Media General expanded its cost-cutting initiative, announcing plans to lay off 500 employees by July on top of the 250 laid off last year. The reduction amounts to 11% of the company’s 6,900-person workforce, an unusually deep cut even in these troubled times. Media General has been hammered by its exposure to weak Florida and California markets, where real estate advertising has shriveled and the recession is being felt more deeply than in other parts of the country. Most of the job cuts will come in the publishing division. Media General also owns 22 broadcast stations. The company will add 60 jobs in interactive media.

StopBigMedia.com smells a rat. The advocacy blog notes that Media General was one of the biggest beneficiaries of the FCC’s decision to lift its 30-year-old ban on media cross-ownership. The layoffs are thus hitting geographies where readers already have little choice in media, meaning that Media General will simply hack away at quality in the name of profitability, the blogger alleges. It appears, though, that the FCC’s decision will be reversed by Congress.

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The Beaver County Times of Pennsylvania is shutting down its printing operation and consolidating production with the New Castle News. The move was necessitated by th deteriorating condition of the Times’ 44-year-old press, the publisher said. The paper will cut 16 full-time and 80 part-time positions. The News plans to hire six full-timers to handle the additional work.

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Editor & Publisher reports that editorial cartoonists have been especially hard-hit by the newspaper downturn. Two decades ago, the industry employed about 200 cartoonists. Only about 85 are left. Latest casualties: Jake Fuller of the Gainesville Sun and Dave Granlund of the Metro West Daily News.

Miscellany

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz pens an unusually frank column on the state of the newspaper industry. Kurtz lists the names of talented colleagues who are leaving the paper and speculates about political maneuvering, but then closes with an honest account of the management mistakes and demographic trends that have led to this predicament. Quoting: “If newspapers wither and die, it will be in part because the next generation blew us off in favor of Xbox and Wii and full-length movies on their iPods. Network news faces the same erosion. Maybe, in the end, we get the media we deserve.”

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Mother Jones has published photos of the empty San Jose Mercury News offices taken by staff designer Michael Martin Gee in April. The whole set is available on Flickr.

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

Quoting from Baquet:

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

And from O’Shea:

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

Survey says Newspaper Websites Attract Smart, Rich People

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

Murdoch Still Favored to Win Newsday

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

Envisioning the Future of News

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Layoff Log

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

The owner of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is disputing a report in the New York Post that the paper is on the brink of bankruptcy. In a statement issued late Friday, Publisher and Chairman Chris Harte said the Star Tribune “currently has sufficient liquidity and is current on all its debt payment obligations.” However, he acknowledged that the company has hired a private equity firm to advise it on business options.

There’s no question things are grim at the “Strib.” The paper has cut 10% of its workforce over the last two years and was one of the leading losers in the ABC audit report published last week. In February, Harte told his people “Total revenue is down almost $75 million in the last two years… classified revenue was down over 50 percent from what it was at the start of the decade.”

A Star Tribune bankruptcy raises the likelihood that the paper’s creditors could end up owning it, and you know how committed banks are to quality journalism. The most likely scenario is massive expense cuts and a fire sale. The Star Tribune’s near-monopoly position does buy it some breathing room, but it’s hard to imagine there would be much hope of attracting new readers from such a crippled state. Ironically, as we noted two weeks ago, readers of the Star Tribune’s website spend almost as much time there as readers of The Wall Street Journal’s wsj.com.

Do J-Schools Hinder Progress?

Vin Crosbie writes a searing commentary on ClickZ about why journalism schools are part of the problem in the newspaper industry, rather than part of the solution. Having spent most of the last year on a sabbatical from consulting to teach journalism, Crosbie says he’s been astounded by the refusal of faculty at various academic institutions to change the ways in which they teach their craft in the face of seismic industry disruption (he’s careful not to point the finger at his own). “What I found were faculties resistant to change and students whose insights and mastery of new media were being eroded by the authoritative resistance to change of so many professors,” he writes.

He estimates that a quarter of J-school professors are actively blocking curriculum change and that they’re intimidating the 50% of the teachers who do want to move forward. Surprisingly, it’s the academics in their 30s and 40s who seem to be most in denial.

Union Agitation in the East Bay

It didn’t take long for union organizers to return to the East Bay. More than half the employees of a chain of newspapers in the region have signed cards demanding that they get union representation. They’ve filed their petition with the National Labor Relations Board, which will probably clear them for a vote.

The unit of MediaNews Group that runs the papers in the area probably thought it had scored an end run around the union nine months ago when it combined enough operations to dilute union membership below the 50% level required for recognition. Now employees of the combined operations have struck back. It’s hard to imagine what either side stands to gain. As a commenter on Los Angeles Times Pressmens 20-Year Club notes, “Gee, now they get to be laid off in order of seniority instead on who can do the job best.”

