Bob Cox said the Free Press will continue to publish via its website and won’t charge readers for missed papers.

A Las Vegas publisher of niche newspapers and magazines laid off as much as 10 percent of its staff this week, or about 20 employees the Las Vegas Review-Journal says. Greenspun Media Group, a sister company of the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, idled the editor of H&D, a glossy bi-monthly home and design magazine, a reporter for the special sections division at the weekly In Business Las Vegas and a few other people.

Writing for Reuters blogs, Robert MacMillan quotes former Merrill Lynch newspaper publisher analyst Lauren Rich Fine as being cautiously optimistic about the long-term outlook for newspapers.  “Most of these companies can still be decent businesses.  They just have to rethink their expectations,” Fine says.  MacMillan also has encouraging words from Goldman Sachs analyst Peter Appert, who believes that newspaper companies will survive in the long term, although at much lower margins.  What’s the timeframe?  At least five years, Appert believes. For now, he’s advising clients to underweight the stocks.

John Schuster wonders how long Tucson, Arizona can continue to be a two-daily town.  The East Valley Valley Tribune announced huge cutbacks last week and the rival Arizona Daily Star is owned by Lee Enterprises, a company that is in severe financial straits.  Meanwhile, public faith in journalism wasn’t helped by an incident at the student newspaper of the University of Arizona.  A student reporter was recently outed for submitting for stories that allegedly quoted fictitious sources.

Cincy Navigator

Mark Glaser has an extended interview with Jennifer Carroll, Gannett’s vice president for digital content. She gives a progress report on Gannett’s Information Center initiative, a 2006 campaign to remake its 85 daily newspaper newsrooms into 24-hour digital publishing platforms. Carroll says that the programming and video skills the company has taught its journalist has led to some truly innovative coverage, like the Des Moines Register’s video/database/map mashup coverage of the Parkersburg tornadoes. Another innovation is CinciNavigator, a mass mashup created by the Cincinnati Enquirer that embeds information about local events ranging from arrests to nightclub listings on a map.

Carroll says database reporting can create a groundswell of interest that leads to improved print sales. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle found that by publishing a database on police overtime the Thursday before a Sunday print date, it created anticipation that drove the highest Sunday single-copy sales of the year.

Carroll says Gannett is hiring and expanding its commitment to digital journalism, even against the backdrop of a terrible business climate.  A few people comment on the interview skeptically, suggesting that newspapers will never be a destination for multimedia content.

Future for Journalism Bright, Just Not So Much for Newspapers

John Kirch writes about a recent panel on the future of journalism at the University of Maryland-College Park. He offers the optimistic view that that future is bright.  The comments by panelists reflect our own opinion that the best time to get into journalism is when everyone else is getting out.  The future of big branded news institutions is dim, panelists said, but journalists will still be able to survive and thrive by promoting their own brands instead of the brains of their employers.

Paraphrasing the panelists, Birch writes, “Reporters will not only have to know how to interview sources and write stories for different media platforms,…they will have to know basic business principles so that they can create individual brand names for themselves that can be used to build followings and create job opportunities.”

Knowledge of business principles goes against the grain of conventional journalism teaching, of course.  However, that doesn’t mean journalist have to sell their souls, only that they need to be able to promote themselves because they are the product.  The risk is that journalists fall back to providing only content that delivers a large audience, such as celebrity gossip. We hope to see nonprofit and public interest organizations emerge that promote content that the public needs to know about.  The difference is that the content mix will be pulled by the readers more than pushed by editors.  What that will look like is anybody’s guess.

Miscellany

Jeff Jarvis is as provocative as ever in this withering attack on a recent AJR piece by Washington Post reporter  Paul Farhi. Farhi makes the case that journalists aren’t responsible for the plunging fortunes of newspapers; a variety of competitive and demographic trends are the real culprit. Balderdash, says Jarvis. “Victimhood is an irresponsible abdication of responsibility, a surrender.” We suspect that Jarvis was trying to stir up controversy and boost attendance to his forthcoming conference more than he was trying to savage a colleague. In that respect, he was successful. There are more than 150 comments on the piece, many of them thought-provoking, and Jarvis returns to engage with his audience frequently during the debate.

