The Washington Post’s voluntary staff reduction has cost it a lot of fine journalists but perhaps no loss is greater than that of Rob Curley, the Kansas wunderkind whom the Post recruited less than two years ago to lead its Washingtonpost Newsweek Interactive division. Curley and at least five of his staff members are pulling up stakes and moving to Las Vegas to work on unspecified projects at the Las Vegas Sun.

Juan Antonio Giner aptly sums up the tragedy this is for the Post, which has long been one of the more progressive papers in its approach to new media. We can only speculate on Curley’s motives. In an entry on his blog last week, Curley paid homage to all the fine talent at the Post and the support he’s received, but notes, cryptically, “I probably wasn’t the best fit with the organization….In Las Vegas, our team has a chance to help shape an entire organization.” Perhaps they didn’t have the chance to do that in Washington.

The bio on the Washingtonpost Newsweek site sums up Curley’s accomplishments:

• Director of new media and convergence for the Naples Daily News and its sister publications along Florida’s Gulf Coast;
• Management positions in the interactive editorial operations for the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World, during which time he gained national prominence as one of the first online editors chosen to lead a news organization’s entire print and broadcast news operations;
• Editor & Publisher named the Lawrence Journal-World as one the 10 newspapers in the United States that does “it right” in 2004. The Naples paper later received similar praise.

Washington’s loss in Las Vegas’ gain.

Time, Inc. Joins User Content Parade

Another publisher – this time a unit of venerable Time, Inc. – tries its hand at a print publication composed entirely of user-generated content. This Old House – renamed Your Old House for this experiment – is the product of “thousands of e-mails, letters, photos and projects since editor Scott Omelianuk’s first call for submissions in his December editor’s letter.” The magazine set up a website to accept content and promoted the initiative in broadcast and online. 8020 Publishing and the Hartford Courant are doing the same thing, perhaps indicating that editors are finally warming to the idea that their readers have something interesting to say. It isn’t easy, though. Editors say the quality of ideas contributed by readers is remarkably good, but the copy needs a lot of work.

Layoff Log

• The nonprofit St. Petersburg Times will try to cut staff through an early retirement incentive but might have to resort to layoffs later this year, according to a publisher’s memo. Attrition has reduced headcount from 1,500 to 1,300, but it still isn’t enough. The newspaper is also freezing wages for a year. (via Romenesko)
• Massachusetts-based SouthCoast Media Group has laid off five full-time and nine part-time employees. Like many news organizations that report on their own staff reductions, SouthCoastToday.com didn’t give any clue as to big this layoff is, other than to note that the move reduces employment by less than 5 percent. Quotes from the publisher demonstrate unrealistic optimism about to the future.

Media General expanded its cost-cutting initiative, announcing plans to lay off 500 employees by July on top of the 250 laid off last year. The reduction amounts to 11% of the company’s 6,900-person workforce, an unusually deep cut even in these troubled times. Media General has been hammered by its exposure to weak Florida and California markets, where real estate advertising has shriveled and the recession is being felt more deeply than in other parts of the country. Most of the job cuts will come in the publishing division. Media General also owns 22 broadcast stations. The company will add 60 jobs in interactive media.

StopBigMedia.com smells a rat. The advocacy blog notes that Media General was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the FCC’s decision to lift its 30-year-old ban on media cross-ownership. The layoffs are thus hitting geographies where readers already have little choice in media, meaning that Media General will simply hack away at quality in the name of profitability, the blogger alleges. It appears, though, that the FCC’s decision will be reversed by Congress.

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The Beaver County Times of Pennsylvania is shutting down its printing operation and consolidating production with the New Castle News. The move was necessitated by th deteriorating condition of the Times’ 44-year-old press, the publisher said. The paper will cut 16 full-time and 80 part-time positions. The News plans to hire six full-timers to handle the additional work.

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Editor & Publisher reports that editorial cartoonists have been especially hard-hit by the newspaper downturn. Two decades ago, the industry employed about 200 cartoonists. Only about 85 are left. Latest casualties: Jake Fuller of the Gainesville Sun and Dave Granlund of the Metro West Daily News.

