You’ve got to wonder about morale at the Los Angeles Times after it was revealed this week that publisher David Hiller (left, with pressman Ed Padgett) hatched a plan to move the paper’s monthly magazine completely under the control of the advertising department without telling the newspaper’s editor. Citing anonymous sources, The New York Times reports that Hiller planned to replace the magazine’s entire nine-person editorial staff and that a new editor has already been hired.

That editor’s credentials don’t indicate that a lot of hard-hitting investigative journalism was in the plan. In a droll resume rundown, the Times’ Richard Perez-Pena writes: “The new editor…is Annie Gilbar, who has been the host of a program on the Home Shopping Network. She is a former editor of InStyle magazine and has written or co-written a number of advice books, like ‘Wedding Sanity Savers.’”

The astounding thing is that Hiller apparently didn’t tell LA Times editor Russ Stanton about any of these plans. The publication currently named Los Angeles Times Magazine was going to hit the street in late summer or early fall with no oversight from the paper’s editorial staff, despite carrying the weight of the paper’s reputation and credibility.

Equally amazing is that the plans had moved along this far without Stanton’s knowledge. According to the Times report, Hiller had already hired a new editor, art director and photo editor. Assuming that the previous staff of the magazine was reporting somehow through the LA Times editorial operation, it seems incredible that those changes could be made under the radar.

This puts Russ Stanton in a tough position, of course. The New York Times story, if true, is a public humiliation, the kind of revelation that could prompt Stanton’s resignation. But Stanton’s only been in his job for four months, and he’s the fourth LA Times editor in the last three years. Another resignation at the top level would send staff morale into the tank.

We won’t even speculate about what Hiller was thinking.

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Washington Post columnist Harold Myerson has a withering piece about Sam Zell, likening the Tribune Co. CEO to the union activist who tried to blow up the LA Times offices nearly a century ago. “At the rate he’s going, [Zell is] on his way to accomplishing a feat that [the bomber] didn’t even contemplate: destroying the L.A. Times,” he writes. Describing Zell as “a visiting Visigoth, whose civic influence is about as positive as that of the Crips, the Bloods and the Mexican mafia,” Myerson trashes Zell’s pronouncements last week that journalists would increasingly be measured on the volume of their output, noting that under those metrics, the Post’s Pulitzer-winner reporters would find their heads on the chopping block.

The 15th World Editors Forum is going on in Göteborg, Sweden, and Editors Weblog is providing exhaustive coverage. A lot of the talk has been about the new, integrated newsroom and the reinvention of journalism. Here are some highlights.

• Two researchers discuss a study analyzing the five stages of news production and how journalism organizations are involving readers in each. Not surprisingly, most news outlets still don’t ask readers for much input until after the story is published, although a few are experimenting with early intervention. News editors still see their gatekeeper role as vital, the researchers say.
• Sweden’s Östersund Posten has launched a hyperlocal experiment involving 101 unpaid bloggers to write about community issues. Traffic is up 60% and so is advertiser interest, although no financial figures are cited.
• The CEO of Denmark’s Det Berlingske Officin, and editor-in-chief of Berlingske Tidende says journalists must give up their gatekeeper role and adapt to a new style of reporting that stresses reader participation and links. “The reader has broken the old circle of power,” says Lisbeth Knudsen.
• The managing editor of The Wall Street Journal’s wsj.com tells how an integrated approach to news reporting has helped double online traffic in the last year. Almar Latour says journalists are now encouraged to incorporate video, photos and informational graphics into their work. It hasn’t been easy to convince writers to put down the pen and pick up the camera, though. One tactic that’s helped has been the Most Popular List, a constantly updated report on the stories that are getting the most traffic. The list has generated healthy competition between reporters.
• The assistant managing editor of the UK’s Daily Telegraph tells how one-week training programs intended to help the newsroom adapt to multimedia have improved camaraderie and morale
• The editor-in-chief of Germany’s Tide sings the praises of citizen journalism as a cost-effective way to develop content, but warns that citizen “reporters” need to be trained that quality is as raw content. The paper has trained almost 200 ordinary folks, who now contribute an hour-and-a-half of video a day to the site, says Werner Eggert.
• The editor-in-chief of the national Danish newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad tells how adding weekend editions and offering defecting readers the chance to switch to a smaller weekend-only package has doubled circulation. Erik Bjerager says the new editions are less newsy and more focused on Christian values.
• The Innovations International Media Consulting Group presents its annual survey and calls upon newspapers to be more innovative. It singles out several papers for praise, including The Spokesman Review of Spokane, WA, which has invited anyone in the community to attend its daily news meeting.
• The managing editor of India’s Mint business newspaper tells how his publication survived in a highly competitive market by making journalistic ethics a differentiator.
• The founder and editor-in-chief of Rue89.com tells of journalism without print and says that life is good. The French website combines professional journalism with blogger and reader input to create rich content at low cost. Many of the best stories have come from reader comments, says Pierre Haski.
• Svetlana Khoroshev, whose role at Russian business newspaper Delovoy Peterburg isn’t identified, says the print publication has managed to connect with the famously print-averse youth audience by incorporating content from a popular MySpace-like community and spreading word-of-mouth through entrepreneurs.
• The head of development at Norway’s VG Multimedia tells how the popular vg.no news website for adults was able to extend its appeal to the youth audience by launching a social network. Jo Christian Oterhals says Nettby.no now has 61% of the teen market, although the model hasn’t necessarily transplanted well to other countries.

