‘When my students come back to visit, they carry the exhaustion of a person who’s been working for a decade, not a couple of years,’ says Duy Linh Tu of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. ‘I worry about burnout.'”

He’s talking about the pressure of the new online newsroom. It used to be that daily deadlines were considered intense, but in today’s hyper-competitive environment, many reporters are expected to file several times a day. “Young journalists who once dreamed of trotting the globe in pursuit of a story are instead shackled to their computers,” writes The New York Times.

Some staffers at The Politico start their work days before dawn. Editors walk the aisles asking who’s broken a scoop that day, and reporters may wake up to find an e-mail sent at 5 a.m. asking why they were beaten on a story. The pressure is on to file something – anything – that a reader hasn’t seen before.

The Politico knows that the new competitive environment doesn’t tolerate delay.  “Everybody in the audience is his or her own editor based on where they want to move their mouse or their finger on the iPad,” says Politico’s editor in chief, John F. Harris. Perhaps it’s not surprising that the Politico has lost about 20% of its news staff this year. But where are they gonna go? The website’s results-fueled journalism is becoming the norm.

The Christian Science Monitor sends a daily e-mail telling its reporters which stories had the highest view count the previous day. Gawker Media displays the top 10 most viewed stories, along with reporters’ bylines, on a monitor in its offices. Some news outlets even compensate their staff based on traffic. And then there are search-driven word factories like Associated Content and Demand Media that assign stories based upon search popularity and pay by the page view.  Search marketing expert Mike Moran calls these outfits “content chop shops” that cheapen quality by elevating search visibility. But you can’t argue with success. Yahoo bought Associated Content for $90 million and Demand Media is reportedly hoping to be the first $1 billion IPO in nearly a decade.

The good news is that some media properties are hot again. The bad news is that they’re places where few people can apparently stand to work (See also Search-Driven News).

Miscellany

A.H. Belo reported a narrower second-quarter loss, but what stole the headlines on the earnings call was the rising importance of circulation revenue, which now accounts for nearly 30% of the company’s sales. In fact, circulation revenue was up 66% in the quarter, largely due to price increases at the Dallas Morning News. Executives crowed that the Dallas paper is now the third most-expensive in the country, behind only The New York Times and the Boston Globe. The prices are a function of “the quantity and quality of what we put in the newspaper,” said Belo CEO Robert Decherd. They’re also a function of what the dwindling ranks of elderly print readers are willing to pay. Belo also reported that it has $60 million in the bank and is increasing is earnings before interest, depreciation, taxes and amortization (EBITDA), even though revenues continue to decline. The company’s strategy appears to reflect that of many of its competitors: milk the print cow while you can, cut costs and hope to get traction in new markets. That’ll work for a little while longer.

The Democrat-controlled Federal Communications Commission surprised everyone this week by choosing to defend rules adopted under the George W. Bush administration that loosed restrictions on media cross-ownership. In a filing with the US Appeals Court, the FCC supported the 2007 ruling by a Republican-dominated FCC that made it easier for media companies to own multiple media outlets in the same marketing. The agency had been widely expected to take the first chance it had to reverse that decision in the name of restoring more competition to the market. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski issued a statement that we read three or four times and still couldn’t understand. Perhaps the FCC has decided that owning multiple local media properties doesn’t matter for much when all are tanking at about the same speed. Fellow commissioner Michael Copps attacked the FCC’s decision and vowed to move the strengthening of cross-ownership rules “to the commission’s front burner where it deserves to be.”

And Finally

Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist Steve Breen decided to satirize the Gulf oil spill by drawing some of his cartoons using oil instead of ink. The process turned out to be a lot more involved than you might think. Breen flew from San Diego to New Orleans on his own dime and then drove to Pensacola, FL to find tar balls of sufficient viscosity to work with. He then diluted the tar with various solvents until he hit upon gasoline as the perfect element to soften the tar enough to work with. The result is a striking sepia tone, with which Breen has skewered not only BP but also America’s obsession with oil. Here’s Breen’s page on the San Diego Union-Tribune site. Click on the image at right to see a gallery.