Miscellany

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz pens an unusually frank column on the state of the newspaper industry. Kurtz lists the names of talented colleagues who are leaving the paper and speculates about political maneuvering, but then closes with an honest account of the management mistakes and demographic trends that have led to this predicament. Quoting: “If newspapers wither and die, it will be in part because the next generation blew us off in favor of Xbox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods. Network news faces the same erosion. Maybe, in the end, we get the media we deserve.”

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Mother Jones has published photos of the empty San Jose Mercury News offices taken by staff designer Michael Martin Gee in April. The whole set is available on Flickr.

The New York Times has added an automated news feed to its technology page called Technology Headlines From Around the Web. Saul Hansell writes with no small amount of pride about how this robo-feed actually includes content that the Times doesn’t control. Thus the Times moves confidently, even arrogantly, into the 21^st century.

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McClatchy’s April revenue fell 14.6%. That’s revenue, not profit. The newspaper chain’s exposure to the weak Florida and California markets has hit it harder than most publishers. Revenue from its California newspapers was off 22.8%. Real estate and recruitment advertising sales were both off more than 35%.

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The Sumter, S.C. Item will stop publishing on Monday. More newspapers are likely to follow this model as business continues to decline. Monday is the least profitable day of the week for most newspapers, while Sunday is the cash cow, of course.

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Strange bedfellows: The Record of Hackensack, N.J., and the Herald News of West Paterson, N.J. will combine their copy desks and photo departments. The consolidation of six separate operations into two is expected to save $800,000 annually and cut staff by 23%. The papers are longtime rivals, but with different audiences. They say this is the least disruptive cost-saving idea they could come up with.

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European thirtysomethings like news sites, says Jupiter Research. Its survey finds that 42% of online Europeans regularly visit online news sites, which is nearly three times the number who hang out in social networks. Keep in mind that Jupiter is the research firm that predicted that 35% of large companies would have blogs by the end of 2006. Two years later, that number is hovering around 12%.

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The Associated Press is refining a new model for reporting breaking news it calls “1-2-3 filing.” Editors Weblog describes the process in an interview with AP Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll. Step one is a 50-character headline. Step two is 130-word summary and step three is something more that she didn’t specify. It sounds a lot like the way the AP has worked for a century. “”It doesn’t sound radical when you say it out loud, but it is if you inject it into your daily news decisions,” Carroll says. We’ll have to take her word for that.

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YouTube has launched a citizen journalism channel called Citizen News. It’ll aggregate videos from self-described video journalists. The vid service has hired a person with the title of News Manager, and she asks the community for ideas and suggestions in this post on the YouTube blog. David Chartier at Ars Technica is skeptical. He notes that credibility has been hard to come by in fledgling citizen efforts like CNN’s iReport. YouTube’s choice of a young person in her 20s to head the effort does raise questions about its commitment. While Olivia no doubt reflects YouTube’s core demographic profile, she doesn’t exactly exude journalism experience. (via Romenesko)

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Here’s a good podcast on the future of news. The topic is “Navigating Media Upheaval” and the panelists are an assortment of long-time journalists who are now navigating change with new companies. Best line is from former Wall Street Journal Publisher Gordon Crovitz. Asked what mainstream news organizations need to do to remain relevant in the new world, he suggests, “The role of the media is to mediate.” He then goes into the possible mediation opportunities between different groups, including advertisers. Bottom line: newspapers’ opportunities are to tap into very specific geographically defined groups, but most aren’t doing a very good job. Other panelists are Neil Chase, VP of author services at Federated Media, Ken Doctor, affiliate analyst at Outsell; and Jeanette Gibson, editor-in-chief of News@Cisco. The session is ably moderated by Sam Whitmore of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey.

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And finally, more morbid but priceless humor from The Onion.

Your obedient editor is on cloud nine this morning, having been on hand in Fenway Park last night to witness a no-hitter by Red Sox lefty Jon Lester. It took 39 years of attendance at hundreds of games in New York, Boston and several other cities in North America, but the thrill was worth the wait. The achievement is particularly notable because 18 months ago Lester was undergoing chemotherapy. His remarkable recovery is a fairy tale of spirit and endurance and this couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

But on to the future of journalism.

Few journalists are better qualified to speak about that topic than Joshua Micah Marshall, founder of TalkingPointsMemo and recent winner of a prestigious George Polk Award for investigative journalism.

