Black and White, Red All Over: Is 2008 the Worst Year in Modern Newspaper History?
On Wednesday morning at 11 a.m., Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson will be managing a conference call that, from the looks of it, won't be much fun.
They'll be reporting The New York Times Company's second-quarter earnings. Last time they did one of quarterly earnings calls, The Times reported big losses; there was a plan to cut 100 newsroom jobs, some through straight-up layoffs rather than superannuation and retirement deals.
And in the past few weeks, it's only gotten worse: the company's stock has fallen to a decade low, and tumbled more than 15 percent in just this month.
The Times is hardly alone. It trickles in day by day: more news of lost jobs and tumbling stocks for major newspapers and their parent companies. But as bad as newspapers have been doing—it's been conventional wisdom for a few years now—the industry is actually doing much worse than most ever anticipated, and that's become painfully clear over the past two months.
At the beginning of the year, things didn't look so bad.
There was bad news, but it seemed consistent with what we've been getting warnings about for years now: In February, The New York Times announced it would cut 100 jobs from its newsroom, including laying people off for the first time ever.
That same month, the L.A. Times publisher David Hiller sent out an announcement as well: He said up to 150 jobs would be lost across the L.A. Times media group (which includes Spanish paper Hoy and other community papers).
When Russ Stanton was named the paper's editor a day after that memo was sent out, he said he was "hopping mad over this seemingly endless ‘Groundhog Day' nightmare. We in the newsroom need to figure out how to break this self-defeating cycle before it does indeed result in our defeat."
Sam Zell, the brand new owner of the paper's parent company, the Tribune Company, said: "Unfortunately, I can't turn this ship from its course of the past 10 years within just a few months." He added, "But, make no mistake. This is not my ultimate strategy for our company."
The February cuts at The Times and the other Tribune papers looked like a one-time deal. Despite the undeniable blow to all these newsrooms, it seemed Mr. Zell was just clearing out some fat, and if there were future cuts, maybe they'd happen next year.
And indeed, things were beginning to look up. In June, Russ Stanton told MediaBistro that morale was starting to reappear at the paper and that people were "focused solely on doing great work and good stories and terrific journalism."
And then Sam Zell threw all that out the window the next day. "What has become clear as we have gotten intimately familiar with the business is that the model for newspapers no longer works," he said in a memo.
Ad revenue, as bad as its been in recent years, fell to levels that no one had anticipated either at Tribune papers or in the industry overall. Last year, ad revenue dropped 8 percent from 2006; this year there has been a double-digit decline from even that poor performance.
"It's going a lot worse than anybody predicted, and if we have double-digit ad declines for two years, some newspapers will be in real financial jeopardy," Edward Atorino, an analyst at the Benchmark Company, told The New York Times in June.
After gutting those 150 jobs earlier in the year, the L.A. Times fired 150 more people from its newsroom this past week. And the body count is getting larger all around the Tribune. This year, The Baltimore Sun is cutting about 100 jobs; the Chicago Tribune announced recently it would cut 80; the Sun-Sentinel about 50; the Hartford Courant would cut 57; and the Orlando Senintel about 50.
Last week, newsroom employees at the Sun picketed their building, carrying slogans calling for Mr. Zell's ouster. But, of course, these problems are not just slamming Mr. Zell.
There was that business last week with Times stock dropping 15 percent in one week, to a decade low.
Over the past week or so, the paper's stock has consistently been hovering in the $12 range, whereas it was batting around $14 just a few weeks ago.
The company's stock began to fall after Craig Huber, an analyst for Lehman Brothers, wrote earlier this month in a letter to clients about his surprise that ad revenue is projecting a 9.1 percent decline this year, more than the 7.2 percent previously projected.
Ad sales next year probably will fall 7.5 percent, compared with his earlier estimate of 6 percent, he said.
Last year's purchase of Dow Jones Inc. by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. was seen as a sign that something interesting could still happen with newspapers. Mr. Murdoch and
The Wall Street Journal's managing editor Robert Thomson have been promising to invest money in the paper.
But they also cut 50 jobs last week, and closed most of the paper's editorial operations in South Brunswick, an emotionally fraught decision since that was the paper's home base after the Sept. 11 attacks closed their downtown newsroom for months.
It's obviously easy to look at ad revenues and a tanking economy and point toward that and blame this year on that. But there are other theories.
"Because we are in the newspaper industry, we spend a lot of time writing about the demise of newspapers," Katharine Weymouth, the new publisher of The Washington Post, told The Observer last week. "Nobody—I mean, we never see Katie Couric doing a 20-minute segment on the evening news talking about the audience that the nightly news is losing. I mean, they just don't do those stories, right? We write a little obsessively about our own industry, I think. But when you look at the real story with what's happening with newspapers, is there a seismic shift going on? Absolutely. Are ad revenues plummeting? Absolutely. But there is still a very good story."