Tom Foremski could be excused for trashing the business model Henry Blodget has used to get Business Insider over the profitability hump, but he chooses to trash journalism traditionalists who criticize Blodget instead.

The trigger was this profile of Business Insider deputy editor Joe Wiesenthal in The New York Times. Wiesenthal has an obsessive personality. He rises at 4 a.m. and routinely works till 9 p.m. He files 15 news items in an average day and sends 150 tweets. His first tweet each morning is “What did I miss?” He is the ultimate new media journalist.

Have a look at Business Insider. It’s nothing like a traditional financial newspaper. It’s got headlines like “14 Common Ways People Cheat At Golf” and “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Russian Mail Order Brides.” The home page is about 20 screens long and adorned with cheesecake photos of models in bikinis next to headlines about the Greek financial crisis. It’s Huffington Post meets Weekly World News. It’s offensive to everything traditional journalists believe a news outlet should stand for. And it’s turning a profit.

Broken Rules

A lot of journalists hate operations like Business Insider because it violates so many rules. It reports information that hasn’t been verified, mixes reportage with editorializing and blatantly caters to its readers’ prurient interests. Dan Reimold, a journalism professor at the University of Tampa, posted a critique of Wiesenthal on the Associated Collegiate Press blog, arguing that Wiesenthal’s approach to journalism – and his lifestyle – are something no aspiring reporting should emulate. “It doesn’t seem like Weisenthal has conquered the news cycle.  He is a pathetic slave to it,” Reimold wrote.

Reimold’s post drew a pointed response from Henry Blodget, the disgraced former equities analyst who was banned from the securities industry after the dot come bubble burst and who has reinvented himself as a publisher. Blodget argues that Reimold is addicted to an old model of long-form journalism that isn’t relevant in the manic, always-on Web 2.0 world. “The skills required to do what a great real-time digital journalist does are different than those required to do what a great magazine writer does,” Bodget writes. “Doing what Joe Weisenthal does is extraordinarily difficult. That’s why there are so few Joe Weisenthals.”

Tom Foremski is a traditional reporter who understands and respects the new  journalism, and he’s got the street cred to command respect. A veteran of the newspaper industry, Foremski most recently worked at the Financial Times, but in 2004 he quit to become a full-time blogger. His story at Silicon Valley Watcher is good reading.

Foremski backs Henry Blodget on this debate. “Criticism of Business Insider’s largely lightweight journalism by journalism professors is valid only when it’s debated within the context of the economic reality of the news business,” he writes. For good measure, he adds “My chief complaint about journalism professors is how distant they are from a real newsroom.”

As we’ve noted before the pay structure of today’s online news industry is dramatically lower than that of the dying print industry. Demand Media pays freelancers as little as a nickel a word, and Huffington Post gets most of its content for free. Staffers at The Politico typically start their work day before dawn and may file thousands of words per day.

This sucks, but it’s part of the evolution of a more sustainable model. Foremski doesn’t endorse the way Business Insider treats its employees, but he clearly thinks that cursing the onrushing tide is a waste of breath. “Journalism professors should be railing against the failure of the industry to establish a business model that works, and rallying students to learn new techniques in producing quality journalism in quantity,” he writes.

We agree. Remember that the newspaper world of the 1930s and 1940s was no model of integrity. Publishers routinely invented news to support political agendas and the concept of seeking both sides of the story was a novelty. Reporters also didn’t make much money.

That business evolved through trial, error and consolidation, and we expect much the same process to occur in the new online world. Whether that results in a 40-hour work week and six-figure salaries is still to be determined (although we doubt it), but the challenge for people who are committed to journalism today is to find a way to preserve it within a new business climate. Tom Foremski is an important voice in that crusade.

Incidentally, Business Insider claims that Reimold has accepted an offer to come to New York for a day and do Joe Weisenthal’s job. It apparently hasn’t talked to him directly or confirmed anything but is basing its report on an offer that Reimold posted on his blog. How very new media of it.

