If the new owners of the San Diego Union-Tribune are planning to reinvent the news operation, they made a surprising choice in appointing Ed Moss (right), a 32-year newspaper veteran, to lead the charge. Moss was most recently president and CEO of the Los Angeles Newspaper Group and publisher of the Daily News of Los Angeles, as well as eight other titles. He’s is known for his ability to focus on local communities, so it could be that owner Platinum Equity is taking “hyper-local” to heart.

“I’m all about local, local, local – local news, local advertising,” Moss told the U-T. “That’s our niche. The way to differentiate ourselves is to be as local across the company as we can.”

Moss is an advertising guy. He’s been a publisher at papers in California, Ohio, Michigan and Louisiana and also held several advertising sales positions. He told the U-T that there is an unlocked opportunity in sales to local advertisers and that he would move aggressively to capture that business.

“I like to move very, very quickly,” he said. “And I like to build a culture that believes you have to move quickly.”The piece quotes past colleagues saying Moss is a nice guy, a visionary and a great leader. One of his prior bosses is David Black, who’s advising Platinum on the U-T’‘s makeover.

Lessons From the NY Newspaper Strike

If the past is any clue to the future, then the New York newspaper strike of 1962-63 may offer a glimpse of what a nation without daily newspapers would look like. Slate’s Jack Shafer has a wonderful account of what a news-starved city did when the strike crippled all of its newspapers for nearly four months.

In short: it improvised. Non-unionized dailies in the boroughs saw circulation explode. The Philadelphia Inquirer imported thousands of daily copies. Radio and TV stations began reporting real news instead of just parroting what the dailies said. The Village Voice exploded out of anonymity to become the flagship of alternative weeklies. Tom Wolfe sought freelance income by writing an article for Esquire that would launch his book-writing career. Shafer cites example after example of what a population that had been accustomed to consuming 5.7 million newspapers a day did when it suddenly had none. They made do. And the world went on.

Which is what will happen when major metro dailies begin to close or scale back: Alternatives will rush in to fill the void. People will get their news elsewhere, and what they can’t get will be delivered by entrepreneurs who figure out a way to deliver it at a profit. Destruction is an ugly thing, but it’s usually a necessary precursor to reinvention. Shafer shrewdly notes, “The least reliable source for what the end of newspapers means is usually the newspaper men, who are too stuck in their roles to reimagine the world.” Once you shed assumptions, then possibilities open up.

Miscellany

With 39 more layoffs last week, the San Francisco Chronicle has brought its staff reduction total to 151 since March, or about where ownership said it had to be to achieve short-term equilibrium. The cost-cutting is unlikely to end there, though. According to the San Francisco Business Times, “the Chronicle will rely increasingly on freelancers and non-staff unpaid or poorly paid bloggers to fill the paper, in many cases using former staffers.” With so many laid-off journos on the street, what’s happening to the per-word rate you’ve been able to get? Comment below.

Online strategist Matt Maggard posts a lengthy proscription for change at the Los Angeles Times. He’s even redesigned the home page of the website for them. Maggard calls his essay “an open proposal. This includes a summary of value in the digital marketplace, how the Times can improve its product and how journalism should evolve its practices and business models to survive. I’m sending this around as an open proposal to help jump-start the discussion on what can be done to save the industry.” We didn’t find a lot of revolutionary thinking in the proposal, but its recommendations seem sound enough.

The state of Washington is shifting some of the burden of propping up a dying industry onto the taxpayers, approving a 40 percent cut in the state’s main business tax for publishers and printers. What’s next, rebates for the recording industry? The Seattle Times‘ 95-word news bite on the subject inspires more than 220 comments, indicating that the recession-plagued populace might feel just a wee bit strongly about this lobbyist-inspired giveback.

For newspaper publishers who whine that Google is an Internet parasite, Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker offers a brief tutorial in the workings of the robots.txt file, which enables publishers to easily block the company’s search spider whenever they want.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers has published a 56-page report called “Outlook for newspaper publishing in the digital age.” Our day job hasn’t permitted us to consume the entire document yet, but based upon this PWC summary, we probably won’t bother. The bottom line appears to be conventional wisdom that the print model is troubled, the future is in multiple media and the revenue mix has to shift away from a sole reliance on advertising. We suspect PriceWaterhouseCoopers will be more than happy to help publishers make the shift.

And Finally…

Ryan Pagelowis a reporter at the Lake County News-Sun in Waukegan, Ill. a contributor to Mad magazine (talk about a venerable print title) and a recipient of the Charles Schulz National College Cartoonist Award. He also pens a clever daily comic called Pressed, which he describes as “a behind-the-scenes look at a newsroom that’s trying to survive in an online world of tweeting blogospheres. It features a frazzled editor, reporters, a blogger and an assortment of politicians, weasels and snitches.” Check this out. It’s good.

Gawker’s Ryan Tate takes issue with the conventional wisdom that bloggers can’t be depended upon to cover local government.  Keying off of David Simon’s testimony before Congress this week, Tate tells of his experience as a reporter in Oakland, Calif. pounding a local beat. “I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as ‘gadflies’ – deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived,” he writes.

Tate makes an important point that’s been largely missing from the debate over the value of bloggers.  The conventional wisdom is that these newfangled Internet publishers like to lounge in their pajamas all day and spout off about the news reported by the hard-working journalists who get paid to sit in boring local government meetings and pore over boring documents.  No one in their right mind would do this kind of work without pay, the wisdom goes, so the decline of newspapers is the loss of an essential public service.

The flaw in this argument is that it assumes that no one cares about local government or will bother to waste time learning how it works.  But our experience is somewhat different.

Engaged Citizens

Drop by any meeting of your local town government and you’ll find concerned citizens sitting in the cheap seats, watching intently what’s going on.  What motivates these people?  Usually, it’s passion for the topics  being discussed.  Whether it’s an increase in property taxes, a school bond, a new sewer project or a prohibition against walking dogs on the town common, citizens do come out to learn about issues that matter to them.

All of these people are, broadly defined, potential bloggers.  Maybe their tools of choice don’t look like this one, but their desire to communicate is no less powerful than anybody else’s.  Some may choose to use a listserv or e-mail list.  They may tweet their opinions or share them on talk radio.  But they have opinions to share and facts to convey.

Check out a list of bloggers in the borough of Brooklyn as noted in the blog rolls on Brooklyn Heights Blog and A Brooklyn Life.  These people write about all sorts of things: local arts, events, politics, schools and community organizations. They’re not journalists, but they have a lot to contribute to a public discussion and they observe things at a level of granularity that few newspapers could ever match.

The twist is that every one of them has an opinion.  Their “coverage” is filtered through the lens of their biases, which is uncomfortable for people who are accustomed to just-the-facts reporting.  The flipside is that these people collectively gather far more information than news organizations ever could.  With dozens of bloggers covering the borough of Brooklyn, can you really make the argument that citizens have less news available about the their community today than they did five years ago?