But even she conceded: "This is not me being Pollyannaish," she said. "It's real."
Good luck, Arthur and Janet.
They'll be reporting The New York Times Company's second-quarter earnings. Last time they did one of quarterly earnings calls, The Times reported big losses; there was a plan to cut 100 newsroom jobs, some through straight-up layoffs rather than superannuation and retirement deals.
And in the past few weeks, it's only gotten worse: the company's stock has fallen to a decade low, and tumbled more than 15 percent in just this month.
The Times is hardly alone. It trickles in day by day: more news of lost jobs and tumbling stocks for major newspapers and their parent companies. But as bad as newspapers have been doing—it's been conventional wisdom for a few years now—the industry is actually doing much worse than most ever anticipated, and that's become painfully clear over the past two months.
At the beginning of the year, things didn't look so bad.
There was bad news, but it seemed consistent with what we've been getting warnings about for years now: In February, The New York Times announced it would cut 100 jobs from its newsroom, including laying people off for the first time ever.
That same month, the L.A. Times publisher David Hiller sent out an announcement as well: He said up to 150 jobs would be lost across the L.A. Times media group (which includes Spanish paper Hoy and other community papers).
When Russ Stanton was named the paper's editor a day after that memo was sent out, he said he was "hopping mad over this seemingly endless ‘Groundhog Day' nightmare. We in the newsroom need to figure out how to break this self-defeating cycle before it does indeed result in our defeat."
Sam Zell, the brand new owner of the paper's parent company, the Tribune Company, said: "Unfortunately, I can't turn this ship from its course of the past 10 years within just a few months." He added, "But, make no mistake. This is not my ultimate strategy for our company."
The February cuts at The Times and the other Tribune papers looked like a one-time deal. Despite the undeniable blow to all these newsrooms, it seemed Mr. Zell was just clearing out some fat, and if there were future cuts, maybe they'd happen next year.
And indeed, things were beginning to look up. In June, Russ Stanton told MediaBistro that morale was starting to reappear at the paper and that people were "focused solely on doing great work and good stories and terrific journalism."
And then Sam Zell threw all that out the window the next day. "What has become clear as we have gotten intimately familiar with the business is that the model for newspapers no longer works," he said in a memo.
Ad revenue, as bad as its been in recent years, fell to levels that no one had anticipated either at Tribune papers or in the industry overall. Last year, ad revenue dropped 8 percent from 2006; this year there has been a double-digit decline from even that poor performance.
"It's going a lot worse than anybody predicted, and if we have double-digit ad declines for two years, some newspapers will be in real financial jeopardy," Edward Atorino, an analyst at the Benchmark Company, told The New York Times in June.
After gutting those 150 jobs earlier in the year, the L.A. Times fired 150 more people from its newsroom this past week. And the body count is getting larger all around the Tribune. This year, The Baltimore Sun is cutting about 100 jobs; the Chicago Tribune announced recently it would cut 80; the Sun-Sentinel about 50; the Hartford Courant would cut 57; and the Orlando Senintel about 50.
Last week, newsroom employees at the Sun picketed their building, carrying slogans calling for Mr. Zell's ouster. But, of course, these problems are not just slamming Mr. Zell.
There was that business last week with Times stock dropping 15 percent in one week, to a decade low.
Over the past week or so, the paper's stock has consistently been hovering in the $12 range, whereas it was batting around $14 just a few weeks ago.
The company's stock began to fall after Craig Huber, an analyst for Lehman Brothers, wrote earlier this month in a letter to clients about his surprise that ad revenue is projecting a 9.1 percent decline this year, more than the 7.2 percent previously projected.
Ad sales next year probably will fall 7.5 percent, compared with his earlier estimate of 6 percent, he said.
Last year's purchase of Dow Jones Inc. by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. was seen as a sign that something interesting could still happen with newspapers. Mr. Murdoch and
The Wall Street Journal's managing editor Robert Thomson have been promising to invest money in the paper.
But they also cut 50 jobs last week, and closed most of the paper's editorial operations in South Brunswick, an emotionally fraught decision since that was the paper's home base after the Sept. 11 attacks closed their downtown newsroom for months.
It's obviously easy to look at ad revenues and a tanking economy and point toward that and blame this year on that. But there are other theories.
"Because we are in the newspaper industry, we spend a lot of time writing about the demise of newspapers," Katharine Weymouth, the new publisher of The Washington Post, told The Observer last week. "Nobody—I mean, we never see Katie Couric doing a 20-minute segment on the evening news talking about the audience that the nightly news is losing. I mean, they just don't do those stories, right? We write a little obsessively about our own industry, I think. But when you look at the real story with what's happening with newspapers, is there a seismic shift going on? Absolutely. Are ad revenues plummeting? Absolutely. But there is still a very good story."
