To no one’s great surprise, Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller (left) resigned today. The clock had been ticking on the embattled executive since an embarrassing incident a little more than a month ago when it was revealed that Hiller was planning to turn the paper’s weekly magazine into an advertorial without consulting Editor Russ Stanton. When the subterfuge became public, it was Stanton who set the record straight in a clear public snub of his boss.

The LA Times pulls no punches in documenting its own dirty laundry.  “The paper has experienced the steepest drop in cash flow of any in the Tribune chain of 11 daily newspapers,” writes staffer Michael Hiltzik. “Hiller also acquired a reputation among Tribune brass as an indecisive leader…the Times has been without an advertising manager since February, for example.”

The timing couldn’t have been worse for staff morale, coming as the paper begins cutting 250 jobs. Hiller is the third publisher in eight years, and he’s overseen a revolving door of editors who have left under unpleasant circumstances. The news also comes just one day after Chicago Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski announced that she would leave the paper after more than seven years at the helm.

What’s really going on here? A changing of the guard that isn’t unusual at companies that have been sold during troubled times. After a year on the job, CEO Sam Zell has decided that the only way to right the Tribune Co. ship is through severe cutbacks. Executives who don’t get with the program are going to be quickly shown the door. During the reign of Zell, anyone with bottom-line responsibility who doesn’t move quickly will be moved aside. Publishers at other Tribune Co. properties should see the handwriting on the wall. It’s all about revenue right now, which is appropriate when the noose of huge interest payments is staring you in the face.

A tumultuous as these events are, they’re actually a positive sign for Tribune leadership. A company in such deep trouble needs a strategy. It’s almost inconsequential whether it’s a good strategy or a popular one. Simply getting people pulling in the same direction is an improvement. Say what you will about Rupert Murdoch, you can’t deny that he has acted quickly and decisively to shoot dissenters and bring in his own team to implement a new strategy for The Wall Street Journal. As a result, the paper is generally acknowledged to be making rapid progress in its campaign to challenge The New York Times. Zell’s biggest mistake so far may have been to let things deteriorate so much before taking action. Now he’s getting something done.

I was a guest on a webcast about social software yesterday (you can watch it here; it’s free)  and the question came up about what publications can do to build community. I responded that they can’t do much and they shouldn’t even try because, with few exceptions, readers aren’t a community.
Then I checked my RSS reader this morning and noticed this item from Content Ninja that makes the very same point: “You cannot build a community around content.”
“Community” is a poorly understood term (just look at the variety of definitions in online reference sources) and, like many buzzwords, it is being overused right now. Publishers trying to escape their sinking  businesses are clinging to the community life raft, hoping that it offers hope for a future. For some it does, but that’s not a good prospect for most newspapers.
Newspapers have historically defined their communities geographically because that’s the business model that worked. While people who share a common space on the planet are technically  a community, they’re the least cohesive kind of community. Outside of a shared interest in certain issues like public safety or schools, residents of a city or town have little in common. They may occasionally form strong communities around common interests like a school bond or tax increase, but those groups invariably dissolve as the issue goes away.
There are readership communities that work. Readers of a special interest magazine about needlepoint or scuba diving are a type of community. Those people have intense shared interests and they are much more likely to bond together in an online forum that serves those interests. Publishers of special-interest magazines have the best chance of turning their readership into self-sustaining online communities.
Newspapers, however, don’t. Their strength is creating content and their best chance of building community involves giving people a chance to discuss, comment upon and contribute to their content. USA Today does about the best of any major newspaper at encouraging this kind of reader participation. But USA Today isn’t trying to become a community. Its management knows better than that.

Miscellany

• Jeff Jarvis suggests that it’s crazy for newspapers to operate their own websites and they should just hand over the back-end work to Google.  Newspapers should focus on what they do best: journalism and local ad sales. All the staff time and money spent building technology infrastructures is basically reinventing the wheel. He’s got a point.
• The Daily Telegram of Superior, Wisconsin will cut back from six to two print issues a week beginning this fall. The 6,000-circulation afternoon daily has been publishing for 118 years. A BusinessWeek account notes that theDaily Telegram competes vigorously with the Duluth News Tribune, which is only about five miles away and which is owned by the same publisher. We’re wondering if combining, rather than competing, might be a more practical approach.
• Washington State’s The Columbian laid off 20 people – eight of them in the editorial group – in the second round of cutbacks this year. The paper cut 30 positions back in February. Editor Lou Brancaccio told the Portland Business Journal that early retirements could trim the current staff of 306 even further.
• The delightfully vicious Tell Zell site gives Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell a performance review using the company’s own performance management form.  The world is a better place because of anonymous blogs.
• Rev. Jesse Jackson’s stated desire to remove Barack Obama’s testicles apparently caused a minor uproar on copy desks around the country. In a bold bid to produce the most trivial news story of the week, the Columbia Journalism Review sends in a reporter to analyze how major titles dealt with the “nuts” crisis. Could anyone be less interested?