The challenge for news organizations is to develop new ways to synthesize and make sense of this deluge of information.  Instead of assigning a reporter to cover city council meetings, it might be easier to set up a webcam and let citizens watch the proceedings themselves.  Local bloggers can be co-opted to contribute to a news aggregation site in exchange for traffic.  Journalists can be retrained to filter and interpret information and validate it against the video captured by the webcam. Coverage of events can be surrounded by opinion about what actually happened.

News organizations were created to serve a public that was starved for information.  Today, the equation has flipped.  We are drowning in information.  The new role of journalists will be to simplify and contextualize.  They’ll be serving a different need, but a need that’s no less pronounced than the one they served previously.

Kindle to the Rescue

The newest port in a storm for the embattled newspaper industry is Amazon’s Kindle, a $500 handheld device that can store thousands of books and periodicals while retaining some of the look and feel of traditional print.

The reason publishers are swarming the Kindle is because of evidence that consumers will do something with it that they don’t do with their desktop computers: pay subscription fees.  It’s not surprising that leading publishers like The New York Times and the Washington Post are syndicating their content through Amazon at fees of up to $14 per month. Both papers have announced programs to offer discounted Kindles to paying subscribers. The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News are investigating ways to deliver devices from Plastic Logic of Mountain View, Calif. that offer a similar experience.

Is the Kindle the salvation for the industry?  Not at $500, it isn’t. As long as Amazon premium-prices the device, the market will be limited to no more than about 5 million US users, according to Forrester Research. Most people aren’t ready to pony up that kind of money for a device that can easily be left in the back pocket of an airline seat, as happened to Sara Nelson, editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly last year.

But don’t expect these prices to hold.  At this point, Kindle has the market mostly to itself, but a slew of competitors are on the horizon. As Moore’s Law kicks in, expect prices to drop to the sub-$100 range within two to three years.  Big publishers are doing the right thing to prepare themselves for mass-market digital reading devices, which could replace laptop computers over time.  By not making the mistake of giving away their content for free on the Kindle, they can avoid the mess that has devalued their current online content.

Miscellany

If anyone thought the purchase of the San Diego Union-Tribune by an equity investment firm would save the company from major layoffs, their hopes have been dashed by news that Platinum Equity plans to lay off 192 employees — or about 19% of the U-T‘s workforce — over the next couple of months. The announcement came just three days after Platinum Equity completed its purchase of the paper from the Copley Press.  Once the new owners, who are self-described turnaround specialists, dig into the property they just acquired, more layoffs will probably follow.

Rupert Murdoch wants to start charging for access to the newspapers owned News Corp., apparently in the belief that subscribers to the New York Post are just like subscribers to The Wall Street Journal. Good luck with all that.  The Boston Globe is also looking into micropayments as a way to extract revenue from readers of its popular Boston.com website, reveals Globe publisher P. Steven Ainsley in an interview that is otherwise unremarkable.

Murdoch, who has been pessimistic about the economy for months, now says things are getting better. This week he declared that “it is increasingly clear that the worst is over,” and that “revenues are beginning to look healthier.” You wouldn’t know that from quarterly earnings just reported by Gannett, McClatchy and Lee Enterprises, but in all fairness, those are backward-looking indicators.

The Columbia Journalism Review explores the changes at The Wall Street Journal that have made it an enigma among US newspapers. In an atmosphere of decline and panic, the Journal is growing both print and online subscriptions. While its advertising revenue has suffered along with the rest of the industry’s, there is a sense that this paper is doing something right. It’s “moving the needle,” as journalist Liz Featherstone notes at the outset of her 3,300-word analysis.

Moving the needle is apparently a sore spot at the Journal. Some people see the phrase as a euphemism for dumbing down the content, and their opinion has some merit. A 3,300-word analysis like Featherstone’s would have a tough time getting in the paper these days. Featherstone counted a dozen stories of over 2,000 words in the front section during a one-week period in 2007. In a more recent comparison, that total had dwindled to three. Instead, the Journal has got reporters chasing news in general and The New York Times in particular. Stories are shorter, reporters are running from press conference to press conference and the Journal no longer seems to regard its mission as being to explain capitalism. Instead, it’s becoming a hard news-driven international wire service with a specialty in business topics.

Reader Focus

Under new editor Robert Thomson (left, WSJ photo), the paper has become more focused on giving his readers what they want, even if that isn’t what the journalists like.  Featherstone snagged an interview with Thomson, who refers disdainfully to some newspapers as being written more for journalists than for their readers.  The reference is clearly to the Journal itself.

Thomson sees today’s constantly distracted, media-agnostic reader as needing quick information delivered in plain language.  Some see this approach as a heretical rejection of the principles of legendary editor Barney Kilgore, who guided the paper for 27 years and who oversaw its meteoric growth.  But others believe Thomson is simply staying true to Kilgore’s principles of giving readers what they want, rather than what journalists think they need.

The Journal story isn’t a simple one.  While Rupert Murdoch has clearly put his stamp on the organization he acquired for more than $5 billion nearly two years ago, fears that he would meddle with the paper’s editorial voice haven’t materialized.  Murdoch has also proven to be strikingly eager to support editorial quality, such as when he personally stepped in to prevent the government of China from denying a visa to a Journal Beijing reporter.

Many journalists have found themselves at odds with the new direction of the paper and have left with thinly disguised disgust.  But others are fully on board with management’s efforts to make the Journal more relevant to its audience in an effort to insure its long-term vitality.  This story is a balanced account of a journalistic institution in the midst of a transition that has torn at the fabric of its organizational values but that is clearly succeeding in the marketplace. For better or for worse.

Miscellany

There are limitations to how far one should go in giving readers what they want, of course.  The Chicago Tribune apparently stepped over that line recently with an experimental project initiated by the marketing department to seek feedback on stories that hadn’t yet been published or even fully reported. A group of reporters didn’t like this idea one bit, and 55 of them signed an angry e-mail in protest. Editor Gerould Kern quickly backtracked, issuing a statement calling the experiment “a brief market research project that tested reader reaction to working story ideas.”

The Trib went too far, says Newsosaur Alan Mutter, but the fundamental idea has merit.  Mutter sees nothing with using a little market research to shape content, even if it’s only keeping an eye on the most e-mailed stories. He relates the practice of one South American newspaper that posts stories to a website as soon after they clear editing but before they appear in print.  Editors then monitor online activity through the evening and take reader interest into account in laying out pages.

The rule of thumb with buyouts is to take them early because the terms get worse as time passes. Now we’re seeing news organizations do away with severance packages entirely. It happened at the Reading Eagle last week, where 52 staffers were shown the door with just two weeks of health insurance coverage to tide them over. One of the laid-off employees had been with the paper for 45 years.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal just laid off 19 newsroom people without any severance, according to one of the victims, who contacted us.  What they did get was instructions on how to tap into their Guild Retirement Income Plan at a penalty of 10% plus tax withholding at 20%.  Or laid-off employees could elect a lump sum payment from the plan, which would lead them with retirement annuities of less than $10 a month, in some cases. “Will that even pay for a prescription for ‘sugar diabetes’ medicine?” the former employee asks. “I’m in my 40s but everybody over 65 in my family has the ‘sugar diabetes,’ as we call it here in the South.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has been hemorrhaging readership, has got a clever new campaign to promote coziness within the newspaper. Called “Unplug. It’s Sunday,” the promotion positions “the old-school Sunday newspaper as a refuge from the constant buzzing and beeping of smart phones, instant messages and e-mail that marks the modern workweek,” according to a short article in AdWeek. We think it’s a great idea.

