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The Newspaper Crisis discussed at Princeton event | State | NewJerseyNewsroom.com -- Your State. Your News.
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The Newspaper Crisis discussed at Princeton event
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Jim Willse, editor of The Star-Ledger, told the audience that the Newark-based newspaper lost half its ad revenue in the past two years.
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'Denver Post' Reduces Print Copies in Outlying Areas
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The Denver Post says outlying parts of Colorado will no longer get the print edition of the newspaper Monday through Saturday.
The newspaper said Thursday only the Sunday edition will be available in print for home delivery and single-copy sales in far western, southern and eastern Colorado and in surrounding states -
Affected cities include Grand Junction, Durango, Gunnison, Telluride, Alamosa, Walsenburg, Trinidad, La Junta, Lamar and Burlington.
Big Job Cuts at NAA -- And No Longer Will Print 'Presstime'
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Big Job Cuts at NAA -- And No Longer Will Print 'Presstime' -
, the Newspaper Association of America is cutting its staff by 50% and will cease publication of the print edition of the magazine Presstime.
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Adverse events at top 100 newspapers, 2006-2009
Adverse events at top 100 newspapers, 2006-2009
Newspaper
City, State
Owner
Circulation, as of March 2008
Staff reductions
For sale/sold
Bankruptcy
Reduced print days
Closed or online only
Comment
Newspaper
City, State
Owner
Circulation, as of March 2008
Staff reductions
For sale/sold
Bankruptcy
Reduced print days
Closed or online only
Comment
USA Today
McLean, Va.
Gannett Co.
2,284,219
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USA Today laid off 20 people from its newsroom in November 2008 -- a reduction of nearly 5%. Gannett has required weeklong, unpaid furloughs for all employees in both the first and second quarters of 2009. USA Today suffered fewer cuts than the company's other papers. In December 2007, the paper accepted buyouts equivalent to about 10% of the paper's staff.
The Wall Street Journal
New York, N.Y.
News Corp.
2,069,463
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WSJ laid off 14 editorial employees in February 2009, after the voluntary departures of 11 journalists in the previous couple of months. Thirty jobs were eliminated in the summer of 2008. News Corp. bought the Journal in December 2007.
The New York Times
New York, N.Y.
New York Times Co.
1,077,256
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In March 2009, New York Times Co. announced plans to cut the pay of most employees by 5% for nine months, in return for 10 days' leave, and said it will lay off 100 people. In 2008, the Times newspaper eliminated 100 of more than 1,300 newsroom jobs - primarily through buyouts, but also with some layoffs - but with hiring for new positions, the net reduction was about half that. In January 2009, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim agreed to invest $250 million in the publisher, the latest in a series of moves by the newspaper publisher to shore up its finances.
Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles, Calif.
Tribune Co.
773,884
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In January 2009, the L.A. Times said it would cut up to 300 jobs, or about 11% of its news staff. Last October, the Times said it would cut 75 newsroom jobs. In July, it cut 250 jobs,
Jacobson: We can out-compete Craigslist | ReinventingClassifieds.com
Finally, someone has some good ideas about/for classifieds.
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I can tell you why there is so little innovation.
1. LEADERSHIP.
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ANCAM
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Chronicle May Cut More Than Half Its Newsroom
Chronicle May Cut More Than Half Its Newsroom
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Chronicle May Cut More Than Half Its Newsroom
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Typically, the longer a journalist has been with the company, the higher they are paid. The company's demands are sure to divide the newsroom between younger, lower paid journalists, and older, higher paid ones.
Nostaligia for newspapers
Alex Kuskis <alex.kuskis@sympatico.ca>
reply-to MEA@lists.ibiblio.org
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date Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 10:59 AM
subject [MEA] Nostalgia for a Declining Medium
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One of the things that we users of "old" analog media always lament, whether
it's books, CDs, records, magazines, or newspapers, is the loss of
physicality, the inability to touch, hold, turn pages, and peruse the medium
itself as an object. A keyboard doesn't seem to provide an adequate
"digital" substitute to satisfy our most intimate senses - touch, as well as
smell. Although there is such a thing as "distributed touch", these two
senses cannot really be digitized or mediated.....Alex Kuskis
Observations of a newspaperman
By David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen February 28, 2009
Like so many who arrived in this "profession" of newspapering -- whether
accidentally or on purpose -- I suffered from an early and irrational
attraction to newspapers as physical objects. From about the age of six or
seven, when the newspapers at hand happened to be the Pakistan Times and
various Urdu-language journals seen at streetside kiosks in Lahore, I wanted
to touch them, and turn the pages, and see the pictures, and read whatever I
could.
