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.

An intern at the Tampa Tribune has posted excerpts from a remarkable speech by Editor in Chief Janet Coats to her newsroom the other day. The newspaper had just announced plans to cut its newsroom staff by about 10% or 21 people. Coats said some politically unpopular things. ““People need to stop looking at TBO.com as an add-on to the Tampa Tribune,” intern Jessica DaSilva quotes Coats as saying. “The truth is that The Tampa Tribune is an add-on to TBO.”

Coats went on to compare the newspaper industry to the music industry, which is in a death spiral of its own right now. Demand for music has never been higher, but the record industry is hemorrhaging because its business model is tied to a distribution system that is now irrelevant. Newspapers will enter a death spiral of their own if they don’t change their thinking, Coats said.

Janet Coats is one smart editor, and let’s hope her staff responds to her rallying cry: “It’s worth fighting for.” While they’re at it, find a full-time job for Jessica DaSilva, who turns in a nice piece of reporting here.

Latest Cutbacks May Not Go Far Enough

Alan Mutter has a fascinating analysis of newspaper industry layoffs. He counts up all the cuts announced this year, compares them to previous downturns and concludes that publishers are cutting back far too little. In previous slowdowns, Mutter demonstrates, publishers cut headcount roughly in line with ad declines. This time around, though, they’ve trimmed less aggressively. It could be that publishers’ decisions to cut expenses in 2005, when business was good, made them think they were ahead of the game, but they’re actually falling further and further behind as the ad business spirals downward.

This is depressing news, and it further supports the likelihood that a death spiral is beginning. Death spirals happen when revenues decline faster than expenses. Companies avoid tough decisions about cost cuts, figuring that things will get better and they want to retain their best people. When things don’t get better, they find themselves scrambling to shed workers as quickly as possible. They take a hatchet to their workforce, which scares employees and spooks investors. The best people leave and the remaining employees cower in a corner, getting little done and mostly speculating about the next round of cost cuts. This happens every time a big corporation goes off a cliff, and the same scenario is ominously forming in newspapers today.

In light of Mutter’s analysis, the Tribune Co.’s recent aggressive cost-cutting measures may be smart business. Yesterday’s 250-person layoff at the Los Angeles Times, for example, was more than 8% of the total workforce. Nevertheless, with revenues falling at a 14% clip in the first quarter, it still may not be enough. Which sucks.

• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will cut 130 people, or about 10% of its workforce. Management is hoping to use buyouts and attrition, but will resort to layoffs to meet the number. The Journal Sentinel just won a Pulitzer.

Getting on the Hyper-local Train…Or Not

The Santa Cruz Sentinel is the latest paper to joint the reader-generated content trend. But instead of celebrating the addition of community-contributed articles to the new “Perspectives” section, an editorial presumably written by EIC Don Miller under the dour headline of “More changes at the Sentinel” makes it clear that this was not a popular decision. “I try to keep all these changes in … perspective. Because change is what is happening,” says the writer. “And for newspapers, in whatever form they will be published and delivered, to survive, change is what we have to do.” Wow, that oughta rally the community! (via Editors Weblog)

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Steve Outing vamps on an earlier opinion he wrote with the controversial position that local news can be boring. Outing, who is an unabashed supporter of the “hyper-local” concept, uses his hometown newspaper as an example. The section devoted to reader-contributed items is full of uninteresting, poorly written and marginally relevant content. “I’m a believer in hyper-local! I just don’t think we’re doing it right yet,” he writes. Good point. Hyper-local doesn’t mean publishing every 4-H Club meeting announcement and blog entry citizens that citizens contribute. It’s about constructing a new kind of news service that targets specific interests. The prolific Outing offers some of his own ideas.

Miscellany

A columnist for the Rocky Mountain News proposes a novel idea: shut down his newspaper. Or maybe close the Denver Post. Either/or. The current business model isn’t working, says David Milstead. Denver has a been a joint operating agreement town for eight years, but the uneasy alliance between owners E.W. Scripps and Media General hasn’t led to sustained profitability for either of Denver’s two papers. Perhaps the best course of action is to shutter the weaker paper and the weaker website. Milstead suggests that this could result in the News continuing in print while the Post serves Denver online.

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If you want to see heartening examples of the innovative things newspapers are doing, subscribe to Editor & Publisher’s Best of the Web feed.

