The inclusive model of journalism that is evolving online will demand more editors than the media world has ever seen.  In effect, all journalists will become editors. They will learn to gather first-person accounts and combine them with expert insights to create a tapestry of information. They may then be called upon to tend and update those stories for years. Journalists will be at the vortex of an information swirl, and their ability to sort through and harmonize information from many sources will be their principal value.

These new rules will demand a different set of skills than the ones historically taught by journalism schools and demanded by professional editors.  As we have noted in earlier essays, the role of the reporter will become less prominent in the value chain.  In the past, reporters were taught to gather and sift through large amounts of information, discarding selectively as time and space limitations dictated.  In the future, space limitations will be irrelevant.  Every bit of information can be captured and archived forever. Time demands will both shrink and expand.

Deadlines Compress, but Stories Never Die

They’ll shrink because deadlines will be constant and unrelenting.  Journalists will be under pressure to publish news in near real-time.  This will demand new aggregation and organization skills.  A single journalist will no longer be the funnel — or bottleneck, depending on how you view it — for news events.  Ordinary citizens will deliver important news accounts as they happen.  A journalist’s competitors will no longer be a handful of regional print and broadcast outlets but an army of interested stakeholders who, in many cases, are more knowledgeable about the topic than the reporter.

It will be futile for a news organization to compete with this kind of citizen firepower.  The only rational strategy is to co-opt it.  That means reporters must develop relationships with people closest to the story, create the means to capture their observations and perspectives and deliver them quickly.  Reporters will become, in effect, editors supervising a loosely formed team of interested stringers.

On the back end, time frames will lengthen considerably as news stories become archives.  The Wikipedia model is perhaps the best illustration of this.  On Wikipedia, stories begin as a “stub” and grow to sometimes epic proportions.  Journalists will no longer write just “the first draft of history,” but will help to shape an archival account of considerably more long-term value. In some cases, a journalist’s career may become tied to a single story that he or she tends and enriches over time.

Promise and Problems

This model has great potential but also great challenge.  The loss of trust is a huge issue.  While not everyone trusts the news media, they can at least be reasonably certain that professional editors are working in their best interest.  The inclusive journalism model has no such guarantees.  Anyone can publish anything he or she wishes online, so editors will be needed to arbitrate conflicting claims.

This will certainly require old-fashioned reporting techniques.  When the facts can’t be discerned from field reports, it will still be up to the professional journalist to get on the phone and verify them.  Readers will come to trust these professional truth-sayers, whether they be individual journalists or media institutions. That’s an important point. In the future, readers may make little distinction between The New York Times and an independent journalist as long as they believe they can trust the source.  As Matt Drudge demonstrated a decade ago, trusted brands can emerge without the blessing of media institutions.

Disclosure Trumps Verification

News will increasingly be published without the rigorous fact-checking that information consumers have come to expect.  This is a controversial issue, but all trends point to accuracy becoming less vital as a criteria for publication than it is today.

The reason is that published information is no longer archival.  Online reports can be changed at any time, which means that the impact of incorrect information is greatly diminished.  Today, publication is no longer an end but a beginning.  Disclosure will become more important than confirmation.  Readers will come to accept that not all the facts are confirmed as long as those shortcomings are disclosed.

The fit and finish that has been characteristic of print publications will diminish in importance.  While this is a difficult idea for many editors to accept, the reality is that online information consumers are more tolerant of typos, grammatical errors and structural inconsistency than print readers (this blog is perhaps a good example!).  While some media outlets will continue to take pride in delivering high quality finished product, many readers will accept a trade-off between perfection and timeliness.  Top editors are already coming to accept this.  Faced with staff cuts and the need to do more with less, major newspapers are discovering that they no longer need a dozen editors to touch every front-page story.

In short, journalists will need to significantly broaden their range of skills.. The journalist of the future will be a resourceful, online-savvy and relationship-driven aggregator of information with the ability to apply reportorial shoe-leather where needed.  Deadlines will contract on the front end, but stories may live for years in a continually updated archive. The journalist will become part reporter, part editor and part librarian, playing a pivotal role in framing the stream of events and opinion for an audience that demands context.

Tribune Co. posted a $4.5 billion loss on a massive writeoff of goodwill to reflect the lower value of its newspaper assets. There was no good news in the results. Print revenue was down 15%, classified revenue off 26%, circulation sales down 2%, even online revenue was down 4%. The company’s next move will be to sell the Chicago Cubs, Wrigley Field and possibly its famous headquarters building in Chicago to meet a debt payment. After that, it’s a matter of crossing fingers and hoping that the economy improves enough to make more asset sales possible.

Alan Mutter thinks the Tribune writeoff may be the largest ever by a new owner. He pulls out the calculator and estimates that the value of the company has declined $20 million a day under Sam Zell’s leadership. Of course, Tribune is owned by its employees, so everyone shares Sam’s pain. Only Sam’s not feeling much pain because his highly leveraged position is funded almost entirely by other people’s money. Mutter’s Default-o-Matic ranking now rates Tribune as the company most likely to default on its debt. “At its new Caa2 [junk bond] rating, Tribune’s issues are considered to have a 48.3% chance of not being repaid,” he writes.