In a speech to a recent conference on the future of the Web, Marshall mourned the atmosphere of fear and denial that pervades mainstream media newsrooms and said journalists must prepare themselves to do their jobs very differently. He’s optimistic, though. Professional journalists have become too dependent on professional insiders who manufacture sound bites and offer convenient but predictable analysis. In contrast, the new journalism involves the community directly in the reporting, bringing journalists into close contact with their readers. TalkingPointsMemo actively invited readers into its award-winning work on the Alberto Gonzalez scandal and continues to solicit reader investigation and input for such tasks as building, “a better virtual list of politicians’ stances than anything tabulated by the traditional media or the White House.”

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Reading the perspective from overseas, it’s becoming clear that the UK is leading the US in understanding, adapting to and delivering upon the promise of a new kind of journalism. While many American newspaper editors wallow in self-pity, British editors are welcoming readers into the fold, rethinking the role of the investigative journalist and envisioning a brighter future. Editors Weblog interviews Emily Bell, editor-in-chief of guardian.co.uk. She sees bloggers as valuable overseers of journalist practice and believes that journalists must engage more actively with their readers. “The closer you are, the more authentic you are, and the more knowledgeable you can be, then the more purchase you have with the community that will come to you, tell you things and point to your work in certain areas. I think if you don’t have that, in the future as a journalist, you probably don’t have much of a future.”Bell believes newspapers will exist for the foreseeable future but may not be around in 15 years. She accepts this matter-of-factly. She’s optimistic about journalism’s future, even though she sees the profession entering an uneasy period where resources that were once available for investigative projects will be cut while a new model of reporting is still taking shape.Unfortunately, the guardian.co.uk still has to wrestle with the same business challenges as all other newspapers. Press Gazette cites recent comments by the Guardian’s head of editorial development that the site would need “’many millions’” more visitors to sustain the level of investment in journalism it currently makes.”

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Sean Dodson of The Guardian looks at community publishing and the risks of newspapers lending their brands to extremist bloggers. He cites the example of The Telegraph‘s MyTelegraph portal, which plays host to many thoughtful blogs, but “is also inhabited by some very unsavoury characters, including a minority of active members of the far right, anti-abortionists, europhobes and members of an anti-feminist ‘men’s movement’. ” Dodson goes on to compare the community-policing model employed by The Telegraph to the gatekeeper role of papers like the Daily Mail, which pre-approves blog entries before posting. In contrast, The Telegraph lets readers flag unsavory material for editors to review manually. It’s clear that all newspapers (at least in the UK) are moving to open up their brands to reader commentary, but there are still no clear standards for policing these new communities (via Editors Weblog).

CEOs Not Suffering as Badly as Shareholders

Alan Mutter looks at CEO pay, which is always a favorite whipping post for disgruntled shareholders. Not surprisingly, a few sinners stand out. Most notable is Robert E. Jelenic, the former CEO of Journal Register Co. (JRC), whose compensation grew 333.2% to $6.3 million despite the company’s near-bankrupt condition this year in the wake of his leadership. Mutter notes that Jelenic’s golden parachute last year amounted to more than half the market value of JRC itself.

Other CEOs who got raises while their companies stumbled include Robert Dercherd of Belo and Mary E. Junck of Lee Enterprises. On the whole, Mutter says, CEO compensation declined 11.7% while shareholders collectively lost more than 35% of their investments in newspaper stocks in 2007.

Business Shorts

• Looking to gain efficiencies from last month’s giant merger of Thomson Corp. and Reuters Group PLC, the newly combined Thomson Reuters will cut 1,500 jobs, or about three percent of its workforce, an unnamed source told the AP. The source estimated that 140 journalist jobs could go. Like any good news company, Thomson has no plans to announce or comment upon the cutbacks, leaving it to speculation and rumor to discern its actions.
• Gannett reported operating revenue down 7.7% in April on a 10.4% drop in advertising revenue . Classified advertising was off 20% compared to last year.
• April revenue at The New York Times Co. slid 2.2%, although circulation revenue was up 3.3%. Classified advertising was cited as the main culprit.
• Minneapolis Star Tribune Editor Nancy Barnes has been told she will have to cut $2.5 million, or about 10%, from the annual newsroom budget, a Newspaper Guild local official told Editor & Publisher. The paper has recently been reported to be on the brink of bankruptcy, an allegation that management disputes.

