We have a stack of good news about the reinvention of journalism that we really, really will get to you ASAP. It’s just that this depressing stuff keeps coming up.

2007 Newspaper Ad Plunge Was Worst in a Half Century

You’ve got to admire John Sturm, the CEO of the Newspaper Association of America. Here’s his quote in Editor & Publisher, commenting on news that the newspaper industry experienced its worst one-year drop in advertising revenue in 50 years in 2007: “Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms.”

You get the sense that John is the kind of guy who could find a silver lining behind any cloud. In this case, it’s the news that online revenue now represents 7.5% of overall newspaper ad revenue, up from 5.7% the previous year. The “near-term challenges” are that print ad revenue plunged 9.4%. Run the numbers, and you can attribute at least half of the gains in online revenue to the fact that the whole pie is getting smaller.

Newsweek Cuts 111, Including Many Top Critics

Newsweek is buying out 111 staffers, reports Radar, and a lot of institutional memory is going out the door. Quoting: “Among those leaving are some of the magazine’s best-known, most-admired and longest-service critics, including David Gates, David Ansen and Cathleen McGuigan. Harold Shain…All of the chief researchers are also leaving, including Nancy Stadtman, Ray Sawhill and Ray Anello, and their positions may be eliminated.” The report doesn’t say what percentage of the total staff this represents, but the cuts were probably inevitable in light of the recent 16% decline in newsstand sales.

Cuts aren’t just in print

Online technology publisher CNet has laid off 120 people, or about 10% of its workforce. The cuts were announced suddenly and were immediate, with no grace period. International Business Times has the details and the corporatese memo from the CEO. CNet is suffering from an overall downturn in tech ad spending, the result of consolidation and lack of new startup activity in the IT market. It’s also being pecked to death by ducks, as bloggers steal traffic in dribs and drabs. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington remarks on this phenomenon, but suggests that bloggers will have to band together to form a significant media entity. He says it’s going to happen, though.

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Malaise is apparently spreading into local broadcast media. U.S. New’ Liz Wolgemuth reports that TV stations in Miami, Denver and Sacramento have laid off staff. A commenter says it happened in Dallas, too.

Short Takes

One of the few newspaper chains to resist the recent write-down frenzy, Lee Enterprises, finally swallowed the bitter pill, taking $500 million to $700 million in lost goodwill charges for the first quarter. A defiant management statement said the current stock price undervalues the company.

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LA Observed has assembled some of the parting e-mails sent by laid-off staffers at the LA Times. Several take shots at TribCo owner Sam Zell. “You want people to ‘Talk to Sam’ but not to ‘Talkback to Sam,'” says one.

As If You Didn’t Know, “The State of the News Media Is Troubled”

If you don’t have time to read the voluminous (180,000-word) State of the Media Report, J.D. Lasica gives a pretty fine overview here. Summarizing his summary: The old “destination” model is dead. The job of the news organization today is as much to direct people to information as to tell stories. The big-brand news organizations may have even more throw weight online than they do in print. The vast democratization of news that was expected isn’t occurring. In the age of search, every story is a home page (we liked this one). More reporting will consist of incremental updates, some even being simple e-mail or Twitter messages.

The New Yorker devotes 6,600 meticulously edited words to the impending death of newspapers, examining objectively the promise and perils of a new-media world which writer Eric Alterman sees embodied in the Huffington Post. Drawing on sources ranging from Walter Lippman to The Simpsons, Alterman concludes:

• That the death of newspapers is inevitable;
• That the model that will emerge to replace them looks strikingly like that of the newspapers of 200 years ago; and
• That our democracy is probably better off for this trend, although the plight of people in “the dark” is worse.

Here are some excerpts. Everything is elliptical:

Bill Keller, the executive editor of the Times, said recently in a speech in London, “At places where editors and publishers gather, the mood these days is funereal. Editors ask one another, ‘How are you?,’ in that sober tone one employs with friends who have just emerged from rehab or a messy divorce.”

The McClatchy Company, which was the only company to bid on the Knight Ridder chain when, in 2005, it was put on the auction block, has surrendered more than eighty per cent of its stock value since making the $6.5-billion purchase. Lee Enterprises’ stock is down by three-quarters since it bought out the Pulitzer chain, the same year. America’s most prized journalistic possessions are suddenly looking like corporate millstones. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared.

Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.

It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers’ stock valuation.

A recent study published by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they could believe “all or most” media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago, Nearly nine in ten Americans, according to the Sacred Heart study, say that the media consciously seek to influence public policies, though they disagree about whether the bias is liberal or conservative.

Arianna Huffington and her partners believe that their model points to where the news business is heading. “People love to talk about the death of newspapers, as if it’s a foregone conclusion. I think that’s ridiculous,” she says. “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”

[Huffington Post] is poised to break even on advertising revenue of somewhere between six and ten million dollars annually, according to estimates from Nielsen NetRatings and comScore, the Huffington Post is more popular than all but eight newspaper sites.

The blogosphere relies on its readership, €”its community, €”for quality control.

Most posts inside the [Huffington] site, however, go up before an editor sees them.

Journalism works well, [Walter] Lippmann wrote, when “it can report the score of a game or a transatlantic flight, or the death of a monarch.” But where the situation is more complicated, journalism “causes no end of derangement, misunderstanding, and even misrepresentation.”

When Lippmann was writing, many newspapers remained committed to the partisan model of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American press, in which editors and publishers viewed themselves as appendages of one or another political power or patronage machine and slanted their news offerings accordingly.

The twentieth-century model, in which newspapers strive for political independence and attempt to act as referees between competing parties on behalf of what they perceive to be the public interest, was, in Lippmann’s time, in its infancy.

[The piece goes into an analysis of a 1920s debate between Lippman and rival John Dewey over the nature and methods of democratic discourse.]

As the profession grew more sophisticated and respected, top reporters, anchors, and editors naturally rose in status to the point where some came to be considered the social equals of the senators, [P]olitics increasingly became a business for professionals and a spectator sport for the great unwashed

The Huffington Post was hardly the first Web site to stumble on the technique of leveraging the knowledge of its readers to challenge the mainstream media narrative. For example, conservative bloggers at sites like Little Green Footballs took pleasure in helping to bring down Dan Rather after he broadcast dubious documents allegedly showing that George W. Bush had received special treatment during his service in the Texas Air National Guard.

Talking Points Memo “was almost single-handedly responsible for bringing the story of the fired U.S. Attorneys to a boil,” a scandal that ultimately ended with the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and a George Polk Award for Marshall, the first ever for a blogger.

During the Katrina crisis, for example, [Talking Points Memo] discovered that some of [its] readers worked in the federal government’s climate-and-weather-tracking infrastructure. They provided the site with reliable reporting available nowhere else.

Traditional newspaper men and women tend to be unimpressed by the style of journalism practiced at the political Web sites, Real reporting, especially the investigative kind, is expensive, they remind us. Aggregation and opinion are cheap.

In October, 2005, at an advertisers’ conference in Phoenix, Bill Keller complained that bloggers merely “recycle and chew on the news,” contrasting that with the Times‘ emphasis on what he called “a ‘journalism of verification,’ ” rather than mere “assertion.”

“Bloggers are not chewing on the news. They are spitting it out,” Arianna Huffington protested, “In the run-up to the Iraq war, many in the mainstream media, including the New York Times, lost their veneer of unassailable trustworthiness for many readers and viewers.”

Newspaper editors now say that they “get it.” Yet traditional journalists are blinkered by their emotional investment in their Lippmann-like status as insiders. They tend to dismiss not only most blogosphere-based criticisms but also the messy democratic ferment from which these criticisms emanate. The Chicago Tribune recently felt compelled to shut down comment boards [because they] “were beginning to read like a community of foul-mouthed bigots.”

[Huffington] predicts “more vigorous reporting in the future that will include distributed journalism, €”wisdom-of-the-crowd reporting, A lot of reporting now is just piling on the conventional wisdom, €”with important stories dying on the front page of the New York Times.”

And so we are about to enter a fractured, chaotic world of news, characterized by superior community conversation but a decidedly diminished level of first-rate journalism.

Before Adolph Ochs took over the Times, in 1896, and issued his famous “without fear or favor” declaration, the American scene was dominated by brazenly partisan newspapers. And the news cultures of many European nations long ago embraced the notion of competing narratives for different political communities, It may not be entirely coincidental that these nations enjoy a level of political engagement that dwarfs that of the United States.