And Finally…

Does Lindsay Lohan really look like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings trilogy? You decide. TotallyLooksLike.com will help you make the decision. The site has scores of photo pairs contrasting well-known celebrities with other figures who bear a striking resemblance to them, although we’re sure the likeness wasn’t intentional. Does Mary Kate Olson Totally Look Like Ozzy Osbourne? We didn’t think so till we saw the two in their separated-at-birth photo. See for yourself. You’ll be sharing the images with your friends within minutes. We guarantee it. Use Facebook.

As negotiations with the Boston Globe‘s unions continued past a midnight deadline, The New York Times Co. filed notice with the federal government today of its plans to shut down the paper in 60 days. Such notice is required under federal law, but the filing of a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification statement doesn’t require the Times Co. to go through with its threats. The Globe unions called the move a negotiating ploy. The Times Co. says it is ready to go ahead and file a binding plant-closing commitment with the state today.

Tense negotiations continued through the weekend, with the Guild saying its offer exceeds the goals set by the Times Co. and the Times Co. raising the stakes even further by admitting that it had made a $4 million accounting error that would require the union to dig even deeper for cuts. The Boston Herald quotes a union official alleging that most of that oversight is actually bad-faith bargaining. Whatever happens, union officials said, expect large layoffs at the Globe. No one seems to think the Times Co. intends to carry through on its threats to shutter the 137-year-old paper, but it’s virtually certain that whatever Globe survives this negotiation process will be far smaller and weaker than the one that has dominated New England for decades. We’ll keep an eye peeled today, but you’ll probably find out quicker from Romenesko.

In Iowa, a Blueprint for Change

They’re shaking up the traditional newspaper model in eastern Iowa. Mark Potts sums up a blueprint for reinvention by the designated change agent at the Cedar Rapids Gazette that outline a vision of the publisher as a center of information, commerce and community. It isn’t about publishing, Steve Buttry says. “We need to become the connection to everything people and businesses need to know and do to live and do business in Eastern Iowa.” He goes on to list the many ways in which the publisher can expand its franchise, from delivering up-to-the-minute Twitter feeds to enabling visitors to buy concert tickets directly from its event listings page.

The part that will rub traditionalists the wrong way is Buttry’s vision of a new approach to revenue in which journalists will be just as responsible for the financial well-being of the company as sales reps. The wall between advertising and editorial is considered no man’s land in most newspaper companies, but Potts praises Buttry for having the courage to envision an alternative. Publishers can position themselves as intermediaries between their audience and local merchants and extract a small fee for enabling transactions. There is nothing dirty about thinking about the financial health of one’s employer. In fact, this economy doesn’t permit the luxury of old silos. Read Potts’ synopsis of how one news organization is changing the way it perceives its business. Read the entire 38-page blueprint document here if you want details.

Conde’s Outlook: Nasty

How bad is it in the upscale lifestyle magazine market? “Wired magazine posted a 57% drop in ad pages in the first quarter, while ad pages at fashion magazines W and Lucky were down more than 40% and 35%, respectively, for the quarter. Architectural Digest‘s ad pages were down 47%,” reports The Wall Street Journal in an article about Conde Nast’s decision to pull the plug on Portfolio magazine after only two years. The numbers make it clear why the decision was necessary: despite its paid circulation of nearly 450,000, Portfolio‘s ad pages were down 61% in the first quarter. The highly visible publication was launched with fanfare and an all-star lineup of journalists two years ago, entering the market dominated by Forbes and Fortune. However, luxury advertising has fallen off the table during the recession and Portfolio was still working off its startup costs. Advertising revenues would have to increase significantly in 2010 to support the business plan, and that just wasn’t going to happen. Some observers think the flight of luxury advertising from upscale magazines could be permanent.

It’s going to get worse, says MarketWatch’s John Friedman. In a short video clip, he says the business publishing market is over-populated and under-advertised. Every business magazine, even the most venerable titles, is vulnerable in an ad downturn like this one.

The J-School Paradox

The Capital Times of Madison, Wisc. Writes about the astonishing surge in journalism school enrollments. “According to an annual enrollment survey done by the University of Georgia, there were 199,711 undergraduates enrolled nationwide in journalism and mass communication schools in
2007 — a jump of 41.6 percent from 1997,” reporter Todd Finkelmeyer writes. “Meanwhile, a recent article on Forbes.com noted that journalism schools at Columbia University, the University of Maryland and Stanford University saw significant spikes in applications this past fall — 30 percent, 25 percent and 20 percent, respectively.”

The story goes on to quote several bright-eyed J-school students who aren’t at all worried about the 15,000 or so journalism jobs that have disappeared over the last 18 months. They believe that a market for quality reporting will always exist and hope that by the time they graduate, the jobs will be there. Professors are quoted saying that journalism teaches critical thinking, an essential skill that can serve a young person well in any profession. It appears that the University of Wisconsin at Madison is ahead of the curve, having revamped its journalism program nearly a decade ago to accommodate multiple media. Ironically, the Capital Times itself exited the print business more than a year ago and has been publishing solely online since then.

Miscellany

The Baltimore Sun laid off 30% of its newsroom last week with the cuts hitting disproportionately hard on senior editorial staff. About one third of those laid off were editors and managers, Editor & Publisher reports. They included both top editorial page editors. Newspaper Guild officials said the moves appeared to be part of a realignment of the news operation toward “multi-platform content,” whatever that is. A reduction of that size could presage a reduction in print frequency along the lines of what the two Detroit dailies are doing. The Sun has the handicap of competing against the Washington Post and other smaller dailies just to the south.

Canada’s National Post will suspend Monday publication during the summer in a cost-cutting move. No layoffs are planned.

The Reading (Pa.) Eagle laid off 52 people, or about 12% of its workforce.

The company that publishes the Vancouver (Wash.) Columbian has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, but the issues apparently revolve around real estate investments and not business losses at the newspaper. The Columbian will continue to publish during reorganization.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett reads five newspapers every day, but he wouldn’t buy one at any price. “They have the possibility of going to unending losses…I don’t see anything on the horizon that causes that erosion to end,” says Bullett, who owns the Buffalo News and a piece of the Washington Post Company. He doesn’t intend to sell those ownership stakes, but he isn’t expanding them, either.

And Finally…

The New York Times has two stories that illustrate the severity of the industry’s crisis. It tells of  Todd Smith, a reporter for the Suburban Journals chain of newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises, who was shot while on the job last year. That’s a pretty big sacrifice to make for one’s employers, so “On April 15 of this year, when Mr. Smith was called to a meeting at the Suburban Journals…he wondered if the staff had won an award for coverage of the massacre. Instead, he learned that he and several others were being laid off,” Richard Perez-Pena writes. The story also tells of Paul Giblin, a reporter for the East Vallely Tribune whose work won a Pulitzer Prize two weeks ago. Giblin was laid off last year and now works at a startup online news organization.