Needless to say, the not-so-loyal opposition at Tell Zell finds more to hate in the numbers. Pointing out that Tribune’s investment in its television assets actually increased in the quarter along with revenues, the anonymous blogger comments, “They realize that investing in the product can produce increases in revenue.” True ‘nuff, but when a 7% increase in investment yields a 2% increase in sales, that’s the equivalent of selling dollar bills for 95 cents. You’ll sell lots of product and still lose your shirt.

For Zell and crew, this is simply race against time. Ken Doctor sums up the company’s dilemma: It’s bailing water in a rising storm tide and desperately hoping that the storm will stop. The more assets it sells (and there are rumors that the LA Times may be the next big property to go), the fewer resources it has to generate revenue to meet its debt payments. At some point, this model simply collapses.

The only scenarios that can rescue Tribune Co. from ultimate default are either a reinvigoration of the newspaper industry (unlikely) or a turnaround in the real estate market (more likely, but not soon). But with many economists now predicting that the hoped-for 2009 economic turnaround probably won’t happen, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which this company survives intact much beyond the end of next year. What does that mean for all the employee retirement funds being held in the form of Tribune stock?

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The heavy debt load borne by many newspaper owners continues to take its toll. Cox Enterprises is looking to sell the Austin (Tx.) Statesman and 28 other regional newspapers in hopes of raising enough money to meet its debt obligations. Cox also owns the better-known Atlanta Journal Constitution but is selling the Statesman because the paper is profitable and may fetch a better price. Don’t count on it, says analyst John Morton. “The sales value of newspapers has probably dropped in half in the last five years,” he’s quoted as saying. “There are a lot of newspapers that are up for sale and there are no takers.” (via Romenesko)

Media Organizations Pull Back on Convention Coverage

Now this is progress. Newspapers are reducing their reporting staffs at the political conventions by up to 20% this summer, apparently in response to the fact that these vacuous, over-scripted media circuses are becoming less and less relevant to an American public that finally has alternatives. The fact that American Idol is the most popular alternative is beside the point.

As we’ve pointed out many times, the practice of sending 15-20 reporters to transcribe the same speeches that the TV cameras are already capturing makes no sense. With both parties’ nominations sewn up months ago, there is nothing happening at these conventions that’s going to make a difference to the democratic process. The most interesting insight to come out of the conventions is the speeches by the up-and-coming party insiders, and those are broadcast anyway.

Interesting tidbit in this story: some 320 bloggers are credentialed for the two conventions this summer, compared to just 42 in 2004. These people are mostly traveling on their own dime and they will work tirelessly because each and every one is competing with all the others. Instead of sending staff reporters to cover the convention, couldn’t newspapers contract with some of these bloggers for exclusive interviews and color pieces? Wouldn’t that be a lot cheaper than paying full-time staff and travel expenses? Is anyone actually doing this? Share your comments.

Miscellany

Wirting in Editor & Publisher, former editor and ad sales rep Maegan Carberry says the unspeakable: journalists have to learn how to help their employers make money. “I was aghast when I asked the (UCLA) Bruin staffers how many of them knew what a CPM (cost per thousand) was and my question was met with resounding silence,” she writes. “Same for an Alexa ranking or Google Analytics. Viewing the news through a myopic editorial lens is prohibitive to success.” Journalism schools still appear to be teaching their students to think of themselves as siloed and separated from the business side, a luxury no one can afford any more. Quoting a colleague, Carberry relates, “The person who figures out the revenue model for 21st century journalism will be a hero in the industry along the lines of Gutenberg with his printing press.”

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CNN is actually hiring. It plans to expand its number of bureaus to 20 from 10. Some of these new staff will be what the news network calls “all-platform journalists.” They each get laptops, cameras and online editing tools as well as the capacity to upload video reports from their remote locations. Some may get canteens and K-rations, too. CNN’s SVP of newsgathering insightfully observes, “Everyone’s a reporter now. Even our viewers.”

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Tell Zell analyzes a curious list of laid-off staff that was distributed to departing LA Times employees and calculates that older workers were more likely to lose their jobs. Twenty-one percent of workers over 50 were terminated, compared to 10% of workers under 40. Naturally, the entire internal memo is on the site for all to e-mail to their friends.

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Blethen Maine Newspapers continues to exemplify the concept of bleeding staff.It’s cutting 20 full- and part-time positions at the Kennebec Journal and Morning Sentinel. That’s about 10 percent of the payroll. A lot of the laid-off employees are from the pressroom. Blethen unsuccessfully tried to shore up its business by doing commercial printing work, but that market collapsed as the economy worsened.

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The Newspaper Guild is going to become more active in trying to reinvent the industry, says its incoming president. Bernie Lunzer says the union will actively investigate new ownership models, since the old ownership models have failed so badly. “There are non-profits, co-op ownership along the lines of what was used in agriculture for many years,” he tells E&P. And he won’t rule out the possibility that the Guild could take an ownership stake in some concerns. Lunzer says the Guild is also going to take a strong stand in defending newspaper ad salespeople, who are increasingly threatened with a move to 100% incentive-based competition. Fear is not a good motivator for sales people, he says.