In “Imagined Communities” (1983), an influential book on the origins of nationalism, the political scientist Benedict Anderson recalls Hegel’s comparison of the ritual of the morning paper to that of morning prayer: “Each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.” It is at least partially through the “imagined community” of the daily newspaper, Anderson writes, that nations are forged.

 

Newsday in Play: Media Moguls Salivate

The New York Times has more details on Sam Zell’s interest in selling Newsday. In addition to the previously reported interest by Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman, it now appears that Cablevision also wants to get in on the bidding. Unless Cablevision wins, the most likely outcome is that Newsday’s production facilities will be combined either with Zuckerman’s Daily News or Murdoch’s New York Post, thereby putting heavy pressure on the loser. It’s been questionable for some time whether New York City could support three tabloids and this may decide the issue. For Zell, the sale of Newsday must be a defeat. As the Times points out, the deal “illustrates the paradox Tribune faces: The best way to raise cash to meet short-term demands is to sell the very same properties the company would want to keep in the long run because they generate healthy profits.”

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Variety analyzes the first few months of Zell’s Tribune ownership and concludes that the real estate magnate got more than he bargained for. The 15% decline in revenues was unexpected, insiders say, and that’s why extreme measures like layoffs and asset sales are on the table. Zell has tried to bring in managers who question everything, but the problems at Tribune Co. run deeper than a calcified corporate structure. The industry is imploding and that’s not good when there’s a $13 billion debt to service.

Faltering Economics

Alan Mutter comments on the potential impact of bond rating downgrades on the newspaper industry. In a helpful tutorial on the workings of the bond market, he explains why the near-junk status of Belo, GateHouse Media, McClatchy, Media General, MediaNews Group, Morris and Tribune increases their debt burden at a time when they can least afford it. Paying off bonds is simply a matter of growing the business faster than the debt burden, but newspapers are unable to do that right now. Lenders don’t want to run newspapers, so they’ll do what they can to right the business, but that usually means vicious cost cuts. In a worst-case scenario, the defaulting borrower’s assets are chopped up and the company shut down.

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On top of everything else, the price of newsprint is up over 10% in the last six months. The increases are offsetting many of the savings publishers had hoped to realize from resizing initiatives. Dow Jones spent $30 million to retrofit presses and manufacturing operations when it shrunk the Wall Street Journal a year ago. Those expenses may have done little more than stave off the impact of the rise in paper prices for a while.

 

Three From the Coast

Pasadena Weekly attempts to total up the newspaper layoffs in the Los Angeles area. It comes up with 70, including 31 pressroom workes at the LA Times, 22 at the LA Daily News and 10 in Pasadena (where there are now five reporters left to cover a dozen communities). The epicenter (‘scuse the reference) of coverage is LA Observed, which journalists are reportedly checking every half hour for more bad news.

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That’s the Press, Baby! proposes a novel explanation for the San Jose Mercury News’ implosion: geography. The author proposes that in a high-cost area like the South Bay, the Merc had to expand or be pecked to death by free local papers in the bedroom communities crowded into the narrow corridor between the bay and the mountains. There was simply nowhere to expand.

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Finally, the Los Angeles Times has an interesting new example of grassroots journalism. The Homicide Report blog, written by a reporter and one contributor, documents every homicide in Los Angeles County (which adds up to 165 as of this writing). It’s the type of reporting that only a professional news organization could do and it dramatizes that real people are affected by homicide, a topic that is often treated matter-of-factly by the news media.

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Continuing the dirge of dreary earnings that began on Wednesday this week, Tribune Co. wrapped up its last quarter as a publicly traded firm with a $78 million loss from continuing operations. The pattern was identical to that reported by Journal Communications, McClatchy and New York Times Co. yesterday: Classified revenue down 25%, hurt by a 34% drop in real estate advertising and a 28% decline in help-wanted; retail advertising off 10%; national down 11%. Most ominously, the publisher reported that Internet ad revenue was up only 6%.

Evidence is mounting that Sam Zell had no idea what he was getting into. Having initially declared that the Tribune Co. wouldn’ t downsize its way to profitability, he has hacked more than 500 jobs and is talking of further cuts. Zell said he planned to keep the company mostly intact, but in announcing disappointing quarterly earnings on Thursday, the company said it has ““begun a strategic review of certain Tribune assets.” There’s now talk that Newsday is on the block, with media moguls Rupert Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman sniffing around.

