Four today

1. Hello walls. The Belo-owned Dallas Morning News is charging for online content: Newsonomics; The New York Times is set to launch it's own paywall: MarketWatch; and Gannett now wants to charge, too: Bloomberg

2. James Fallows embraces inevitability. Atlantic

3. A way to rescue investigative pieces from stagnation? Nieman Journalism Lab

4. Actor seeks intern to help with new job hunt. Internships

Four in the afternoon

1. The New York Times has named Carolyn Ryan as Metro editor. Poynter

2. The war against cliches in journalism. The Cutline

3. The city of New York will launch an internal social network to spur innovation. gov20

4. More thoughts on the downfall of Lean Dean. Ken Doctor

Just how many journalists are out there?

The implosion of daily newspapers, the largest employer of professional journalists, has left behind a river of unemployed bodies, the victims of layoffs, downsizing, buyouts, attrition, and whatever else got people off the shrinking payrolls.

But the expansion of non-traditional media has, even in this down economy, offered some opportunities for transition into journalism jobs of a different sort. For example, public radio and nonprofits are expanding, though at a slow pace, offering some former daily reporters and editors new homes. Online sites, from AOL's Patch to the Daily Beast, are giving writers of varying experience a chance to resettle.

The quality of journalism from the new and expanding media is mixed, but then so was the quality of many newspapers. Nonetheless, it's hard to evaluate, in the middle of a massive upheaval, whether "good" journalism will thrive - especially since there's increasingly loud disagreement about what constitutes "good" journalism.

But for those tracking the numbers, Ken Doctor has a roundup of the jobs lost and jobs gained in recent years, which might give us a little a blurry idea of where things are headed. It's still an ugly picture for anyone out of work (or at a bad paper) who's uncomfortable with opinionizing, taking a pay cut, and for whom editing down video of a community meeting is torture. But some green shoots (a godawful phrase) are appearing.

KPCC news staff could grow by leaps and bounds

Bill Kling, the soon-to-be retired president and CEO of American Public Media, wants big boosts in reporting staff at four APM stations, including KPCC in Pasadena. If his fund-raising dreams come true, he'd flood the L.A. market with as many as 100 reporters, each with salaries that will make most journalists in Southern California drool.

This could all be pie in the sky, of course. But even if he's only half successful, this could be a major shift in how L.A. gets covered. Ken Doctor at Newsonomics has the story, and here's an excerpt:

The initial four stations involved in the alliance planning are WNYC in New York, WBEZ in Chicago, KPCC in Los Angeles and Minnesota Public Radio, in the Twin Cities, says Bill Kling, current (and now retiring, ”MPR’s Bill Kling Steps Down — and Up — From Public Radio“) president and CEO of the American Public Media Group (APMG), the parent of the L.A. and Twin Cities stations, as well as a major syndicator of public radio programming.

One hundred “public media” reporters and editors in a market is a huge increase. Among those four stations, the news staff now ranges from 12 to 30 each. It’s tough to count precisely because these are legacy radio operations, and radio requires different job descriptions than digital news. Still, at those numbers, the alliance members are aiming at adding more than 300 reporters and editors in four markets, if the plans succeed. Kling says the positions created “would be a very good job for people who love journalism,” in the six figures with full benefits.

Kling and his colleagues are strategizing their plans and foundation asks — and his hope is that funding can be locked down by next June, when he formally steps from his APMG post. He says his post-retirement plan is to focus on the building out of public media. If it is, hiring could commence by mid-2011.
How much funding?

The plan will cost about $5 million per market per year, says Kling, or $25 million for a five-year funding plan, which is what the group aims to obtain. So that’s $100 million if four markets can be launched; $150 million, it it’s six markets. After the first four markets, Kling says, “we’d go on to five, six, seven, eight.”

The Deseret News cuts nearly half its staff, and other riddles of language

The Deseret News, a daily newspaper in Salt Lake City and owned by the Mormon Church, has announced that it will axe 43 percent of its newsroom staff - 57 full-time and 47 part-time employees. But rather than let the obvious shock settle in over the fact that the 143-year-old paper is hacking at its bones, management threw up all kinds of flares, fireworks and fancy neologisms to cast the layoffs as part of a creative disruption reinvention system that will add to and improve the paper's coverage.

Less is more, in other words, using the latest in media jargon. Here's one of the executives, quoted by Ken Doctor, explaining why layoffs won't hurt coverage:

“That’s an Old Media world view,” Deseret News President and CEO Clark Gilbert told me today. “We have access to more journalists, hyperlocal contributors, national sports figures than ever before.”

Doctor's piece goes on to explain all kinds of things the Deseret News is up to, from its values-based missionary journalism to its labeling of journalists as Rewrite/First Responders.