And finally…

Mark Hamilton alerts us to this gem of a cover image from The Onion.

After stating confidently last week that his deal to buy Newsday was as good as done, Rupert Murdoch abruptly pulled out of the bidding, ceding ownership to Cablevision. Thus ends a month of speculation about Murdoch’s supposedly devious strategy to corner the New York market and then spread is his publishing empire westward.

Maybe.

As Newsday points out in its own outstanding coverage of the saga, Murdoch walked away from the Dow Jones deal several times before eventually settling on the price he wanted. So the concession to Cablevision could be a ruse meant to force Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell to make a decision (Alan Mutter has a fine analysis of the dire circumstance at the Tribune, whose debt service obligations were an incredible 24% of revenues in the first quarter).

On the other hand, as Newsday points out, a sale to Murdoch could have raised significant antitrust and regulatory issues. With Zell under intense pressure to generate cash, a quick sale to the cash-rich Cablevision could be a more practical option.

For now, it appears that this story is over. Murdoch was reportedly having a grand old time at the Time 100 gala dinner in New York last week, while Mortimer Zuckerman sulked in a corner. Murdoch conceded to a reporter that he might have been a bit hasty in declaring victory in the bidding a day earlier. His demeanor didn’t indicate that he was tired or frustrated about the sudden collapse of the deal. Rather, his relaxed confidence may have been that of a skilled card player waiting to see if his bluff will be called.

Small Town News Outlet Writes New Rules

Columnist Jerry Large of the Seattle Times tells the story of a community newspaper that is thinking differently. The Orting News is an online service that’s filling a void left by the death of a local newspaper. It has ramped up to 14,000 subscribers with a model in which nearly all the reporting is done by members of the community. Anyone can submit an article, and the only fact-checking is an e-mail verification that the sender is who he or she says. Any disputes or corrections are sent directly to the writer. Paid writers cover the really important stuff.

An interesting comment Large’s column is this one: “The Orting News isn’t journalism.” Really? According to who?

Losses & Layoffs

• In what has become an all-too-common refrain of late, Gannett said it’s offering buyouts to about 160 workers at five of its six newspapers in New Jersey. If there aren’t enough takers, layoffs are likely.
• Editor & Publisher cites an SEC filing in which McClatchy estimates its 49.5% stake in the publisher of The Seattle Times has fallen more than a third since last December and 88% from its value at acquisition in late 2006.
• Community newspaper publisher GateHouse Media reported a first-quarter net loss of $28.8 million compared to a $6.1 million loss a year ago. Total revenues were up 78% but same-property revenues fell 4.2%. Gatehouse’s strategy is to buy up newspapers and then use free cash flow to pay out dividends that drive up it stock price. However, even that strategy doesn’t appear to be working these days.

Editor & Publisher has an interesting piece on the debate over paid subscription newspaper websites. It cites a rivalry between the well-established Watertown Daily Times of upstate New York and NewZjunky, a one-man link log that’s beating the tar out of the local newspaper online (That’s the Press, Baby had this story three months ago). The daily just took down its pay wall and is seeing Web traffic increase, but at what cost?

The quandary for newspaper publishers is whether to treat online audience as an extension of print subscribers or to level the playing field and compete for eyeballs with everybody else. The first scenario dictates that you circle the wagons around a paid model, and some 50 small newspapers have done exactly that. But the second option may be the only one that offers hope for long-term survival.

Business News

Newspaper Delisting Watch: Sun-Times Media Group (STMG) joins Journal Register on the list of newspaper companies recently kicked off the New York Stock Exchange. No matter, though. You’ll be able to invest via the Pink Sheets. STMG is exploring strategic alternatives, as are many others.

How to lose $75 million in 12 months: Avista Capital Partners, the owner of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, has taken a $75 million goodwill write-down on its investment because of declining circulation and advertising revenue. Avista bought the paper in late 2006 and took the write-down a year later. Star Tribune revenue fell $75 million between 2005 and 2007.

Miscellany

Alan Mutter documents a trend that many people in the business probably understood instinctively: newspaper advertising declines are proportional to growth in broadband adoption. The good news? There’s still money to be made in Mexico.