The ax has fallen at Sam Zell’s hometown Chicago Tribune, although not as hard as it did at sister papers in Los Angeles, Baltimore and Hartford. The Trib will cut 80 of its 578 newsroom positions – that’s about 14% – but less than 60 people are actually expected to lose their jobs because some vacancies won’t be filled. The news hole will also shrink by up to 14%, which is in line with the cuts Tribune Co. is making elsewhere.

The story on chicagotribune.com also notes that Tribune Co. sold its stake in Shoplocal.com to Gannett for $22 million.  That values the 141st most popular site on the Web at about $50 million.  The expected sale of the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field should cover Tribune’s 2009 debt obligation, but after that, things get dicey.

Alan Mutter looks at the market for newspaper properties and finds it to be a wasteland.   Playing off of News Corp.’s abandoned plans to sell its Ottaway line of small newspapers and other frustrations at Landmark Communications and Sun-Times Media Group, he concludes that there simply aren’t any buyers at the moment. With so many publishers teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, there’s a possibility that scores of newspapers could hit the market within the next year selling for pennies on the dollar. It’ll be a buying opportunity for somebody, but the most likely buyers are frozen right now, either because they have debt issues of their own or they don’t know where the bottom is.

For highly leveraged giants like Tribune, this is a particularly worrisome trend. Zell got good money for Newsday, but there isn’t a Cablevision lurking in every market looking to buy up the hometown daily. It’s unlikely that anyone is going to want to do a big deal until revenues stabilize. This is a race against time. If the market bottoms out by the middle of next year, Zell can start selling off titles like the LA Times and Baltimore Sun to keep the company afloat. If the market is still in free-fall, it’s unlikely he’ll find anyone willing to put up the cash that Tribune needs to service its debt.

This is particularly tragic for the 21,000 employees of Tribune Co., since they own the company. If Tribune defaults and debtors step in to sell off assets, the actual value of the company will be set by the market. There’s no way to tell what the value will be, but the hard reality at the moment is that thousands of retirement plans are tied up in assets that, for the moment at least, no one seems to want to buy.

More on Editorial Outsourcing

Yesterday we noted a piece in the Hindustan Times about the emergence of a fledgling editorial outsourcing business in India. Now BusinessWeek has done a deeper dive on the issue, sending reporters to visit the modestly titled Mindworks Global Media near New Delhi, where 90 employees are doing jobs once done in U.S. newsrooms. The story notes that Mindworks stumbled into this line of business by accident. It began as a custom publisher for local companies, but then got an assignment to write a story for a British airline magazine. The editors found they could report the story from 6,000 miles away. That gave them the idea to take the operation global and a new business was born.

BusinessWeek reports that venture capital firm Helion Venture Partners  has pumped a staggering $350 million into Mindworks. Yes, you read that right – $350 million. The story quotes Helion’s managing director as saying media outsourcing could be a $2 billion industry. Mindworks is planning to grow from 100 to 1,500 employees over the next two years.

You can be certain that this will be a major growth business for India and an equally large source of angst for US journalists and publishers.  Forner newspaper editor David Stancliff kicks it off in this opinion piece in the Eureka Reporter, which reads like something steelworkers were saying in the early 1970s.

The migration of jobs offshore will happen if it makes economic sense. Patriotism, loyalty and tradition have nothing to do with it. Sadly, that’s a fact. Journalists need to look at the value they provide, determine whether their job can be done more cheaply by somebody else and adjust their skills accordingly. An industry that’s flush with cash can afford luxuries like loyalty, but in the do-or-die environment like most publishers face today, those options aren’t available. (via Romenesko)

Miscellany

The Charlottesville Daily Progress buries the lead in announcing that it will lay off its entire pressroom and move printing operations to neighboring Richmond. Its headlines the story “Daily Progress moves printing to Richmond facility” and mentions in the second paragraph that the move “affects 25 employees whose positions were eliminated.” Can you spell “layoff.” Apparently not at the Daily Progress.