While free daily newspapers have struggled in US, they’re evidently hitting a chord with the commuter set in the UK.  Brand Republic reports that free dailies given away to commuters are gaining a foothold with the younger readers, who have largely forsaken paid daily newspapers. “City AM‘s daily reach has increased from 23% in 2007 to 32% this year, while the FT’s has dipped from 22% to 20%,” writes Mike Fletcher. Metro’s circulation now tops 3 milllion across the UK and has brand extensions that offer eight different platforms for advertisers. Perhaps more importantly, the freebies have solid demographics among the up-and-coming audience of young adults. London Lite, which is published by the same company that also produces the Daily Mail and Evening Standard, counts almost 80% of its readers in the 18- to 34-year-old demographic group.

The Providence Journal will lay off 25 part-time in six full-time employees, all from its news operation.  The move leaves a news staff of 200 people and a total staff of 705 at the ProJo, down from 763 in early September.

If online competition is hitting the broadcast industry as hard as the print business, why haven’t there been more layoffs in TV newsrooms?  Here’s one explanation.

The collapse of so Wall Street firms will hit the media business hard, with newspapers taking a disproportionate share of the body blows, according to a Bernstein Research report.  The report says finance and insurance/real estate advertising makes up 21% of newspapers’ ad revenue, about double that of broadcast media and slightly more than that of online media. “History suggests that another industry will eventually fill the growth void left by the insurance/real estate and finance sectors, but the operative word is clearly ‘eventually,” wrote the report’s author, analyst Michael Nathanson.

Happy Double Ten Day, everyone. In Taiwan, they’re setting off firecrackers, dancing in the streets and still fretting about the loss of the mainland.

Tampa Bay Tribune: “Um, Never Mind.”

Tampa Bay residents took a break from following the success of their hometown baseball team to scream bloody murder about recent changes to the hometown newspaper. The Tampa Bay Tribune redesigned just one week ago, collapsing multiple news sections into a single main section and reorganizing several features. The paper also broadly cut the length of news stories.

The changes apparently didn’t sit well with readers, some 300 of whom canceled subscriptions while 10 times that many called or wrote letters of protest. “Apparently the folks who came up with the idea for New Coke have finally found employment designing newspapers,” read one letter.

Tribune executive editor Janet Coats listened, and it didn’t take long for her to issue a mea culpa and to promise immediate changes, including a return to sections. “People want sports in a separate section. . . they want to be able to hand sections around. Turns out, we had really disrupted the way people communicate with each other in the morning,” says Eric Deggans’ account on TampaBay.com.

Give the Tribune credit for thinking outside the box, for listening and for responding quickly to comments. In atmosphere of crisis, institutions don’t have the luxury of researching their decisions to death, and they shouldn’t have the arrogance to stick with them in the face of strongly negative reaction. We believe the Tribune will get brownie points from its readers for listening, which it richly deserves, because it must’ve been a helluva rough week in that newsroom.

Miscellany

Journalism iconoclast Patrick Thornton asks readers to take themselves back 10 years and describe how they would do journalism differently. Always perceptive commentator Tim Windsor responds with a 15-point laundry list of suggestions, many of which would work just as well today. There are a few disconnects in Windsor’s commentary – mySQL was barely known in 1998 — but his advice is sound for publishers who still talk about “eyeballs” and “lock-in.” (via Mark Hamilton)

A comment posted on Gannett Blog notes that revenues at USA Today are running 11% under plan on a budget of 1% under plan. “Someone has to make up for that 10 percent difference,” the anonymous commenter writes. “That is not even taking into account a prospective collapse in Christmas advertisements.” USA Today employees are wondering if they should file for back overtime pay given the likelihood of layoffs.