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McClatchy Vice President of News, Howard Weaver, has set up a wiki to seek ideas from staff members and really anyone who wants to weigh in. It’s lightly trafficked so far, but it’s still early. Advice to Weaver: the vast majority of wikis go nowhere. There seem to be two elements of success: 1) People have no other other way (like e-mail) to express their opinions; and 2) One or more people are actively tending the fires, responding to comments and posting new material. Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come.

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The Review-Atlas of Galesburg-Monmouth, IL will drop its Monday edition, following the lead of several small papers that have scaled back frequency in the same of cost savings. Monday is the smallest issue of the week for most newspapers and frequently loses money.

And Finally…

If the industry’s troubles have got you in a bad mood and you want to blog off some steam, change the routine a bit. Find an insult that’s  more offensive that the usual F-bomb and use language that won’t make a bad impression on the 4-year-old is in the back seat. Brush up on your scurrilous vernacular with the Shakespeare insult kit. Take it from the Bard himself and don’t be a qualling hedge-born moldwarp.

 

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 to provide becomes part of editorial voice.

This new reality should be liberating for readers and journalists alike. No longer do journalists have to make difficult choices about what readers may know. No longer do readers have to regard media institutions with suspicion. Everyone is free to contribute, correct and weigh in on the story. Whatever the media entity chooses not to cite in its published account can be discovered through search. Journalists will be more accountable and readers will be more confident that they can trust the information they receive.

A lot of media veterans are uncomfortable with this idea, though. Their profession has long been shrouded in mystery. Editors are accountable only to a small group of higher-ups who share the same priorities as they do. A self-policing strategy rarely works. Very few readers understand what goes on in a newsroom, and this makes them suspicious. One of the reasons so few people trust the media is that so few people understand how the media works.

Bonds of Trust

We’re going to start opening that up. When readers and viewers have access to the source material for a reporter’s story, they feel more confident that  the account is accurate, even if they never consult that background. Ironically, I believe we will see less accuracy in reporting in the future, but that’s a topic for a future essay. The basic point is that the reporters will increasingly become aggregators and topic stewards. They will be obliged to present a variety of inputs and opinions because those opinion-makers will publish whether the reporter wants them to or not.

Reporters will also come to write not only the first draft of history, but subsequent drafts as well. A story will evolve the same way that an entry in Wikipedia begins as a one-sentence stub and evolves into a comprehensive account representing multiple sources and points of view. In a few cases, the public will participate in this process. Mostly, they will observe, but they will have confidence that the process by which the truth is reported is transparent and accessible if they so wish.

Next we’ll look at the role of editors

Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell must be relieved to be back on familiar territory in the real estate business. He’s just put the neo-Gothic Tribune Tower up for sale as well as Los Angeles Times property in historic Times Mirror Square. Technically, Zell says he’s only seeking ways to maximize the value of the properties, but it’s hard to imagine that his options would include making the investment required to redevelop the buildings for the long term. He’s putting them up for sale and potentially buying another year of life for his highly leveraged company. The Wall Street Journal quotes sources estimating the two properties could fetch $385 million.

So the man who said he was going to shake up the Tribune by challenging conventional thinking and breaking the mold is now going back to what he knows best: selling real estate. That kind of vision has got to inspire the troops, especially in the wake of major layoffs at two Tribune papers this week. Edward Padgett has Zell’s memo to employees urging them to keep their eye on the ball and not speculate about what’s up with the property sales.

Assume that more layoffs are on the way shortly. Edward Padgett has the text of a memo from Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller to his staff setting the stage for major cost cuts. We can assume there won’t be a lot of joy around the barbeque at LAT employee picnics this weekend.

The Atlantic has a Q&A with Tribune Chief Innovation Officer Lee Abrams in which he doesn’t come off sounding nearly as goofy as his memos make him out to be. Still, his comments are short on the kind of breakthrough insight that the Tribune probably needs right now.