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The Newspaper Guild has filed a grievance against The New York Times over a small number of layoffs that were necessary to meet the Times‘ goal of a headcount reduction of 100 people. Demonstrating logic that only a union leader can appreciate, New York Guild President Bill O’Meara said that his union “values quality journalism” and so would be filing a grievance because the layoffs were based on merit rather than seniority. (via Romenesko)

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Editors Weblog has released more results of its Newsroom Barometer survey of more than 700 editors from around the world. Among them are detailed findings about the biggest threats to editorial independence, investment priorities and more.

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Boston Globe EVP Al Larkin is retiring after a 36-year career. His job will be redistributed among other people. Larkin oversaw the Globe’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of school desegregation in the 1970s. The paper’s work at that time really put it on the national map.

LAmag.com rounds up a group of former LA Times editors for one-on-ones about the past and future of the newspaper. The conversation is pleasant until you hit the jump page, when former EICs Dean Baquet and James O’Shea unload on owner Sam Zell.

Quoting from Baquet:

“Tribune was not a good steward, but Zell seems to be worse. Tribune didn’t like the L.A. Times, but Zell seems to be flailing and making it up as he goes along. At least with Tribune, you could have a rational fight—they never shouted obscenities at me. I wish somebody could tell this guy that he’s presiding over important newspapers and that sounding like a knucklehead won’t work in the newspaper business. Doesn’t he understand that the best people at the Times are floating résumés across the country because of his bullying?”

And from O’Shea:

“I think Mr. Zell looks at newspapers as he looks at any business, but a newspaper isn’t any other business. It’s a public service. If you do a good job serving the public, then business will be good. Public service is not a dividend you decrease or increase when profits fall or grow. What the L.A. Times becomes will depend on Mr. Zell’s understanding of that.”

Survey says Newspaper Websites Attract Smart, Rich People

A Nielsen survey commissioned by the Newspaper Association of America reports that newspaper websites attracted more than 66.4 million unique visitors in the first quarter, up 12.3% from last year. Page views were up a more modest five percent. In addition, the survey found that regular online newspaper readers are richer, better educated, more likely to travel and more likely to use iTunes. They have all kinds of other desirable characteristics, which you can read about in the press release.

Murdoch Still Favored to Win Newsday

Newsday continues to provide the best coverage of its own impending sale. You’d think that with Cablevision outbidding two other suitors by $70 million, the deal would be a no-brainer.  Not so, says this report. For one thing, Sam Zell may be reluctant to snub his new buddy, Rupert Murdoch. Cablevision may also face the same kind of cross-ownership regulatory hurdles as News Corp. And the whole deal needs to be rubber-stamped by a watchdog group of Tribune Co. employees, who may or may not agree with their boss. The whole thing could drag on for months. (via Romenesko)

Envisioning the Future of News

Susan Edgerley, assistant managing editor of The New York Times, is answering questions from readers. She’s focused on reinventing the newsroom. Some notable quotes:

“Two years ago, we might have been hesitant to break a scoop on the Web — we would have worried about the competition catching up to us before our print deadline. No more. Now we put the story out there and figure out how to advance it for the next day’s paper.”

 “The Web staff used to be in a different building a couple of blocks from our old Times Square office. When we moved into our new building about a year ago, we had the space to sit together for the first time.”

 “I don’t think you’re wasting your time getting a print journalism degree. Telling stories fairly and compellingly will always be at the center of what we do.”

 “We’re hiring people, some of them straight out of school, for their Web skills.”

 “Finally, NYTimes.com is more than the stories, pictures and graphics you see everyday in The New York Times. It is more than a newspaper on the Web. We want to use its blogs and reader comments and Topics pages and interactivity to talk more directly to our readers and find ways for them to share information with us.”

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ReinventingClassifieds.com has a prescription for resuscitating the dying business. Newspapers should put all their classifieds into one distributed, constantly updated database and then distribute them freely to bloggers, who can sell display ads against them. Bloggers can offer free classifieds to their readers, which become part of the master database. It’s an interesting idea, although we question how much interest bloggers – or display advertisers – will have in running ads next to ads. (via Romenesko)

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For the true TV news junkie, check out LiveNewsCameras.com. The site aggregates video feeds from more than 100 stations around the U.S. The project is the brainchild of a former Bay Area TV producer, says the San Francisco Peninsula Press Club.

