In a recent column headlined “What’s Really Killing Newspapers,” Slate.com’s media writer, Jack Shafer, blames a changing world, not journalism, for the ailing health of newspapers. The newspaper once was an ATM machine for owners because it provided people with the social currency needed to build relationships, lubricate conversations and generally appear well informed.

Here’s one graf Shafer wrote that I especially liked:

The social networking that takes place via instant messaging, microblogging, or e-mail further steals from newspapers the mindshare they once owned. You no longer need to rely on a paper for the social currency that a weather report, movie listings, classified ads, shopping bargains, sports info, stock listings, television listings, gossip, or entertainment news provide.

Sure, more people have more places to go to get their hit. While I do appreciate Shafer’s point, I do think newspapers have contributed a great deal to their present woes: a failure to invest a decade ago in creating innovative products and new streams of revenue (hello, Kaplan?), a sluggish improvement in diversifying their newsrooms and story-mix to appeal to a wider audience (most newsrooms are still overwhelmingly white), and owners’ greed in maximizing profits (which once rivaled those of pharmaceutical companies) at the expense of investing in staff and training (one of the lowest rates among all industries). 

Reporters, designers, photographers, and a few editors are paying the price now for those bad business decisions by executives. As I’ve written here before, last year was perhaps the worst in recent memory for layoffs of journalists. I fear we are poorer as a profession from losing so much talent so quickly.

Some papers will survive this period, but there will be some that do not. We are still in the early phase of a massive shift in advertising dollars to other media platforms, such as Facebook, e-mail and mobile. Ad revenue for newspapers will continue to decline, but it’s hard to say if and when the ad revenue will totally disappear. The truth is that advertisers covet a wrapper that people want to read.

In our national policy debates on education, health care, public safety and a variety of other goods deemed to be in the public interest, it’s widely accepted that there are minimum provider ratios (providers per 1,000 people) that must be honored to preserve a decent product or service.  We have designated “shortage areas” where federal incentives are offered to doctors willing to practice there. We have best practices for the teacher-student ratio in classrooms.

Should we be concerned about the falling ratio of professional journalists to citizens in a community?

There’s an interesting blog post about how the latest wave of cutbacks at newspapers violates a longstanding norm: “The unwritten but widely honored rule of thumb in the industry always has been that a newspaper should employ one journalist for every 1,000 in daily circulation,” writes media analyst Alan Mutter in a post today. 

In response to the layoffs and fiscal problems besetting the newspaper industry, there’s a web site, TreeHouse Media Project, that’s gotten buzz for its promise of helping journalists become their own publishers. The headline is catchy, but it misses the mark. Google is here to stay, and we’re better off if we use it to help our fortunes rather than try to stop it.

I was stunned by the statistic on the TreeHouse Media home page:

“One in four newspaper jobs have disappeared since 1990 — more than 10,000 in 2007 alone.”

Anyone know where that statistic comes from?

This may be the year that we see a major metro newspaper file for bankruptcy. According to the Newsosaur blog, newspaper shares have slid $23 billion in 6 months.

These stocks are so cheap that it’s a perfect opportunity for an angel investor - a technology guru, perhaps - to buy these companies and take them private. The days of 25 percent profit margins in the newspaper industry are long gone and aren’t coming back.

Paging Craig Newmark…

According to Mark Potts, a media consultant and former Washington Post editor, this past week has been especially brutal for newspaper employees across the nation.

In a recent blog entry on recoveringjournalist.com, Potts lays out the bloodbath that took place over several days. One of the announcements touched a soft spot for me: The Palm Beach Post, a newspaper I spent nearly six years at in my 20s, is eliminating 300 jobs across all departments, including about 130 in the newsroom. According to my sources at the newspaper, that amounts to about a 40-50% cutback in the newsroom, an unprecedented rollback.

There is no question that the papers must slash their expenses with urgency to adjust to the stormy economic seas they are in now. We’re all trying to survive a tsunami of economic forces that will definitely leave some communities without newspapers before it’s over.

Potts rightly points out that newspapers aren’t innocent bystanders in this tragedy. The executives who run many of the big chain papers, Potts says, were too smug and slow to recognize the need for change, to act with urgency, and to diversify their revenue streams, among other things.

I hope to raise more public awareness with a documentary on an industry in the grips of a crisis. Won’t you join me?

Even as we see newspapers shrinking across the country, we know that minority journalists are being laid off and making a shortage of diversity in newsrooms even worse.

Op-ed pages are no different, apparently, according to a Rutgers University study.

Erica Smith, a graphic designer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is mapping all the recent layoffs in journalism. The map says it best.

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.