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In other union news, Philadelphia’s two biggest unions have agreed to forego a $25/week raise they had negotiated for Sept. 1. Members apparently want to help company ownership avoid total financial collapse. They might give a call to their colleagues in Honolulu and share this perspective.

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Sun-Times Media Group (STMG) is outsourcing its inbound classified advertising sales to Buffalo-based Classified Plus. It didn’t say how much the move would save. Classified Plus handles calls for more than 200 newspapers in the U.S. The way things are going, it may soon be able to do that with a single employee.

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David Esrati’s “How Newspapers can become relevant in a Web 2.0 world” reads like an extended blog comment, but has some sound advice for how newspapers can learn a few things from Google and other Web properties.

And Finally

This 2 1/2 minute video has scored over 11 million views on YouTube, and if you watch it, you’ll understand why. It’s an incredible love story that could only be told in this medium. What a heartwarming story of love across the boundaries of time and species.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, whose company has played a critical role in the destruction of the US newspaper industry, bemoaned the decline of investigative journalism, a discipline he called “fundamental to how our democracy works,” in remarks  at the the recent Ad Age Madison & Vine conference in New York. The executive said a fundamental challenge to the industry is that readers are spending less time on content and thus less time being monetized. The idea that new advertising models will emerge to support quality journalism after the newspaper industry collapses is misguided. “The evidence does not support that view,” he said.Schmidt observed that newspapers are being challenged by the triple whammy of advertising competition, high newsprint prices and a decline of non-targeted advertising. “These guys are in a world of hurt and we as a community need to find economic models that will fund really great content,” he said. He noted ruefully that sketchy coverage of the war in Iraq is a particularly compelling example of the loss of investigative resources.

Redesigns Called “Reinventions”

That’s the South Florida Sun-Sentinel before (left) and after its forthcoming redesign. Or should be say the SunSentinel? That’s right. As Charles Apple wryly notes, amid the cutbacks at Tribune Co., the new SunSentinel has laid off a hyphen.

Apple quotes SunSentinel design director Paul Wallen saying, “Although our median reader is in the mid to late 50s, our target audience is almost a generation younger. We’re after occasional readers, people who don’t feel they have the time or enough interest to read our paper on a regular basis…We want the paper to feel vibrant and alive, much like the community it serves.” The new design formally launches on Sunday. To get a larger (and different) example, click on the image at left.

Another Tribune Co. property, the Baltimore Sun, will debut a new design on Aug. 24. No prototypes are being floated yet, but Editor & Publisher quotes Sun publisher Tim Ryan saying the overhaul is a  “reinvention.” There’ll be three sections: news, sports and features. The features section will be called “You” in a nod to the complete USATodayification of the American newspaper industry. Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams called the Sun redesign “a tour de force package that’s going to help re-write the Tribune Co. — and newspapers.” We’ve already shared our opinion on the business value of redesigns.

Milwaukee Feels the Pain

The Milwaukee Business Journal writes of forthcoming layoffs at the Journal Sentinel as the paper struggles to meet its goal of a 10% staff cut. The piece illustrates the scope of the industry’s pain. Milwaukee should be a good newspaper town. It’s got a solid blue-collar middle class, people who don’t change their habits very quickly. The Journal Sentinel has a near-monopoly position, with 70 percent readership among Milwaukee adults on Sundays and about 50 percent on weekdays. Yet ad revenue is down 13 percent so far this year on top of an 8 percent decline in 2007 and 4 percent in 2006. Sunday circulation is down 16% from a decade ago.

The story has the obligatory Newspaper Association of America quote about combined print/online audiences being larger than ever, but the nut graph is a quote from a Morningstar analyst: “For every dollar daily newspapers have lost in print revenue, they’ve been able to replace it with only 15 cents in revenue from their Web sites.” The only way newspapers can survive the online shift is to get smaller, the analyst says. It’s just that no one knows how small they have to get.

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A Journal Sentinel columnist is taking a buyout package and looking ahead. In this wistful, but ultimately uplifting farewell column he reminisces on the joys and frustrations of journalism and looks forward to taking a chance and spending some time with his family.

Miscellany

Former New York Times editor John Darnton recently retired from the paper. But instead of writing a tell-all memoir, he’s aired some dirty laundry in the form of a murder mystery called Black and White and Dead All Over (order it on Amazon). Reviewer Seth Faison knows many of the people who appear in Darnton’s fiction, including Publisher Arthur Sulzberger and Executive Editor Bill Keller. Faison praises the book for offering candid insight on the politics, chaos and juvenile behavior that characterizes a city newsroom. Darnton may lose friends as a result of this bitingly satirical work, but he’s made for darned good summer reading.

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Tucson Citizen assistant city editor Mark B. Evans has some kind words for political bloggers who are, in some cases, outclassing the area’s newspapers in political coverage. We ignore these new voices at our peril, he says. Newspapers are falling further behind, so why not welcome these emerging opinion leaders into our fold and benefit from the readership and revenue they can bring?

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The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader is trying to further reduce staff through buyouts.  Kentucky’s largest newspaper already cut its workforce from 417 to 382 in June, but that wasn’t enough. Executives didn’t set a target figure for this round of cuts.