The Washington Post has named ousted Wall Street Journal editor Marcus Brauchli executive editor. That’s a cultural shift for the Post, which has a tradition of promoting internally. Brauchli called the assignment “possibly the most challenging thing I have ever done.”

Writing in The New York Times, Timothy Egan invokes the spirit of Thomas Jefferson in an impassioned plea for continuation of the status quo in the newspaper business. His argument is more eloquent than most, but it’s predicated on two shaky assumptions.

The first is that newspaper readership is higher today than ever. Egan calls this the great paradox, and it would be if the numbers existed in a vacuum. It’s true that newspapers’ total audience is growing, but the real question is relative to what? This blog gets a lot more readers online than it would if it were copied and distributed on street corners, but is that an inherent measure of value? The growth of the Web and the emergence of high-quality search engines are a tide that lifts all boats, but that doesn’t make the boats themselves any more valuable. You can turn around this logic: There are some 20 million active blogs today that didn’t exist five years ago. Facebook traffic drawfs that of all major newspapers combined. Does that make blogs and Facebook a more useful resource than The New York Times?

Fewer Jobs, But Not Fewer Journalists

The second assumption is that journalism jobs are going away and with them, professional journalism. Egan cites Huffington Post, a favorite mainstream media whipping post because it pays its contributors so little. We could be left with a national snark brigade, sniping at the remaining dailies in their pajamas, never rubbing shoulders with a cop, a defense attorney or a distressed family in a Red Cross shelter after a flood, he moans.

Well, he’s got one thing right: in the future there will be fewer salaried staff positions at big media institutions. But it’s stretch to say there will be fewer professional journalists.

Huffington Post lists 30 editors on its masthead. We can assume that some of those people are getting paid. While it’s true that staff jobs are declining, there is a model for the future of journalism careers. It’s called freelancing. Lots of professional journalists make a perfectly good living today writing for multiple clients. Some of those clients are businesses and others are media organizations. The corporate work generally pays better, and that supplements the more interesting pure journalism work. Many of the best journalists in the US long ago left their staff positions in order to go solo. Most freelancers I know prefer the flexibility and freedom that the lifestyle provides. And most magazines couldn’t survive without their services.

Lots of industries work this way. The accounting profession has a few mega-firms and thousands of individual practitioners. Doctors can choose to work for a medical group or hang out their own shingle. Many independent consultants provide specialized services that their clients can’t get from big organizations. These people make good livings without working a staff job. Freelancers create good journalism without working for media organizations.

A Cleansing Process

The Internet is in the process of cleaning inefficiency out of the media business. To demonstrate the waste of the current media model, search for coverage of any major news story on Google News. Chances are you’ll find more than 100 stories about the same topic, each reported by a different organization. Every day across the US, hundreds of reporters, editors, copy editors and layout artists duplicate each other’s efforts producing the same stories about the same topics. This duplication of effort was necessary when the only way to reach readers was on a printed page. It isn’t necessary any more.

Why are there over 100 journalists at every Presidential press conference, political convention, World Series game and Olympic event when five could report the facts equally well? Is it conceivable that a smaller number of national media organizations could do the work more efficiently by pooling resources for the big events and farming out the color stories and sidebars to a network of freelancers? Could journalists make a decent living selling these services? I think so.

The destruction of newspapers is creating pain and heartbreak for the people who are losing their jobs. Our heart goes out to them. But this process is part of a necessary cleansing process, one that will force many journalists to re-evaluate their strengths and seek new sources of income. This will ultimately bring efficiency to a market that is shedding a legacy of waste and duplicated effort. Read Chris Jennewein’s upbeat piece on SensibleTalk.com about why it’s a great time to be a journalist for inspiration.

An intern at the Tampa Tribune has posted excerpts from a remarkable speech by Editor in Chief Janet Coats to her newsroom the other day. The newspaper had just announced plans to cut its newsroom staff by about 10% or 21 people. Coats said some politically unpopular things. ““People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add-on to the Tampa Tribune,” intern Jessica DaSilva quotes Coats as saying. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add-on to TBO.”

Coats went on to compare the newspaper industry to the music industry, which is in a death spiral of its own right now. Demand for music has never been higher, but the record industry is hemorrhaging because its business model is tied to a distribution system that is now irrelevant. Newspapers will enter a death spiral of their own if they don’t change their thinking, Coats said.