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

Quoting from Baquet:

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

And from O’Shea:

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

Survey says Newspaper Websites Attract Smart, Rich People

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

Murdoch Still Favored to Win Newsday

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

Envisioning the Future of News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Layoff Log

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

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

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

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

Stirring Story From the Heartland

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

Labor Struggle Amid the Palms

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

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

Veteran Editors Sound Off on Industry Woes

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

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

Survey Reveals Editors Realistic About Industry’s Future

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

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

And Finally…

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

Final Earnings Reports Trickle In

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

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

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

Layoff Log

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

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

Where Will All the Dollars Go?

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

Department of Unintended Consequences

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

Ad Age this week discovers what NDW readers have known for a year: The major metro newspaper business is in deep trouble. Better late than never!

Quoting: “Ad Age is launching this series about the 1,437 dailies still working hard in the U.S. It’ll look at the thought leaders in the industry, their attempts to leave the past — and even formats — behind and their strategies for finding new business models. ”

One common complaint, of course, is that newspapers give away their content. Ad Age charges for its content after a few days of public viewing. Maybe there’s a business there

Earnings Drumbeat Continues, but With Fewer Surprises

Gannett’s quarterly earnings continued the pattern established by the New York Times Co. and Media General last week, but at least they weren’t surprising. Earnings were down 9% on an 8% drop in revenue. The industry-wide slump in classified ad revenue pulled down the numbers, with real estate and recruitment ad sales both down more than 24%. Gannett continues to benefit from having USA Today, which saw actual growth in the entertainment, financial and advocacy (whatever that is) categories. However, total ad pages at the national newspaper were still off 14%.

There was nothing from Lee Enterprises or JH Belo to lift investors’ spirits. Lee hit a 52-week low after reporting a quarterly loss while Belo’s new pure-play newspaper company said its results would disappoint. Both got slammed on Wall Street. However, investors rewarded NYT Co. and Media General for making progress in their shareholder battles.

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Tacoda founder Dave Morgan writes in Media Post that a lot of big media companies are going to collapse, victims of declining revenues and high fixed costs. We agree, and we said as much nearly two years ago. Morgan sees opportunity in decline. The collapse of many metro newspapers will create a vacuum for distribution channels that can deliver sponsorship messages to local communities. He speculates on those opportunities.

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The Associated Press is doing its part to throw them a lifeline, however. It’s cutting its fees in response to protests from newspapers. The move will save members about $14 million in total, or more than double the savings of the original AP proposal. Attendees at the recent American Society of Newspaper Editors convention were reportedly still grousing about the charges, though.

Would Founding Fathers Have Defended Behavioral Targeting?

The Newspaper Association of America has weighed in on the Federal Trade Commission’s debate about privacy standards over behavioral targeting, taking the unusual stance that this is a First Amendment issue. According to the group, publishers should not be infringer in any way from delivering ads, even if that means collecting information about people’s onliine activities that could potentially reveal their identities. Apparently the NAA feels that since the Constitution doesn’t guarantee a right to privacy but does guarantee a right to free speech, behavioral tracking is legally protected.

The Changing Ad World

Louis Hau writes in Forbes about the increasing chuminess between editors and ad sales people. This is a new fact of life, he suggests. Newspaper ad sales people haven’t historically been oriented toward developing new lines of business, so they need all the help they can get. Editors need to cooperate on business opportunities in order to keep their jobs. This new reality challenges the traditional church-state separation of mainstream journalism, but we’d better get used to it because this is the way media is evolving.