But even she conceded: "This is not me being Pollyannaish," she said. "It's real."
Good luck, Arthur and Janet.
the further rise of stupid hollywood = furthur decline of newspapers
Bye Bye liberal rags. Oh joy when the Old York Times, and the other two 'news lite' papers pictured above go out of business.
It's a combination of factors, the main three being: 1) the rise in corporate control, which inherently brings in the cost-cutting bean counters, cautionary lawyers, and conservative corporate execs not very willing to anger fellow corporate execs (often sharing board positions and partnership ventures) as well as possibly useful politicians; 2) the fall off in heads-up, thorough and investigative journalism (press "coverage" of the Iraq invasion and ensuing war will likely be a poster child for bad journalism for decades to come); and 3) the rapid rise in alternative, pseudo-news sources like blog sites and cable shows that can target specific demographics based on political and philosophical beliefs, no matter how extreme or just plain goofy -- would you want to read or hear news and reports that you don't like when there are other sources that are more than happy to only tell you things you do want to read or hear?
This is also bad news for freelancer writers like myself. I've lost three outlets, and more are on the way, I'm sure. Magazines are doing no better, with in-flight mags eventually going the way of the dinosaur, and airlines switching to on-screen mags. It's all about the Internet -- now we just have to figure out how to make it pay.
WHATS WRONG AND HOW TO SAVE THE NEWSPAPER INDUSTRY:
Whats Wrong- Simple; the newspaper is quite literally yesterdays news. Trying to sell a paper today is like trying to sell a telex machine- outdated technology. News is now a living, fluid flow of information. A newspaper is a still, lifeless snapshot of what was news last night, nothing more.
How To Save The Industry: Blow up the current business model and get rid of any old school execs who can't radically adapt to the concept of a ground up reinvention.
Step 1. Get rid of the cos ofbuyinganewspaper. Yes, give them away FREE. The readership will triple, driving up ad value and relevancy. The pennies earned selling a newspaper pale in comparison to the increased value of larger readership, more advertising value.
2. Destroy the current front page design. Instead of a feature story (1 hook for all people?!? Slim odds) instead cover the front page (above the fold) with numerous mini headlines which are merely teasers to the interactive online newspaper site.
3. Max out the local coverage of all things kids, school events and be light on text, heavy on photos. People don't read papers- PARENTS DO.
4. Shoot video (regardless of how amateur it may look) of ALL local events you cover and references those video clips in the print version- again driving people to the digital version.
There are more industry saving tips but thats all I am giving away for free.
Troy Dunn
tdprivate@hotmail.com
But even she conceded: "This is not me being Pollyannaish," she said. "It's real."
This sentence doesn't make any sense.
Could it be that Mr. Koblin doesn't understand what "Pollyannaish" means?
If content is king, why give it away?
Corporate control could be considered now the salad days of newspapers for a host of economic
reasons that would not be of interest to the average left wing anti-business mind.The evidence is
that the private buyers in Chicago, Minneapolis and Philadelphia have made the situation worse.
I bet that all the employees at those papers who spent years complaining about public ownership
wish they had their old owners back. That is the fraction of people that are still left.
The problem isn't corporate control or bean counters.
Both ad revenue and subscibers are leaving in droves making it a cash flow problem.
The ideologs have to realize they are a business. They must provide content at a price subscribers are willing to pay. Ditto for the advertising.
Stop pointing fingers and look in the mirror.
Who decries the demise of the dailies...the papers ownership. Why are papers losing money when ad revenues are up over what they were decades ago...Answer: because the ad revenues are SUPPORTING the online versions. The much bandied online versions have not been money makers. Question: Why would papers publicize their own demise? Answer: Maybe they want to get rid of the print edition...or is it the Guild? Hmmmmm.
When papers were privately owned they were satisfied with 4-7% profits. Wall Street doesn't find that acceptable, instead looking for 35%. When papers were bought up by media conglomerates, papers were now subject to those expectations. So with layoffs and shrinking news hole, demoralized staffs, less comprehensive coverage, sloppy production work by recent college grads under immense pressure at low wages. Hey, it almost looks self-destructive, doesn't it? The suggestion of a better product seems appalling to the noveau owners. How about taking a closer look at some of the smaller papers and how they're managing to survive.
Why do you not include non-newsroom employee reductions in your count. Last week, the LA Times fired 250 people, of which 150 were newsroom employees. The real number truly reveals the scope of the layoffs.
The demise of newspapers at the hands of the Internet and a vastly changed reading public has been coming for a long time -- going on at least 10 years now, I'd say -- and plenty of people, including upper management, saw it coming.