The battle over concessions by Boston Globe union is over and management won. Was there ever any doubt? By a decisive 366-to-179 vote, the Boston Newspaper Guild voted to accept a package of pay cuts, benefit reductions and other concessions that is harsher than the one the union rejected last month. Owner New York Times Co. responded to the earlier contract rejection by unilaterally slashing wages 23%. That forced the union to dance a jig and recommend a revised package that had even deeper benefits reductions. Despite considerable grousing in the ranks, Guild members ultimately decided they’d better accept the current deal before things get any worse. Still, widespread layoffs are expected.

Meanwhile, Boston Business Journal editor George Donnelly reports that the Globe’s cross-town rival Herald just closed its fiscal year with a $2 million profit. It seems the publisher started cutting costs and working with the union long ago, while the Globe shoveled money into a pit. So who’s more likely to survive if the recession continues? Ask staffers at the Seattle Times, who believed that the Post-Intelligencer was the weaker of the two local dailies before Hearst abruptly pulled the plug.

Miscellany

Congressional Quarterly, which has been on the market for much of this year, has been acquired by rival Roll Call, which is part of the Economist Group. This can’t come as happy news to CQ employees, who now face the awkward task of merging with an organization that would have been happy to put them out of business. Still, they could do worse than work for The Economist. “The new CQ-Roll Call Group will have the largest and most experienced newsroom covering Washington,” said Laurie Battaglia, managing director and executive vice president of Roll Call Group. Mike Mills, editorial director at Roll Call, will call the shots at the combined entity.

Steve Yelvington has a well-balanced reality check on the future of journalism. The decline of print isn’t the end of journalism, he argues, but it will require a shape-shift. While Yelvington does succumb to some finger-pointing (“Newspapers could have invented search, directories and social networking. Few even tried.”), he ultimately puts the challenge of reinventing journalism at the door of journalists: “How long and how well newspapers and professional journalists persist in our future will be determined in part by how well they identify new ways to play socially valuable roles.”

Cox Enterprises continues to divest its newspaper holdings. It just sold three North Carolina dailies and 10 weeklies to John Kent Cooke, a media, sports and real estate magnate. Cooke’s son will run the North Carolina operation.

Mark Potts analyzes Rupert Murdoch’s plans to knock off The New York Times with The Wall Street Journal, dubbing it a “scorched earth strategy.” Murdoch appears content to let the Times Co. implode under the weight of its own debt while gradually moving the WSJ into its mainstream news stronghold. “There’s been some speculation that Murdoch’s real endgame is to buy the Times on the cheap, but why bother? If he makes the Journal the dominant national paper as the Times withers, he’ll emerge the winner,” writes Potts. It’s a good point. Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff has said that the Australian media magnate “sits around all day and thinks about buying The New York Times,” but why bother when market forces may make that expense unnecessary?

Darrell Laurant writes: “I run something called The Writers’ Bridge that is unique in the freelance universe. Not only do we match ideas with markets, but we generate lots of ideas for writers. We handle each member individually, and we’re good at hand-holding. My biggest frustration is the inability to recruit journalists, a group I see as the guts of this endeavour. I am currently a columnist/feature writer for a mid-size daily in Lynchburg, and I think I have something to offer. It costs $10 a month, but I’m willing to offer two months free to anyone who’s been laid off, just to check us out. After that, it’s $10 a month.” Let us know if it helps, OK?

Ahwatukee Foothills News staff writer Krystin Wiggs writes about being victimized by an elaborate hoax concocted by a young man who claimed to be a gifted and successful chef. The man, Vinayak Gorur, convinced Wiggs that he had won scholarships to culinary school and landed a sous chef job at a top restaurant at the tender age of 21. Gorur even enlisted an accomplice to masquerade as head chef at the restaurant for a phone interview. The guy even duped his parents. Wiggs is sick, angry and apologetic about the whole thing, but her story will resonate with any reporter who had gone through the usual motions of reporting a seemingly benign human interest story. How often do we go the extra mile to verify a story when everyone appears to be so genuine?

