The Recession & The Newsroom

Clark Hoyt, the Public Editor at the New York Times, wrote an interest an interesting article, "Recession, Revolution and a Leaner Times," about the impact the recession is having on the newsroom. Here are some highlights:

• The Times retains the largest newsroom of any American paper — 1,250 reporters, photographers, editors, columnists, graphic artists, Web producers, videographers and more — it is about to cut 100 people through voluntary buyouts and, if needed, layoffs that would happen in the weeks before Christmas.
• Other cuts: The Baltimore Sun had 400 journalists, is now down to 150 journalists. The Los Angeles Times, where a staff of more than 1,100 has been cut nearly in half.
• Rick Edmonds, a scholar at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center in Florida, estimated last month that newspapers have reduced spending on journalism by $1.6 billion a year over the past several years.
• Bill Keller, executive editor, said he is determined to avoid closing foreign or national bureaus and does not expect significant cuts in Washington, DC.
• The Times has already reduced "the support staff, cutting freelance budgets, capping expense-account meals, seeking bargain airfares and hotels, rotating foreign correspondents every five years instead of four, and housing some bureaus in correspondents’ homes rather than downtown offices. The nice car and driver for the London bureau chief? History."
• "The metro staff, with more than 60 reporters, is still the largest, but it has been reduced by nearly 20 percent over a decade. The paper, for example, no longer has correspondents in the state capitals of New Jersey and Connecticut." Much the way the Journal announced that it would close its Boston bureau, shifting some coverage to New York.
• With an around-the-clock news cycle, reporters file throughout the day, and copy can be edited over a smoother cycle.
• Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, said the newsroom cuts and a decision about charging online readers are entirely separate issues. The cuts are “meant to address the immediate, short-term realities of our current economic situation.” Charging for online content, he said, is a strategic issue that “would have little or no impact on our financial results in the short term, but rather position us differently for long-term grow.

Very interesting insight into the newsroom.

Prediction: The Associated Press will Consider Substantial Changes to its Model in 2009

A number of papers have given the AP notice that they want to cancel their participation in the AP. Most of these are smaller papers – like the Bakersfield Californian, Idaho Falls Post Register, Yakima Herald-Republic and Wenatchee World – seeking to renegotiate down the fees they pay. But some big papers like the Tribune Co. (parent of the LA Times and Chicago Tribune) and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (no relation) have also given notice.

On the one hand, many papers seem to rely on wire service coverage even more in 2009, thanks to closing bureaus in Washington, DC, and foreign capitals. On the other hand, the renewed focus on local coverage means that one article appearing multiple times no longer makes sense. After all, when searching on a topic on Google News, how many links to the same article do you need?

All this means is that the AP needs to re-evaluate who it serves and how it serves them.

More Bad News for Newspapers, Part II

I wrote today's first post over the weekend, before seeing today reading today's New York Times article by Richard Perez-Pena, "Uncertainty as Tribune Prepares to Retrench."

Here are some additional points that Perez-Pena made:

• Watering down the product can hurt staff morale.
• "'To the extent you diminish your product, I think you diminish your success in print or online. In the long run, it's going to be harmful to newspapers' brand names, which is the strongest thing they've got,'" John Morton, an independent newspaper analyst. "Offering readers less, trying to cut costs and preserve unrealistic profit margins. 'It’s a strategy, basically, of gradually closing down,'" Morton added.
  
• Although not addressed in last week's analyst call, Sam Zell has said that he thinks too many resources have been allocated to international and national news -- information available from other resources on the Internet -- and that local news is what's most important to readers of local newspapers.
• The implications include smaller national and international sections -- and heavier reliance on wire service copy.
• "But a newspaper dominated by wire articles would offer little that was original — and little temptation to a reader who could just as easily go to Google or Yahoo for news."

What's the biggest problem facing newspapers? Cost structure and circulation are issues, but not the real problem. According to Mike Simonton, senior director at Fitch Ratings in Chicago, quoted in the article, "The biggest problem still is the loss of ad sales...I think there’s very little evidence that any of these strategies and changes will change that.”

Again, the point I've made before in this blog, as much I respect journalism, its survival mostly rests on being an effective mechanism to distribute advertising -- not on circulation or journalism awards. (The same is true for broadcast TV, which has been more successful in experimenting with new means to distribute advertising via product placements, even as viewership has declined.)

More Bad News for LA Times, Chicago Tribune -- and Other Major Newspapers

During a recent conference call with financial analysts, billionaire owner Sam Zell said that the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune will cut staff and the size of each paper to get to a 50-50 ratio of editorial copy and advertising.

The Los Angeles Times could lose 82 pages a week, leaving regular daily issues with just 56 news pages. (Sundays issues would have bigger page counts.)

Of course this means cutting reporters. How will Tribune Co. determine which reporters to layoff?

By measuring journalists’ output. According to a New York Times article, "Tribune Co. Plans Sharp Cutbacks at Papers," Randy Michaels, the Tribune Co.'s COO, said, “'When you get into the individuals, you find out that you can eliminate a fair number of people while eliminating not very much content.' He added that he understood that some reporting jobs naturally produce less output than others."

This is a new approach to the industry, but one, that according to the article, "would save on newsroom and newsprint costs, which together typically account for 25 percent to 30 percent of a newspaper’s operating costs."

Additional changes include: redesigning newspapers' formats, like the Orlando Sentinel, to feature “maps, graphics, lists, ranking and stats...(because reader surveys showed that's what readers want, and) we’re in the business of satisfying customers, and we will respond to what they say they want,” Zell wrote in a note to employees.

In other words, the readers' experience with the paper will be totally transformed.

Even though the company says decisions will be based on productivity, the result means that Tribune Co. newspapers will be unable to adequately cover their markets. We've already heard that response from reporters themselves at the Boston Globe, Associated Press, Reuters and other news outlets. That does a disservice to readers and the community.

But at least they'll get the perception of more ads in their shrunken papers -- and we all know how people's main complaint about newspapers has been they just haven't gotten enough ads.