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Editors Weblog reports on Sunlight Foundation’s new tools for online journalists. They include a Google Maps mash-up of earmarks from last year’s Labor, Health and Human Services appropriations bill.

There’s also an item on the innovative uses of Twitter by the Evening Leader in the UK. The group text-messaging service recently enabled the paper to cover local election results, scooping its competition and setting up the print edition for more thoughtful next-day coverage. Will Twitter become an essential tool for journalists in the future? Let’s hear your comments.

Layoff Log

• The Lexington Herald-Leader is offering a voluntary buyout program, looking to reduce its staff of 385 employees by about four percent. Layoffs are possible if the offer doesn’t generate enough interest.
• The Camera of Boulder, Colo. laid off nine employees — 6 percent of its staff — in response to declining advertising revenues. The president of the company described the newspaper’s business as “healthy.” You figure it out.

The New York Times tells the story of International Data Group’s (IDG) successful transition from the print to the online model, proving that it can be done (full disclosure: I worked for IDG for 15 years). IDG still has a lot of print publications, but the print component of its publishing revenue model has dropped from 86% in 2002 to 48% online today. The Web has not only picked up the slack but is actually driving growth of 10% annually, according to CEO Pat McGovern.

This story focuses on Infoworld, which was once a top technology title in the U.S. Buffeted by the rapid shift of its techie readers from print to the Web, Infoworld shut down its print edition a year ago. Today, it’s bringing in just as much money online as it did in print, only lthe margins are much better.

The technology trade media market is unique in several ways, but publishers should take heart that an online business model really does exist and that you really can get there.

Stirring Story From the Heartland

When The Times of Liberal, Ks., cut back from daily to three days a week last fall, readers took it as a slap in the face. The proud town of 20,000 thought it deserved better. So the publisher of the Times packed up, took 70% of his staff with him and launched the High Plains Daily Leader, a new daily newspaper (yes, you read that right) that distributed its first 7,000 copies on Sunday. Key details are unclear; the paper has no website yet and the AP report says nothing about who’s funding the venture. But its kind of thrilling to see that entrepreneurial spirit and reader advocacy are alive and well amid the pervasive gloom in the industry.

Labor Struggle Amid the Palms

The Santa Barbara News-Press laid off 10 employees last week, including two newsroom managers, in part because of financial damage caused by a Teamsters boycott. The trouble started two years ago, when most of the top editors collectively quit over allegations that the owner was interfering with editorial coverage. The owner shot back that all she was doing was preventing the editors from injecting their opinions into their reporting. So the editors voted to organize, the owner resisted, the Teamsters urged readers to cancel their subscriptions and apparently a lot of them did. Now we supposed the next move is up to the union. It’s hard to imagine all this unrest in such a pretty Pacific coast town.

Update: Craig Smith offers a lengthy perspective on the  News-Press‘ problems, laying the blame squarely at the feet of owner Wendy McCaw. Smith says McCaw has run the paper like a personal blog, micro-managing the editors and using threats and intimidation to keep staff in line. The large number of recent stories about animals is a consequence of McCaw’s passion for animal rights, he claims. Staff members live in fear.

Veteran Editors Sound Off on Industry Woes

Doug Fisher does what a good columnist should and challenges conventional wisdom by arguing that the newspaper industry should stop panicking and starting finding out where the readers are. Reporters and editors are too inclined to make assumptions, says Fisher, and a lot of the headlong rush to online delivery is driven by their gut belief that readers prefer to get their news that way. In fact, Fisher believes a lot of readers would gladly start taking a daily newspaper again if publishers could figure out how to make the product more useful.

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Veteran editor Jerry Ceppos says it’s time for the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME) organizations to merge. The existence of two groups with similar charters and declining memberships is weakening both, says Ceppos, who’s a past APME president. He describes attendance at the recent ASNE meeting as being the worst he’s seen in 25 years. In writing this Poynter opinion piece, Ceppos ran the merger idea by officials from both groups. The APME basically trashed it while the ASNE sounded interested. The best part of the article is excerpts from the groups’ mission statements, which read like they were written on the back of cocktail napkins.