And Finally…

Slate has a clever video mashup of what media coverage of the moon landing might look like today. Many of the quotes are clipped from the last presidential election, but work just fine. Best scene: Wolf Blitzer interviewing a Neil Armstrong avatar.

For sheer satirical hilarity, though, we can’t beat this clip from The Onion.

The New Republic devotes 3,400 words to an examination of The Politico, a beltway publishing phenomenon that is upending the balance of media power on Capitol Hill. The piece implies that the Politico is not a place where aging reporters go to live off their reputations. It’s a pressure-cooker environment fueled by the constant drive to be first with everything and to win the attention of broadcast outlets. Witness its Politico44 diary, which documents the activities of the Obama administration literally minute by minute.

Politico’s 60 reporters file their first stories of the day by 8 a.m. and carry tech gear that makes it possible for them to post from anywhere, including a city bus. Stories are written and formatted to be read on a BlackBerry. Speed is essential. Politico aims to be first with every story and it has scored some notable exclusives, including last fall’s scandal about the price of Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.

Worked to Exhaustion

Reporters are handsomely paid but worked to exhaustion. The piece relates the story of one Politico staffer starting his daily column as other reporters covering the Hillary Clinton campaign where shuffling off to bed after a long day. Journalists are encouraged to promote their own stories. A staff of three publicists spend their days sending links to political bloggers to do just that.

The goal is not just to be first, but also to the influence of the media.  Political strategy is to be the number one source of breaking news for the cable networks that cover Washington on almost a 24/7 basis.  It is making rapid gains against the Washington Post, which initially offered to incubate the startup before alternative funding sources emerged.

Started by two ex-Washington Post editors and funded by media mogul-to-be Robert Albritton, The Politico is upsetting the applecart in Beltway journalism. On Capitol Hill, it’s considered a must-read. However, it’s earned its share of critics among mainstream media, who sniff that The Politico is too quick to go with gossip in the absence of facts.

The Politico makes most of its revenue from a print edition that recently expanded to five days a week, but Allbritton says he’s preparing for the day when print is out of the picture and The Politico makes its money online. Those preparations are going pretty well; Allbritton said the operation could turn a profit in six months. “We’re way ahead of budget…It wouldn’t surprise me if the profit this year would count in the millions of dollars.”

Blogger’s Growing Influence Doesn’t Faze Gannett

Gannett Blog's Hopkins

Dow Jones profiles Jim Hopkins, the man behind the popular Gannett Blog. Hopkins took a buyout from Gannett a little more than a year ago and has been living on severance, savings and the kindness of visitors ever since. He hopes to generate about $6,000 per quarter in advertising and donations revenue. At 100,000 page views a month, the site has impressive traffic for one about such a specific topic.

Gannett Blog is a great example of how blogs have changed corporate communications. In this case, the chief source of information about a company is outside its own walls, yet Gannett continues to ignore Hopkins. That only magnifies curiosity about the blog and boosts its visibility, not to mention its word-of-mouth popularity among disenfranchised employees. Gannett spokeswoman Tara Connell is quoted as saying that Hopkins doesn’t want to hear the company’s side of the story. “Since that’s a frustrating process with him, we try to keep it to a minimum.”

But Gannett doesn’t have to engage with Hopkins. Blogs have a feature called comments that enables visitors to state their opinions directly, without a media filter. If Gannett would start engaging with readers through comments, it would win sympathy just for listening, regardless of whether Hopkins agreed or not.

There’s plenty of evidence that engagement works.  About 18 months ago, Dell Computer reversed its practice of ignoring blogger commentary and adopted a new policy of responding to each and every post, whether positive or negative. The initiative reduced negative commentary from 50% to 20% in a little less than a year. For businesses have good reasons for doing what they do, engagement is always a better strategy than avoidance. Gannett still doesn’t get it.