In Other Layoff News…

• Gannett Co. is looking to cut 150 employees from the Detroit Free Press and the rival Detroit News. That’s about 7.5% of the total workforce, according to Gannett Blog. Management is hoping to make the cuts through buyouts rather than layoffs, but hasn’t ruled out the latter. Detroit is a joint operating agreement town, meaning that the two competing papers belong to the same corporate parent. That’s how bad the advertising climate is. (via Fading to Black)
• We noted yesterday that when the new round of layoffs at the Hartford Courant are complete, the news staff will have been reduced from 400 to 175, or 55%. That’s not the worst of it, though. Alan Mutter calculates following a small layoff just announced at the San Jose Mercury News, its staff will have been cut 63%. Commenters say that estimate might actually be on the low side.

The Future Takes Shape

Veteran journalists might scoff at the joint effort by MySpace and NBC to recruit citizen journalists to cover the upcoming political conventions, but we think it’s an innovative idea. Someone with a lot of talent but without a lot of connections is going to have the chance to gain a national audience for a few days this summer based solely on his or her creativity and hard work. And what the heck is wrong with that?

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Add the San Diego Union-Tribune to the growing list of newspapers that are republishing the best content submitted by users in print. The paper has launched a social network for residents of San Diego county. It’s got all the usual Facebook-like stuff, but editors will be monitoring the discussions and publishing good material in the company’s community weeklies.

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for information and some of the promise and challenge that presents. The NPR example is great.
Speaking of citizen journalism, the Guardian has been reporting on a conference about the future of journalism. Caitlin Fitzsimmons blogs a panel about how news organizations are tapping into crowds

Miscellany

Online Journalism blog has the first in a series of planned stories about semantic journalism. Nicolas Kayser-Bril kicks things off with a plain-English explanation of the semantic Web. Basically, if machines could do a better job of interpreting information, it would make all our lives a lot easier. And the Death Watch editor could catch another hour or two of sleep.

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We have intentionally avoided commenting on the pissing match between the Associated Press and a group of self-righteous bloggers over fair use of AP copy. We tend to side with the bloggers, but we think the AP also has a point. If you’re late to the party or haven’t been following it closely, Editors Weblog has done the legwork for you. This timeline of the dispute is full of links to relevant detail and covers the big issues succinctly.

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Alan Mutter has created the Default-O-Matic, a tool that rates the likelihood that various large newspaper companies will default on their debt. Journal Register Co., whose stock is almost literally not worth the paper it’s printed on, leads the funeral procession, while Washington Post Co. is the healthiest overall. Read this post if you want a quick tutorial on what “default” means. It’s more involved than we thought.

And Finally

LA Times Pressman Edward Padgett shares this gem: “A recent study conducted by Harvard University found that the average American walks about 900 miles a year. Another study by the American Medical Association found that Americans drink, on average, 22 gallons of alcohol per year. This means, on average, Americans get about 41 miles to the gallon!” Have a nice weekend everyone.

The Baltimore Sun Media Group announced this morning that it will lay off 100 people out of its 1,400-person staff, with a disproportionate percentage of the cuts coming from the newsroom. The unit, which owns the Baltimore Sun and several community newspapers, told the Newspaper Guild that 55 to 60 jobs would be cut on the Sun’s editorial staff, or about 20% of total newsroom employment. The paper will offer buyouts through July 18 and then use layoffs to meet its total job reduction goal.

The Hartfort Courant will cut 57 newsroom jobs, or nearly a quarter of its total editorial staff, along with a corresponding reduction in news pages. At its peak in 1994, the Courant employed 400 journalists. With the most recent cuts, that number falls to 175.

The focus on the editorial department is interesting in light of recent criticism by Tribune Co. executives of journalist productivity. CEO Sam Zell and COO Randy Michaels made it clear in a call with investors early this month that writers and editors would increasingly be measured by the quantity of their output. They said that most papers in the Tribune portfolio would lose pages and staff in the coming months and outlined plans for a series of redesigns that kicked off with a new look for the Orlando Sentinel this week.

Tribune Co. stands alone in its focus on cutting editorial staff. Most publishers have tried to limit newsroom layoffs out of concern about harming the quality of the product. Tribune Co. executives appear to have no such reservations. Zell and Co. are making a big bet that cuts in quality won’t significantly damage circulation, which is the key to advertising revenue. In a quote on Courant.com, Journalism Professor Rich Hanley of Quinnipiac University said of the shrinking Courant, “People could look at it and say, ‘This is nothing but a shopper on steroids.”