Newsosaur Alan Mutter has a creative idea for the growing ranks of newspapers that are scrapping unprofitable Monday editions and scaling back to six days a week. Why not create a special interest edition on a popular topic like sports and deliver it free on Mondays instead? The savings achieved by axing a single edition don’t amount to much in light of the formidable fixed costs that most newspapers maintain, Mutter says. Newspapers would be better off swallowing the modest incremental cost of continuing to publish on Mondays while giving readers a product they really want and salespeople something exciting to sell. It makes sense to us.

The Wall Street Journal confirms speculation that the New York Times will shut down the web site of sister paper International Herald Tribune and host the news instead on a co-branded “global edition” of NYTimes.com. The Journal also reports that the Houston Chronicle will lay off 10 employees after failing to reach its goal of 90 volunteers for a buyout program. (via Romenesko)

The UK’s Express Newspapers group has been so shaken by circulation declines that it has sharply cut back on staff and taken to letting some reporters post their stories directly to the printed page. The resulting gaffes prompted one unidentified staff member to send a sharp rebuke to his colleagues about their sloppiness — including a reference to a couple from Wales as being English and a description of an island as “floating” (islands don’t float) — and to identify 20 serious errors in the most recent Sunday edition. Rival Guardian gleefully tells all.

And Finally…

Back in May we marked the launch of a new blog called Praying for Papers, with the stated purpose of encouraging “anyone who is touched by this shift in our industry to include it each day in their prayer life.” Having noted its launch, we feel compelled to point out that the most recent post was on July 11, when author Mike Koehler said he was going on vacation. We haven’t heard from him since. Either he’s having a great vacation, his prayers have been answered, or he’s given up hope. We’re not sure which.

Into the perfect storm of Internet competition, spiraling newsprint costs and the decline of classified advertising has come a fourth factor: probable worldwide recession. It couldn’t happen at a worse time for the beleaguered newspaper industry.

Newspaper advertising revenue is expected to decline a record 11.5% to $40.1 billion this year, the Newspaper Association of America says. The organization does see light at the end of the tunnel; it’s predicting that the nosedive will level off a bit in 2009. But such forecasts should probably be taken with a grain of salt, considering that no one knows the full extent of the current financial crisis or the likelihood that worldwide government interventions will succeed. Also consider, at Tim Windsor points out in a comment on the E&P blog, that the NAA initially forecast just a 1.2% decline in business this year.

The 11.5% revenue drop would be the largest the association has seen since it started tracking results 58 years ago, and it reflects the continuing collapse of the classified advertising market at the hands of Craigslist et. al. In fact, the NAA expects classified revenues to fall from $14.1 billion in 2007 to just $9.4 billion in 2009, a 33% crash in a business that is already off by 50% from its peak. Retail advertising is expected to decline about 10% and national advertising should drop 13% in the same time period. Online revenue won’t pick up much of the slack: the NAA forecasts meager growth of 1.8% this year.

Media Life magazine catches up with David T. Clark, senior research analyst for publishing and advertising at Deutsche Bank Securities, to get his take on the wreckage. Here are a few quotes:

“This is a pivotal time for the newspaper-retailer relationship…Share losses now will be amplified when we emerge from this downturn.”

“Newspapers must be perceived as a marketplace in which the advertising is considered content, not clutter.”

“I think we’ve got at least several more quarters of very steep industry ad revenue declines to go before we see much improvement.”

“Newspapers do digital pretty well, but…it doesn’t look like a viable business model will emerge in time to save some metro dailies…They are at the bleeding edge of the structural issues the industry faces…Metro papers over-index to classified advertising, which is disappearing fast….They need to variabilize as much of their costs as possible, get all of that old media hardware off of the balance sheet…Tough to sell a printing press these days, though.”

Desert Storm

The East Valley Tribune of Mesa, Ariz. will make massive cutbacks, laying off 142 people, or about 40% of its staff. The daily will also withdraw coverage from nearby Scottsdale and Tempe and scale back to four days a week, most likely Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. The print format will also be scaled back to two  sections ‑ one for local news and one for sports, entertainment and late-breaking news.The Tribune has a paid and free distribution of around 100,000. It’s owned by Freedom Communications, a publisher of more than 100 mostly small newspapers and a few big ones, including the Orange County Register. Ray Stern analyzes the impact on the valley, including the huge loss the cutbacks represent to the city of Scottsdale, which may become the US’ largest major metro area without a daily newspaper.He also lists some of the prominent journalists who will be exiting the scene.