Some of the ideas might work. But I suspect most of these overly intellectualized plans are going to fail unless and until the Deseret News, and all other expand-by-shrinking media companies, can figure out what they want to do and explain it to themselves in plain language (can you imagine putting Rewrite/First Responder on your resume?). Words that describe actions, not words meant to convey the idea of activity.

Hyperlocal hypersports and the nationalization of local news

Gannett, the largest newspaper chain in America, plans to launch 100 "hyperlocal" high school sports sites that will be patched together on the HighSchoolSports.net platform. PaidContent writes:

This current sports effort will begin this month in 38 Gannett media markets, including Atlanta, Washington, DC, and Denver, CO. The full rollout is expected to be completed by the end of 2010.

This patchwork approach to coverage (also AOL's model for its Patch sites) is probably the future for newspaper chains and national media companies, as they go smaller, more local and more niche with their coverage but use their vast resources and broad name recognition to create a regional or national networks based on common themes. It's sort of what the fragmentation of the small- and medium-size newspaper was heading for anyway.

Is it hard to imagine MediaNews, Belo and Gannett partnering on a regional high school sports network that pushes scores and updates to mobile devices while feasting on what's left of the auto and mall advertisers in Southern California?

It would make sense under this model for other popular beats - cops, courts, schools, weather - to be strung together and published on similar platforms. Readers might turn to a regional or national Gannett-run network to get their local police blotter, for instance. The model uses fewer journalists, offers a single focus and yet still allows the company to sell ads on a regional or national level.

It's not the greatest news for journalists, given that the coverage is almost certain to lead to fewer jobs, require less skill, offer less interesting experience, and create a box that eschews enterprise or creativity.

Here's how Ken Doctor sees it in his examination of AOL's Patch:

The fact that Patch is getting such recognition, and discussion, is another indicator of how thoroughly journalism has fallen on hard times. The announcement of the hiring of a single journalist in a single community? That was the stuff of internal newsroom memos not too long ago. It’s as if the news industry is struggling to rebuild itself, cell by cell, just as researchers are figuring out how humans themselves can regenerate lost limbs and organs.

At the same time, Doctor points out that the oxymoron of national chains doing hyperlocal is probably the way of the future. Here's why (again, using Patch as the example):

It seems to me that scale is a plus in a couple of ways: 1) national ad sales (witness the Pepsi Refresh campaign running across the current sites) and 2) technology costs, with one centralized production and presentation system, one that should be able to get to market quicker with tech innovations. In two important ways, though, scale will be of a lot less help — and these are core to the site’s promise and success: 1) local content production and 2) local ad sales. Patch, with its organizational structure, will get some efficiency boost through regionalized ad selling and some content sharing (as sites with a common school district may combine coverage, for instance). In the main, though, the hard work of gathering local news and selling local merchants isn’t greatly helped by the national brand.

The rise of online ad dollars

Internet ads accounted for 8 percent of total ad revenue in in 2005. The number jumped to17 percent in 2009. Ken Doctor reports:

...digital marketing, with better targeting being introduced around the clock, keeps pulling dollars away from traditional media — TV, newspapers, radio, and magazines. TV ($26.2 billion) and newspapers ($24.6 billion) are still ahead of Internet, but cable (at $20.4 billion) and TV networks (at $15.5 billion) are below. Radio pulls in $14 billion, while consumer magazines take in $10 billion and trades $7.5 billion.

Four in the morning

1. Former LA Times and Weekly reporter Daniel Hernandez and others offer some righteous criticism of the "immersion" journalism practiced by The Entryway. LAO

2. The Voice of San Diego has advertised an opening for "engagement editor." Nieman Journalism Lab explores what the job title means. Nieman Lab

3. "Can the iPad feed a Slow Journalism movement?" and eight other questions answered about how the iPad could change news. Ken Doctor

4. MOCA wants kids to break some rules. LA Downtown News

Books on journalism

Ken Doctor, who blogs at Content Bridges, has a new book out. "Newsonomics: Twelve Trends That Will Shape the News You Get" promises to take readers "inside the fast-changing landscape of shrinking newspapers and always-on digital news." I know plenty of journalists who don't want to be inside that fast-changing landscape anymore, but Doctor is an insightful observer and the book is worth checking out.

Bankruptcies could make strange bedfellows in L.A.

Last Friday, Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group sent out a press release that said the company would file for bankruptcy. The message included reassuring language about the future and promises that the company's newspapers would be shielded from any fallout.

Such promises came up hollow since most of the company's collapsing bottom line has already demolished its newsrooms. But assuming Singleton holds to his pledge and closes no papers and cuts no jobs as a direct result of the bankruptcy, the future remains uncertain for MediaNews.

In trying to divine what it all means, media observers focused their attention on a couple of paragraphs in the Wall Street Journal's story about the bankruptcy:

...Mr. Singleton said he wanted to be aggressive in merging newspapers.