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The Christian Science Monitor’s Jan Worth-Nelson has quietly, subtly replaced her morning newspaper with a MacBook and an RSS feed, but she still remembers the days when reading the Sunday paper was a treasured ritual. Sadly, cutbacks at the LA Times have made the paper less relevant to her Sunday mornings and she misses the thrill that came with snapping open that first issue of the day to drink in the fresh news that it promised.

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Howard Rheingold has an interesting essay on how to get more out of Twitter. Best advice: keep the list of people you’re following short and engage in meaningful interactions with them. He also doesn’t tweet what he had for breakfast. (via Mark Hamilton)

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End of an era: In a nod to the realities of advertiser pressure and a weakening print market,  Rolling Stone will ditch is unique, awkward trim size and switch to a standard format effective with the Oct. 30 issue. The magazine’s size will be reduced from 10″ x 11 3/4″ to 8″ x 10 7/8″.

And Finally…

People always celebrate success, but they don’t give enough credit to really creative failure. Thank goodness, then, for The Fail Blog, a photographic tribute to failures big and small. Don’t look at this site in the office. Your colleagues will wonder why you’re laughing so hard. And don’t, under any circumstances, view it while you’re drinking milk, if you know what we mean…

We’ve been thinking hard about how to defend of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s decision to suppress most of its non-breaking news until after it has appeared in print. It is so easy just to dismiss the policy as bone-headed and retrograde, as Jeff Jarvis, Steve Outing and Steve Boriss quickly did. Perhaps there is some counter-intuitive brilliance here, we reasoned. After all, the Inquirer hasn’t much to lose. Its owners are nearly in default on their debt and newsroom staffing has been slashed as badly as any paper in the country. Perhaps there’s merit in challenging the conventional wisdom that all news has to be free. Perhaps, by bucking the conventional wisdom, the Inquirer can motivate Philadelphians to get excited about their hometown paper again. Perhaps people will actually want to subscribe to the Inquirer because they can’t afford to miss the great journalism that’s there. Perhaps the print-first philosophy is so retro that it’s actually on the leading edge.

Naaah. It’s just a dumb policy. Here’s the basic misconception in Inquirer ME Mike Leary’s thinking: people are hungry for information and they’ll go to where the good information is. The Inquirer staff produces great features and investigative reports that Philadelphians just have to read. If those reports are denied to them online, they’ll have to get the newspaper, because they just can’t afford to be without that information.

Here’s the reality: people are swimming in information. They have so much information at their fingertips that they can no longer tell where it comes from. RSS readers, iGoogle and MyYahoo pay little attention to brand or news source. Americans’ biggest problem is keeping their heads above the water as the deluge of information increases. There is little in the Inquirer or any other major newspaper that is so relevant to people’s daily lives that they must have the information the minute it’s available. If they don’t get it from the print edition, they’ll hear it on the radio or read it in an e-mail newsletter or catch it on their FriendFeed if other people think it’s important.

The Inquirer policy is rooted in the outmoded conceptions that information is scarce and media brands are important. The reality is that information is plentiful and media brands are becoming irrelevant. Maybe the Times or the Journal could pull off a policy like this, but they aren’t dumb enough to try. The Inquirer apparently is.

Media Arrogance on Parade

A couple of media watchers are taking the press to task for ignoring seemingly important stories. Mark Potts excoriates mainstream media for ignoring the John Edwards affair. Much of their indifference was apparently due to the fact that the National Enquirer broke the story. Media snootiness about the supermarket tabloids is legend, but in this case, the Enquirer’s reporting was about 95% accurate. Plus they had photos, for goodness sake. This is classic media arrogance. If the story wasn’t reported by a “real journalist” (there’s that term again), then it isn’t to be trusted. But there are fewer and fewer real journalists out there, so where are you going to get your news? Perhaps it’s time to redefine your definition of credible source.

Mark Hamilton comments on the indifference of the Canadian press to the outbreak of fighting between Georgia and Russia. Even though the conflict has taken more than 1,000 lives, the local media – and newspapers in particular – have been more focused on the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics. Here’s the herd at work: send your limited reportorial resources on a two-week junket to Beijing for an event that’s being covered by thousands of other reporters. What’s the point of that? What insight are your reporters going to mine from a press conference with some gold medal winner than the other 75 reporters in attendance have missed?

These two cases are emblematic of newspapers’ inability to reinvent themselves. Facing a near total collapse of their business model and unprecedented pressure to do more with less, major news organizations are responding by doing more of what they’ve always done. Maybe it’s human nature, but it’s not the kind of behavior that will pull them out of the death spiral.

Business News

Gatehouse Media, whose stock price has dwindled from $22 a share to 69 cents, reported a $430 million quarterly loss, reflecting a huge writedown in goodwill. The company owns a portfolio of small-town papers that are outperforming industry averages, but it is burdened by $1.2 billion in debt and could default soon.

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Hearst Corp. bought the Connecticut Post and seven other non-daily newspapers from MediaNews Group. While this might appear to be the early rustlings of a consolidation trend brought about by plummeting values, Mark Potts thinks it’s actually a harbinger of a Hearst plan to sell the San Francisco Chronicle to MediaNews. The question is why anyone would want it.