Spokane Spokesman-Review Girds for More Cuts

The Spokane Spokesman-Review, whose editor quit last week over cutbacks in his staff, named Gary Graham to the post. Publisher W. Stacey Cowles took some questions from staffers and offered little optimism about the immediate future. His responses are noted on a staff blog. Highlights:

• The S-R “is planning for the possibility of not having” the Associates Press in the future.
• Potential cost-cutting measures include a reduction in trim size reduction (next June), dropping some circulation routes in outlying areas, reconfiguring press runs and office space consolidation. The paper is likely to close its Spokane Valley bureau.
• “The company would like more flexibility in compensation of newsroom employees, more flexibility to change compensation to reflect market rates.” In other words, pay cuts are likely.

Tumbleweeds in Albany

The New York Times writes of the impact of staff cuts on the press corps covering goings-on in Albany. With the closure of the New York Sun last week, five newspapers have exited the state capitol in less than two years. The organization of statehouse journalists in Albany has seen its ranks dwindle from 59 members in 1981 to 42 journalists last year. “With the exception of Buffalo, Watertown and Albany itself, no city outside the New York metropolitan area has a newspaper with a dedicated, full-time correspondent in the Capitol,” writes Jeremy Peters. Wire-service bureau reporters don’t offer the local angle that correspondents used to provide. Reporters who once jostled for desk space now have their pick. “It’s like tumbleweed should be blowing around here,” says one reporter. Observers fret that the cutbacks are leaving legislators to play in their own private sandbox withoutthe limits of citizen oversight.

Layoff Log

• More cutbacks at the Los Angeles Times. LA Observed is reporting that the paper will cut 75 positions, which would bring total newsroom staffing to about 650. That’s down from a high of nearly 1,200 in 2001. The reductions will be achieved through buyouts, if possible, but staffers will be told that this round of cutbaks will be their last chance to get a package of two weeks’ pay for each year of service. Media Bisto says the Washington bureau will be cut back right after the election.  American Thinker comments“More and more unemployed left wing journalists are joining the sans culottes. History teaches us that unemployed intellectuals are fodder for revolutionary movements.” (via Edward Padgett)
• The Cleveland Plain Dealer plans to cut 38 unionized newsroom jobs, or about 13 percent of the newsroom’s staff. Most of the jobs being eliminated are held by Guild members. Employees have until Nov. 20 to accept a buyout offer, with layoffs expected to make up the difference. The Plain Dealer, which has 299 newsroom employees, cut 64 journalist jobs in 2006. The actual reductions are somewhat below the rumors of 20% cutbacks that circulated in June.
• Boulder’s Daily Camera is moving all of its remaining printing and packaging operations from Boulder to Denver and laying off 29 more workers by the end of October.The paper will now be printed at the Denver Newspaper Agency facilities, where the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News have recently taken up residence.

And Finally…

The industry downturn has claimed one of the world’s most famous journalists – and he isn’t even a real person. Rick Redfern, the resident ink-stained wretch of the Doonesbury comic strip for more than 30 years, has decided to accept a buyout. “Redfern leaves with utter resignation, apparently having reasoned that he has no real newsroom options,” writes The Washington Post‘s Michael Cavna. “Thanks for the 30-plus years, Rick. By the fourth panel — in the style of a true newspaperman — you always had the perfect line.”

We constantly hear about the angst that aspiring young journalists face as they wrestle with the decision of whether they made a huge mistake in choosing journalism as a career. Let us share a story that hopefully provides some encouragement. We can’t name all the names because we don’t have permission.