Janet Coats is one smart editor, and let’s hope her staff responds to her rallying cry: “It’s worth fighting for.” While they’re at it, find a full-time job for Jessica DaSilva, who turns in a nice piece of reporting here.

Latest Cutbacks May Not Go Far Enough

Alan Mutter has a fascinating analysis of newspaper industry layoffs. He counts up all the cuts announced this year, compares them to previous downturns and concludes that publishers are cutting back far too little. In previous slowdowns, Mutter demonstrates, publishers cut headcount roughly in line with ad declines. This time around, though, they’ve trimmed less aggressively. It could be that publishers’ decisions to cut expenses in 2005, when business was good, made them think they were ahead of the game, but they’re actually falling further and further behind as the ad business spirals downward.

This is depressing news, and it further supports the likelihood that a death spiral is beginning. Death spirals happen when revenues decline faster than expenses. Companies avoid tough decisions about cost cuts, figuring that things will get better and they want to retain their best people. When things don’t get better, they find themselves scrambling to shed workers as quickly as possible. They take a hatchet to their workforce, which scares employees and spooks investors. The best people leave and the remaining employees cower in a corner, getting little done and mostly speculating about the next round of cost cuts. This happens every time a big corporation goes off a cliff, and the same scenario is ominously forming in newspapers today.

In light of Mutter’s analysis, the Tribune Co.’s recent aggressive cost-cutting measures may be smart business. Yesterday’s 250-person layoff at the Los Angeles Times, for example, was more than 8% of the total workforce. Nevertheless, with revenues falling at a 14% clip in the first quarter, it still may not be enough. Which sucks.

• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will cut 130 people, or about 10% of its workforce. Management is hoping to use buyouts and attrition, but will resort to layoffs to meet the number. The Journal Sentinel just won a Pulitzer.

Getting on the Hyper-local Train…Or Not

The Santa Cruz Sentinel is the latest paper to joint the reader-generated content trend. But instead of celebrating the addition of community-contributed articles to the new “Perspectives” section, an editorial presumably written by EIC Don Miller under the dour headline of “More changes at the Sentinel” makes it clear that this was not a popular decision. “I try to keep all these changes in … perspective. Because change is what is happening,” says the writer. “And for newspapers, in whatever form they will be published and delivered, to survive, change is what we have to do.” Wow, that oughta rally the community! (via Editors Weblog)

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Steve Outing vamps on an earlier opinion he wrote with the controversial position that local news can be boring. Outing, who is an unabashed supporter of the “hyper-local” concept, uses his hometown newspaper as an example. The section devoted to reader-contributed items is full of uninteresting, poorly written and marginally relevant content. “I’m a believer in hyper-local! I just don’t think we’re doing it right yet,” he writes. Good point. Hyper-local doesn’t mean publishing every 4-H Club meeting announcement and blog entry citizens that citizens contribute. It’s about constructing a new kind of news service that targets specific interests. The prolific Outing offers some of his own ideas.

Miscellany

A columnist for the Rocky Mountain News proposes a novel idea: shut down his newspaper. Or maybe close the Denver Post. Either/or. The current business model isn’t working, says David Milstead. Denver has a been a joint operating agreement town for eight years, but the uneasy alliance between owners E.W. Scripps and Media General hasn’t led to sustained profitability for either of Denver’s two papers. Perhaps the best course of action is to shutter the weaker paper and the weaker website. Milstead suggests that this could result in the News continuing in print while the Post serves Denver online.

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If you want to see heartening examples of the innovative things newspapers are doing, subscribe to Editor & Publisher’s Best of the Web feed.

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McClatchy Vice President of News, Howard Weaver, has set up a wiki to seek ideas from staff members and really anyone who wants to weigh in. It’s lightly trafficked so far, but it’s still early. Advice to Weaver: the vast majority of wikis go nowhere. There seem to be two elements of success: 1) People have no other other way (like e-mail) to express their opinions; and 2) One or more people are actively tending the fires, responding to comments and posting new material. Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come.

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The Review-Atlas of Galesburg-Monmouth, IL will drop its Monday edition, following the lead of several small papers that have scaled back frequency in the same of cost savings. Monday is the smallest issue of the week for most newspapers and frequently loses money.