The Chicago Sun-Times ran a contest for the best reader-submitted video opposing Sam Zell’s proposal to sell naming rights to the Chicago Cubs. The winner was a college student who interns at the Tribune. The Trib has some fun with winning its rival’s contest in this clip, which also includes the winning video.

Hapless Sun-Times May Be Next Big Downturn Victim

Could the Chicago Sun-Times be the next big city daily to shut down? Read this BusinessWeek profile and you’ll probably come to that conclusion. Once a hard-hitting scourge of local politicians, the Sun-Times has been slammed by a combination of the industry downturn and management misdeeds that landed two former executives in jail. Having hacked away at costs in an effort to stabilize the ship, the paper that once won seven Pulitzers in one 20-year stretch is now reduced to haranguing rival Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell while also outsourcing its delivery to him. Concludes BW: “it’s hard to see how the Sun-Times will be around much past its 61st birthday next year.”

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Meanwhile, the Chicago Sun-Times Media Group (STMG) reported a dismal fourth quarter 2007 net loss of $59.1 million, up from $34.6 million a year earlier. Editor & Publisher notes that “STMG, which publishes about 100 dailies and non-dailies in the Chicago market, is in the midst of a study of ‘strategic alternatives,’ including a sale of all or part of the company.”And to highlight how bad things are, “STMG launched a plan to reduce operating costs by $50 million by June 30, 2008. Among the measures the company undertook was outsourcing distribution to the rival Chicago Tribune, outsourcing ad production, newsroom and management layoffs, and folding some newspapers.” Can you imagine outsourcing distribution to your competitor?

Profitless in Seattle

Wanna buy a newspaper? Or three of them, actually. The Seattle Times. Co. is trying to unwind its ill-advised 1998 decision to go into debt to buy three newspapers in Maine. Apparently, the purchase was homage to the paper’s founder, who hailed from the Pine Tree State. However, the cash-strapped company can no longer afford such folly and is looking to dump the Portland Press Herald, Waterville Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal. There’s even talk that Portland’s newspaper union might buy the local rag. Perhaps that’d be a way to restore the 27 jobs the paper recently cut.

Dow Jones Surveys the Damage

Regular NDW readers won’t find much new in this Dow Jones story about the perilous state of the U.S. newspaper industry, but it is a good wrap-up of recent events. It’s generous to the industry in recounting why newspapers didn’t invest more aggressively online a few years ago. Quoting:

“For one, many newspapers were scared away from online ventures when the dot- com boom turned to a bust in 2000. In order to fully nip online competition in the bud, however, newspapers would have needed to invest heavily in burgeoning Web ventures before those entities got too expensive. For many newspapers, that kind of investment was not within their means.”

Not within their means. That’s like driving a car on bald tires because new ones are not within your means. Newspapers have had gross profit margins of more than 20% for decades. There were plenty of “means” to invest if owners had simply seen the bullet train that was heading at them. The post-bubble period was the best time in a decade to buy into the Internet. So why didn’t any newspaper companies do that?

The best quote in the story comes from McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt, who told a December conference that a “significant portion” of the current troubles the industry faces are “cyclical.” Right. So is global warming.

Envisioning the Future of Journalism

The Editors Weblog interviews Jim Brady, Executive Editor of Washingtonpost.com, who provides sensible insight on the future of journalism. Newspapers aren’t going away, he says, but many smaller papers are finding that the economies of scale of online publishing make it a more sensible route that newsprint. Journalism itself will also evolve to include more reader interaction, with readers doing more of the legwork. “Iif journalists allow readers, not to investigate for them, but to help them flag and acquire easily accessible information, it makes investigative journalism easier to do than it was fifteen years ago, when the journalists had to make dozens of phone calls and go down to the public library.”

Online Media Baron’s Advice: Blow It All Up

Billionaire entrepeneur and former AOL top executive Ted Leonsis has a 10-point plan to rescue the newspaper business. It basically comes down to blowing up the existing model, going entirely online and distributing through every available channel. Oh, and search-optimizing. Veteran journalists will love this suggestion:”Get rid of senior editors. Turn them into algorithmic managers…Knowing statistically what content gets the best click through across all media is a key deliverable. Newspapers need math majors running big swaths of the organization…There are too many English majors in key positions.”