A friend of ours has a son attending a Boston area university.  In his sophomore year, this young man found himself interning at the Boston Globe, where he worked the overnight shift on the rewrite desk.  This past summer, the Globe offered him the opportunity to write a daily blog about activities in the New England area.  Last month, the young man headed back to school and a paid internship at a major newspaper, where he is spearheading an initiative to build a new online community.  This young man is 21 years old.

There’s a lesson in this anecdote.  The decline of traditional media creates huge opportunities for those who have the stomach to take a chance. Back in the 1970s, the conventional wisdom was that the path to a journalism career involved slaving away at a small daily paper, working for food and rent and hoping to catch the eye of a big-city editor.  Today, so few young people want to go into journalism that the opportunity for those who do is virtually limitless.

Savvy investors know that the people who make the biggest killing in any market are those who are willing to buy when everyone else is selling.  The field of journalism right now is a buyers market for the few who buck the conventional wisdom.  Newspapers may not survive much longer in their print form, but most people agree that the core skills of journalism will be needed in one way or another long into the future.  Risk-takers like our young journalist are capitalizing on this trend to gain experience and visibility that a decade or two ago would have taken many years of hard and anonymous work.

That’s why it’s a great time to get into a journalism career.  The current malaise about media will eventually give way to optimism about new models.  The people who have gained the core skills that are necessary to succeed in a reinvigorated industry will rocket ahead in their careers.  Sure, there’s plenty of uncertainty about what media institutions will look like in the future, but if you’re willing to take a chance, you stand to reap huge rewards.  Newspapers are hungry for new ideas, and the best ideas are coming from the generation of young people who aren’t burdened by a romantic attachment to the past.  There’s never a better time to take risks than when you’re in your 20s.  My friend’s young son knows that, and we predict he will be one of the big winners when the trend inevitably reverses itself.

Redesigning Newsrooms

The Tampa Tribune will introduce a new design on Monday, and it’s keeping the details secret. The St. Petersburg Times has some inside dope, though. An interesting sidelight is that the merged Tribune/WFLA/TampaBayOnline.com newsroom is also being redesigned around these subject areas: data, deadline, watchdog journalism, personal journalism and grassroots. We wouldn’t have thought of those ourselves. Give credit to Executive Editor Janet Coats, who’s communicating some urgency: “For most of us, it’s only been in the last year to 18 months that we’ve started getting away from the idea that the Web site is the newspaper on a computer screen . . . I’m worried that if we don’t change how we think about this further it won’t matter what falls through the cracks because we’ll have no readers.”

Speaking of redesigning the process, editors at the UK’s Birmingham Post, Sunday Mercury and Birmingham Mail are also turning the newsroom on its head. Editors Weblog reports that the three papers now share a physical space and some resources. The process of publishing news story has been condensed from five steps to three, with online leading the way. News editing and production have been merged into a single stage. Reporters carry laptops and video cameras and can file from anywhere. There’s been tension, of course; 65 jobs were eliminated in the redesign and staffers were made to re-apply for available positions. However, these three paper are envisioning a future and doing something about it, which is what we call leadership.

Editor Quits, Speaks

Yesterday, we noted the resignation of Steven A. Smith as editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review in protest of job cuts that he said were cheapening the product. Knight Digital Media Center caught up with Smith for an interview and provides interesting background. If you think this guy is some old-line curmudgeon who won’t face up to new realities, think again. Smith has actually be an outspoken proponent of the need to change calcified newsroom thinking and to reinvent newspapers around digital platforms. He conceived of an innovative idea to invite readers to observe and participate in daily news meetings. There’s more detail in the Knight story. We think Steven Smith won’t have trouble finding a job. Vision like that is still rare in this business.

Miscellany

Calamity and politics are good for online traffic. The Washington Post’s Web site, washingtonpost.com, scored a 42% jump in year-over-year traffic. The trend was driven, not surprisingly, by political and business stories.

Google says it’s figured out a way to tell when bloggers are writing news. A new feature of Google Blog Search shows categories of blog entries in a left sidebar. In some cases, the popularity of topics is displayed in chart form on the right. Here’s an example.