And Finally…

If the industry’s troubles have got you in a bad mood and you want to blog off some steam, change the routine a bit. Find an insult that’s  more offensive that the usual F-bomb and use language that won’t make a bad impression on the 4-year-old is in the back seat. Brush up on your scurrilous vernacular with the Shakespeare insult kit. Take it from the Bard himself and don’t be a qualling hedge-born moldwarp.

 

The Los Angeles Times will lay off 250 people, including 150 in the newsroom, in the latest round of Tribune Co. cutbacks. The layoffs have been rumored ever since Tribune Co. COO Randy Michaels singled out the paper as a trough of journalistic productivity in Tribune Co.’s portfolio. Tribune has since announced steep cuts in Hartford and Baltimore.

In contrast to layoffs at other newspapers around the country, Tribune Co. has focused the knife on editorial departments. The cuts in Hartford and Baltimore each amounted to 20% or more of the newsroom. Michaels and CEO Sam Zell have openly stated that journalist productivity, as measured in column inches,  will be one of the metrics they use to identify layoff targets. The LA Times is slashing its news staff by 150 people, or about 17%. The surviving staff of 725 is nearly 40% smaller than  it was during the boom days just before 9/11, when it employed 1,200.

In a memo to employees, Times editor Russ Stanton also outlined other planned changes, including a redesign of the newspaper and merging of the print and online news staffs. Stanton’s memo indicates that Times management is solidly lined up behind the transformation of the brand from a print to multiple media. Ed Padgett has the full text of Stanton’s memo.

Padgett also reprints an unusually upbeat and conciliatory memo from Sam Zell, whose public mood had raged from dazed to cynical recently. While this probably isn’t the last of the Tribune cuts, it may be the most painful. the LA Times has the largest newsroom and the broadest reach of any Tribune title and the industry has been waiting for the ax to fall.

Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell was interviewed on CNBC’s Squawk Box show last Friday morning and took the opportunity to reinforce his position as a change agent. “Because newspapers have historically been monopolies, I think they’ve been insulated from reality,” he said. Actually, newspapers have historically been competitive, but no so much for the last 30 years or so. Zell also made it clear that business sucks far more than he expected. “Are you talking about the people who buy ads? I’m trying to find one of them,” he says in only partial jest. Romenesko has a transcript.

The Washington Post quotes bond analysts saying Tribune Co. will be able to meet its debt obligations through mid-2009, but that’s when things might get ugly. A big bond payment is due at about that time and no asset in the portfolio is going to raise enough money to make that nut. The story also has a rundown of recent cost-cutting efforts at Tribune Co., all of which have been documented here.

Add Tell Zell to your RSS reader because this blog is not only snarky but fun. It’s got a new tool called the Hackinator that enables users to compose letters of resignation to various Tribune Co. managers using an assortment of menu-driven insults. Tell Zell is also publicizing an Orlando Sentinel staffer’s call for a company-wide sickout by Tribune Co. employees on July 9. As of Monday morning, sentiment was running 70% in favor. But will they actually follow through?

Miscellany

From across the pond, the Guardian sums up the wretched state of the US newspaper industry. While there’s no news here you haven’t read in NDW before, the quotes from screenwriter David Simon are interesting. He compares newspapers to the Napster-era music industry and says what’s needed is an iTunes for newspapers. The piece also hints at a theory we floated last week: Rupert Murdoch may be the big winner in all this.

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Mark Potts was busy on Friday, posting a 10-point manifesto for fixing major metro dailies. While not everything in the blog entry is new (we know it’s all about going local), advice like “zero-base the news operation” and “lose the editorial page” are compelling. The latter idea really stuck with us. The editorial page is a vestige of bygone days when institutional voices ruled the land. Today, it’s all about community, yet all major metro dailies march on with this outdated and increasingly irrelevant daily opinion. Potts closes with the sad observation that the greatest innovation in newspapers of the last decade has been Sudoku. For which we are profoundly grateful.

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A day earlier, Potts rounded up the week’s carnage and figured about 900 jobs were eliminated during the week on top of the 1,400 cut by McClatchy the week before. He quotes Simon Dumenco writing in Advertising Age that reading Romenesko these days is like “reading the obits.”

Layoff Log

The Bay Area News Group, which operates eight regional papers in the San Francisco area, will lay off 13% of its workforce. The actual number wasn’t announced. The company will also lay off 29 out of 226 employees in a newsroom that voted for unionize early this month. A 17% decline in first-half business was cited. One of its member papers, the Palo Alto Daily News, will also eliminate its Monday edition.