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Lee Enteprises is shutting down the South Idaho Press of Burley, its second-largest Idaho daily, along with two weekly papers in the area. The Press has a circulation of 4,000. It will become a section in the Times News, which is Lee’s Idaho flagship. Lee said 14 people will lose their jobs.

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Sun-Times Media Group Inc. lost $37.8 million in the second quarter, and CEO Cyrus Freidheim said he’s planning new cost cuts to help cope with steeper-than-expected declines in revenue. Some of the cost-saving methods under consideration at the Sun-Times include outsourcing classified ad sales and some financial and administrative activities; cutting corporate costs through possible privatization or de-registering of stock, and changing the size and format of its papers. The company also said it plans to explore real estate sales to generate cash.

And Finally…

Editors Weblog reports on The Guardian’s plans to deliver its product on e-ink. That’s a thin, flexible computer display that can be rolled up and stashed in a shirt pocket. When combined with an Internet connection, e-ink could make it possible for a constantly updated newspaper to be delivered electronically in a format that readers could conveniently carry around. E*Ink Corp. has been working on this stuff for a decade. The Guardian estimates it’ll be eight years before the technology is commercially practical.

Nine summers ago, I left a job running a 75-person newsroom to become the sixth employee at an Internet startup. That was the thing to do in the late 90s, when stock options were plentiful and the Internet promised boundless reward. By 2002, that had all changed, and many dot-com entrepreneurs were slinking back to their old employers, asking if they could have their jobs back.

That didn’t happen to me, though. The media startup I joined, TechTarget,  actually grew through the technology nuclear winter. It went public last year (although the stock has recently been sucked down by the media stock malaise) and now employs about 600 people.

One thing we did early on that challenged conventional wisdom was to tear down walls between advertising and editorial. At previous employers, it was accepted that sales people and editors not only never talked, they were often openly hostile toward each other. My new organization didn’t have cultural barriers like that, so we experimented with a more collegial process.

Ad sales and editorial people sat together in biweekly meetings to discuss story budgets and the sales climate. Things got pretty testy sometimes, but the debate was open and honest. Instead of calling people names behind their backs, each side shared stories about its successes and challenges. Over time, the relationships grew to be, if not chummy, at least respectful.

Once people respected each other, they began to work collaboratively. Management urged along the process by putting in place a bonus plan that rewarded everyone for a business unit’s financial success. Sales reps and editors openly batted around ideas for products that would have both advertiser and reader appeal. They came up with a lot of innovations. It turned out that collaborating didn’t mean infringing. Boundaries were still respected, but conversation wasn’t prohibited. Imagine that.

It was my job as chief editor to insure that the quality and integrity of the editorial product weren’t compromised. In five years in that  role, I never once felt that my principles were violated. If ever there was a challenge, I appealed to the CEO, who always came down on the side of editorial quality.

Incidentally, a handful of people switched groups over these five years, including a few  editors who realized their true calling was in sales.

This experience came to mind today reading Chris O’Brien’s Five Steps to Foster Innovation in the Newsroom. Among them: “Find new ways to get people from different areas to work together. This includes editorial and business side (Sorry, but it’s long past time to kill this sacred cow).”

Amen to that. Stick a fork in that well-done bovine. Building moats between the revenue side and the product side was excusable when profits were healthy, but now is the time to discard assumptions. Ad sales people aren’t contagious and talking with them won’t make you compromise your principles. If it does, then you have bigger problems.

Traditionalists are still resistant. Over at the San Francisco Chronicle,  whose future is probably less secure than any major metro daily’s, “real journalists” are appalled about the decision to give former mayor Willie Brown a column because of Brown’s history of alleged self-dealing.  People who aren’t disgusted by Brown’s column “are people who don’t put journalism first,” says one insider.

Puh-leeze. Giving a popular ex-mayor a column sounds like a pretty interesting way to spur circulation. And if the purists have a problem with that, have it out in public. Let the Chron columnists and bloggers debate the issue in front of everyone instead of grousing in the men’s room. Too many editors continue to use the shield of journalistic integrity to duck new ideas and then complain to each other instead of airing their opinions in public.

Newspapers need strong chief editors who support collaboration. They also need publishers who will rally to the side of quality journalism when  a dispute occurs. Reporters and editors need to get over the old biases that never made much sense to begin with. I can’t think of another industry in which the people who sell the product are at such odds with the people who make the product. If you can make a persuasive case for maintaining this rigid separation, please contribute to the comments section. I just don’t see it.

The Futility of Corporate Secrecy

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at the Gannett Blog.  On Wednesday, Editor Jim Hopkins picked up on an item in one of the Gannett titles that said corporate finance and accounting operations were being  consolidated and moved to Indianapolis. He suggested that recent cutbacks at other Gannett holdings point to layoffs of as many as 2,300 people, or about 5% of Gannett’s workforce.

Blogs are a petrie dish for speculation, so when Hopkins asked reader for input, they responded.  Gannett folk from Asheville, Detroit, Louisville and elsewhere are jumping in with their local version of layoff rumors. It sounds like something’s coming, and it isn’t good. Absent from the discussion is Gannett, which certainly should be aware of this popular site. If the rumors are false, why isn’t someone from corporate stepping in and correcting them? Perhaps it’s because the rumors are true. Absent Gannett’s voice, people will tend to believe that silence is confirmation.