As the Internet picked up steam and, initially, help-wanted ads started thinning (most noticeably about 7-8 years ago, with the advent of CraigsList), there was a lot of hand-wringing and aggrieved talk about what to do. AND .. WE ... DID ... NOTHING. Revenue shortfalls in classified advertising were covered by other areas (auto ROP, real estate), until both of those ultimately tanked, which got us to where we are now. Corporate accounting departments didn't care that no new revenue streams were being developed as long as individual properties were hitting their budgets using the old ones. Then the old ones died. Guh.
The most troubling thing about all of this has been the dearth of ideas from the alleged leaders of the media companies, who -- I'd like to reiterate this -- SAW ALL THIS COMING. The present and future of the business rests with the Web, but online newspaper efforts were launched/refined far too late to move the needle, and were -- and continue to be -- undermined by the fact no one's figured out how to make all that effort pay off. Newsrooms are left scrambling to fill Web sites with content, including video and audio, yet have no dedicated revenue stream to pay for it -- and no plans for one.
Meanwhile, top editors continue to tinker with page designs and other bells and whistles, thinking that will ease the problem but failing to understand that readers don't care ONE BIT about pretty page designs, cool graphics or cutout photos.
Advertising departments, and by extension group CEOs, are arguably the worst culprits in all this, refusing for YEARS to surrender the big profits of in-paper ROP and move their model online, where lower ad rates could have been countered by increased ad volume over time. Instead, they let the printed-paper corpse bleed out, flipped it over to get the last drops, and now are whining that no one wants to advertise in dead trees. Where are your online sales reps and managers? Where is your online sales strategy? Where are your online special sections -- once cash cows in printed form? Where the heck have you been, advertising managers?
I like the earlier suggestion about giving away the printed paper itself to boost circulation, penetration and readership numbers. The fact is, circ. departments barely make any money if they make money at all -- many of them are in the red each year -- since acquiring new subscribers and retaining old ones is so expensive, and they'll do just about anything to sell a subscription and boost their ABC numbers. (Me? I got a mid-sized daily delivered for an entire year -- for a dollar. Sounds like a GREAT financial model.) Circulation has been described as a bucket with a hole in the bottom, and these days, the bottom hole is bigger than the one at the top. Why not just give the thing away?
I worked as a newspaper reporter full-time for 20 years and watched how the suits at the top would conduct readership surveys, be told by the readers that they wanted more local news, and then decimate the local news bureaus. If they didn't cut staff, they forced the local beat reporters to write fluffy features with "great art" instead of covering the town meetings, the county courts, the schools, the cops and all the other stuff you can't get online.
People paying ungodly amounts of local and county taxes have an interest in where the money goes. They want to know about local crime. They care about school issues. But editors seeking awards and status are bored by all that ...
Here! Here! The demise of the newspaper has been written on the walls for some years now and the industry has been slow to change from a subscription based service to a content based one. Though from the New York Times website and the various initiatives I have seen in the news that they are taking (like offering targeted headlines to LinkedIn members based on their profiles seems like a step in the right direction. The basic tenet to remember is: News is not going away - Newspapers are.
The decline of respect for the media is hardly surprising, given that their primary role seems to be to make money rather than to act as a bastion against government and corporate malfeasance. President Eisenhower's prescient warning about the dangers posed by the Military-Industrial Complex has proved to be an understatement, for the latter has morphed into an infinitely more dangerous cabal, the Military-Industrial-Media complex.
An increasing number of people have become aware that the 'freedom and democracy' mantra spouted by politicians and their media mouthpieces is a travesty of the truth. One of the best examples of media censorship is the refusal to consider any of the mountainous evidence against the official conspiracy theory relating to the events of 9/11.
You can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
Martin Hanson, retired science teacher, Auckland, New Zealand
There will be few tears shed for the biased media. The only sadness will be from the left as they see their main propaganda machine fall apart. Next will come the nightly network news casts, the last of the liberal water carriers.
In the end the media has only themselves to blame for their demise. In the face of poll after poll indicating the general public found their reporting liberally biased their answer was in effect to "double down" and become even more biased.
They committed suicide and will not be missed except by the left. Their major fault was the same as the left for whom they carried water for so long. Hubris, plain and simple. The infuriating attitude the media has of "telling" us all what we should think of the news instead of simply reporting it and leaving the rest to us.
Good riddance
@Joseph
Stuff a sock in it, blinders boy. You're purposefully confusing "the media" with "the news," for your own purposes, and you know it. You make me sick.
I do not believe what is in newspapers until/unless I verify it elsewhere except for sports scores and the weather, CERTAINLY nothing about politics can be believed.
Also, I will not pay for a newspaper that hates me, a white, male, US Armed Forces veteran, and Republican. I do check their messages of the day online.
Almost all newspapers (other than the tiny community newspapers) have become political advocacy organization for the Democratic Party.
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