The Albany Newspaper Guild says 14 people took buyouts, but it doesn’t say where. We’re not aware of any cost-cutting going on at the Times-Union, which actually recently announced expanion plans. Let us know if you can shed light on this announcement.

And Finally…

In Romania, they apparently like things simple. So the Romanian Senate just passed a law requiring the media to provide a 50-50 balance of positive and negative news. Fortunately, the government council designated to arbitrate the rule quickly denounced the law as ludicrous.

Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell must be relieved to be back on familiar territory in the real estate business. He’s just put the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower up for sale as well as Los Angeles Times property in historic Times Mirror Square. Technically, Zell says he’s only seeking ways to maximize the value of the properties, but it’s hard to imagine that his options would include making the investment required to redevelop the buildings for the long term. He’s putting them up for sale and potentially buying another year of life for his highly leveraged company. The Wall Street Journal quotes sources estimating the two properties could fetch $385 million.

So the man who said he was going to shake up the Tribune by challenging conventional thinking and breaking the mold is now going back to what he knows best: selling real estate. That kind of vision has got to inspire the troops, especially in the wake of major layoffs at two Tribune papers this week. Edward Padgett has Zell’s memo to employees urging them to keep their eye on the ball and not speculate about what’s up with the property sales.

Assume that more layoffs are on the way shortly. Edward Padgett has the text of a memo from Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller to his staff setting the stage for major cost cuts. We can assume there won’t be a lot of joy around the barbeque at LAT employee picnics this weekend.

The Atlantic has a Q&A with Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams in which he doesn’t come off sounding nearly as goofy as his memos make him out to be. Still, his comments are short on the kind of breakthrough insight that the Tribune probably needs right now.

In Other Layoff News…

• Gannett Co. is looking to cut 150 employees from the Detroit Free Press and the rival Detroit News. That’s about 7.5% of the total workforce, according to Gannett Blog. Management is hoping to make the cuts through buyouts rather than layoffs, but hasn’t ruled out the latter. Detroit is a joint operating agreement town, meaning that the two competing papers belong to the same corporate parent. That’s how bad the advertising climate is. (via Fading to Black)
• We noted yesterday that when the new round of layoffs at the Hartford Courant are complete, the news staff will have been reduced from 400 to 175, or 55%. That’s not the worst of it, though. Alan Mutter calculates following a small layoff just announced at the San Jose Mercury News, its staff will have been cut 63%. Commenters say that estimate might actually be on the low side.

The Future Takes Shape

Veteran journalists might scoff at the joint effort by MySpace and NBC to recruit citizen journalists to cover the upcoming political conventions, but we think it’s an innovative idea. Someone with a lot of talent but without a lot of connections is going to have the chance to gain a national audience for a few days this summer based solely on his or her creativity and hard work. And what the heck is wrong with that?

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Add the San Diego Union-Tribune to the growing list of newspapers that are republishing the best content submitted by users in print. The paper has launched a social network for residents of San Diego county. It’s got all the usual Facebook-like stuff, but editors will be monitoring the discussions and publishing good material in the company’s community weeklies.

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for information and some of the promise and challenge that presents. The NPR example is great.
Speaking of citizen journalism, the Guardian has been reporting on a conference about the future of journalism. Caitlin Fitzsimmons blogs a panel about how news organizations are tapping into crowds

Miscellany

Online Journalism blog has the first in a series of planned stories about semantic journalism. Nicolas Kayser-Bril kicks things off with a plain-English explanation of the semantic Web. Basically, if machines could do a better job of interpreting information, it would make all our lives a lot easier. And the Death Watch editor could catch another hour or two of sleep.

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We have intentionally avoided commenting on the pissing match between the Associated Press and a group of self-righteous bloggers over fair use of AP copy. We tend to side with the bloggers, but we think the AP also has a point. If you’re late to the party or haven’t been following it closely, Editors Weblog has done the legwork for you. This timeline of the dispute is full of links to relevant detail and covers the big issues succinctly.

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Alan Mutter has created the Default-O-Matic, a tool that rates the likelihood that various large newspaper companies will default on their debt. Journal Register Co., whose stock is almost literally not worth the paper it’s printed on, leads the funeral procession, while Washington Post Co. is the healthiest overall. Read this post if you want a quick tutorial on what “default” means. It’s more involved than we thought.