Survey Reveals Editors Realistic About Industry’s Future

The results of the annual Newsroom Barometer survey of 700 editors from around the world was just released, and it’s worth a scan at Editors Weblog. We found few big surprises in the numbers. Most editors believe news will be free in the future, the Internet will be the preferred delivery platform and journalists will need to use every medium at their disposal to tell a story. Nearly 60% think the decline in young readership is the industry’s biggest threat. Almost two-thirds expect some editorial operations to be outsourced.

If anything is remarkable about this survey, it’s that a significant minority of editors continues to curse the darkness. Nearly a third still believe that print “will be the most common way of reading the news in your country” in a decade. One-third also believe that readers will pay for news (although the ambiguous wording of this question may have skewed the results). Sadly, only 45% believe the quality of journalism will improve over the next decade, down from 50% in 2006. The research was conducted by Zogby International and commissioned by the World Editors Forum and Reuters.

And Finally…

• Trading volume of McClatchy stock was seven times higher than normal on the New York Stock Exchange yesterday. Nobody knows why.
• The New York Post has cut its trim size by about an inch and a half over the last two weeks, making itself almost square. True to its mission of informing the public, the paper won’t comment about why it did this or how much it expects to save.
• The Charlotte Observer has eliminated its telemarketing operation and laid off 13 employees, or about five percent of the paper’s total workforce. The Observer statement didn’t say the operation was being outsourced, but rather eliminated entirely. It will be interesting to see the effect on circulation.

The owner of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is disputing a report in the New York Post that the paper is on the brink of bankruptcy. In a statement issued late Friday, Publisher and Chairman Chris Harte said the Star Tribune “currently has sufficient liquidity and is current on all its debt payment obligations.” However, he acknowledged that the company has hired a private equity firm to advise it on business options.

There’s no question things are grim at the “Strib.” The paper has cut 10% of its workforce over the last two years and was one of the leading losers in the ABC audit report published last week. In February, Harte told his people “Total revenue is down almost $75 million in the last two years… classified revenue was down over 50 percent from what it was at the start of the decade.”

A Star Tribune bankruptcy raises the likelihood that the paper’s creditors could end up owning it, and you know how committed banks are to quality journalism. The most likely scenario is massive expense cuts and a fire sale. The Star Tribune’s near-monopoly position does buy it some breathing room, but it’s hard to imagine there would be much hope of attracting new readers from such a crippled state. Ironically, as we noted two weeks ago, readers of the Star Tribune’s website spend almost as much time there as readers of The Wall Street Journal’s wsj.com.

Do J-Schools Hinder Progress?

Vin Crosbie writes a searing commentary on ClickZ about why journalism schools are part of the problem in the newspaper industry, rather than part of the solution. Having spent most of the last year on a sabbatical from consulting to teach journalism, Crosbie says he’s been astounded by the refusal of faculty at various academic institutions to change the ways in which they teach their craft in the face of seismic industry disruption (he’s careful not to point the finger at his own). “What I found were faculties resistant to change and students whose insights and mastery of new media were being eroded by the authoritative resistance to change of so many professors,” he writes.

He estimates that a quarter of J-school professors are actively blocking curriculum change and that they’re intimidating the 50% of the teachers who do want to move forward. Surprisingly, it’s the academics in their 30s and 40s who seem to be most in denial.

Union Agitation in the East Bay

It didn’t take long for union organizers to return to the East Bay. More than half the employees of a chain of newspapers in the region have signed cards demanding that they get union representation. They’ve filed their petition with the National Labor Relations Board, which will probably clear them for a vote.

The unit of MediaNews Group that runs the papers in the area probably thought it had scored an end run around the union nine months ago when it combined enough operations to dilute union membership below the 50% level required for recognition. Now employees of the combined operations have struck back. It’s hard to imagine what either side stands to gain. As a commenter on Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20-Year Club notes, “Gee, now they get to be laid off in order of seniority instead on who can do the job best.”

Your Daily Murdoch

As expected, Cablevision bid $650 for Newsday, which means Murdoch will have to match the ante. Speculation is that he’ll do just that and will eventually walk away with the prize, in part because his offer cuts Tribune Co. in for a tax-efficient minority stake and in part because he and Sam Zell are now good buddies.