Here’s the memo from Sun Publisher Tim Ryan to employees:

The two key factors that will sustain our company for the future are customer satisfaction and financial stability. Achieving both goals is challenging in the very best of market conditions. In the face of today’s tough economy, adapting to consumer trends while maintaining our fiscal strength is proving to be even more difficult – yet even more critical.

Our long-term strategy of going on offense and creating growth opportunities will continue to get us closer to our goals. Already this year, we generated incremental Sun circulation gains, launched a new, free daily publication, b, which is the first of its kind in the market and, through our “explore” websites, delivered highly-localized news and information for the region’s consumers.

In spite of these early, significant wins, we struggled to achieve our performance goals. So, while we will stay on the offense, we are altering our game plan. In order to align ourselves more closely with our customers, we are retooling our business model, which will include enhancements to our newspaper. In August, 2008, The Sun redesign will debut, giving readers more of what they want – a more concise newspaper with more local news, personally relevant and useful content, consumer information, watchdog coverage, more graphics and better navigation.

By adjusting our business model and redesigning our core publication, we expect to stimulate readership growth and improve our financial performance. Regrettably, our new course also requires us to reduce our workforce by about 100 positions across BSMG. These actions are necessary for us to remain competitive and win in the future, and will enable us to create new targeted print and interactive media for the marketplace that satisfy both consumers and advertisers.

Transition Timeframe

The workforce reduction will include a combination of closing open positions, attrition, and voluntary and involuntary separation plans according to this timeline:

• Friday, June 27 – Voluntary separation packets will be available to all employees (availability to Guild-represented employees is being negotiated with the Guild). Volunteers will have two weeks, through Friday, July 11, to apply.
• Friday, July 11 – Thursday, July 17 – Volunteers will be notified whether their applications were accepted or not; decisions on involuntary separations will be made based upon voluntary results.
•  Friday, July 18– Employees who are part of the involuntary separation plan will be notified. Voluntary and involuntary separations will occur in early August.

Human Resources, your leadership and plan documentation will provide further detail of plan terms, including compensation, savings/retirement funds and medical benefits. While Tribune does not have a formal severance policy, the formula that the company is using to determine benefits payable to employees affected by the current workforce reductions is more generous than any formula that the company may use after 2008.

Moving Forward

It is extremely difficult for all of us to lose colleagues and friends. However, while we cannot control the current economy, we can control what action we take to create a stronger future. We are, by far, Baltimore’s media leader, and through ongoing innovation to introduce new and exciting media for our marketplace, we will maintain our competitive position.

The leadership team and I will continue to keep you informed throughout this transition. Thank you for your patience, continuing contributions and commitment to our company

Tim

Continuing fallout from McClatchy’s 1,400-person layoff last week: PaidContent.org’s Joseph Weisenthal remarks on all the attention to CEO Gary Pruitt’s pay, noting that you have to offer a competitive salary to get a good executive these days. He’s right. Tempers also flared at the Raleigh News & Observer over an executive’s decision to stay at a $210-per-night hotel on a recent visit to the paper just before the layoffs. The Raleigh Chronicle has the dirt, including links to executive blog postings on the topic. The Chronicle also claims that, in blaming the Internet for the company’s fortunates, McClatchy execs failed to note the impact of a strong alternative publishing market on the N&O’s business. Editor & Publisher’s Mark Fitzgerald analyzes McClatchy’s $4 billion debt, which seemed worth taking on at the time but which, in retrospect, was horribly timed. Still, McClatchy may be better positioned than most publishers to survive the industry’s collapse, he concludes. Analysts say it’s one of the better managed companies in the business.

Meanwhile, McClatchy editors and columnists weighed in on what comes next. Dave Zeeck at the Tacoma News quotes Mark Twain reasoning that there’ll always be jobs for reporters. Sacramento Bee Editor Melanie Sill is defiant. She points out all the good work the paper is still doing and says the loss of seven editors will just force everyone to be a little more innovative. Meanwhile, Miami Herald ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos takes the novel approach of asking readers to tell him what choices they think the paper should make. And Bob Ray Sanders of the Fort Worth Star Telegram compares the whole thing to a funeral in a dour, backward-looking essay.