And Finally

LA Times Pressman Edward Padgett shares this gem: “A recent study conducted by Harvard University found that the average American walks about 900 miles a year. Another study by the American Medical Association found that Americans drink, on average, 22 gallons of alcohol per year. This means, on average, Americans get about 41 miles to the gallon!” Have a nice weekend everyone.

The Baltimore Sun Media Group announced this morning that it will lay off 100 people out of its 1,400-person staff, with a disproportionate percentage of the cuts coming from the newsroom. The unit, which owns the Baltimore Sun and several community newspapers, told the Newspaper Guild that 55 to 60 jobs would be cut on the Sun‘s editorial staff, or about 20% of total newsroom employment. The paper will offer buyouts through July 18 and then use layoffs to meet its total job reduction goal.

The Hartfort Courant will cut 57 newsroom jobs, or nearly a quarter of its total editorial staff, along with a corresponding reduction in news pages. At its peak in 1994, the Courant employed 400 journalists. With the most recent cuts, that number falls to 175.

The focus on the editorial department is interesting in light of recent criticism by Tribune Co. executives of journalist productivity. CEO Sam Zell and COO Randy Michaels made it clear in a call with investors early this month that writers and editors would increasingly be measured by the quantity of their output. They said that most papers in the Tribune portfolio would lose pages and staff in the coming months and outlined plans for a series of redesigns that kicked off with a new look for the Orlando Sentinel this week.

Tribune Co. stands alone in its focus on cutting editorial staff. Most publishers have tried to limit newsroom layoffs out of concern about harming the quality of the product. Tribune Co. executives appear to have no such reservations. Zell and Co. are making a big bet that cuts in quality won’t significantly damage circulation, which is the key to advertising revenue. In a quote on Courant.com, Journalism Professor Rich Hanley of Quinnipiac University said of the shrinking Courant, “People could look at it and say, ‘This is nothing but a shopper on steroids.”

Here’s the memo from Sun Publisher Tim Ryan to employees:

The two key factors that will sustain our company for the future are customer satisfaction and financial stability. Achieving both goals is challenging in the very best of market conditions. In the face of today’s tough economy, adapting to consumer trends while maintaining our fiscal strength is proving to be even more difficult – yet even more critical.

Our long-term strategy of going on offense and creating growth opportunities will continue to get us closer to our goals. Already this year, we generated incremental Sun circulation gains, launched a new, free daily publication, b, which is the first of its kind in the market and, through our “explore” websites, delivered highly-localized news and information for the region’s consumers.

In spite of these early, significant wins, we struggled to achieve our performance goals. So, while we will stay on the offense, we are altering our game plan. In order to align ourselves more closely with our customers, we are retooling our business model, which will include enhancements to our newspaper. In August, 2008, The Sun redesign will debut, giving readers more of what they want – a more concise newspaper with more local news, personally relevant and useful content, consumer information, watchdog coverage, more graphics and better navigation.

By adjusting our business model and redesigning our core publication, we expect to stimulate readership growth and improve our financial performance. Regrettably, our new course also requires us to reduce our workforce by about 100 positions across BSMG. These actions are necessary for us to remain competitive and win in the future, and will enable us to create new targeted print and interactive media for the marketplace that satisfy both consumers and advertisers.

Transition Timeframe

The workforce reduction will include a combination of closing open positions, attrition, and voluntary and involuntary separation plans according to this timeline:

• Friday, June 27 – Voluntary separation packets will be available to all employees (availability to Guild-represented employees is being negotiated with the Guild). Volunteers will have two weeks, through Friday, July 11, to apply.
• Friday, July 11 – Thursday, July 17 – Volunteers will be notified whether their applications were accepted or not; decisions on involuntary separations will be made based upon voluntary results.
• Â Friday, July 18– Employees who are part of the involuntary separation plan will be notified. Voluntary and involuntary separations will occur in early August.

Human Resources, your leadership and plan documentation will provide further detail of plan terms, including compensation, savings/retirement funds and medical benefits. While Tribune does not have a formal severance policy, the formula that the company is using to determine benefits payable to employees affected by the current workforce reductions is more generous than any formula that the company may use after 2008.

Moving Forward

It is extremely difficult for all of us to lose colleagues and friends. However, while we cannot control the current economy, we can control what action we take to create a stronger future. We are, by far, Baltimore’s media leader, and through ongoing innovation to introduce new and exciting media for our marketplace, we will maintain our competitive position.