Milestone Award for New-Media Publisher

A landmark event in online journalism occurred in late February, when Talking Points Memo was awarded a George Polk Award for its coverage of the firing of eight United States attorneys. This New York Times account points to the difference between the new breed of online reporting and traditional print journalism. Chief among them is the involvement of readers in the process. “There are thousands who have contributed some information over the last year,” the paper quotes Talking Point’s Joshua Micah Marshall as saying. Marshall has even been known to give “assignments” to his readers, asking them to comb through official documents. His journalism also mixes original reporting with generous links to other information online. It’s very Wikipedia-like. And it’s working. The reader- and advertising-funded site gets about 400,000 page views a day and has about 750,000 unique visitors a month.

Two Midwest Dailies Cut Staff

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch will elminate 31 jobs, mostly out of operations and marketing. No newsroom positions will be cut. The publisher said the P-D is performing pretty well, considering, but that the housing slump had hurt ad revenues. The story didn’t say how many people the paper employs.

The Duluth News Tribune plans to cut between 15 and 30 workers, or anywhere from 6% to 13% of its workforce. The company said the cuts were prompted by an ad revenue slide of more than 10%.

A Hostile Takeover in Long Beach?

It’s still too early to add the Long Beach Press-Telegram to the RIP list, but it looks like the paper is headed in that direction. MediaNews Group, which owns both publications, has said that it plans to consolidate the Press-Telegram with the Torrance Daily Breeze. That process is under way, and it looks like the Daily Breeze is running the show. Its publisher and editor will now effectively run the Long Beach paper, and the “consolidation” is mainly a matter of cutting jobs in Long Beach and requiring people to apply for the same jobs in Torrance. The Press-Telegram now has just 10 reporters covering 19 communities. Did we mention that the Press-Telegram is a unionized paper and the Breeze isn’t?

Black Humor at the Merc

It’s difficult to figure out from this AP story just how many SJ Mercury employees were cut, but we think it was 50. In any case, 20 of them were newsroom employees who got laid off or took buyouts. Employees marked the occasion by dressing in black and gathering for a noon ceremony. This is the fourth round of cuts at the Merc since 2006. HR experts will tell you that cutting by dribs and drabs is not the way to reduce staff. Better to do one deep, painful layoff and get it over with.

Washington Post Goes Buyout Route

Following the paths taken recently by the New York Times and Bay Area Newspaper Group, the Washington Post Co. offered buyouts to employees who are 50 or over and have at least five years of service. Publisher Katharine Weymouth didn’t say how many jobs were to be cut and the buyouts weren’t offered to everybody. She noted that she couldn’t rule out layoffs. The Post story says that more more than 100 of the 785 newsroom employees meet the new criteria.

Feeling the Chill Downeast

The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram will eliminate 27 jobs – requiring 15 layoffs -and cut the size of its news hole. No reporters will be laid off, although some editorial jobs will be cut. The publisher cited a continuing gloomy business climate. The Time Record in nearby Brunswick laid off 10 employees last month.

The state of Maine’s Department of Economic and Community Development is investigating layoffs of 10 people at the Times Record in Brunswick. Apparently the new owner financed the purchase of the paper in part with tax-free bonds from the Department, which put the state in the difficult position of financing local layoffs to support an out-of-state publisher.

Also…

The New Haven Register hasn’t announced anything, but you can’t tell a journalist not to share a good story. The paper’s Capitol reporter, Greg Hladky, told someone at the Courant that he was one of five people let go in “cuts” (not necessarily layoffs). The NH Register editor couldn’t be reached for comment and that’s all she wrote.

Vignettes from the field

Our RSS reader picks up occasional commentary by newspaper readers and former journalists that provide a glimpse into how the newspaper industry collapse is affecting ordinary people:

• A Bay Area book enthusiast laments the Chron’s decision to fold its stand-alone book review section into the weekly news analysis pages.
• A Twin Cities consultant lists the reasons he’s canceling his newspaper subscription. There are several. Like many readers, he simply doesn’t see much value any more. As newspapers slash costs and staff, the devaluation spiral continues. The product gets worse, which gives readers less inclination to read it.
• Mark Hamilton remarks wryly on the dubious value of incessant political polling
• Finally, the head of global public relations for Disney Parks & Resorts issues the most pessimistic forecast for the newspaper industry that we’ve heard anywhere. At about 10:20 in this podcast interview Eric Schwartzman, Disney’s Duncan Wardle states, “The printed newspaper industry has three to five years to live.” We hope his staff heard that!