Some of journalism’s most prestigious brands took it on the chin in the new round of circulation figures released this morning by the Audit Bureau of Control. Collectively, the 395 newspapers reporting numbers experienced a 7% year-over-year decline, with some of the worst declines occurred at big-city titles in the Northeast.

There was little good news, except for The Wall Street Journal‘s continued gravity-defiance. The paper squeaked out a .61% circulation gain and is now more than twice as large as The New York Times.  Some other troubled papers, like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, also showed only minor declines in the most recent six months.

USA Today, which has managed to maintain relative stability in previous reports, fell with a thud, dropping almost 7.5%.  Marriott Corp.’s recent decision to stop delivering the paper to hotel guest rooms won’t affect the numbers until the next reporting period

These figures shouldn’t be taken as a snapshot in time but rather as a trend. Newspaper circulation falls for all sorts of reasons, including voluntary cutbacks by publishers.  Trends become evident only over multiple reporting periods. With that in mind, the titles listed below have to be considered the most at risk, since they have shown average declines in the double digits over the last two reporting periods.

Miscellany

Jeff Jarvis asks journalists to focus on where they add value and to stop doing everything else. “If you can’t imagine why someone would link to what you’re doing, you probably shouldn’t be doing it,” he writes. Jarvis cites the example of TV reporters dashing from place to place to tape standups in front of iconic institutions. They’re not reporting, they’re simply relating commodity information in a contextual setting. Why are TV stations spending money on this?  “When we cut out all the incredible waste – those standups and rewrites and frills and blather – and when we have an ecosystem that rewards unique value, as the internet does, then I think we could end up with more journalism, more reporting,” Jarvis says.

Robert Picard tweaks bankrupt newspaper companies for paying large executive bonuses, calling the argument that said such payments are necessary to retain good people “hollow.” Few people are leaving good jobs in a time when nobody’s hiring, Picard writes. Bankruptcy is a time to restructure, not just get out from under your obligations. The good news: Picard believes “Most newspapers… are surviving the downturn and will be serving their communities for many years.”

The Springdale (Ark.) Morning News has laid off nine newsroom workers and an unspecified number of employees in other groups, reports in its newsroom, in addition to cuts in other departments within the paper, reports KSFM television. The paper will also reduce its size and page count. The station’s spare report is typical of those we see on TV websites. If most of these stations didn’t have newspapers and wire services feeding them copy, they wouldn’t have any news at all.

The Los Angeles Daily News laid off at least four more newsroom employees, according to a blog maintained by its Newspaper Guild chapter.

Boston Globe unions staged a rally last Friday to save the paper, which faces a shutdown decision at the end of this week. Speeches by union members were reminiscent of the greatest Samuel Gompers oratory, only the problem is that the Globe‘s parent is flat on its back. Cutting executive pay isn’t going to close an $85 million profitability shortfall.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune reached agreement with the union representing 300 newsroom workers that gives the publisher $1.7 million in cost relief. The deal includes a 3% cut in base wages, a 30% cut in merit pay, two days of unpaid furlough in each of the next two years, a freeze in some pensions and a reduction in severance.

The New York Times Co., which is struggling just to hold its business together, reported a loss in the first quarter as advertising revenues dropped a sickening 27%. The only good news is that the company delayed some debt payments and the CEO said there are signs that ad spending might increase in the third quarter.

The company’s performance dramatically undershot Wall Street estimates, where analysts were expecting a loss of 3 to 6 cents a share. The actual operating loss was 34 cents. Even online revenue, which was traditionally been a bright spot, was down 5.6%.

Media General also disappointed the few analysts who continue to follow the company, reporting an operating loss of 77 cents a share on an 18% drop in revenue. One analyst had pegged the likely loss at 5 cents a share on revenues of $180 million. Actual sales were a little under $160 million.

Moody’s has downgraded Gannett Co. yet again. The agency lowered its rating of the publisher into junk territory earlier this year and has since lowered it again. Now Moody’s says Gannett may not have the necessary profits to meet the terms of one of its debt convenants. Gannett logged a 60% drop in profit on an 18% slide in revenue in its most recent earnings report.

And there are more earnings still to come.

Specialty Publishers Hold Their Own

The 10,000-circulation weekly Jackson County (Mo.) Advocate focuses on serving its own neighborhood and it’s doing just fine, thank you. Sure, its four-person staff works long hours to produce the weekly, but employees will also stop to talk with residents who stop by the office because that’s where the best stories come from. Like the local man who found an image of the Virgin Mary on a rock in his back yard. “You never know who’s going to come through the front door,” says Editor Andrea Wood, who’s interviewed in this five-minute report by local radio station KCUR. “We’ve done stories about people who had grown freakishly large pears. It’s about the community.”

Wood says the turmoil that’s killing large metro newspapers isn’t hitting hyper-local titles nearly as hard. “This industry is stable,” she says. “People use the [community newspaper] for scrapbooks. You’re never going to get that from the Internet.” Local businesses are also more stable and loyal advertisers.

The Advocate competes with the Kansas City Star, which has been cutting back local news coverage. That appears to be helping the Advocate. Circulation is growing and now tops 10,000 subscribers. The Star no longer sends reporters to cover local government meetings, leaving the Advocate as the main source of information about their community.

Further to the west, where the industry downturn has been very bad to the local newspaper industry, a veteran publisher of Chinese-language papers has actually started a new one. Brian Ho launched News for Chinese, a free monthly, just one month after the financial crisis hit. He admits that his motivations were unconventional: He got a great deal on real estate and started the business to keep the offices occupied while the market recovers. Nevertheless, local advertising has picked up nicely and, while he still isn’t making a profit, Ho says that may be in the cards. “If my newspaper can earn a small profit to support my employees, I will consider that as a success.”

Awaiting New Owner, Union-Tribune Frets About Its Politics

Alf Landon

Voice of San Diego reports on a conundrum at the Union-Tribune: it doesn’t know whether it’s conservative or liberal any more. The U-T has leaned to the right going back to 1936, when it endorsed Alf Landon for president even as Franklin Roosevelt won 62% of the vote. New owner Platinum Equity has no clear political bias. Its chief partner gave $20,000 to the McCain campaign, but the partner who has the most experience running newspapers seems to prefer Democrats. Also, Platinum is based in Los Angeles, causing some locals to worry that the owners won’t care about local politics. That could tip the balance of elections, since observers figure the newspaper’s endorsements typically deliver a 3-5% edge to candidates, who tend to be conservative. It will tip the balance even more if the new owners decide to adopt a liberal bias.

J-School Enrollments Soar As Jobs Vanish

Alana Taylor is an NYU journalism major who’s doing everything right, yet “I have no idea what I am going to do when I graduate,” she writes on MediaShift. The college junior has 4,000 Twitter followers, lots of professional connections on LinkedIn and a well-established personal brand, but the jobs just don’t appear to be out there. She interviews industry experts (including us) and gets discouraging news: working for a daily is a non-starter because many papers are going under and even the survivors aren’t paying a living wage. Starting a business is impractical in this economy. About the only hope for employment is to hook on with an Internet company and hope for the best.