Go East, Young Journo

Media markets in India are booming, thanks to the surging economy and the growing middle class, and some discouraged US journalists are picking up and moving east. New dailies and magazines are popping up every week and they’re hiring. Some TV stations are paying ex-print reporters up to $180,000 to go on-air, and that kind of money goes a long way in India. Five recent graduates of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism recently joined the Hindustan Times and say the experience has been great and the opportunity is greater. One expat says he turns down two or three assignments a month. “I’d like to see more freelancers move to India. There are too many stories to cover and just not enough time to get to them all.”

Miscellany

San Diegans may have reason for cautious optimism. The owner of a local TV station says he may make a bid for the distressed Union-Tribune. Michael D. McKinnon was a print publisher back in the 50s and 60s and he doesn’t want to see a local institution in the hands of an outsider.

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Just because it’s user-generated, doesn’t mean it’s profitable. In May, we told you about Everywhere and JPG, two new magazines from 8020 Media that break the mold by deriving most of their content from readers. Well, it turns out that Everywhere wasn’t everywhere with advertisers, so 8020 has shuttered it after only four issues in order to focus on JPG.  Management prefers to use the term “on hold” and said it’s still committed to the model. Interesting side note: only two editors lost their jobs.

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While owner Blethen Maine Newspapers continues to seek a buyer, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram  bleeds. An unspecified number of people have been laid off in the fourth round of cuts in a year. The publisher is also adjusting trim size and consolidating some sections to save money on paper. Employee solidarity helped mitigate the pain; workers volunteered to take time off so that jobs wouldn’t be eliminated.

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Management at the Los Angeles Daily News apparently thought that one way to boost sagging morale would be to implement a dress code. Employees didn’t agree. The idea has been scotched.

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The McPherson (Kan.) Sentinel  becomes the latest daily to eliminate its Monday edition. It will publish five days a week. Mondays are notoriously poor for ad sales.

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James Cogan says it’s a great time to get into the newspaper business because chaos is a good time for innovation.  We wish there were more people with his positive attitude.

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Charles Apple has a practical, whimsical and uplifting  essay on advice for the recently laid-off. Our favorite: “Your editor didn’t want to lay you off. Seriously. Make him/her a reference. Even if you have to apologize for throwing that potted plant during your HR interview.”

The newspaper industry needs to make radical changes, but neither the management nor the culture in a typical newsroom is conducive to much change at all, according to an organizational behavior specialist.

Mark Glaser interviews Vickey Williams, director of the Digital Workforce Initiative in the Media Management Center at Northwestern University and author of  All Eyes Forward, a report about  the challenges in changing newsroom culture.

Bottom line: Williams believes most newsrooms are still forcing young journalists into the mold that existed 20 years ago: a top-down structure in which decisions are made at the top and underlings are expected to execute them without question. Characterizing many newsrooms as “aggressive-defensive workplaces,” she finds structural impediments to the adoption of digital tools, suspicion of online media and organizational resistance to any ideas that don’t come from the top.

What’s most troubling about this behavior is that it’s sending young journalists for the doors, Williams says. They don’t believe their ideas are getting a fair hearing and they don’t want to work for organizations that are so insular.

Glaser has a transcipt of his interview with Williams. A few quotes:

• “Resistance [to change] is going down. I am not at all convinced that we know how to replace that with something constructive. So in short, we don’t fight it as hard and as loudly — the fact that we have to change — but we don’t know what to do instead.”
• “Journalists need to get more business savvy — and they will get more business savvy one way or the other. If they become a victim of the cutbacks, then they will be looking at making their own living and be worried about income and attracting advertisers to their website. So getting more business savvy is only a plus.”
• “We asked people what they thought about the data [showing that young people wanted to leave], and the veterans even wanted to argue down that the data was correct. And if it was correct and young people were leaving, it was because they were wimps, and good riddance.”
• On creating a change-oriented culture: “For years, we have been an industry with our panels and task forces and we’ve generated lots of reports that have gathered dust on the corners of bosses’ desks, and people don’t have the energy for that anymore.”
• “I agree with Jeff Jarvis that it would be a very good gamble to allow Millennials to start up companies or products. But I can’t think of a single media company where that would be allowed to happen on a broad scale.”

Williams’ conclusions are sobering. There’s a lot of talk about change and what newspapers need to do to save themselves these days .There are many great ideas for reinvention, although there is no avoiding a lot of pain in the process. Ideas are just one part of the picture, though. There needs to be a culture in place that’s willing to accept change. Newspapers don’t have a lot going for them in this area.

Newspapers have done business more or less the same  way for about 150 years.Few industries on earth can say that. The newspaper business has been historically stable, profitable and predictable. It’s boring, but it makes a lot of money. In the 1970s and  80s, some titles enjoyed renewal rates of 90%. In addition, consolidation during the last 50 years has left most cities with only one or two newspapers.  Monopolies and duopolies  usually suck at innovation. When was the last time your electric company did something clever?

Williams is right that newsroom culture rewards obedience. After all, you need structure and process to  produce a fresh product every 24 hours. The  hierarchical  organization of most newsrooms is appropriate for what they’ve been asked to do for many years. Now you’ve got a situation in which authority needs to be openly questioned.  Do you suppose a 30-year veteran city editor is going to cozy up to that idea? Cultures don’t change until people change, and organizations that are run by old guys who have worked their way up through the ranks are the least change-oriented of all.