Ohio Papers Try Sharing

A group of Ohio newspapers has gotten together to share stories and even reporting assignments in a novel response to the cost-cutting pressure that all newspapers are feeling. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, Toledo Blade, Cincinnati Enquirer and Akron Beacon Journal now post all their daily stories on a private website where editors can pick whatever they want and publish it in their own pages. The idea goes against reporters’ natural competitive spirit, but it’s probably delivering better news to the readers. The outlets are even teaming on some joint reporting projects. So instead of having five different papers covering the same state house story, they’re actually spreading around their resources and minimizing duplication of effort.

Debating Old vs. New Media

The New York Times’s Sunday blockbuster story about the Pentagon’s secret media manipulation campaign is generating some understandable chest-thumping by newspaper editors. Crosscut Seattle comments that a story like that took shoe leather, not laptops, and praises its local journals for being willing to go to court to get access to secret documents. No blogger is going to go that extra step, says editor Chuck Taylor.

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CBS has launched a citizen journalism website where people can upload news by cell phone, Editors Weblog reports. What will be really cool is when news organizations don’t relegate citizen journalism to an online ghetto and actually start integrating readers’ comments with staff reports on their main sites. This short article points to a couple of examples of that.

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Glenn Frankel, Hearst Professional in Residence at Stanford University and former Washington Post reporter, writes Romenesko a tongue-in-cheek commentary on Slate columnist Jack Shafer’s recent counter-intuitive sermon in praise of buyouts. Frankel comments on a recent visit to the SJ Merc: “The spaciousness and the blessed silence reminded me of the peace and tranquility I found in abandoned villages in Kurdistan in 1991 after the Iraqi army had passed through during its own special buy-out program.”

We wish we could end the week on a happy note, but as we noted on Monday, it’s earnings season. Unfortunately, the news couldn’t be much worse. If troubles at the New York Times and Media General are any indication, the rest of the year could be ugly.

New York Times Co. Troubles Deepen

The New York Times Co. swung to a small loss in the first quarter from a $24 million profit a year ago. In a conference call, the CEO didn’t indicate that things were going to get better any time soon. The more worrisome trend may be that online growth is now slowing.

As a result, it looks like the Times newspaper will have to resort to some layoffs to achieve its goal of a 100-position reduction in workforce. Not enough people have taken the buyout offer. The deadline is next Tuesday and the layoffs, if they happen, will be the first in the paper’s 167-year history.
The media’s focus on the 100 job cuts at the Old Gray Lady may obscure the bigger view of the NYT Co. crisis. Media Post points out that the company has cut over 2,000 jobs – about 18% of the total staff – since 2003. The reason for the low response to the recent buyout offer is that the job market is so bleak for ex-journalists, the article suggests.

It offers this cheery quote from analyst Ken Doctor: “Clearly, the decline in revenues is deepening. At this point, there really is no bottom.” As layoffs continue, in future he predicts “a lot of newspapers hiring part-timers, stringers and bloggers–but no more full-time, $50,000-a-year jobs.”

Media General Hammered by Florida Exposure

The news was even worse at Media General, which is heavily dependent to the recession-laden Florida market. The quarterly loss of $20.3 million is more than three times last year’s loss. But check out the declines in these ad categories:

• Newspaper ad revenue off 19.1%
• Interactive media revenue down 3.3% (this is the future, remember)
• Classified ad revenue off 28%
• National ad revenue down 21%

It’s not surprising that Media General just offered buyouts to half the employees in its Florida Communications Group. The terms are generous, ranging up to 39 weeks of pay. Media General didn’t say how many jobs it hopes to eliminate with the offer, but it did say that layoffs are possible.

And the Bad News Spreads

More talk of layoffs, closings and cost reductions. Here’s the rundown:

• The Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20-Year Club has the scoop on Advance Publications’ plan to shut down one of its two production facilities. Advance Publications publishes the Newark Star-Ledger. The two plants employ more than 600 people, though it’s not clear how many jobs would be cut. A decision is expected within the next few weeks.
• Times are hard, indeed, in the New York-Philadelphia corridor. The AP reports that the owner of Philadelphia’s two largest daily newspapers told a judge last week that unraveling its pension mess could lead to more layoffs. One of the two pensions the company merged is underfunded and the costs of bringing it up to snuff were unanticipated. In January, Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC said it had to cut costs by 10% or its viability would be in doubt.
• The Toronto Star will cut 160 jobs, or a little less than 3% of its total workforce. The Canadian Journalism Project points out that this is disconcerting in light of the recent reports that the Canadian newspaper industry is faring much better than its U.S. counterpart.
• The Raleigh News & Observer just told its staff that layoffs may be needed to cope with the business downturn. The paper employs 206 editorial staff.
• The suburban Chicago Daily Herald laid off an unspecified number of employees throughout the company. Classified ad revenues are off as much as 45% year-over-year.
• And finally, further evidence that Sam Zell’s Tribune Co. empire may be unraveling. Revenues continue to fall faster than expected, and now Zell is talking about selling off “newspapers and other properties.” Could that mean that titles other than Newsday may go on the block? One recent report said the LA Times may be in play.