Nevertheless, J-school enrollments are at an all-time high, which prompts BusinessWeek’s Sarah Lacy to ask “What are these people thinking?” Lacy writes on TechCrunch that her lack of journalism training made her a more successful journalist. “I don’t know how to write an inverted pyramid story or even really what that is. I do know how to write for different platforms, be scrappy and break news. I’ve had zero important alum connections and never got an internship at a big daily. And, in hindsight, that’s probably the greatest stroke of luck I could have had.”

Being free of the hidebound expectations of an irrelevant journalism style has freed her to adapt her reporting style to the new standards of the Web, she writes. In contrast, her friends who went to J-school found that the experience delivered no career value. In fact, it embedded habits that are proving to be liabilities in the free-form style of the Web.

Miscellany

This year’s Pulitzer Prize for local reporting goes to Paul Giblin (no relation), who teamed with Ryan Gabrielson for a five-part series in the East Valley Tribune about a local Sheriff’s questionable obsession with immigration enforcement. Unfortunately, the honor will be bittersweet for the Tribune, which laid off Giblin when it cut back to four-days-a-week last October. Jeff Bercovici notes the irony, and catches up with the Tribune’s publisher, who issues a rather embarrassing comment about winning journalism’s top prize:  “I don’t think [Giblin’s dismissal] diminishes at all, frankly, the excellent work they did on that project.”

Unions in San Francisco continue to strike a remarkably agreeable attitude toward Hearst’s demands that they help reduce expenses at the Chronicle by $50 million or face shutdown of the paper. The union representing delivery truck drivers agreed to let the paper cut between 90 and 100 driver positions by hiring subcontractors for home delivery. In return,  the drivers keep the right to deliver papers within the city limits. Annual savings are expected to top $5 million.

The Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise has reportedly laid off an unspecified number of employees. No word on body counts, but Gary Scott lists the names of 14 reporters and editors whom he believes got the ax.

The New York Times’ Tom Zeller takes issue with Marriott’s recent decision to cut out delivery of newspapers to its hotel rooms because of environmental concerns. Assuming that guests are turning more to their laptops and PDAs for the news, Zeller wonders if the decision doesn’t actually increase carbon emissions. He finds evidence that in countries that produce most of their power from fossil fuels, a 30-minute snuggle with the newspaper is actually less damaging to the environment than a PDA power-read. Of course, you have to take into account the cost of delivery, the impact of logging trees for paper, etc. It’s all very complex.

Columnists are supposed to be controversial, and you have to give media critic and Newser exec Michael Wolff credit for stirring up controversy with his forecast that 80% of newspapers will die within 18 months. You also have to give media veteran Martin Langeveld credit for injecting reality into that outrageous comment. Langeveld pulls out his calculator and notes that for Wolff to be correct, two newspapers would have to close ever day for the next year-and-a-half. Sometimes mathematics is a great tool.

And Finally…

The 31 newly laid-off employees at the Raleigh News & Observer decided to poke some rather vicious fun at the newspaper’s owner. They mocked up a front page comparing McClatchy to the Titanic, which sank 97 years and one week ago. The parody portrays McClatchy CEO Gary Pruitt as a happy-go-lucky ship captain who sees the icebergs coming but figures his ship will simply strike them a glancing blow and use the ice fragments for cocktails. “She was welded together from the hulls of several old steamships, including a leaky tub called the RMS Knight Ridder,” they write. You can download a PDF of the mock front page here.

New media enterprises are rising out of the ashes of their collapsed predecessors.

Sportswriter Sam Adams is one of several INDenver Times staff who introduce the new site on video

A group of 30 former Rocky Mountain News staffers has launched INDenverTimes, a professional-looking news site that aims to cover local news, sports, business, arts and entertainment, along with “a Denver perspective on national news.” The venture will take a novel approach to subscriptions when it begins charging for premium access in two weeks. Paid subscribers will get “access to the INsider Channel where you can have a direct, real time conversations with our editors and writers…from 10 am to 5 pm every weekday.” The channel will also go live if breaking news happens at other times of the day.

In its first month, the operation recorded 70,000 unique visitors and more than 311,000 page views, or about as much traffic as a top-500 blog. Funded by entrepreneurs Kevin Preblud, Brad Gray and Ben Ray “three Denver entrepreneurs” (we’re trying to get their names), the venture has a hybrid revenue model and has recruited an impressive list of writers and business-side executives. The site also looks clean and well-organized. Believe it or not, this venture is running on WordPress, the same content management system that powers this blog. They’re just doing a lot more with it.

Also, some former Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers have launched a nonprofit online newspaper with regional coverage. Seattle PostGlobe is basically a multi-author blog that covers news, sports, lifestyles and opinion. It’s very early-stage and looks it, but we’ll keep an eye on this bootstrapped operation as it gets its sea legs.

Street Brawl in Boston

The Boston Globe, evidently tired of all the razzing it was getting about its threatened shutdown, fires a return volley at crosstown rival Boston Herald. Weekday circulation at the Herald is off 38% in the last decade and the newsroom staff has been cut by half. Yadda yadda. What’s really interesting about this story is a comment posted by Tom Mashberg, the Herald Sunday editor who’s quoted in the piece. Mashberg reprints part of an e-mail sent to him by reporter Keith O’Brien in which O’Brien outlines plans to include Mashberg’s comments about the Globe‘s perilous situation that don’t appear in the story. He also notes that the fact that the Herald is actually profitable isn’t mentioned, either, despite a lengthy discussion about what the Herald is doing to survive. “Looks like the editors got hold of this and turned it into a hatchet job,” he says.

Jules Crittendon, a Herald editor, minces no words telling what he thinks of the Globe story and the Globe in general. “One Herald reporter is worth something like 5 to 10 Globies, for all their inflated sense of self-worth,” he writes. And he’s just getting started. Crittendon rips the Globe for a self-important attitude, lazy reporters, layers of redundant management, endless story lengths and on an on. If you hate the Globe to begin with, his blog entry will warm your heart.

The Globe‘s negotiations with its unions continue to be rancorous. The Newspaper Guild now says it will negotiate concessions related directly to cost cuts, but won’t talk about issues like the elimination of lifetime job guarantees for about 190 veterans and the end of seniority rules in layoffs. The Guild is also calling for negotiations to be performed in public and says it wants to deal directly with any potential acquirer on the cost-cut issue. The union’s defiance is a marked contrast to the relatively quick work the San Francisco Chronicle‘s unions made of Hearst’s demands to cut costs. By the way, Globe managers are feeling some of the pain, too. Bonuses have been eliminated for this year, affecting more than 200 people, including the publisher.

Government Bailout for News Infrstructure

Mark Cooper suggests a hybrid approach to saving quality journalism: a “media stimulus package” that could give new localized news services a platform upon which to build profitable businesses. ” Just as IT health and education funds seek to build a new infrastructure for public service in their areas, IT media funding can build infrastructure in the journalism space,” writes Cooper, who is a fellow at the  Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University.