And Finally…

When you can’t beat ’em, steal ’em. Fading to Black has a short item about a newspaper war in the San Francisco Peninsula area that heated up this week when the San Francisco Examiner caught a delivery man for the Palo Alto Daily Post apparently stealing copies of the Examiner as he delivered his own newspaper. When confronted and asked to open his trunk, the man had more than 1,000 copies of the rival newspaper stashed away. Maybe he just had a lot of birdcages to line.

Not to harp on The Politico, but we continue to be impressed by the stunning success of this for-profit venture whose value is built on delivering – gasp! – quality journalism. To those who mourn the newspaper industry’s implosion as foreshadowing the end of public service reporting, we point to this news boutique as an example of What Might Be. MediaBistro’s Fishbowl NY has a brief but interesting interview with Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei, who comments on the appeal of his unique business model. The focused mission is to “provide the fastest, smartest, most essential coverage of Congress, the White House, politics and those who try to influence all three.” And not to rely on classified advertising, which is one reason things are going so well.

A vandal disrupted distribution of the Boston Herald Wednesday morning, just two weeks before the paper plans to shut down its printing plant and outsource the operations to the west. Someone who apparently knew what he or she was doing cut several belts and wires on collating machines. Workers scrambled to compensate, but not all subscribers got their Heralds that day. The unions denounced the vandal’s actions. Members stand to get severance benefits – but only if the transition to the new printer goes smoothly.

Steve Outing comments on NYU journalism professor and Pressthink blogger Jay Rosen’s initiative to get his Twitter followers to submit accounts of reporters who document untruths by the McCain presidential campaign. You can see some of the results here. Outing things social networks are a great way for people who share common interests to quickly self-organize around a common goal, such as the one defined by Rosen. Unfortunately, the tools can also be misused. In an update, Outing notes that some troublemakers are now trying to subvert the effort.

Somebody help this guy, if you know him. He needs a hug.

Appropriately named columnist Joe Grimm has useful advice for a newspaper veteran who fears he’s about to lose his job. 

Layoff Log

News has been trickling out about planned cuts at the Raleigh News & Observer, but some numbers are finally available: 53 people, including 20 newsroom staffers. Among the notables leaving the N&O: TV columnist Danny Hooley, illustrator Grey Blackwell, consumer-affairs columnist Vicki Lee Parker and book editor Marcy Smith. Cartoonist Dwane Powell, who earlier said he would scale back to part-time but keep his job, has also decided to leave. Most of the cuts were achieved through buyouts, but some layoffs were necessary. The N&O already cut 40 positions earlier this year.

Pittsburgh’s largest newspaper, the Post-Gazette, told its staff to expect layoffs soon. Meetings between management and union leaders to discuss the specifics begin next week. The closure of a major department store (and advertiser) downtown hasn’t helped. Stay tuned.

The Kenosha (Wisc.) News plans to lay off three full-time and three part-time employees, all from editorial.

The Tacoma News Tribune will lay off one employee and buy out 17 others in continuing reductions that have reduced its workforce by 100 people this year.

And Finally… 

How appropriate. Now you can generate your own tombstone messages for free. Tombstone Generator creator J. J. Chandler has left plenty of space for you to wax eloquent about the dearly departed – or those whom you wish would depart. 

Technorati has come out with its annual State of the Blogosphere report and some numbers are truly eye-popping. The site found blogs in 81 languages and daily posts are closing in on one million. Nearly 185 million people have started a blog (although most don’t tend them regularly). Newspapers have the bug: 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs. Four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews and 90% of bloggers say they post about the brands they love or hate. Most bloggers who accept advertising make a profit. Technorati did a big survey and got comments from various media influencers. We haven’t had a chance to read it all yet, but if you’re interested in publishing, you should check it out.

Meanwhile, The Politico, which is one of the more promising Web-only journalism ventures, is expanding. It will add employees, grow circulation of its Washington-area newspaper and and print more often. The staff will be expanded to at least 105 from its current 85. Circulation of its Capitol Hill newspaper will be increased 20% to 32,000 and a Monday issue will be added. All this will happen after the election, which is The Politico’s busiest season, but officials said there’s going to be plenty of news to keep people busy. Also, they expect to reach profitability next year, far ahead of schedule.