But wait, there’s even more: The source of many of the industry’s problems is doing just fine. Blogger Roy Greenslade notes that Craigslist.org has quietly expanded its global footprint by 120 cities, bringing the total to 570. Craigslist may be the single biggest financial competitor the newspaper industry has. Here is the devastatingly brief, haiku-like announcement from Craig Newmark.

Finally, Philip Stone comments on the empty halls at the once-great Nexpo newspaper equipment trade show. It used to be that Nexpo was so big that only a few convention centers in the country could accommodate it, he says. But at this year’s event, you could have rolled a bowling ball down the expo floor and not disturbed anyone.

Go bowling this weekend. We can use a break.

Better Make That A Double; It’s Earnings Time

Today’s lead factoid: The American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) says the number of U.S. newsroom journalists shrank to its lowest level since 1984 after total cutbacks of 2,900 in 2007. Update: Newsosaur Alan Mutter says this survey is a load of hooey.

In this week’s news, earnings season is upon us, and investors will be watching nervously as Media General and the New York Times Co. kick off what is likely to be a gruesome round of financial reports. Reuters says Media General revenue could fall 10.6% and lose money. The revenue slide at the times is expected to be a more modest 3.5%.

The news from Journal Register Co. could be worse than that. The floundering chain is being delisted by the New York Stock Exchange this week, which is hardly surprising given that its stock is off more than 99%. The company has hired an investment banker to explore it options. What a rapid fall from grace. Your obedient editor actually owned a few shares of this catastrophe two years ago when one of the leading money magazines called it a sleeper. Today, it looks like sleep of a permanent variety is a more likely possibility.

Alan Mutter writes that JRC was actually a model of expense management under the reign of CEO Robert Jelenic, but the disasterous acquisition of a chain of newspapers in the Detroit area saddled the company with a debt burden that may now pull it under. Some of Mutter’s stories about Jelenic’s obsession with expense reduction are amusing. What’s not amusing is the outlook: with debt at seven times trailing operating earnings and a business rooted in declining markets, it looks unlikely that JRC can successfully pull out of this tailspin.

Rate of Decline Quickens In Seattle

How bad is the newspaper business in Seattle? Despite owning a legally sanctioned near-monopoly, the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer have seen revenues drop more than 25% since 2000. What’s potentially worse is that online revenues are shrinking, too. No doubt the 2000 figures were bolstered by recruitment advertising revenue during the tech stock bubble, but the current year-to-year declines are outstripping industry averages. The fact that the company has made two major belt-tightening moves in just four months indicates that the shrinkage of its business is racing ahead of its own forecasts.

Crosscut Seattle publisher David Brewster has some ideas for rejuvenating the struggling Times. He advises the company to start delivering more products to people’s doorsteps, create an advertising network to sell locally on behalf of national advertisers and find a big partner, among other things.

Good And Bad News In The Numbers

This chart from eMarketer illustrates painfully the obscuring effect of percentages. Online ad sales at U.S. newspapers were up almost 19% in 2007, while print sales were down 9.4%. But the online revenue increase amounts to just $500 million, compared to a $4.4 billion drop in print sales. That means that print contracted eight times as fast as online expanded last year. This trend is ominous. In 2006, the falloff in print sales was only 1.3 times the growth in online sales.

There’s good news, though. Newspapers are doing pretty well in local advertising markets, according to Borrell Associates. Quoting from Media Post: “The survey of 3,000 local Web publishers found that newspaper sites garnered 26.9% of total local online advertising dollars, and also forecast big increases in spending for online video in particular in 2008. Overall, in 2007 newspaper Web sites netted over $2 billion in local online advertising. Thus, according to Borrell, they dwarfed online Yellow Pages sites…” The researcher says the secret is that newspapers are learning to sell better to local advertisers.

And finally…

Los Angeles Daily News Editor Ron Kaye quit 23 years after joining the paper and one month after being forced to lay off nearly 20% of his newsroom staff. “All good things in life come to an end sooner or later, even my love affair with the Daily News,” he wrote. with characteristic bluntness. Noted the E&P writeup: “During his tenure at the Daily News, Kaye became the public face of the newspaper, and his bombastic personality and scathing criticism of Los Angeles City Hall shaped the editorial pages of the paper.”

Romenesko treats us to t-shirts given out at a recent Hartford Courant awards event.