People in the industry have pointed to MediaNews's paper in St. Paul and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis as potential candidates for a combination, as well as to adjacent papers in Southern California published by MediaNews, MediaNews Group Co. and MediaNews Group Inc.

The media site FishbowlLA reasoned that this merging would inevitably lead to more layoffs:

It's hard to imagine how merging any of MediaNews's Southern California papers won't result in lost jobs - and a reduction of local coverage. Perhaps Mr. Singleton has a more active imagination than the rest of us?

Additional layoffs are always possible. But the fact is, MediaNews has already consolidated most of the operations of its nine Southern California newspapers. It's hard to see where else the company could squeeze. While individual newsrooms exist under different mastheads and in different offices (and fight to remain independent, sometimes to the point of mutual contempt), they're highly interdependent. The Los Angeles Newspaper Group (LANG), as they're collectively called, shares stories, relies on a single copy desk, operates under a board structure, outsources printing, and has almost no redundant beats.

The three papers in the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group (aka SGVN) are essentially one newspaper with three zoned editions. While each of the papers has its own news staffs and at least two pages of original content, editorial oversight and business operations are centralized. SGVN, in turn, has a close relationship with the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, San Bernardino Sun and Redlands Daily Facts. Together, they form the Inland Division of LANG. The other three LANG papers - Los Angeles Daily News, Torrance Daily Breeze and Long Beach Press-Telegram - form LANG's Metro Division.

So what's left to merge? Geography and local advertising warn against a single LANG newspaper or news site. But the bankruptcy could clear away business entanglements leftover from MediaNews's buying sprees. Notice the WSJ article mentions "MediaNews, MediaNews Group Co. and MediaNews Group Inc." This is because MediaNews has different investors for different blocks of newspapers, even with LANG. If the bankruptcy creates a single company, LANG papers might find ways consolidate further - or even partner with other papers.

On this latter point, MediaNews has already made overtures to share limited content with the Orange County Register (which also went bankrupt) and prints several of its papers on the Register's presses. Out in Riverside, the shrinking Press-Enterprise has largely ceded San Bernardino County to the Sun. It wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility for the two papers to cross-pollinate.

A few media analysts have raised the prospect of a deal between MediaNews and the Los Angeles Times. The Times - it's bankrupt, too - has a shrunken newsroom and a smaller vision for itself. This could, theoretically, pave the way for a deal to distribute Times content through MediaNews properties.

Former Daily News editor Ron Kaye:

The only obstacle to the Times taking over the whole LA market and potentially salvaging the existing papers nameplates in localized editions is the U.S. Justice Department and laws against monopolies.

Former Knight Ridder exec Ken Doctor's take:

In L.A., Tribune’s soon-to-be-owners similarly may have little interest in staying the course. Maybe a L.A. combination, involving the Times around lowered-cost, higher-efficiency publishing -- Singleton’s once and future trademark – is the way to go.

Is it possible we've come to the point where rivals end competition and embrace collaboration? At one time, Singleton's papers were seen as stepping stones on the way to a job at a paper like the Times, but times have changed and economic woes have become a greater leveler. Furthermore, bankruptcies have a way of killing ego and the drive to compete, and shrinking papers aren't looking to be dominant anymore - they just want to survive.

The daily battle for Detroit

The decision to cut delivery of the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News to three days a week has opened the door to a new daily newspaper - the Detroit Daily Press.

The name itself is a finger in the eye of the former dailies, as Ken Doctor points out, but also a clever mashup that will give subscribers and advertisers a sense of establishment. But who wants a daily newspaper anymore?

Doctor answers:

Daily newspaper publishers have been making the point that the new economics of the news business simply won't pay for business (and staff and product) as usual. They are right, of course -- given their economics, but not necessarily the next guy's.

In making reductions, they've had to hit the panic button more often than the strategic switch, and that inevitably may have left them open to competitors of all kinds. They may not have protected their flanks well enough in cutting back. If the entrepreneurial pioneers turn into a parade, newspaper publishers will have a new headache: intensifying competition for the local ad dollar, and for readers' share of attention.

In Detroit, the exposed flank is home delivery. Publisher Dave Hunke may well have been right that the Detroit Newspaper Partnership was unsustainable in its traditional form, and that cutting whole days of home delivery made sense for Gannett and MediaNews. He exposed the flank though -- a big flank of maybe more than a 100,000 baby boomers and up (in age) who want the newspaper delivered to their home. They don't want an e-edition to be read on a computer, and they don't want to wait 'til they get trundled off to an old-age home (DNP has decided to keep up daily delivery to senior citizen facilities). They want a newspaper. Delivered.