Your Daily Murdoch

As expected, Cablevision bid $650 for Newsday, which means Murdoch will have to match the ante. Speculation is that he’ll do just that and will eventually walk away with the prize, in part because his offer cuts Tribune Co. in for a tax-efficient minority stake and in part because he and Sam Zell are now good buddies.

Alan Mutter thinks Zell has a secret agenda in cozying up to Murdoch: he sees News Corp. as his exit strategy. Mutter sketches a scenario in which Tribune Co., on the brink of default, sells to News Corp., giving News Corp. cross-ownership of multiple print and TV properties in key cities. Murdoch and Zell then argue before the Federal Trade Commission that such consolidation is necessary for survival in the face of Internet competition. If the FTC modifies the rules, then News Corp. goes on a shopping spree. Intriguing idea.

And Finally

Editor & Publisher has a nice analysis of recent shakeups in D.C. newsrooms, including the ousters of the Associated Press bureau chief and a top national editor at The Washington Post. The common thread appears to be that these people were the victims of political struggles touched off by industry change.

The Economist summarizes the trials of the U.S. newspaper industry. It’s nothing you haven’t read here already, but it’s done in that crisp, efficient Economist style.

Blogging for Time, Justin Fox says newspapers will milk their current business until they die because they just can’t bring themselves to change their print-centric mentality. This statement is followed, curiously, by a discussion of his lunch.

The oddmakers are still placing their bets on Rupert Murdoch to emerge from the Big Apple newspaper scrum clutching Newsday, but he apparently won’t get it without a fight. Newsday itself reports that Cablevision is ready to hike its bid above $600 million, meaning that Messrs. Murdoch and Mortimer Zuckerman will probably have to raise their bids as well. Cablevision’s controlling Dolan family apparently feel that Long Island is home turf, and may even join in a joint offer with New York Observer owner Jared Kushner to keep Murdoch’s hands off the paper. Meanwhile, Murdoch has hired former U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato to grease the skids with local elected officials, who still have the power to nix the deal.

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Fortune’s Devin Leonard has an insightful analysis of the financial machinations behind the Muroch-Zuckerman dogfight. He says Murdoch’s proposal to Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell isn’t an outright buy but a joint venture between Tribune and News Corp. Such a deal would save the famously tax-averse Zell a lot of money in capital gains taxes while shoring up the money-losing New York Post. Of course, Murdoch would still have to get the deal past the FCC, but his track record there has been pretty good. Meanwhile, Zuckerman probably sees a Newsday-Post combination as a death knell for his Daily News, a fact that may force him to raise his offer.

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Over at The Wall Street Journal, the special committee to oversee editorial independence issued a protest against the way former WJS managing editor Marcus Brauchli’s resignation was handled last week. The committee says it was informed after the fact in a manner that was inconsistent with the letter and spirit of its agreement with Murdoch. It plans to play an active and vigorous role in hiring a successor, said a statement by the five-member committee, whose formal authority is unclear. Chairman Thomas Bray hastened to note that he has no intention of stepping down from the committee, which isn’t surprising, considering that members are paid $100,000 a year for their work.

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Retired LA Times veteran Ken Reich shares his plain-talk view of the difference between Tribune and News Corp., casting his vote for Murdoch. “He invests in his newspapers. He builds them up, rather than tears them down,” Reich writes. He then goes on a tirade against the situation at the LA Times, particularly the “squalid duet [sic]” of publisher David Hiller and editor Russ Stanton. The editor “likes to write memos, and each one is dumber than the one before. He is a lackey to Hiller,” says Reich, who is probably not seeking freelance work from his former employer. Thanks to the LA Times Pressmens Club blog for the link. But guys, you’ve got some serious spyware issues.

Pearlstein Cautions Against Too Much Hyper-locality

Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post advises putting the brakes on the rush to hyper-local journalism. In a speech to the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual conference, he said that readers value business coverage and that news of markets and investments shouldn’t be overshadowed by what’s happening down the street.

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Pearstein’s message was a little too late for the St. Petersburg Times, which is continuing an industry trend by merging its stand-alone business section into the rest of the paper. There’ll be a full page of business news, but stocks are going away, to be replaced by summary market data.