And in Non-McClatchy News…

Add Hearst Corp. to the list of publishers struggling with the shifting winds of the industry. The publisher of 15 dailies and more than 200 magazines lost its CEO of 15 years last week over an apparent policy dispute with the board. Hearst has managed to make some smart bets online over the last decade, buying it a degree of insulation from the industry’s troubles, but with its San Francisco Chronicle serving as the poster child for newspaper collapse, it perhaps can’t change strategy quickly enough. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds speculates about what’s been going on in the Hearst board room and remarks upon Hearst’s unusual management trust, which expires upon the death of the last family member who was living at the time of William Randolph’s death in 1951.

By the way, where’s Belo Corp. in all the recent layoff activity? Jeff Siegel notes that last week’s bloodbath at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram should be putting pressure on the Dallas Morning News to cut back, but owner Belo has been strangely silent. So the stock market is speaking, knocking Belo shares about 6% lower last week. If the Star-Telegram can cut a sixth of its editorial staff with impunity, can the Morning News afford not to notice?

Forecasts of the impending death of the Sun-Times Media Group are greatly exaggerated, at least according to company executives. The struggling company, which has been saddled by the misdeeds of former executives, has $120 million in the bank and is ready for the worst, top managers told shareholders last week. In fact, CEO Cyrus Freidheim actually believes newspapers will rebound when the economy does in a year or two. His optimism is striking in light of the company’s recent announcement that it is “exploring strategic alternatives,” which is a euphemism for finding a buyer.

Tribune Exec’s Memos Invite Staff Derision

When chief scientists from Google speak, the technology media hang on their every word. Contrast that to Tribune Co., whose executives increasingly look like the village idiots of the newspaper world. The company’s chief innovation officer, Lee Abrams, is fond of sending memos about how the industry can reinvent itself. They’re a rambling brain dump from someone whose lack of insight is almost painful to read. Now parodies are springing up, and P.J. Gladnick excerpts a few from the Poynter discussion forums. Read one of Abrams’ original works on LA Observed before looking at the knock-offs. This is some great satirical writing which is unfortunately being shared amongst only a few insiders. Steve Outing comments that Abrams probably disenfranchised his audience at the outset by admitting that he had “NO idea that reporters were around the globe reporting the news.” Outing titles his blog post bluntly: “Are we watching a Tribune train wreck in progress?”

Layoff Log

• The Eugene Register-Guard will cut its work force by 30 employees, or 12 percent of its 260-person full-time workforce. The paper will try to achieve the reductions through a combination of buyouts and unfilled vacancies, although the publisher wouldn’t rule out layoffs.
• The Cleveland Plain Dealer isn’t laying off - yet. Although two news outlets have reported that dozens of jobs have been cut, Publisher Terrance Egger issued a denial, saying the reports are “100% not accurate.” However, the debate may be a matter of semantics. “Given the current economic conditions and trends, we cannot maintain the current expense base and stay viable,” Egger told Editor & Publisher. A local alternative reporter wrote on his blog last week that executives have told staff that they plan “to cut 35 pages a week from its news pages and 20 percent of its workforce.” The paper employs 304 newsroom staffers.

Miscellany

Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts shows why the people who run newspapers now are not the ones who will reinvent the industry. In a column that is striking in its lack of insight into the troubles facing his own industry, Pitts announces that he’s changed his thinking and now believes that maybe online should come first, that newspaper websites should be the principal online destination for local residents and that people should pay for that service. This was conventional industry wisdom circa 2001. Then Pitts notes that he’s come to this view reluctantly and mainly because he’s afraid of losing his job. Unfortunately, folks like Leonard will lose their jobs anyway because they’re being dragged kicking and screaming into the future. Cynical attempts at defining a solution only make them look more clueless. And solutions like those he proposes are what got the industry in trouble in the first place.

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One of the week’s more convoluted exercises in deductive reasoning comes from the Mercury News‘ Dale Bryant. In an unusual inversion of the rules of supply and demand, she blames the surging price of newsprint on the lack of demand: “With less construction, there is less wood waste that would have found its way to pulp mills and eventually to newsprint. In response to rising costs, newspapers have cut back on the use of newsprint, trimming the size of papers as well as turning to the Internet. That has caused prices to go even higher,” she writes. The result is that the Merc is cutting back on some of its print sections, but that’s actually in the readers’ interests. “[T]he choices we’ve made are based on our belief that what’s most important to our readers is that we continue providing news about your local community,” Bryant concludes, bringing new meaning to the concept of “less is more.”