The leadership team and I will continue to keep you informed throughout this transition. Thank you for your patience, continuing contributions and commitment to our company

Tim

Another Boston Massacre is in the works, with the Herald and Globe both planning cost cuts. The Herald is taking the worst of the blows, announcing that it will lay off between 130 and 160 press operators, electricians and other production workers this summer and outsource its printing to presses in two towns, one of which is nearly 90 miles from its headquarters. The current presses are creaking with age and the paper has been exploring alternatives for some time, including possibly contracting with the rival Globe for printing (that didn’t happen).

Herald Publisher Patrick Purcell made a daring bid for expansion in 2001 with the purchase of the suburban newspaper chain Community Newspapers Co., but he sold the business five years later. The Herald is the perennial also-ran to the Globe in Boston and the loss of so many staffers is a major blow. The move to a printing press in faraway Chicopee also can’t help the paper’s ability to provide timely scores to the sports-crazed Boston fans. Neither of the accounts in the Herald or the Globe mentioned the size of the Herald’s total employee base.

The Globe’s news was less dire: it has asked the unions to agree to a 10% wage cut and is threatening to consolidate printing plans, a move that would strike the unionized workers hardest. The union is pissed, but there may be little they can do. The economic climate doesn’t leave them much negotiating room. The Globe has already been through two rounds of layoffs in the last three years.

Orange County Register Tests Offshoring

The Orange County Register will steal a page from the high tech and customer support industries and outsource some copy-editing to India on a trial basis. The one-month experiment is the first of its kind that we’re aware of, although some newspapers have reportedly toyed with covering routine local government meetings remotely in recent months. Officials at Orange County Register Communications made every effort to characterize the project as experimental and non-threatening to US-based employees, but that’s what tech executives said a decade ago when their industry was first considering offshore outsourcing. Forrester Research now estimates that 450,000 tech jobs a year will migrate overseas by 2012.

There’s no reason for the Register not to do this. Most educated Indians already speak English better than most educated Americans, and minor cultural nuances can be dealt with by domestic editors. What surprised us about this deal is that the Register limited it to one month. It will be impossible to assess success in that short a time, so our guess is that the Register either isn’t serious about the idea deal or that, more likely, its management is trying to minimize the negative public relations impact. In our opinion, it’s a bold approach that could quickly be imitated by many others.

Miscellany:

• When news leaked last week that the Orlando Sentinel was planning a major design overhaul as part of a campaign to change the look and feel of many of the papers in the Tribune Co. portfolio, the Death Watch suggested that readers would care less. Our skepticism has apparently been borne out, as Alan Mutter reports. Less than .05% of Sentinel readers voiced an opinion over the redesign. While eight people felt strongly enough to cancel their subscriptions, the 126 comments voiced in the first couple of days amount to a drop in the bucket. All told, the change is much ado about nothing.
• Palm Beach Newspapers Inc., owner of The Palm Beach Post, the Palm Beach Daily News, the Florida Pennysaver and La Palma, will cut 300 workers from its 1,350-person payroll. The company said it hopes to achieve the reductions through attrition and buyouts instead of layoffs. However, the likelihood of reducing staff by 22% through those means is low. “We are the last major Florida newspaper to implement staff reductions,” the publisher told the Post. However, the percentage of cuts is by far the largest of any nearby paper.
• The newspaper industry has always been able to take some consolation in the fact that (presumably older) C-level executives would continue to prefer newspapers to online alternatives. However, a new study by a Forbes and Gartner finds the opposite. The research determined that the percentage of senior executives who choose the Internet over newspapers as their primary source of business information has increased 37% in the last four years, while preference for newspapers and dropped by the same amount. Quoting from the Editor & Publisher account: “Before starting the work day, C-level executives prefer to access the Web rather than read the newspaper. The number of C-level executives who prefer the Internet first thing in the morning has increased 22% since 2004, while those who prefer to read the newspaper first thing in the morning has declined 11% over the same time period. C-level executives consume media on the Web more than any other medium.”
• Lost in the shuffle of McClatchy’s dramatic cost-cutting moves last week was the news that the Clovis Independent, a weekly serving the Fresno, CA region, would be closed after 103 years. Weeklies tend to rate little attention from big publishers or the media, but they are often tightly woven into the culture of their communities, especially after a century of operation.
• Danny Sanchez reminds us that newspapers are good for more than just reading. You can use them to remove odors from wet tennis shoes, for example. We never knew that!