Save Our Press

Newspapers are likely to become free and place greater emphasis on comment and opinion in the future, according to a survey of the world’s editors. According to 704 senior news executives polled, the greatest threat to the industry is the declining number of young people who read newspapers. Nearly two-thirds also believe that some traditional editorial functions will be outsourced in the future.

Read the survey results.

On a day that offered fresh evidence of plummeting circulation at many major metros (Sunday Denver Post’s sales dropped nearly 15% in the year ended March 31), Poynter’s Amy Gahran offers a testy take on the resistance of news managers to change their mindsets and adapt to the new reality wrought by economic and technological forces.

Gahran strikes the most optimistic note I’ve heard in a while about this moment in our profession:

“…right now is a time of immense opportunity for journalism and journalists to take on a broader and even more vital role in society. It’s a chance for journalists to not only continue doing good work, but maybe also to have more impact than ever before. If they can make this progress within updated, adapted news organizations, fine. But if not, they can find ways to do it independently, collaboratively, or by founding new supporting institutions or businesses.”

Even though I consider myself anxious about the changes sweeping our profession and craft, I share Gahran’s excitement about the potential, the sense that a new journalism is being born, one that is more fragmented, open to contribution and weakened by shorter and shorter attention spans. Gahran identifies several attitudes that are toxic to the evolve-or-die imperative. I shall paraphrase and condense them.

Toxic attitudes in a newsroom today:

1. Traditional, mainstream journalism is the only legitimate source of news, and society is ethically obligated to support us traditional journalists for that reason. Good journalism doesn’t change much.

2. Real journalists do only journalism. They don’t lead a public conversation, they don’t consider ways to extend the reach of their work, they don’t learn new tools.

“There’s a common problem with all these assumptions: They directly cut off options from consideration. This severely limits the ability of journalists and journalism to adapt and thrive.”

What do you think?

Another quality newspaper is making deep cuts. Here’s the latest from the N&O:

In an effort to streamline its operations, The News & Observer Publishing Co. will offer voluntary buyout packages to some employees today. The package will be offered to 204 of the newspaper’s roughly 900 employees, though only a small percentage of those people are expected to accept and leave the company.

Publisher Orage Quarles III said the decision to trim the company’s staff came following a period of declining revenues and other factors such as the rising cost of newsprint and gas.

“It’s almost a perfect storm of factors,” he said. “We’ve got to get the organization to a size that supports the revenue.”

Those who accept the offer will leave the company on May 23.

I remember when the News & Observer won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for “Boss Hog,” its exhaustive coverage of the environmental and health risks posed by the waste disposal practices of the state’s powerful hog industry. That was when newspapers were fielding foreign bureaus, juiced by dot-com advertising and exploring the startling power of mapping and database mining at your desktop.

Now it feels like we’re the ones who are wallowing in stuff that’s not good for us right now - nostalgia, despair, and fear. Can we muster the entrepreneurial creativity to rescue ourselves? Send me your comments.

Okay, so layoffs stink.

But in St. Louis, there’s an interesting experiment by former Post-Dispatch staffers, taking a page from folks in Chicago.

…the Platform’s been given offices at the local public TV station, KETC, whose CEO, Jack Galmiche, says: “We’re creating a new model between a public television station and an online daily news source.” Adds Freivogel: “We’ll go down the road of doing things together and seeing where it leads.” Staffers will appear on camera, bringing the site to the attention of the public—at least the sliver of the public that watches public television.

When talk in mainstream journalism is of death spirals, “to be in the midst of something being born is fantastic,” says Freivogel. Twenty years ago you all might have decided to start another paper, I say. “But it costs so much to do that,” she replies. “Here the cost of getting in the game is pretty modest”—about $26,000 to set up shop, she estimates.

If you have $26,000 you wouldn’t mind parting with, please email saveourpress.org.

Seriously.

In February, a blog suggested the trend for top US newspaper websites was one of decline. The picture gets fuzzier now that the March numbers are in on “time spent per visitor” on newspaper websites. Some call this the “stickiness” factor. It’s another way of measuring web traffic besides the number of visitors (”unique audience”). It’s not necessarily quality versus quantity, but that’s one way to think about the difference between the two metrics.

You’d think with all the presidential hoopla, especially the furious competition between the two Democratic hopefuls, that national newspaper outlets providing blanket coverage would do well on this measure. And some did. The Politico almost tripled the average time spent per visitor in March compared to a year earlier.

The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal also gained, but The Washington Post, USA Today and Los Angeles Times lost ground. Can’t say if it’s related to coverage of the presidential race or not, but it’s one theory. Keep in mind that The Politico has a dedicated core of news junkies, whereas the readers of the other sites are more heterogeneous in interests.

Among the major metro papers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Houston Chronicle saw the biggest gains in time per visitor. Most major metros saw declines in time spent, including a huge drop for the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Editor & Publisher published the March 2008 and March 2007 data from Nielsen NetRatings. I’ve culled the figures for the biggest gainers and losers. Time spent is noted in hours:minutes:seconds. First column of figures is for March 2008, second is March 2007.