All News Must Stand On Its Own

Encyclopedia Britannica kicks off a “Newspapers & the Net Forum” with an excerpt from Nick Carr’s new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.He states what publishers have known for some time: the shift from print to online delivery changes the product entirely. No longer can high-margin classified ads support expensive investigative reporting. In today’s world, every item of content is an island and must stand on its own merit. Advertisers want contextual adjacency. This creates pressure to publish stories about high-definition TVs instead of stories about Iraq.

Among the more than two dozen comments is one that notes “I have a copy of Newsweek with a cover story entitled, if I am recalling correctly, “Are Newspapers Dead?” The magazine is from around 1965. So this debate has been going on a long time.” True, but this is the first time those predictions really appear to be coming true.

The Forum goes on all week with some other provocative topics that I promise to get around to reading. Here’s the index page.

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Rethinking the Value of News

Tom Abate thinks newspaper publishers could learn a few things from the airline industry. In other words, figure out how to charge different prices for the same product. As he sees it, the background notes that a reporter collects, which would never be of interest to a mainstream newspaper audience, could be a gold mine to businesses that specialized in that area. Use a blog to publish those notes and attract those special-interest readers and then sell ads to businesses that will pay top dollar to reach those people.

Abate laments all the attention being paid to Fark.com, a snarky linklog with a juvenile sense of humor. Newspapers shouldn’t be trying to out-Fark Fark, he says (although, if you look at Fark, it sends a lot of traffic to newspaper websites), but should focus on attracting the highly engaged readers who appreciate depth and context. There’s sensible thinking behind his comments, although the airline industry isn’t exactly the gold standard of business models and the devil would be in the details.

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Abate would probably find a soul mate in Ted Gup, a journalism professor at Case Western. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he laments his students’ appalling ignorance of basic current events.

Quoting:”Nearly half of a recent class could not name a single country that bordered Israel. In an introductory journalism class, 11 of 18 students could not name what country Kabul was in, although we have been at war there for half a decade. Last fall only one in 21 students could name the U.S. secretary of defense. Given a list of four countries — China, Cuba, India, and Japan — not one of those same 21 students could identify India and Japan as democracies. Their grasp of history was little better. The question of when the Civil War was fought invited an array of responses — half a dozen were off by a decade or more. Some students thought that Islam was the principal religion of South America, that Roe v. Wade was about slavery, that 50 justices sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, that the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1975. You get the picture, and it isn’t pretty.”

In his view, we’re raising a generation of kids who are so distracted and self-absorbed that they’ve tuned out the rest of the world. And part of the problem is that the don’t read newspapers or watch serious television.

Confidence in the Future

The publisher of the LA Times says the company is getting it together. In a memo to employees published on Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20 Year Club, David Hiller talks of adding 400 new regional advertising accounts, expanding Spanish language products and topping 100 million page views online the last two months running. There’s a new organization, new management and a commitment to build a vision and financial model that is sustainable for the long term. He also mentions in passing that there will only be merit raises this year and that they’ll be three months late. The Pressmen tap dance on that news. More to come during an April 30 town meeting.

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Meanwhile, the Albany Times Union believes in the future of print. The company’s about to spend $55 million to enlarge its headquarters and install a new printing press that will print color on all pages. The additional 70,000 sq. ft. faciliity is also intended to position the Times Union as a printer for other publications in the region.

Silver Linings in Pink Slips

Slate’s Jack Shafer sees some goodness in the latest wave of buyouts: a chance to bring new blood into the organization. The boomers who sit atop the editorial pyramids at all the big publications are too invested in the way things have always been done, he says. Get some whippernsappers in there for whom experimentation is a way of life.

Quoting: “‘There goes our institutional memory,’ somebody usually laments whenever a graybeard leaves a news organization. The speaker is usually another graybeard who, if pressed, couldn’t tell you what is so vital about the institutional memory wheeling out the door.”

Buyouts can mean rebirth for those taking the buyout, too, Shafer says. Longtime Washington Post political reporter Thomas B. Edsall is now at Huffington Post, where he says seeing his work appear without the meddling of a dozen editors is a rebirth.

And Finally

Leave it to Canada to buck the North American trend. Newspapers are actually doing pretty well up there, says Editors Weblog: “Total 2007 revenues, including online operations, slipped only 0.8%, with print advertising decreasing 2.4%. In contrast, online revenue grew 29% over 2006. Newspaper circulation as well took a very minor fall in 2007, decreasing 1.2% after a 3.8% rise the previous year.”

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A Racepoint Group blogger saw some value in my opinions and interviewed me about the future of newspapers. The fellow is a regular NDW reader, which makes the whole thing rather incestuous. Or perhaps circular. In any case, I blather.