Miscellany

It’s the middle of winter and nerves are fraying up in Canada. Quebecor Media has locked out 253 employees at its flagship paper, the Journal de Montréal. Employees there “have refused to accept cuts to benefits, a longer workweek for no extra pay and a loss of journalistic independence over the paper’s content,” writes Lyle Stewart, who admits that he is affiliated with the newspaper’s union. And he thinks the Montreal Gazette may not be far behind. “Unionized workers there recently rejected a contract offer that would have eliminated several positions and offloaded the editing of the paper to a centralized office in Hamilton, Ontario.”

If you wonder why you haven’t read more about this, all we can say is how’s your French?

Tim Burden has assembled an impressive timeline of quotes about the micropayments debate. His discussion thread begins last Dec. 20 with a post by Joel Brinkley and goes for exactly two months. He hits all the high points we’ve seen. It’s a great running script of this tortuous debate and we hope he updates it from time to time.

The Yakima (Wa.) Herald-Republic says business isn’t bad, it’s making money and the layoff of four to six employees – or less than 3% of the workforce – is a response to general economic pressure. In fact, the company just signed a deal to print the 5,800-circulation Ellensburg Daily Record.

The Daytona Beach News-Journal laid off nine more staff members, bringing to 185 the number of employees it has furloughed in the last eight months. That’s 25% of the workforce. Commenters weigh in with the usual collection of politics-laden diatribes, making us wish they was a way to lay off them.

And Finally…

TJ Sullivan has posted an online petition calling upon newspaper companies to wall off their Web sites to non-paying subscribers for one week in July. He posts an extended explanation of his thinking on LA Observed. Lots of people have blogged about the petition over the last two weeks, yet it has garnered less than 200 signatures. It’s not such a bad idea, but maybe the sheer impracticality of it is inspiring ennui.

We wrap up our review of the highlights of 2008 with a selection of the best quotes we carried.

What’s black and white and completely over? It’s newspapers.”

– Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

“We wish Scripps well as it leaves the Denver newspaper market.”

–Denver Post Publisher Dean Singleton, effectively closing the door on any chance he would rescue rival Rocky Mountain News

“Today is set aside as National Punctuation Day (though, like National Grammar Day [March 4, isn’t it?], an occasion I’m inclined to approach with some misgivings); it has been commemorated since 2004 by Jeff Rubin, the self-described Punctuation Man (!) and his wife, who, since “premiering Punctuation Playtime in September 2006 … have been as busy as commas in a Sears catalog,” and who carry the message that “careless punctuation mistakes cost time, money, and productivity”: a proposition that merits examination – and illustrated here by a sentence that will have included all 13 standard punctuation marks when it arrives at a full stop.”

–John McIntyre, Baltimore Sun copy desk director, demonstrating how to use all 13 stanbdard punctuation marks correctly in a single sentence

“You are not in the newspaper business. You are in the business of going into your communities, finding stories, processing them and delivering them back to your clients and charging advertisers for those eyeballs.”

– Journalism futurist Michael Rosenblum, to the Society of Editors

“The newsroom…is down to seeds and stems in terms of numbers of reporters, photographers, copy editors and sports writers.”

–Mike Tharp, executive editor of the Merced (Calif.) Sun-Star, leaving little doubt that he has inhaled

“Victimhood is an irresponsible abdication of responsibility, a surrender.”

— Jeff Jarvis, on journalists’ protests that the newspaper industry’s predictament isn’t their fault.

“The newspaper industry is an abusive relationship. We keep getting beat up but we keep coming back because we love him.”

—Martin Gee, administrator of a new group on Facebook called Newspaper Escape Plan

“I repeatedly witnessed bizarre behavior at newspapers that no other business would ever allow. Some reporters and columnists were frequently drunk or on drugs on the job. Such conduct was not simply tolerated, it was condoned. These third-rate Hunter Thompsons screwed up appointments and scrambled facts but were never called to account for their mistakes, incivility or disruptive behavior.”

—Political consultant Clint Reilly

“We wish Jay well and will miss him – not personally, of course – but in the sense of noticing he is no longer here, at least for a few days.”