Summarizing his argument on Huffington Post (a fuller discussion is here) Cooper notes that major metro dailies are being hit hardest by changes in reader and advertiser behavior because they need to be all things to all people. Although most major metros have discarded much of their national and international coverage, they’re still forced to do too much with too few resources. Shoring up these doomed businesses isn’t the answer, Cooper says. Instead, we should look to the existing media models “that are closest to the emerging citizen-media, like public governmental and educational cable channels on the TV side and low-power FM on the radio side.” These media have long been under-funded, but they have the best chance of molding their models to the new participatory journalism. As long as the US is pouring $1.6 trillion into broken banks, how about a few billion to lay the foundation for a new media infrastructure?

Uh-Oh. It’s Earnings Time

Gannett kicked off the earnings parade, which looks to be more of a funeral procession this year, announcing a60% drop in profit on an 18% slide in revenue. Bad as the numbers were, Gannett’s operating profits actually beat analysts’ expectations by a penny. They also weren’t as bad as the 30% declines expected by some analystsquoted in The New York Times last week.  Those analysts mostly agree that this is a 100-year flood for the industry with the combination of recessionary pressures, catastrophic business problems in some key advertising segments and rising paper and fuel costs sending many publishers into the red. They also agree that more papers are likely to close this year. The revenue plunge isn’t hurting small newspapers and broadcast outlets quite as hard, but even they are expecting double-digit declines.

And it isn’t just newspapers. “Magazines collectively recorded a 25.9 percent plunge in ad pages in the first quarter, with revenue falling 20.2 percent,” says Seeking Alpha’s Jeff Bercovici. ZenithOptimedia is projecting the worst declines in ad spending since it started keeping statistics in 1980: overall US spending down 8.7% with newspapers down 12% and magazines down 11%.

Miscellany

In a sign of the times, the world’s largest maker of newsprint has filed for bankruptcy protection. Abitibi-Bowater, which was formed from a 2007 merger, is struggling to pay $8.78 billion in debt. Even though the Canadian company controls 45% of the North American-based newsprint market, a steep drop in demand has slammed its business. The company has already cut paper production 25% this year. Its 25 pulp and paper mills and 30 wood products plants will continue to operate for now, but some are likely to close as part of the restructuring.

Employment levels in American newsrooms are now lower than they’ve been in more than 25 years, the American Society of Newspaper Editors reports.  The industry shed a record 5,900 jobs last year, more than double the previous record of 2,400 eliminated in 2007. Erica Smith pegs the number much higher at nearly 16,000 reported layoffs in 2008. Employment levels are now comparable to those from the early 1980s. The good news (we guess): there was a 21% rise in online-only journalists last year, to 2,300. Incidentally, the American newsroom remains mostly white: Minorities make up 13.4% of the workforce and 450 newspapers employ no minorities at all.

More people still rely on newspapers for their news than on the Internet, according to a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Parade Publications and published by the Newspaper Project. The study of 1,004 US adults also found that 90% of Americans rely on printed or online newspapers for their news and that newspapers are the only medium used more for local than for national news. The research confirms what most people already know: newspapers are important news sources. It doesn’t cast any light on the real problem, though, which is how to create a business model for them that works.

Sam Zell now admits that his highly leveraged 2007 purchase of Tribune Co. was a mistake. For some reason, several news outlets thought this was newsworthy. Zell is always good for a quote, though: Commenting on the prospect of finding a merger partner for his bankrupt company, Zell said, “That’s like asking someone in another business if they want to get vaccinated with a live virus.”

The Orlando Sentinel laid off 50 people last week and didn’t announce it, according to an anonymous comment on this Chicago Tribune story. The person is right that there was no announcement, but we couldn’t confirm the layoffs.

The New York Times is cutting and consolidating some sections in order to save money. Gone are Escapes, a travel guide published on Fridays, as well as Sunday sections that only go to readers in the New York metropolitan area. They’ll be combined into a new Sunday section featuring regional information. Fashion coverage is axed from the weekly magazine and the guide to each day’s newspaper will be consolidated into a single page.

And Finally…

A reader in upstate New York reports on this example of an over-eager, and ultimately failed, Albany Times Union promotion:

I only wanted Sunday’s paper but then they started delivering Thursday and Saturday for free.

When I tried to stop the free Thursday and Saturday papers, they offered me the whole rest of the week for free. I said no, I only wanted Sunday. They said okay and for a while I only got Sunday deliveries, but then I started getting Thursday and Saturday again. I figured it had something to do with local ads on those days but it still annoyed me.

I was so frustrated that I decided to stop delivery altogether. That’s when I was told “You don’t want to put your paper carrier out of a job do you?”  And then they offered me a totally free subscription seven days a week for three months. I didn’t accept it. I just wanted them to stop delivering free papers that I didn’t have time to read and was just throwing out.

So the irony of the whole thing is that because they kept sending me free papers, they lost me as a customer.”

“Gannett Co., the largest U.S. newspaper publisher by circulation, reports earnings on Thursday, kicking off what is expected to be the ugliest quarter in recent memory for the industry,” says The Wall Street Journal in a blunt assessment of the coming earnings season. USA Today is expected to take it on the chin when Gannett announces its results. Forthcoming numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations are expected to show a six-month decline of about 100,000 in USA Today‘s 2.3-million circulation, largely as a result of lower occupancy in hotels.  Free hotel distribution accounts for more than half of the paper’s 2.3 million circulation.

Adding to USA Today‘s woes is Marriott’s decision to make room delivery of newspapers optional. Citing environmental concerns, the hotel chain said it will now offer guests a choice of papers or no paper at all, if they so choose.  Declining readership was also a factor in the decision, which will reduce daily circulation by about 50,000 across the US.  One quarter of travelers didn’t even crack open the newspaper that was delivered to their doorstep, a spokeswoman said.

Ugly Spat Over LA Times‘ Front-Page Ad

An internal battle of the Los Angeles Times over the publisher’s decision to run a front-page ad resembling news story highlights growing tension between editors and publishers as the industry revenue woes deepen.  The ad ran last Thursday below the fold in a position and typeface that some people believe could be mistaken for a news story (left). Charles Apple has an image of the entire front page. In an interview with TheWrap, LA Times executive editor John Arthur called the ad “horrible” and “a mistake.” However, the VP for entertainment advertising at the paper said Arthur’s boss, editor Russ Stanton, “approved both advertorial units.”

Not so, says Stanton, who told the Times’ own reporter that the ad ran over his objections. “There is not an editor in this nation — including me — who really wants to see something like that on the front page of his or her publication,” Stanton said. Publisher Eddy Hartenstein said he made the decision to run the ad because of the perilous financial situation at the newspaper. “I’m just trying to keep the lights on here, folks,” he told an angry newsroom last week.

Barriers to front-page advertising have been falling recently as publishers struggle to get creative. The New York Timesshattered tradition in January with a front-page strip ad for CBS and the Boston Globe followed suit just two weeks later.