This is why it’s so hard to be optimistic about the future of newspapers. Ideas can’t flourish without a nurturing culture. Newspapers exist in a culture that is so change-averse that adding color to the front page is considered a breakthrough. When your value is defined by process rather than agility, it’s tough to suddenly be agile.

Maybe I’m being too cynical. Please share your views. Is there a way for this industry to reinvent itself without blowing itself up first?

Miscellany

• Perhaps the savior will be cell phones. The New York Times reports that Verve wireless has signed up 4,000 papers and 140 publishers to deliver news via its wireless service. Research says 40 million people use their phones to go online, and Verve’s service can push news alerts, local stories and geotargeted advertising at those customers, most of whom are probably driving at the time.  The CEO of Verve is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, by the way.
• The Santa Fe New Mexican is cutting 16.5 jobs, or about 7% of its workforce. Ten of those lost jobs are in the newsroom.  The biggest culprit is real estate advertising, which has all but disappeared.
• E.W. Scripps may write down the value of its newspaper and local broadcast holdings in the third quarter, the CEO said on the company’s earnings call. Scripps carved out the troubled businesses into their own company earlier this year so they wouldn’t drag on the more lucrative TV and online businesses.
• Speaking of Scripps, columnist Jay Ambrose scolds readers for not appreciating all the great things newspapers deliver. “Perhaps the Internet and innovative editors will come up with ways to preserve the distinguishing value of newspapers,” he writes. “It would help if more citizens understood this value themselves.” Good going, Jay. Blame those customers.

As editors and bloggers have combed through the “Changing Newsroom” study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism over the last couple of days, they’ve increasingly focused on the study’s findings that editors are, on the whole, positive about the future.

“Newspaper editors optimistic despite downs“  was UPI’s headline. Writing on Conde Nast, Jeff Bercovici focuses on all the good news in the study and observes that newspapers are  “very sensibly shifting their resources away from areas where their efforts can easily be duplicated and into the sorts of coverage where they can best distinguish themselves from competitors in all media.”

How can crusty old news editors remain positive amid the drumbeat of dreadful news that’s afflicting the industry? We can only speculate, but that’s what blogs do.

For one thing, perhaps there aren’t as many crusty old news editors any more. Layoffs have washed out a lot of the old guard. Some of them now content themselves blogging about the good old days, although a few still run editorial departments. Mostly, though, the editors who are left are the fighters, and fighters tend to think positively.

There’s also a silver lining  to any crisis: the opportunity to focus and rethink the business. In that spirit, the most remarkable section of the Pew study is the chapter about the future. Read it to see quotes from veteran editors who believe the downsizing has required them to become more resourceful, creative and open-minded. In the words of Miami Herald Managing Editor David Wilson, “Through all that’s happened over the last few years, the quality of our work is among the best I’ve seen—and I’ve been here 31 years.”

The study also reports that editors are more involved than ever in trying to identify new revenue streams, even offering an investigative reporting project for sale on Amazon in one case. What’s more, editors don’t think this breach of the traditional ad/edit wall is such a terrible thing. Some are actually invigorated by the idea of becoming more involved in the success of the business.

“They are working hard, innovating, making changes,” says the report. “They may have fewer reporters and less space to work with, [but] they are certain that what they are producing today is better than what they produced a few years ago.”

We’ve noted before the importance of discarding assumptions. It’s hard to do, but it’s the essential first step toward envisioning the future. The inspiring message from the Pew research is that the editors who are working through the ritual destruction of their industry are discarding assumptions en masse and finding that there really are better ways to do their jobs.

Curmudgeons persist  but, as Jeff Jarvis notes, they are being marginalized. Times of crisis are also times to rethink everything. That appears to be the bright spot in the industry right now.

Layoff Log

The Tribune Co.-owned Allentown Morning Call will cut 35 to 40 newsroom positions, according to a memo from the publisher posted on Tell Zell.  The Morning Call did a small buyout in March, but this appears to be much more sweeping, amounting to more than a quarter of the news staff, according the blog.

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Also in stealth mode is the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, a Tribune Co. property which is cutting its 290-person news staff by 20% but choosing not to report it. Commenting on the paper’s decision not to tell its customers about significant changes to the product they pay for,  Editor Earl Maucker comments, ironically, “It serves nobody’s interest to put it out ahead of time. As I’ve found, it gets butchered in the media.”

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There are bad times all over the Sunshine State. The Fort Myers News-Press is laying off 36 people, eliminating some unfilled positions and killing a weekly supplement targeted at Hispanic readers.  We hope Publisher Carol Hudler is wrong in calling the region’s economic climate “the worst local economy since perhaps the crash of 1929.” In fact, the economy did pretty well in 1929. The worst years of the Great Depression were from 1933-1937.

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The beleaguered staffs at Maine’s Portland Press-Herald and Sunday Maine Telegram are bracing for the fourth set of layoffs in 12 months. The problem is that owner Seattle Times Co. can’t find a buyer for its Maine Newspaper Death Watch › Edit — WordPressholdings, so it keeps cutting and cutting in an effort to prop up the finances. This layoff will take out 10% of the remaining 85 news staffers. Crosscut Seattle has exhaustive background. There’s also a depressing blog devoted to this situation.