—Chicago Sun-Times editor Michael Cooke on the paper’s bitter breakup with sports columnist Jay Mariotti

“Many of our regular readers regard us like the electric company or water utility. Yes, everyone wants electricity and water and it’s a pain to do without them. But your soul just isn’t stirred by the sight of working faucet or wall socket.”

—Chicago Tribune Editor Gerry Kern on giving readers what they want

“These guys are in a world of hurt and we as a community need to find economic models that will fund really great content.”

—Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the decline of investigative journalism resulting from newspaper layoffs, a problem for which his company bears no small responsibility

“Galleria escalator stalls, dozens of riders trapped”

—Headline in Not The Los Angeles Times, a parody website

[Veteran journalists told us that if] young people were leaving, it was because they were wimps, and good riddance.”

—Vickey Williams of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center on the challenges of changing newsroom culture

“The inessentialness of copy editors is underscored by the advent of sophisticated spellchecking systems which have introduced a hole new level of error-free proofreading. No longer can we say that the editor’s penis mightier than the sword.”

—Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten, in playful response to executives’ comments that the paper needed fewer copy editors

“A prototypical publisher selling 250,000 newspapers on each of the 365 days of the year adds nearly 28,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That’s roughly equivalent to the CO2 spewed by almost 3,700 Ford Explorers being driven 10,000 miles apiece per year.”

—Alan Mutter, a journalist and former CEO who admits to owning an SUV

“At least with Tribune, you could have a rational fight; they never shouted obscenities at me. I wish somebody could tell [Sam Zell] that he’s presiding over important newspapers and that sounding like a knucklehead won’t work in the newspaper business.”

—Dean Baquet, former Los Angeles Times editor-in-chief, in an interview with LAMag.com

“In yesterday’s column about badminton, I misspelled the name of Guatemalan player Kevin Cordon. I apologize. In my defense, I want to note that in the same column I correctly spelled Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarak, Poompat Sapkulchananart and Porntip Buranapraseatsuk. So by the time I got to Kevin Cordon, my fingers were exhausted.”

–Humorist Dave Barry, quoted in RegretTheError.com

We wrap up our review of the highlights of 2008 with a selection of the best quotes we carried.

What’s black and white and completely over? It’s newspapers.”

– Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

“We wish Scripps well as it leaves the Denver newspaper market.”

–Denver Post Publisher Dean Singleton, effectively closing the door on any chance he would rescue rival Rocky Mountain News

“Today is set aside as National Punctuation Day (though, like National Grammar Day [March 4, isn’t it?], an occasion I’m inclined to approach with some misgivings); it has been commemorated since 2004 by Jeff Rubin, the self-described Punctuation Man (!) and his wife, who, since “premiering Punctuation Playtime in September 2006 … have been as busy as commas in a Sears catalog,” and who carry the message that “careless punctuation mistakes cost time, money, and productivity”: a proposition that merits examination – and illustrated here by a sentence that will have included all 13 standard punctuation marks when it arrives at a full stop.”

–John McIntyre, Baltimore Sun copy desk director, demonstrating how to use all 13 stanbdard punctuation marks correctly in a single sentence

“You are not in the newspaper business. You are in the business of going into your communities, finding stories, processing them and delivering them back to your clients and charging advertisers for those eyeballs.”

– Journalism futurist Michael Rosenblum, to the Society of Editors

“The newsroom…is down to seeds and stems in terms of numbers of reporters, photographers, copy editors and sports writers.”

–Mike Tharp, executive editor of the Merced (Calif.) Sun-Star, leaving little doubt that he has inhaled

“Victimhood is an irresponsible abdication of responsibility, a surrender.”

— Jeff Jarvis, on journalists’ protests that the newspaper industry’s predictament isn’t their fault.

“The newspaper industry is an abusive relationship. We keep getting beat up but we keep coming back because we love him.”

—Martin Gee, administrator of a new group on Facebook called Newspaper Escape Plan

“I repeatedly witnessed bizarre behavior at newspapers that no other business would ever allow. Some reporters and columnists were frequently drunk or on drugs on the job. Such conduct was not simply tolerated, it was condoned. These third-rate Hunter Thompsons screwed up appointments and scrambled facts but were never called to account for their mistakes, incivility or disruptive behavior.”