Miscellany

Newspaper executives like to point out that their total readership — including the Web — is bigger than ever.  However, online ad revenue is still growing more slowly than the market as a whole, according to Alan Mutter.  The most alarming recent statistic: “Interactive revenues for newspapers dropped by 1.8% in 2008 to $3.1 billion at the same time overall online ad sales in the United States surged 10.4% to a record $23.4 billion,” Mutter writes. What’s more, newspapers’ online ad revenues today are 13.3% of the overall market, the lowest share ever.  Mutter suggests that the culprit is newspapers’ practice of up-selling print advertisers with discounted online campaigns, a strategy that grows weaker as print sales decline.  Publishers need to develop sites that look more like the Web and less like digital versions of their print products, he advises.

The Chicago Tribune is cutting another 20% of its already depleted newsroom staff. The paper didn’t say how many employees are left in the newsroom, but there were about 440 as of the most recent layoffs in February. The paper is also reorganizing some production groups, merging copy editing, page design, graphics, imaging and some photo editing into a single department.

Writing on Slate, Jack Shafer takes on joint operating agreements as the great sucking sound that weakened the newspaper industry.  “The tragedy of the joint operating agreements is that instead of making the stronger paper stronger, the arrangement tends to weaken it,” he says, pointing to the San Francisco Chronicle as the poster child example. “Had the Chronicle and the Examiner been forced to compete on the business side in 1965 instead of to collaborate, a clear victor would have a fighting chance at surviving in today’s environment.” Instead, the Chronicle was forced to support the weaker Examiner to the point that both papers were worse off.

The Gannett-owned Observer & Eccentric Newspapers will cease publication of five print and Web editions of the Eccentric chain in suburban Detroit on May 31. Gone are the Birmingham, West Bloomfield, Troy and Rochester editions of the Eccentric. Two other newspapers will be merged into the South Oakland Eccentric, serving nearby communities. The consolidation will result in the loss of 44 jobs.

The Huffington Post has published a terse set of editorial guidelines, demonstrating that the standards being applied to citizens journalists don’t differ all that much from those practiced by mainstream media.

And Finally…

Is that a penguin on the telly? Well, a few penguins, actually, but click the image to see the truly awesome spectacle of what happens when penguins congregate. This is one of the photos on Incredimazing, a website devoted to collecting bizarre images submitted by people like you and me. If you want to scramble your brain, check out the M.C. Escher car.

The New York Times Company shocked the newspaper industry last week with its threats close the Boston Globe on May 1 unless Globe unions give back $20 million in concessions.  There’s new evidence that the May 1 date is a bluff and that closing down the Globe could cost the Times more than keeping it in business.

The Newspaper Guild is taking an initially defiant stance on the Times’ request that the union shoulder half of the $20 million in targeted cost savings. “We’re willing to consider some concessions but not the draconian amount they put forth,” said union president Daniel Totten, in an apparent call of the Times’ bluff. He also characterized the Times’s demand for freedom to lay off people without regards to seniority as “a nonstarter.” Globe reporter Scott Allen, who has a lifetime employment guarantee, commented “Now, nobody thinks that if we make these concessions, there won’t be more cuts in a few months.” Yes, Scott, we think you can count on that when the paper is losing $85 million a year.

The very act of closing the paper would trigger huge expenses in itself. The Boston Herald analyzed public records and found that union members could be entitled to up to 50 weeks of severance pay and that underfunded pension liabilities could swell the total cost to more than $100 million.  Contractual obligations also make the Globe a tough property to sell, since few buyers would want to assume open-ended liabilities like the lifetime employment pledges to 435 employees.  The only way to cancel the guarantees, apparently, is to close down the paper.

If the Times Co. plans to carry forward with its threats, it has yet to tell the government. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) act requires most employers with more than 100 employees to give 60 days’ notice of plant closings and mass layoffs.  The Times Co. hasn’t yet filed a WARN notice, although it could still shutter the paper and pay employees for 60 days thereafter.

The Globe is raising its newsstand prices by as much as 60% in a gamble that readers will help pick up some of the bill for keeping the paper afloat. Residents outside of Boston will now pay $4 for a Sunday paper, compared to the current $2.50.

The Globe‘s crosstown rival Herald, which can barely disguise its glee in covering this story, also reports that four Guild leaders and six governing board executives are among those with lifetime job guarantees. Those guarantees are one of the biggest obstacles to selling the paper and are a primary negotiating point between the Times Co and the Globe unions.  The guarantees are causing friction within Newspaper Guild ranks, as some members believe that the leadership will be unwilling to negotiate in good faith out of fear of losing their jobs.

The Herald’s rapacious columnist, Howie Carr (left), skewers his blue-blooded competition for a series of past errors provoked by lapses in judgment.  Too bad there are no hyperlinks; it would’ve been nice to read the background on this stuff.

Meanwhile, the Globe itself notes a trend: newspaper owners are increasingly using the threat of closure to extract concessions from their unions. Hearst’s success in gaining significant givebacks from the union in order to keep the San Francisco Chronicle afloat may have prompted the Times Co. to threaten the Globe with oblivion. Also, Members of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild in Seattle were scheduled to vote this week on accepting a wage freeze and two weeks of unpaid furloughs in exchange for keeping the Seattle Times afloat. A similar holdup is going on in Maine. Could it be that newspaper owners are merely posturing in order to gain concessions from the unions? Nah, they both have the higher goal of quality journalism in mind.

Is AP Worst Content Thief?

A new blog called The Future Of Newspapers features a guest column by veteran Denver sports writer Dave Krieger that poses a curious question: How can the Associated Press proposed to champion the intellectual property rights of newspapers when the AP is itself the worst violator of those rights? Krieger notes that readers don’t make a distinction between the source of information and where they consume it. News from the Denver Post that appears on ESPN.com is presumed to be from ESPN.

“Why should any newspaper in the Internet age be a member of an organization that takes that paper’s original material, rewrites it and distributes it around the world without attribution or compensation? In fact, an organization that charges the newspaper for the privilege?” The AP had some utility when newspapers were expected to provide national and international coverage, but obligation is gone now.  For most metro dailies, the AP is nothing more than a subscription service that pirates their content and distributes it free on the Internet.  He has a point.

Miscellany

Executives might want to look at what’s going on at the Virginian-Pilot, where management reports that the financial outlook is brightening even as it lays off another 40 employees.  The company has cut nearly 20% of its workforce in the past year and reduced its newsroom staff by 30% since early 2007, but it has also taken some initiatives to diversify and grow revenue. These include targeted websites, expansion of entertainment coverage and contracts to deliver national newspapers in its region. While print revenue continues to fall, management said online revenue is growing. The newspaper turned a profit in the first quarter and March was its best month in a year.

Boston University’s newspaper asks three journalists-turned -academics if university partnerships could be a solution to newspapers’ financial troubles.  They agree that university endowments could be an important source of support for failing journalist enterprises and that universities have a duty to support worthy cultural and public service institutions.  However, educational institutions are not known for acting quickly and trustees would probably balk at taking on financial liabilities as daunting a complex as those that the industry faces.