You have to wonder if Chicago Tribune owner Sam Zell wishes he had stayed in the predictable world of real estate, where market collapses are at least cyclical. As a novice publishing CEO presiding over a market shift of historic proportions, he looks increasingly helpless even as he becomes more belligerent. Among the recent stories:

Tribune Publisher Quits

The Chicago Tribune is losing its publisher. Scott Smith exits after 30 years at the paper, saying he’s done as much as he can do within the confines of a set of goals that he no longer owns. One suspects that the cost cuts recently outlined by his new bosses were probably a factor, although Smith tells the Tribune that isn’t so. Smith is diplomatic in his exit interview while his Tribune Co. COO damns with faint praise, describing Smith as having been “helpful as we implement our plans for the future.” (via Romenesko)

Public Rebuke for LA Times Publisher

LA Observed posts a memo by LA Times editor Russ Stanton outlining plans to shut down the monthly Los Angeles Times Magazine. What’s interesting is that the memo comes from Stanton and non Stanton’s boss, publisher David Hiller. The two were in the spotlight last week when The New York Times reported that Hiller planned to pull the rug out from under his own editor by re-launching the magazine as a kind of advertorial without telling the readers or even the editors.

Given the publicity this stunt must have generated within the organization (Stanton begins, not-too-subtly, “By now you’ve likely heard that the company is rethinking the future of the Los Angeles Times Magazine…”) the memo amounts to a public flogging of Hiller. A decision to shut down a business is always the publisher’s duty to announce, not the editor’s. It’s safe to assume that powers-that-be at Tribune Co. interceded and directed Stanton to issue the memo as a sign that he was in control of the editorial department. You have to wonder about Hiller’s future after an embarrassment like this, particularly in light of the unflattering things that other former editors have said recently about the current administration. (via Edward Padgett).

Redesign: A Useless Exercise at the Wrong Time

A new blog called Tell Zell is documenting and commenting upon the misadventures of the newspaper industry’s most unlikely tycoon. In the old days, disgruntled employees organized unions. Today, they blog.

Anyway, the site is previewing a new design for the Orlando Sentinel that apparently presages an overhaul of many of the Tribune Co.’s properties. The new look is more weblike, with lots of entry points, an assortment of headline weights and red and black (power colors) everywhere. Alan Mutter hates it and harkens back to an earlier employer’s desperate attempts to save itself through a radical redesign in the late 1970s.

I think it makes no difference either way. Redesigns are a publisher’s classic lipstick-on-a-pig solution to much deeper problems. No publication was ever made or broken by the quality of its design. While design can get attention (remember Wired’s so-hip-we’re-unreadable look of the mid-90s?), the stuff that keeps readers coming back is words and images on a page. People read The Economist, despite its dull design, because they find the content so valuable.

I learned this first-hand presiding over the editorial department of a technology newspaper that was being buffeted by competition and the Internet in the late 90s. We came up with a hip, arresting design that got good reviews from readers but ultimately made no difference in the market. If Zell’s team starts percolating redesigns as solutions for structural problems, they’re wasting money.

And Finally…

Give Zell credit: he brings out the muse in writers. Variety’s Brian Lowry is the latest to skewer the Tribune Co. owner. Invoking Zell’s famous statement to LA Times employees about being the Viagra for the business, Lowry concludes: “[I]t would have been nice [if Zell had] come into the job with a better plan, but it’s too late for that. At a minimum, then, a touch of humanity and humility is warranted, given that despite all the big talk, the new boss looks just as flaccid as the old ones.”

In the new world of journalism, anyone is potentially a journalist, even if only for a few minutes. This idea doesn’t sit well with a lot of media veterans, so it’s no surprise there is debate over the tactics of the Huffington Post and its employee, Mayhill Fowler, that led to two big campaign scoops.

The most recent one, which every political junkie heard by now, concerns a three-minute rant by Bill Clinton over a Vanity Fair report questioning the propriety of his post-presidential decorum. Clinton’s remarks were captured on video by Fowler, who didn’t identify herself as a reporter but who claims to have had the video camera in plain view while Clinton was talking. The LA Times account describes the recorder as “candy bar-sized” and Clinton claims to have not known he was being recorded.

Fowler also recently caught Barack Obama criticizing small-minded Americans in comments that were not meant for reporters.