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Laid-off newspaper employees and their colleagues are increasingly taking to the street to publicize their plight. Baltimore Sun employees staged a rally last week, complete with 100 empty chairs to symbolize lost jobs. Alan Mutter asks if this is really an appropriate response, or if the protests might actually backfire and cause subscriber flight. What do you think? Is all the publicity about the death of newspapers actually worsening the industry’s decline? Maybe they’re on to something at the Sun-Sentinel.

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Tell Zell reprints some of the farewell memos that went out last Friday as laid-of LA Times staffers packed their bags. Journalists write some of their best stuff at times like these.

And Finally

Our Wordpress template chokes when we try to embed video, so we’ll have to settle for a link. If you want to understand the macroeconomic and demographic shifts that are disrupting this and so many other industries, spend eight minutes watching this video. You will be riveted.

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

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

Fewer Jobs, But Not Fewer Journalists

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

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

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

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

A Cleansing Process

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

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

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

One frequent criticism I hear from readers is that the Death Watch is too negative. While the title of this blog betrays a certain tongue-in-cheek pessimism, my intent is also to highlight the many new and innovative approaches to journalism that are emerging in an information-empowered world. Today I’ll begin a series of periodic essays about how changes in the media landscape are reshaping journalism into a much richer, more responsible and more credible profession.

We are in a chaotic period of redefinition right now, and that breeds fear and cynicism. I am fundamentally optimistic about the future, though. I believe that the wreckage of the newspaper industry will yield a more open and enlightened era of journalism that will be shaped by the institutions that embrace the changes we are now experiencing. It’s going to be rocky getting there, but we will figure it out as we go along.

Many other people are writing about this topic, and I list some of them in the media blogs category. In particular, check out the Center for Citizen Media, Jeff Jarvis, Publishing 2.0, Shaping the Future of the Newspaper,  Steve Boriss, Mark Potts, Steve Outing and Editors Weblog. Please suggest others.

Discard Assumptions

So what does the journalism profession become when information is free and everyone is a publisher?

Start by discarding assumptions. This is hard for people to do, and it’s one of the main reasons so many journalists are struggling with change. Many of the practices and conventions of journalism today were actually invented to cope with an age when timely information was difficult and expensive to gather and deliver. Basically, we do what we do in large part because we’ve had to deal with plates and presses and trucks and news stands, all of which added time and cost. We don’t have to worry about that stuff any more. This should cause us to completely rethink our approach to the craft.

Here are the new realities:

• Today, everyone is potentially a journalist, even if only for a few minutes;

• Technology has made it possible for news to be reported in near real-time. People will come to expect this;

• The cost of reporting and publishing news is now effectively zero;

• Publishing is now a beginning, not an end. Once a “story” goes online, an update and refinement begins that may last for years or decades;

• Any person or institution with an interest in a story has the capacity to publish facts, commentary and updates without seeking anyone’s permission. Responsible journalists need to incorporate that information into their work as appropriate.

All of these realities reverse rules that have existed for thousands of years. This is why we need to rethink everything. Nearly everything has changed.

But some things haven’t. People still want trusted sources of information. They want clear distinctions between fact and conjecture. Institutions need to be monitored. We need to know whom to trust. These needs won’t change if newspapers go away, so someone will need to fill the void.

Traditional Reporting is Obsolete

How does journalism need to evolve? Let’s start with the role of the reporter, because that function is likely to change the most. The traditional function of reporter doesn’t make sense any more. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people in cities around the world put their faith in the hands of a small number of people to gather and deliver the news. For the most part, these people aren’t experts in their topics they cover. In fact, reporters get shifted to new beats all the time. Reporters are resourceful, however. Most of them are pretty good at learning on the fly, figuring out what’s important and presenting that information clearly and succinctly. These are important skills and they’ll be needed for a long time to come.

There’s an awful lot of waste in reporting, though. Most of what a reporter learns in the process of working a story is discarded. Even more waste occurs when a story is cut for space. In the end, a task that requires hours of information-gathering may be boiled down to a couple of hundred words on a page. This was necessary in a time- and space-limited world, but it isn’t necessary any more.

The traditional limitations of print and broadcast media have required reporters to make scores or even hundreds of value judgments during the reporting process. An hour-long interview may result in a single sentence of published information or a three-second sound bite. In essence, one trained person makes decisions affecting what hundreds of thousands of people may know. Reporters do a pretty good job of upholding the trust that readers put in them, but the rules are all different now. No one should be denied access to information just because there wasn’t enough space.

New Journalism is Transparent

Today, nearly every relevant fact about a story may be captured and shared with anyone who’s interested. This service may be provided by the reporter, participants, observers and commentators. This information doesn’t have to be part of the story that the reporter submits for publication, but it should be available to those who want to know. The reporter’s role expands to include not only making judgments about what information to include but also about were to link for more information. The “story” becomes an entry point to an archive of relevant content that may be of interest to different people. The ability to make these associations becomes a core journalism skill. The choice of where to link and what background