Rosa Brooks fires a parting shot in her swan song as a Los Angeles Times columnist. She’s going to the Pentagon as advisor to the undersecretary of Defense for policy, but she fears that the evisceration of her industry will leave the American public wanting. She “can’t imagine anything more dangerous than a society in which the news industry has more or less collapsed.” Brooks believes that the government must step up to the plate and subsidize journalism, which isn’t the same as subsidizing media. The problem with existing subsidies is that they “have actually contributed to the decline of high-quality journalism by enabling monopolies, freezing out smaller and locally controlled media outlets and encouraging large corporations to treat the news as just another product,” she writes. The issue isn’t how to save the media, but how to save quality.

The Reno (Nev.) Gazette-Journal is laying off 35 people, or about 10 percent of its workforce, and closing a weekly paper in Carson City. These are in addition to 61 other positions eliminated since December.  Do the math, and the paper has cut almost 25% of its workforce in the last four months.

Veteran newsman Ric Cox has launched a blog called “Save Our Tribune” that’s dedicated to “rescuing Chicago’s leading newspaper.”  In one of his initial posts, he suggests ways that the Tribune can make online subscriptions palatable to users who are accustomed to getting news for free.

And Finally…

Some residents of Omaha, Neb. have created a satirical website to celebrate “Totally bogus news from the mid-heartland.”  The principal target of its barbs is the Omaha World Herald, “which has laid off employees twice (usually after throwing an extravagant party for an ex-publisher), cut back circulation, and now runs obits where it used to run op-eds,” according to a promotional message. One of the early posts notes the possibility that the state may create a precedent in capital punishment due to a typographical error. “The state might be replacing the electric chair with ‘lethal infection’ rather than the intended ‘lethal injection,'” the editors write, noting that some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee actually like the idea. One of them “added an elegant provision permitting the use of a piece of rusty barbed wire to begin the process and inject the pathogens,” says the site.

Two numbers stood out in Friday’s shocking news that the New York Times Co. was threatening to shut down the Boston Globe: $85 million and 450. The first number is the amount of money the Globe is expected to lose this year without union concessions. The second is the number of employees at the paper who have lifetime-employment contracts. All of those people should be very nervous right now.

The Times Co., which is groaning under $1.1 billion in debt, wants the unions to give up $20 million in concessions or face closure of the 137-year-old Globe, which has dominated the news business in Boston for more than 30 years. Given the size of the projected loss this year, $20 million seems like a modest amount. This would indicate that the Times Co. threat is merely posturing, as Alan Mutter argues. But ultimatums appear to be working in San Francisco, where the union just voted 10-1 to give the Chronicle broad authority to lay off employees without regards to seniority as well as to cut vacation time and extend working hours. The Chronicle and the Globe have similar audience characteristics.

The brass ring for Times negotiators has to be the 450 Globe employees who work under lifetime job guarantees. We knew such guarantees existed, but we hadn’t seen a count of the number of employees who have them until this past Friday; they comprise nearly a third of the unionized workforce. It’s hard to imagine any company handing out promises of that kind, but the Globe did that in 1993, when the economy was emerging from recession and businesses were being conservative about guaranteeing anything. Such management hubris testifies to the dominance the Globe enjoyed at the time over the Boston market, where its only competition is the working-class Herald and a string of suburban dailies.

We live in Globe country and can testify to the paper’s reach in the affluent suburbs. Drive through a quiet subdivision on any Sunday morning and the Globe is the paper you see in the driveways of the $700,000 homes. However, the tech-savvy Boston audience is also more open than most to online alternatives, which is perhaps one reason Boston.com is the sixth largest newspaper website while the Globe reported a circulation decline of more than 10% last November on top of an 8.3% decline six months earlier.

If the 450 employees each cost $100,000 on a fully loaded basis, that’s $45 million in annual costs over which management effectively has no control. We don’t have to comment on the lack of motivation that guaranteed employment must instill in a heavily unionized environment. If we were Times Co. management, though, we’d probably aim the first few blows of the ax directly at that soft middle.

The Globe covers its own news with reaction from community members ranging from fry cooks to U.S. Senators.

College student Adam Sell, who has interned at the Globe for two years, sent us a link to a Flickr photostream he created of the closing of the Globe‘s NorthWest bureau 10 days ago.

Miscellany

Two central Pennsylvania newspapers that have published separately with a single weekly combined edition will join forces on a permanent basis at the end of June. The Intelligencer Journal and Lancaster New Era will be published Monday through Saturday mornings with combined news and features operations but separate editorial pages.  The merger will result in the reduction of 60 full-time and 40 part-time positions, or about 20% of the workforce. Management said the combined circulation of 229,500 has been growing but that the economics of the publishing industry demands changes.

Publishers who are struggling with solutions to the revenue problem, none of them very appetizing, might want to look to Europe for inspiration. The big German publisher Axel Springer just reported record profits and is looking to expand overseas, possibly into the US.  Norway’s VG Nett charges citizens for access to its news through a cable TV subscription fee. And a group of papers in Belgium joined forces to force Google to remove their content from its search results. All in all, some papers in Europe are doing just fine, thanks to tight government partnerships and creative approaches to revenue

The Detroit Media Partnership, which publishes the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, has closed a deal with Plastic Logic to distribute the Plastic Logic Reader under purchase or lease to subscribers of the Detroit dailies as an alternative to paper delivery.  The reader is the size of an 8.5 x 11-in. pad of paper, weighs less than many print magazines and sports a touch-screen interface.

With the Minneapolis Star Tribune in bankruptcy, employees have started a grass-roots effort to save the paper. A group has launched a Facebook group (1,280 members, but only one discussion post since Jan. 17), a website (inactive as of this morning) and plans to hand out paper hats and scorecards at the Twins’ home opener. It’s probably going to take more than that.

If you like Chicago Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper, you probably won’t after reading this egotistical, self-indulgent monument to himself. If this is how newspaper columnists regard their own celebrity, it’s no surprise readers are turning elsewhere. But there are a couple of good anecdotes that illustrate how divorced these scribes are from their readers.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt will keynote the Newspaper Association of America national convention in San Diego this week. Schmidt, who is often considered the great Satan by newspaper publishers, has nevertheless been a vocal proponent of the need to help the industry.  It should be an interesting encounter. Schmidt is scheduled to speak on Tuesday at 10 a.m. PDT. You can listen to his remarks live. NAA will offer a moderated “Cover it Live” discussion on its PressimeNow! blog, where visitors can pose questions, share their thoughts and get live reactions from attendees.

The Sun-Times Media Group is considering ending publication of some of its suburban newspapers as it struggles to emerge from its recently declared bankruptcy.

A.H. Belo Corp., owner of the Dallas Morning News and three other daily newspapers, will cut employee salaries next month and suspend a retirement supplement to pension plan participants next year. Cuts will range from 2.5% to 15%, depending on an employee’s salary. The company’s CEO will also take a 20% cut in pay.

Last month we told you about St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor Christopher Ave’s use of song to lament the layoffs of newspaper copy editors. Now, 26-year old Berkeley musician named Jonathan Mann has joined forces with the staff of the East Bay Express to come up with a solution to newspapers’ business problems. You have to wait to the end to hear it, but the three minutes are time well spent.