And perhaps there’s gold in them thar websites. BIA Financial Network and Borrell Associates have a new study that estimates that newspaper websites are the most lucrative local media around, with valuations of the largest properties reaching $450 million. That makes local alternatives like TV and radio small potatoes in comparison. “Given their growth potential, the value multiples of media Web sites may be 2 to 4 times that of the core business,” the BIA president is quoted as saying. The study also praises the strong cash flow at media websites. The problem is that growth is slowing. BTW, the $450 million number is only for the largest properties, so don’t get too excited. We estimate the market value of Newspaper Death Watch is about $1.23.

Miscellany

In the department of publishers that still don’t get it, we’d like to include The American Scholar, which publishes a provocative list of “12 Questions about the future of journalism” by Bill Kovach without offering visitors a way to respond. Um, guys, that’s part of the problem.

In chaos, there is opportunity, or at least that’s what Michelle Rafter says. She points to new launches at Slate, The Wall Street Journal, Silicon Valley Insider and Forbes as evidence that there’s opportunity in business journalism right now. Just make sure you get cash up front.

Death is good business, it seems. Tributes.com, which runs obituaries and related memorial messages, is teaming up with The Wall Street Journal to create a print counterpart to the website. For $80, you can buy a listing on Tributes.com where you can post photos and memories of a departed loved one. Now, for an additional $250, you can run your message in a dying medium, too. Tributes is a startup that was spun out of Eons, a social network for the over-50 crowd. Both are the brainchildren of Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor.

In the 80s, New York City brought us the Village People. Now it brings us TimesPeople. That’s The New York Times‘ new social network. “TimesPeople provides NYTimes.com readers with a way to share their thoughts and recommendations about The Times‘s content with other readers, making their public activities on the site more open,” says a company press release. Apparently you can only share your thoughts about Times content, not anybody else’s, which we suppose makes sense. You can also see the most recommended articles. The Times is a latecomer to the social networking world, trailing The Wall Street Journal by a whole eight days.

Scott Karp analyzes Matt Drudge’s influence and concludes “It’s the Links, Stupid.” The action in online publishing is in filtering and linking, not corralling your audience, he says. Drudge is successful because he tells cable TV and radio reporters what’s important and that shapes their daily broadcasts. Newspapers, in contrast, tend to tell people only what’s important in their pages on any one day, and that’s far less interesting to readers than a guide to that vast Worldwide Web. “In the web media era, when all news content is accessible by anyone, anywhere in the world, and no news brands no longer have a monopoly over news distribution, the power of influence lies in the ability to FILTER the vast sea of news,” he writes.

Layoff Log

• The Anchorage Daily News is reducing its staff by about 10%, laying off 13 employees and holding another dozen positions vacant.
• The Raleigh News & Observer has started making cuts after only 16 newsroom employees accepted a buyout offer. Its editorial cartoonist, a 33-year veteran, and ombudsmen will be cut back to part-time but their jobs won’t be eliminated.
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is going to buy out or lay off workers unless it gets concessions from its unions. Between 10 and 20 Teamsters will lose their jobs, according to a union spokesman, but that’s just the beginning. The paper’s Ohio parent has been losing money for years and is threatening to sell its Pittsburgh property.
• As if the Seattle Times Co. didn’t need more headaches, now the truck drivers are threatening to strike. About 70 truckers could walk off the job on Oct. 21 in protest over the company’s bid to outsource its trucking to Penske Logistics.
• Threats by the publisher of the Newark Star-Ledger to close the paper if cost-cutting goals can’t be met have apparently put a bee in the Jockey shorts of the local union. The union representing 400 mailers at the paper agreed by a 10-1 margin to a three-year wage freeze and buyouts of a quarter of its members. The Star-Ledger is still looking to buy out another 200 of its 750 full-time nonunion employees.