>From my late father, a designer, I learned the most elementary principles of
typography. He was actually asked by the editor of the Pakistan Times to
propose a redesign for it, and I was mesmerized by papa's sketches and
"comps."
The smell of the ink on an old letterpress was, once, an intense thrill --
and the crisp bite of type into paper, from a technology now abandoned. The
very shapes of individual letters in certain type founts still give me a
shudder of pleasure.
My first job, on leaving school at 16, was as a copy boy at the Globe and
Mail. And from my first entry into its (long since demolished) composing
room, wandering among the linotype machines, I was in paradise.
I mention these t
Dallas Morning News parent A.H. Belo posts 4th straight loss | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Dallas Business News
Wonder if the revenues include what the employees are paying for parking? Probably not bcs that is a relatively new innovation.
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Dallas-based newspaper company A.H. Belo Corporation lost $33.1 million in the fourth quarter, the company said Tuesday, its fourth consecutive quarterly loss since becoming an independent company in early 2008.
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Total revenue fell 15 percent,
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The Rise and Fall of the Baltimore Examiner - The Millions
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The stories were shorter - between 300 and 400 words with longer features once a week - and ledes were punchy and headlines sexy.
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Already, just five months after the launch, about a dozen reporters had started and quit the Examiner, many fed up with the crushing hectic pace.
Two stories a day, at least - that's what was expected of us. And these aren't press release rewrites; we're talking fully reported (three source minimum) news stories. I wasn't sure it was possible, and struggled a bit in the beginning to come through, but after a couple months, I was cranking out at least that much each day. It's amazing where you can find stories - though arguably, many of the stories I and others wrote didn't deserve even 300 words. I found myself covering the minutia of a Planning Board decision, the details of each interim report, and countless angry neighborhood associations miffed by some planned development.
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Lee Enterprises and STL P-D finding
The Southern's parent company announces refinancing
Thursday, February 19, 2009 10:40 PM CST
The Southern
Lee Enterprises, the parent company of The Southern Illinoisan, announced Thursday it has taken a comprehensive series of steps to strengthen its financial position during the recession.
Lee Enterprises, based in Davenport, Iowa, has concluded agreements with existing lenders to refinance $306 million of debt linked to the 2005 acquisition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the purchase of the Pulitzer Inc. newspapers.
Lee also will restructure future payments under its $1.1 billion bank financing arrangements and has redeemed the 5 percent interest of its minority partner in St. Louis, The Herald Publishing Company.
Lee announced it has repaid $120 million of the principal amount of its $306 million Pulitzer Notes debt due in April 2009 using a portion of its restricted cash, which totaled $129.8 million at Dec. 28, 2008.
The remaining debt balance of $186 million has been refinanced by the existing lenders until April 28, 2012. Under the agreement, $9 million of restricted cash was retained to facilitate the liquidity of the operations of Pulitzer Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Lee, and its subsidiaries.
"These financing arrangements provide increased operating flexibility during some of the worst economic conditions in our lifetimes. Although significant economic challenges continue, we have stayed focused on protecting our long-term growth. Even in this unprecedented downturn, we remain, by far, the leading provider of local news, information and advertising in our markets. Our strength in print continues to be vast and stable, and our online reach continues to grow," said Mary Junck, Lee chairman and chief executive officer.
"While advertising revenue has decreased because of the economy, we have ramped up our efforts to provide even greater value and effectiveness for advertisers and further increase our lion's share of local advertising spending. At the same time, we have initiated a broad r
WaPo Working with Roger Black - City Desk - Washington City Paper
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That’s where Roger Black comes in. The paper has contracted with this renowned New York design guru to redo its newspaper and Web site. In recent weeks, Black has been meeting with staffers to get their ideas on freshening the look of the Post brand.