A Peek at the Future

Editors Weblog has two interesting short items today:

• The Norwegian press is integrating computer programmers into its news staff because editors believe that databases and online mashups are becoming a critical part of the reporting process. Norway’s public broadcasting flagship’s latest project is Politikerdatabasen, “a database that currently contains information on all members of parliament in Norway and will expand to include information on the country’s 11,000 local politicians in May.” The editor in charge says that all reporters should learn programming skills, to go along with the photography and video skills they’re now having to adopt.
• The site also tells how the U.K.’s Evening Leader is using Twitter to cover soccer matches. “The tweets, texted every few minutes by deputy editor Martin Wright, appeared both on a widget on the Leader website and on the paper’s Wrexham Twitter account.”

Will New York City soon have two New York Times? That hasn’t happened yet, but the trend appears to be in that direction. The Project for Excellence in Journalism analyzed The Wall Street Journal’s editorial profile in the four months before and the three months after Rupert Murdoch’s takeover. It found that business coverage is down sharply in favor of political and international stories. While the Journal still runs far more business news than the Times, the papers appear to be headed toward a similar content model.

The tricky part for the Journal will be figuring out how to sustain its strength (and brand equity) in business coverage and not look too much like the Times. Meanwhile, you have to believe that the Financial Times is salivating at the prospect of moving in on the Journal’s traditional market.

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Newsosaur Alan Mutter believes that Murdoch’s strategy in New York is focused on the Daily News, not the Times. He runs some numbers on what would happen if Murdoch controlled both Newsday and the New York Post and concludes that Mortimer Zuckerman’s Daily News would be painted into a corner. One Newsday asset that many reports have overlooked is AM New York, a free daily with 314,000 circulation. The Newsday-Post combo would dominate the profitable Sunday market while AM New York would squeeze the Daily News’ weekday business. When you add up all the Murdoch strategies, you can see New York eventually becoming a two-publisher town, with one publisher holding three of the four titles. 

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This may answer some recent questions raised on Wall Street about just what Murdoch is trying to accomplish. Put all the pieces together and the answer appears quite clear.

Perhaps this prospect is injecting some jackrabbit juice into the U.S. Senate, which looks set to strengthen the ban on cross-media ownership in large markets.

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On a completely unrelated note, Slate’s Jack Shafer calls out Murdoch for what Shafer says is habitual lying about his 1993 decision to dump the BBC from his Star satellite TV system. The short piece is of mainly historical interest, although it does manage to use the term “genocidal tyrant” as anchor text. If you query Google on that term, you get a page full of Murdoch references.

Other News

• The Boston Globe avoided layoffs as 23 employees accepted buyout offers. We just don’t know who they are, and the Globe intends to keep it that way. Romenesko has the memo.
• A day after Wall Street pushed stocks of three newspapers to historic lows, the issues bounced back big on Thursday. Some bloggers are calling the stocks a bargain at current levels and fears appear to be easing about the credit crunch, which should lift spirits at debt-laden newspaper companies.
• Nielsen posted comparisons of view time spent on various newspaper sites in March, 2008 versus a year earlier. Editor & Publisher noted that only 11 of the top 30 sites reported increases. What struck us was that the Minneapolis Star Tribune and Houston Chronicle websites get almost as much reader time as NYTimes.com and significantly more than WSJ.com. What are they doing right?

There are signs that the industry is trying to reinvent itself, or at least complain more vociferously about the forces that are marginalizing it.

What’s Black & White And Spread All Over? - MediaPost, Dec. 10, 2007
[A study commissioned by the newspaper industry finds that newspaper readers are more likely to be influencers than non-readers. The results really aren’t surprising. In percentage terms, twice as many people over the age of 60 read daily newspapers as under the age of 30. Given that newspaper readership increases with age, it’s not too much of a stretch to believe that older people would be more influential in purchasing decisions than kids. You can also assume that people who can afford a subscription to a newspaper are somewhat more affluent than those who rely solely on the Web. It’s hard to tell; the rather skimpy 10-slide presentation on the NNN’s site gives no demographic breakdown. - Ed.]

Unfettered ‘citizen journalism’ too risky, ajc.com, Dec. 13, 2007
[The author calls for “citizen journalism” to be regulated and/or certified. The scenarios he outlines to support his case are valid. Unfortunately, professional journalists aren’t licensed or certified, so the idea that ordinary citizens should be subjected to some kind of review process rings pretty hollow. -Ed.]

Local Papers’ Web Scramble - WSJ.com, Dec. 18, 2007
[Newspapers are rapidly losing market share in the one market in which they should have a significant edge: local advertising. In 2007, for the first time, pure-play Web companies had a larger share of local advertising than newspapers. In just three years, newspapers’ overall share of that market is down from 44% to 33.4%. This is largely newspapers’ own fault. Instead of investing in local sales staff over the last decade, they have mainly focused on trying to sell more high-margin national display advertising. Meanwhile, pure-play Web companies swooped in and took their market share. -Ed.]