Alan Mutter thinks Zell has a secret agenda in cozying up to Murdoch: he sees News Corp. as his exit strategy. Mutter sketches a scenario in which Tribune Co., on the brink of default, sells to News Corp., giving News Corp. cross-ownership of multiple print and TV properties in key cities. Murdoch and Zell then argue before the Federal Trade Commission that such consolidation is necessary for survival in the face of Internet competition. If the FTC modifies the rules, then News Corp. goes on a shopping spree. Intriguing idea.

And Finally

Editor & Publisher has a nice analysis of recent shakeups in D.C. newsrooms, including the ousters of the Associated Press bureau chief and a top national editor at The Washington Post. The common thread appears to be that these people were the victims of political struggles touched off by industry change.

The Economist summarizes the trials of the U.S. newspaper industry. It’s nothing you haven’t read here already, but it’s done in that crisp, efficient Economist style.

Blogging for Time, Justin Fox says newspapers will milk their current business until they die because they just can’t bring themselves to change their print-centric mentality. This statement is followed, curiously, by a discussion of his lunch.

Final Earnings Reports Trickle In

The Ontario-based publisher of the Toronto Star and dozens of community weeklies reported a $3.5 million loss on a 3.4% decline in revenue. A big factor in the swing from last year’s $15.7 million same-quarter profit was a $21 million restructuring charge associated with the elimination of 160 jobs at the flagship. Less than a month ago, news reports were marveling at the resilience of the Canadian newspaper market, but that optimism seems to have all but disappeared. The Globe and Mail says executives from other Canadian publishers like CanWest Global and Astral Media are also seeing rough times ahead.

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American Community Newspapers (ACN), which publishes three dailies and 100 mostly free non-dailies, lost $4.5 million in the first quarter on an 11.7% revenue decline. It blamed the 44 papers in its Minneapolis/St. Paul cluster. More ominous was its statement that “for the second quarter of fiscal 2008 ACN does not expect to be in compliance with financial ratio covenants contained in its credit agreements.” In other words, it’s hoping creditors will be feeling generous, which isn’t too likely given the ugly state of the market since the Bear Stearns implosion.

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Journal Register Co. will stop acting like a public company, even though it’ll still be publicly held. Beaten, bedraggled and delisted, the publisher of 21 dailies and 300 community papers said the cost of filing SEC reports and publishing shareholder communications just wasn’t worth it, in light of its stock being priced below that of a gumball. You’ll still be able to buy the stock on the Pink Sheets market, but you might just want to use the Pink Sheets to dispose of that wad of gum. Journal Register has applied for the necessary SEC exemptions.

Layoff Log

Fresh on the heels of a whopping 8.5% loss in daily circulation, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said it’s cutting 62 positions and cutting back its distribution area from 74 to 49 counties. As recently as two years ago, the paper was distributed to 200 counties in five states.

Craig Smith says the Santa Barbara News-Press has laid off 16 people and names some names. He quotes a memo from the publishers saying that the Teamsters Union, which represents newsroom employees, has been doing things like calling people and urging them to cancel their subscriptions. One wonders how union members could think this would be constructive activity in the current environment. There’s no mention of total employment at the paper.

Where Will All the Dollars Go?

Respected market analyst Henry Blodgett speculates on Silicon Valley Insider about where $42 billion in newspaper advertising revenue will go. Describing a scenario that’s been outlined on this blog many times, he envisions a future in which circulation declines eventually reverse economies of scale and send newsapers into a tailspin. He adds that the green movement will pile on with its general distaste for anything on paper. Blodgett sees newspapers and their associated websites capturing maybe a third of those ad dollars, most of which will go online elsewhere. A spirited debate ensues in the comments section.

Department of Unintended Consequences

Washington City Paper analyzes the newspaper classified advertising business and finds that it is actually surprisingly healthy in the Beltway area. But the reason is that foreclosure notices have replaced “for sale” advertising as the engine of growth in the deflating real estate market . “On March 13, the Washington Post’s classifieds section totaled 22 pages, approximately 14 of which were devoted to what are technically known as ‘trustee’s sales,'” the website reports. This revenue is a legacy subsidy from area municipalities, which require foreclosure notices to be listed in local newspapers at several hundred dollars a pop. Which proves you can always find a silver lining.