Four at night

1. Peter Y. Sussman at Huffington Post calls for a little perspective when it comes to the citizen-journalism project:

By all means, let's keep the citizens in citizen journalism. Let any interested reader find the raw data from hundreds of localities if they wish. But the measure of our success should be the perspective and understanding we provided for our readers, not how much data was accumulated by how many people or how much of it reverberated elsewhere in the national news echo chamber.

Huffington Post

2. Ken Doctor at Content Bridges considers the algorithms of the new Google News:

As print shrinks, Google will replace its daily functionality, its daily utility -- and it's been on that road for awhile -- with Google News, v2. It sounds like Google News, v1 meets Google IG meets AdWords for news, a new algorithm that knows us better than we know ourselves. Importantly ... Google is recognizing how fundamentally lazy we all are. In effect, we're taken to be the corpulent creatures in Wall E. Google seems to be saying: you don't have to do anything, we'll be your new paperboy.

Content Bridges

3. Jason Pontin at Technology Review proposes ways to save print journalism - starting with an assessment of print journalism's true value:

The comparative advantage of mainstream media is not the ownership of presses, but the collaboration of professionals. The creation of good journalism is a tremendously laborious process, requiring an infrastructure more expensive than any press. The illustration and design of stories has an infrastructure, too. Developing an audience that will attract particular advertisers requires another infrastructure. Selling advertising requires yet another. These structures, which allow publications to reach large, coherent audiences, can exist only within complex organizations, mostly businesses.

Technology Review via Newspaper Death Watch

4. Rob Fishman at Huffington Post reports on the words war between David Carr of the New York Times and Michael Wolff of Newser, and analyzes where they're getting their ammunition:

It's hip for bloggers to bite the hand that feeds them, and Wolff's got some oral fixation. It's not good enough for him to kick the Boston Globe or Seattle Post-Intelligencer while they're down; he needs to cite their own articles while he's doing it. We all have a personal stake in The New York Times, but for Wolff it's more than that, it's his bread and butter. Without the news, he's just an -er.

Huffington Post

The real in the deal

So why did Platinum Equity spend between 15 and 50 million dollars to buy the San Diego Union-Tribune? Ken Doctor makes a persuasive argument that it was to get at the real estate - the newspaper just happened to come with the building. Which isn't particularly interesting in and of itself, but is interesting if it's emblematic of a larger trend, which Doctor thinks it just might be. He writes:

Hard as it may be to believe, we may have entered a new rocky period for newspaper companies. It would be a period in which the real estate on which they sit determines their market value. Consequently, their real estate value may determine who wants to sell the newspaper property and who wants to buy it -- to get at the real estate.

And we all know just how strong the real estate market is these days.

Essentially, Doctor is saying that the only companies willing to invest in newspapers right now are ones that think they'll be able to turn a profit once the real-estate market rebounds. They aren't putting much stock in the part of the business that involves words and pictures. Doctor continues:

What is certain is that the real estate gambit further accelerates the changing of the daily newspaper industry as we know it. After all, there will be a recovery -- including a relaxing of credit and a re-valuing of commercial real estate. That recovery will come before newspaper companies find a formula that stabilizes them.

In many cities -- of course depending on the location and value of the real estate -- that means newspaper real estate first, news publishing second. It's a world that is out of order, literally, but it's one we're inheriting.

All of which raises some troubling questions for newspaper that have already sold off their real estate holdings. What are they going to use to raise capital when the creditors come to collect?

I love you for your real estate*

What will the sale of the San Diego Union-Tribune to Platinum Equity mean for the newspaper? Ken Doctor, who writes at Content Bridges, analyzes the deal over at PaidContent. After surveying what Platinum Equity partner David Black has done at the Akron Beacon-Journal, and considering what Platinum really values in the deal, Doctor's prognosis is unsurprising: the new owners will cut.

Doctor writes:

Judging from Akron, we can intuit that the new private-equity owners and David Black will look first to “efficiencies.” That means less headcount and a concentration on lower-paid, less-experienced reporting staff. Morale—never a newspaper strong suit—will take another hit.

-snip-

The Union-Tribune will get smaller and much more locally focused. And that real estate under its building (and the Union-Tribune’s other San Diego real-estate holdings, which are part of the deal)—that is the real motivator for the purchase. Consider that the Blethen Maine Papers (owned by the Seattle Times publisher) are about to be auctioned off for the value of the related real estate – not that of the papers. This is a big trend worth watching. Commercial real estate has seized up in the recession and the credit crunch. But that’s cyclical. It will come back—and far faster than metro-newspaper values – and therein may lie the next chapter in newspaper ownership.

*Update: Alan Mutter agrees.

Blogs about radio programs about newspapers

Romenesko today includes a link to Ken Doctor's Content Bridges in which Doctor opines about his appearance on Tuesday's "To The Point" in which he, and others, opined about the state of the American newspaper industry.

That's a media hat trick: A radio show on newspapers dissected on one blog and promoted on another.