Business sections feel the blow

Newspaper business sections have been hard hit by the ad downturn,

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Meanwhile, European specialty publisher Reed is going one stop further. It’s eliminating not just the business section but the whole business. Instead, it’ll double down on online media and risk analytics.

Glimmers of digital hope

The U.S. political campaign has apparently given a lift to newspaper websites, according to Media Post. Quoting: “The week ending February 23 saw visits to Web sites in Hitwise’s news and media category increase 22% compared to the same week in 2007. The upswing especially benefited Web sites for print publications, including online portals for magazines and newspapers. The New York Times Web site was the winner in the print category, taking 5% of total visits–a 50% increase in visits over last year. It was followed by People.com, with 3%, and The Washington Post, with 2%.”

The Boston Globe plays it straight in covering the news of its buyout-based staff reduction. As reported earlier, 60 jobs will be axed at the Globe and 20 at the Worcester Telegram. That’s on top of the 125 jobs cut at the papers a year ago. The amazing tidbit in this story is this line: “Globe employees who received lifetime job guarantees in the early 1990s will be given three weeks pay for each year of service, capped at two years’ pay.” Lifetime job guarantees?

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Newsday is cutting 120 jobs, or about five percent of its workforce. The cuts include about 25 editorial employees, along with 24 pressroom positions. The head of the local union is quoted in the article wondering how a paper on an island of 3 million people can have only 400,000 circulation. “That just tells me that Newsday is not putting effort into growing circulation,” he said. He should read the papers more often.

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The Los Angeles Daily News is cutting 22 people from its newsroom staff, or nearly 20% of its editorial workforce. This story got considerably less attention than layoffs at rival Los Angeles Times, but in percentage terms, the cuts are much deeper. The Times still has 850 newsroom employees. The Daily News’ editorial staff has been cut by about half from its peak level, according to a story in the LA Times. The Times’ story wraps up the recent carnage at California newspapers and laments the loss of local reporting. It quotes a local public official as saying, “I think people are losing any understanding of what local government does and how it figures in people’s lives.

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Meanwhile, graphic designer Erica Smith has created a Google Maps mashup of newspaper layoffs going back nearly a year.

There are so many cutbacks to report that we have to spread the news across two posts.

Bay Area Blues

The big news comes out of the Bay area, where some 1,300 employees at San Francisco-area newspapers were offered buyouts. The San Jose Mercury News offered packages aimed at shedding nearly 200 non-union employees and also said it would cut an unspecified number of union jobs. Bay Area News Group-East Bay, which includes the Tribune, the Times and 14 other newspapers, offered all 1,100 of its employees the chance to apply for buyouts, raising the question of what it would do if everyone took the offer. On the other hand, that might be a preferable option to staying in business. Employees have to decide by the end of this week.

MetroActive describes the somber mood in the Merc newsroom, which has lost half its staff since 2001. The story quotes the president of the San Jose Newspaper Guild says, “A whole lot [of people] have been looking for something else because they are done. This is not a company that people want to work for.” But where else are you going to go?

The AP quotes a veteran Merc business reporter saying, “We’ve been through this a number of times. You just wonder when it’s all going to end. The problem is nobody knows where the bottom of this is.” Hint: it’s still a long way down. The Merc covers its own gloomy news here.

In nearby Tracy, Calif., the Tracy Press has scaled its frequency back from five times weekly to twice weekly over the last six months and just laid off an unspecified number of staffers. The paper has a free circulation of 9,700. One of the laid-off employees commented, “I’m a victim of three things: the Internet, the real estate mess and the recession.” Management at Tracy‘s two other daily newspapers — the San Joaquin Herald and Stockton Record — have also recently announced cost-cutting measures, though this story didn’t specify what they were.

 

Venture Trims and Tells the Tale

In the spirit of true openness The Ventura County Star devotes 750 words to a layoff amounting to 2% of its staff, including perspective on its parent company’s finances and the overall health of the newspaper industry. No editors were affected in this round, however, the newspaper’s publisher ominously noted, “I don’t think we’ve seen the bottom yet…Things could get worse before they get better.”