—Political consultant Clint Reilly

“We wish Jay well and will miss him – not personally, of course – but in the sense of noticing he is no longer here, at least for a few days.”

—Chicago Sun-Times editor Michael Cooke on the paper’s bitter breakup with sports columnist Jay Mariotti

“Many of our regular readers regard us like the electric company or water utility. Yes, everyone wants electricity and water and it’s a pain to do without them. But your soul just isn’t stirred by the sight of working faucet or wall socket.”

—Chicago Tribune Editor Gerry Kern on giving readers what they want

“These guys are in a world of hurt and we as a community need to find economic models that will fund really great content.”

—Google CEO Eric Schmidt on the decline of investigative journalism resulting from newspaper layoffs, a problem for which his company bears no small responsibility

“Galleria escalator stalls, dozens of riders trapped”

—Headline in Not The Los Angeles Times, a parody website

[Veteran journalists told us that if] young people were leaving, it was because they were wimps, and good riddance.”

—Vickey Williams of Northwestern University’s Media Management Center on the challenges of changing newsroom culture

“The inessentialness of copy editors is underscored by the advent of sophisticated spellchecking systems which have introduced a hole new level of error-free proofreading. No longer can we say that the editor’s penis mightier than the sword.”

—Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten, in playful response to executives’ comments that the paper needed fewer copy editors

“A prototypical publisher selling 250,000 newspapers on each of the 365 days of the year adds nearly 28,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That’s roughly equivalent to the CO2 spewed by almost 3,700 Ford Explorers being driven 10,000 miles apiece per year.”

—Alan Mutter, a journalist and former CEO who admits to owning an SUV

“At least with Tribune, you could have a rational fight; they never shouted obscenities at me. I wish somebody could tell [Sam Zell] that he’s presiding over important newspapers and that sounding like a knucklehead won’t work in the newspaper business.”

—Dean Baquet, former Los Angeles Times editor-in-chief, in an interview with LAMag.com

“In yesterday’s column about badminton, I misspelled the name of Guatemalan player Kevin Cordon. I apologize. In my defense, I want to note that in the same column I correctly spelled Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarak, Poompat Sapkulchananart and Porntip Buranapraseatsuk. So by the time I got to Kevin Cordon, my fingers were exhausted.”

–Humorist Dave Barry, quoted in RegretTheError.com

Journalists are at each other’s throats in the Windy City. It all started last Tuesday, when provocative Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Jay Mariotti quit the paper after 17 years and only a few weeks after signing a lucrative three-year contract. Mariotti’s epiphany apparently was a trip to the Beijing Olympics, where he observed that most of the journalists in attendance were “there writing for Web sites.”

After resigning, Mariotti launched into attacks on his former employer and the newspaper business in general, which he said is dying. The Sun-Times and the Tribune probably won’t survive, he said. “To see what has happened in this business. … I don’t want to go down with it,” he told the Tribune.

Mariotti has clearly made some enemies with his tough-guy style, and critics didn’t hesitate to pile on. Film critic Roger Ebert abandoned his usual soft style to post a blistering open letter, concluding, “On your way out, don’t let the door bang you on the ass.” CBS Chicago caught up with several of Mariotti’s colleagues, who didn’t mince words. “We wish Jay well and will miss him — not personally, of course — but in the sense of noticing he is no longer here, at least for a few days,” said Sun-Times editor Michael Cooke. White Sox Manager Ozzie Guillen chipped in “Am I enjoying this? Yes.” There are more good quotes in the CBS account.

Meanwhile, the Cubs have lost four in a row, and the team’s NL Central division lead has shrunk to four games. There is no apparent correlation with Mariotti’s departure.