Like all deliberative processes at the Post, this one won’t spawn a revolution. “Instead of a redesign, it’ll be much more of a cleaning up of visually contrasting elements,” says a Post source, referring to “typefaces changing from section to section,” among other minor design problems.
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The content “innovations” of the site may have been a bit ahead of their time, including “400,000 horizontal entry points, or ‘news themes,’” integrated into the site, as well as this feature: “Communities built around topics and hosted by ‘mayors’ who moderate the debate each day, with related sub-communities called neighborhoods into the web site.”
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Free Newspaper Venture Depends on Local Blogs - NYTimes.com
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“We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content,” he said. “There were so many techniques that I’ve seen working online that maybe I could apply to the print industry.”
A Revolving Door of Editors and Publishers - NYTimes.com
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USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, The San Jose Mercury News and The Kansas City Star have something in common, aside from some of the biggest names in an endangered industry.
By the start of February, not one of them will have the same top editor it had when 2008 began. Most of them will have different publishers, too.
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“The primary explanation is the unremitting pressure on these guys to produce journalism at a lower and lower cost,” said Conrad C. Fink, a professor of newspaper management at the University of Georgia.
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Los Angeles Times: A vacant echo within L.A. County press corps
Only four reporters covering LA county.
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A slow plague has reduced the corps of journalists who cover county government to four. That's just four reporters (and one of them has other responsibilities) who focus a critical eye on the biggest local government in America -- a $22-billion behemoth that provides policing, healthcare, welfare and more to a county of nearly 10 million people
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But now just four reporters tend this turf anywhere close to full time: two for The Times, one for eight dailies controlled by newspaper baron William Dean Singleton, and one for City News Service, although that young reporter frequently gets pulled off for other duty.
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Poynter Online - E-Media Tidbits
Ethan Zuckerman: Print Ad Prices Are "Fundamentally Irrational"
Posted by Amy Gahran at 10:15 AM on Jan. 19, 2009
Advertising has long been the main source of revenue for mainstream journalism -- but have advertisers ever really gotten their money's worth?
On Jan. 16, Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society examined the economics of print vs. online advertising and posed a very basic -- but crucial -- question that everyone in the news business probably should consider carefully: Is ad-supported journalism viable in a pay-for-performance age?
First, Zuckerman quoted this comment left by Joshua Jeffryes on a 2007 Publishing 2.0 post. Jeffryes wrote:
"When I worked in advertising the ineffectiveness of advertising was hardly a secret. But customers couldn't measure the effectiveness of ads. So they paid and continue to pay ridiculous prices for them. Online ads, on the other hand, are measurable. They work just as well, if not better, than print, television, etc., the difference is that for the first time ad customers know exactly how ineffective they are."
From that, Zuckerman observed: "Basically, there are two ways to explain the disparity in online and offline ad cost. One is to argue that paper ads are, for some combination of reasons, 10 to 100 times more effective than online ads. The other is to argue that advertisers are better at pricing online ads than offline ads."
Zuckerman continued:
"Let's posit for a moment that the price of newspaper ads may have more to do with how much money a newspaper needs to earn to keep the presses running, rather than how effective they are at producing new business for advertisers. ... Why are advertisers willing to pay these prices without strong evidence that they give an effective yield? They may not have much choice -- other options in a community where many customers are offline are also pay per impression and may be similarly expensive. ... Without good methods to track the effectiveness of the print ads, [a paper's] ability to sell
Newspapers jump through hoops to stay alive -- chicagotribune.com
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The Atlanta Journal Constitution is supposed to be losing around $1 million a week. The Eugene Register-Guard, Oregon's second-largest paper, lost several million dollars in 2008 and is seeking concessions from workers.
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Here in Chicago, the Sun-Times—whose parent is attempting to make its second cut of around $50 million from its annual operating costs since the end of 2007—not only wants cuts in compensation, but it has told its newsroom union it would like to outsource its copy editing to a foreign outfit, enabling it to eliminate around 25 jobs.
Gitmo Database Details 779 Prisoners’ Cases - ProPublica
Good mention of Margo Williams and description of how a good newspaper can structure itself as the community's hub for data/information. More of this is what papers should have done/be doing.
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