Meanwhile, on the East Coast…

A blogger published a memo sent by Boston Globe publisher Steve Ainsley confirming layoff plans. “We are expecting a total reduction of 80 positions, with approximately 60 from the Globe and roughly 20 from the [Telegram & Gazette],” the memo said. “This reduction in staff is a difficult but necessary step toward our ongoing goals of reducing costs and finding efficiencies that allow for the long-term health of our business.” As the Silicon Valley of the east, Boston will see the ugly scenario now being played out in the Bay Area spread next to its shores. However, the whole thing will play out much more slowly there.

Can it get any worse in Philadelphia? In January, the publisher of the Inquirer spoke of “dire consequences” if costs aren’t cut at least 10%. Now Philadelphia Newspapers has laid off 68 Guild employees in the advertising, circulation, customer service, finance, marketing, and systems departments. That’s about 10% of Guild membership. It sounds like management-union relations aren’t so rosy there. Management basically tells the Guild it’s cutting expenses and that’s that. Meanwhile, Guild reps complain that they can’t get management to listen to their revenue-generating ideas. The concept of a union coming up with ideas to grow revenue sounds just a little too bizarre for this editor. What are they going to do: charge advertisers dues?

Not far away, in Allentown, the Morning Call announced an unspecified number of buyouts. No newsroom jobs will be affected, said editor Ardith Hilliard. A newsroom reorganization last month already resulted in eight lost positions, mostly through attrition.

Honolulu Advertiser’s 600 Employees to Protest Contract Offer from Gannett – Hawaii Reporter, Feb. 19, 2008

[Demonstrating that unions are as clueless as ever, six unions that represent 600 employees at the Honolulu Advertiser are incensed at Gannett’s latest offer of a 1 percent increase in wages and a 1.5 percent bonus. Gannet is “doing great,” said Hawaii Rep. Neil Abercrombie, who evidently has not read Gannett’s latest earnings release or noticed that its stock is off 60% over the last three years. All the congressman wants is for Gannett to share some more of that bounty, since its future looks so bright. One is reminded of the UAW strikes in the 1970s, which were just what the US auto industry needed at the time. – Ed.]

[The editors at E&P should have read this story more carefully. It appears to contain good news for newspapers, but the numbers just don’t make sense. Tell me if you can untangle this:

According to new research, “the increase in the online newspaper audience is making up 28% of the losses in print readership.” Umm, what does that mean? Making up what? Circulation? Advertising revenue? It goes on to say that “from August 2004 through March 2007….online newspaper readership grew 14%.” Wow, that’s pretty pathetic, if you ask me. That would be an annual growth rate of less than 5%, which differs from all the other research that’s been done in this area. Finally, we learn that “70% of all newspaper web site visitors also read the print version.” It that’s true, it’s bad news. It indicates that newspaper Web sites are attracting mostly their own print subscribers. – Ed.]

 

‘Baltimore Sun’ Launches Youth-Oriented ‘b’ – MediaPost, Feb. 21, 2008

The Baltimore Sun is planning to launch a new free tabloid targeting younger readers called “b.” The first daily issue is set to appear on April 14. With a mix of typical tabloid fare and lifestyle content, the newspaper plans to freshen its pages by inviting readers to submit their own stories, photos and video to the newspaper and its Web site.

 

At Annual Meeting, Lee Enterprises Claims Growing Print Readership In ‘Toughest’ Year – Editor & Publisher, Feb. 20, 2008

They appear to be doing something right at Lee Enterprises. Quoting: “[T]he reach of Lee’s print and online newspapers between October 2006 and October 2007 increased to 71% of all adults inits markets from 67%. And while the percentage of adults who read only the print newspaper remained steady at 50%, the percentage who read both print and online editions grew to 16% from 11%… Lee advertising revenue declined 1.4% in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2007, compared with an industry average decline of 7.4%.”

 

Help wanted. Desperately. – Reflections of a Newsosaur, Feb. 10, 2008

[Alan Mutter analyzes the crash of the newspaper help-wanted market, which he figures has contracted 54% in the last seven years. He traces the beginning of the end to 9/11 and cites newspaper smugness over their once near-monopoly on that business. Newspapers failed to understand that readers weren’t going to go to a single destination to find jobs. Increasingly, they want the jobs to find them. Unless newspapers understand that and act quickly, he says, they’re going to lose the half of the market that hasn’t slipped away yet. -Ed.]