Fowler claims no professional journalism experience, which means she isn’t a “true” journalist, to use a phrase favored by veteran editors. Yet no one can dispute the veracity of her reports. After all, they’re on tape.

The hot potato for professional journalists is that ordinary people with a $100 video camera can now capture major news events that the media miss. The problem for public figures is that these folks don’t necessarily identify themselves as journalists or operate by the rules. And since public figures have practically no coverage under libel laws, their every utterance is potentially fair game for the media. Which is actually a problem for the media.

Layoff Log

• Continuing the trend toward newspapers burying their own bad news, The Day of New London, CT cut about 12% of its jobs and relegated the news of the cuts to an inside business page on a Saturday. The comments are as interesting as the story on The Day’s website. Readers question whether senior executives are taking pay cuts and cite a director’s profile from dating site Match.com, of all places, as a source of information about the director’s compensation for his services.
• Layoffs are spreading into the magazine industry, which until now has been far less affected by the ad sales slowdown than the newspaper business. Folio magazine reports that three publishers are announcing layoffs. Meredith Corp. will cut 60 positions and leave 60 other open jobs unfilled. B-to-b publisher Reed Business Information is eliminating 41 jobs in advance of its divestiture by parent Reed Elsevier. And another b-to-b stalwart, Penton Media, will cut 42 jobs. There’s no word on what percentage of the workforce these layoffs constitute.
• The Cleveland Plain Dealer is one of a ring of innovative Ohio newspapers that came up with the idea of putting aside rivalries to share resources. That isn’t going to save it from the storms that are battering the industry, though. Cleveland Leader reports that management plans to cut 35 pages of news a week along with 20% of the workforce. That’s on top of a 17% cut in positions after a recent buyout.

Miscellany

Craig Stoltz reviews the redesigned websites of the ultra-conservative Unification Church-backed Washington Times and the Bay Area-bred San Francisco Chronicle and concludes that, surprisingly, the Times is the one doing the innovating. Whereas the Chron’s new design is more of the same, he says, Times has apparently started with a blank slate and rethought its approach to news presentation without bias toward print or anything else. The most innovative new feature is the Dig Deeper button, a hyperlink that literally flips a story on its head to show more background and detail. Try it; it’s neat. (via Jeff Jarvis).

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Editors Weblog rounds up some data and opinion from around the industry and shows why the economics of online advertising don’t comfortably replace the print model. There’s a study that shows that readers of nytimes.com spend an average of 68 seconds per day with the paper, compared to 16 minutes for the print edition. And the bounty of alternatives means that ad rates are under constant competitive pressure. Quoting Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0, “Print circulation is about 10% of total audience reach, while online advertising revenue is 10% of total ad revenue — the economics are nearly the perfect inverse of what they should be.” This is not an optimistic piece.

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Gannett Co. will write down the value of its assets by up to $3 billion, blaming troubles at its UK operation. Gannett is widely to considered to be one of the most financially sound US newspaper publishers.

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Google CEO Eric Schmidt says his company has a “moral imperative” to help the newspaper industry and that the company’s recently acquired DoubleClick ad service could help. He didn’t offer any more details. Newspaper publishers must be breathing a huge sigh of relief.

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Dan Schultz of MediaShift Idea Lab proposes a five-step process for vetting news that originates from citizen journalists. It involves link analysis, commenting, geotagging and moderation, among other things. Content Ninja has an analysis.

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It’s depressing to see newspapers shutting down ventures in new markets. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will close a free weekly aimed at young readers. A memo posted by Romenesko cites two years of ad declines and increasing newsprint costs as the double whammy.

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The new venture by former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger has debuted. Pro Publica will produce investigative reports in partnership with other media outlets and publish those stories first on the partner’s print and Web properties. The initial site is nothing more than a roundup of news from other sources, but the site is almost fully staffed and original material will begin appearing shortly, according to the “about” page. Pro Publica is a nonprofit funded by some big charitable organizations. It will initially employ 27 journalists.

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Paul Bradshaw wants to know if blogging has changed the way journalists work. You can take his short, anonymous survey here.

And Finally…

The Online Journalism Blog is piercing the gloom with a new website where journalists can tell why it’s a great time to be in the business. It looks like Jolly Journalist just debuted, so hurry on over to be one of the first to comment.

 

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.