Data for The Seattle Times wasn’t included in the E&P report. I’ve sent an email to the journal to find out why. The San Jose Mercury News was left off the top newspaper websites list in the February data, so this seems to have something to do with a cut-off for making the top 30 by some metric.

But the overall decrease in time spent at newspaper websites is part of a broader trend in declining time spent at web portals in general as RSS and other widgets allow users to pull content to them. In other words, the whole damn iceberg is breaking up.

A co-worker who got laid off recently pointed me to a site called AngryJournalist.com, a clever WordPress blog that lets journalists vent anonymously about the incredible challenges they face in these times. The t-shirts I found there were funny. My favorite was “print is dead”… certainly feels that way.

It’s not surprising, but the hard numbers are in…

WASHINGTON — After years of mildly reassuring numbers tracking the size of newspaper newsroom staffs, the latest American Society of Newspapers Editors’ annual census (http://www.asne.org/index.cfm?id=6936)  leads with a bombshell. Fulltime professional news staffs fell by 2,400 last year, a drop of 4.4% to a total of 52,600.

Well, there’s quite a lively discussion going on in the Brittanica blog.

In fact, I so don’t think so that I am waiting for the moment for someone with some passion and some money to suggest it is time to start a newspaper. The cost of entry isn’t very great, the technology makes us all look brilliant and one might create a beast that has feet in the print and online world at the same time, from scratch, avoiding the ankle breaking bumps that plague “old media” when it tries to become “new media.”

It might be so local you can’t imagine how it would feel, but it would be a newspaper and it would tell people what happened that touches on their lives.

It would be free. It would be distributed to very rich demographic areas and it would be very smart about how it approached news and events. It’s staff would expand based on revenue, which would not come until distribution was wide enough to point to a solid audience. So people would have to live on gruel for a while.

It would do some interesting things. If you were getting married, for example, it might create a whole media production of it for a price, like a little commercial arm of the local news empire. You would get a video, a coffee table book full of pictures and text, goodies. It would cost, say, a couple of thousand dollars. Very high quality and very dependable.It might do the same thing with the local high school football, basketball or soccer team. It might track the efforts of your choir. I do believe those kinds of things would produce revenue, mainly because most people don’t have the time to learn how to do them. Does that present an ethical challenge? Wait and see. I don’t think it’s inherent. Anyhow, it would be no more of an ethical challenge than building your business on used car ads and then telling everyone as often as you can how great it is to have a car!

…Having read my own paper, and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal for years, I must admit, sadly, that they don’t present a very clear picture of what actually is happening in the lives of common people. That’s too bad because that is where journalism’s connection should come from.

I stumbled upon two interesting posts on the IFRA website.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/the-great-unbundling-newspapers-the-net/

While it’s painful to hear, I think the writer has hit upon a truth:

In a 2005 interview, the Rocky Mountain News asked Craig Newmark what he’d do if he ran a newspaper that was losing its classifieds to sites like Craigslist. “I’d be moving to the Web faster,” he replied, and “hiring more investigative journalists.” It’s a happy thought, but it ignores the economics of online publishing. As soon as a newspaper is unbundled, an intricate and, until now, largely invisible system of subsidization quickly unravels. Classified ads, for instance, can no longer help to underwrite the salaries of investigative journalists or overseas correspondents. Each piece of content has to compete separately, consuming costs and generating revenues in isolation. So if you’re a beleaguered publisher, losing readers and money and facing Wall Street’s wrath, what are you going do as you shift your content online? Hire more investigative journalists? Or publish more articles about consumer electronics? It seems clear that as newspapers adapt to the economics of the Web, they are far more likely to continue to fire reporters than hire new ones.

Speaking before the Online Publishing Association in 2006, the head of the New York Times’s Web operation, Martin Nisenholtz, summed up the dilemma facing newspapers today. He asked the audience a simple question: “How do we create high quality content in a world where advertisers want to pay by the click, and consumers don’t want to pay at all?”

The answer may turn out to be equally simple:  We don’t.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/what-newspapers-and-journalism-need-now-experimentation-not-nostalgia/

Read the grim news and send me your thoughts. It’s also on Romenesko’s blog.

This news comes on the heels of bad news for The New Haven Register, the flagship paper of the Journal Register Co., a publicly traded newspaper chain that could seek bankruptcy protection, according to a story in last Saturday’s New York Times.

The Journal Register’s troubles are mainly related to the heavy debt it took on four years ago when it paid $415 million for several Michigan dailies, which have declined in value as auto manufacturers in Detroit slashed their advertising budgets. The New York Times article quotes Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute.

“This is the year that maybe those companies that are highly leveraged can’t make their debt payments, and Journal Register could be the first,” Edmonds said. “Who would have thought that a relatively substantial public newspaper company would be at risk of bankruptcy? People are going to see this and say, who’s next?”