San Juan Star Gave No Clue of Shutdown Plans

Aug. 29, 2008 was the final issue of the San Juan Star

Here’s the front page of the last issue of the San Juan Star, which shut down abruptly last Friday after nearly 50 years. This leaves the island of Puerto Rico with no English-language daily. The paper gave no indication that it would cease publishing. On page three of that day’s issue, there was a small announcement that frequency would be scaled back to five days a week (above right). Employees said they were unaware of the change in plans until a general announcement was made.

Miscellany

More proof that adversity makes strange bedfellows: The Miami Herald, Palm Beach County Sun-Sentinel and the Palm Beach Post will share basic news stories with each other while continuing to compete vigorously in the South Florida market they serve. The experiment will last for three months, after which the participants will decide if they want to continue.

2008 Newspaper Job Cuts Total Nearly 4,000; Source: Erica Smith

The Des Moines Register has laid off 12 staffers and frozen another 11 open positions. The publisher is being unusually open about who’s losing jobs. They include a 30-year veteran farm reporter and a top feature writer. Daily circulation is down 20% since 1994 and Sunday circulation is off nearly 30%.

After trying to make a go of it as a daily newspaper for five years, the Noblesville (Inc.) Daily Times gave up the ghost last week and shut its doors, idling 24 full-time employees. Owner Schurz Corp. had tried to sell the paper for the last six months but was unable to find a buyer. The Daily Times had increased from weekly to daily frequency in 2003. The company also shut down the twice-monthly Westfield Times.

Apparently, a lot of central California residents think that just because the Modesto Bee will now be printed in Sacramento, the paper is going away. Its editor says that couldn’t be further from the truth.

The Arizona Republic is shedding 27 newsroom employees on top of 35 pressroom workers laid off earlier this month. Gannett Blog claims the paper has 2,700 employees, which makes these reductions a drop in the bucket compared to the typical industry cutbacks of about 10% of the workforce. Blog visitors say the mood at the Republic is horrible. “Morale here is so low people who weren’t offered buyouts congratulated those who took them,” writes one.

Following the lead by several papers recently to reduce “soft” news and features, the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C. will cut its second editorial page and eliminate its dedicated book reviews section. Editorial Page Editor Allen Johnson doesn’t mince words: “We won’t even attempt to pretend that these changes will give you a bigger, better opinion section. They won’t. And you know that.”

The
Seattle Times Cuts 86 Jobs – Associated Press, Jan. 9, 2008

[Actual layoffs total 31 people; 55 vacant positions won’t be filled. Most of the cuts are in circulation. Since the paper delivers The Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and the Financial Times to the Seattle area, we can assume this indicates broader circulation weakness. -Ed.]

Shrinking Union-Tribune: ‘Doing Less With Less’ – Voiceofsandiego.org, Jan. 7, 2008

Herald-Republic announces job cuts, expense trimming – Yakima Herald.com, Jan. 3, 2007

Quoting: Yakima Herald-Republic has laid off five employees, closed its Sunnyside bureau, and eliminated its zoned edition for the Lower Valley to trim expenses for 2008.

The Herald-Republic will leave several open positions unfilled, including one news reporter job. It will revamp its Spanish-language weekly, El Sol de Yakima, partly by outsourcing some page production to Mexico…”I don’t think it has to negatively affect the product,” [publisher] Shepard said. “Like any business, we can try and do as much or more with a few less folks.”

Sun-Times to cut costs; layoffs loom — chicagotribune.com, Dec. 15, 2007

[The Sun-Times had previously announced plans to cut $10 million in operating expenses, so this is a dramatically more ambitious goals. The CEO is quoted as saying, “We have to accept that the print advertising market may never again reach the levels of the past. We must scale our organization to meet that reality.” – Ed.]

How Garry Steckles can hang around – Chicago Reader Blogs, Jan. 9, 2008

[As the Chicago Sun-Times prepares to cut 30 editorial positions, staffers have come to focus on two employees who have recently been promoted to exempt positions and spared the threat of layoffs. Both are pals of EIC Michael Cooke, and speculation is rampant that that’s what saved them. Worse, this columnist claims, one is effectively a do-nothing consultant. -Ed.]

Cuts at Yakima, Bremerton and byline strike in Maine – Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild Blog