More rounds of pay cuts

Gatehouse media, which included my former newspapers The (Brockton, Mass.) Enterprise and The (Fall River, Mass.) Herald News is planning pay cuts that amount to 7.75 percent.

http://www.boston.com/business/ticker/2009/05/gatehouse_plans.html

Meanwhile, 10 percent pay cuts are coming to Portland, Maine newspaper owned by the Seattle Times.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009277672_apmenewspapersale1stldwritethru.html

Pay cuts of this magnitude will have to start driving talent out of the newspaper business, in my opinion. If content suffers, newspaper brands will lose their value as well. If a newspaper's brand doesn't signify that it's news content quality is superior to some start-up Web-based news site then it cannot compete.

Bye, bye, P-I

No more print for the Seattle P-I. It will go online only as of Wednesday.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D96V8GFG0&show_article=1

P-I's fate to be announced next week

Or so MSNBC is reporting, although no details on which day next week.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29621015/

Seattle Times looks at the P-I's move online and precedents for online-only papers

Link is here, but the bottom line is that the Post-Intelligencer will be trying to fly solo as an online paper, where most of the other online-only papers still have a connection to some print publication.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008823971_onlinepapers07.html

An offer they can't refuse?

Seattle P-I staffers being offered lower-paying positions at online-only edition:
http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=67955853853&h=3wxz-&u=JOwXm

Hearst shows no interest in Seattle

P-I owner Hearst is not only putting the P-I up for sale with a short deadline, it's also NOT making a $1 million annual payment that gives it first refusal rights to the Seattle Times, so it seems that they don't have any plans to merge the two.

A local group trying to put together a deal for the P-I demanded to know if Hearst made the payment. I presume they needed to make sure the way was clear in order to line up financing.

http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/stories/2009/02/02/daily21.html

Can someone come up with the cash needed to buy the P-I

It's not looking too promising.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2009/02/02/daily21.html

With just six weeks left to do a deal, there's little indication anyone with the deep pockets needed is interested in stepping forward.

Seattle P-I unlikely to find a buyer

Seattle is one of those two-newspaper towns where the second paper survived for another generation on the strength of a Joint Operating Agreement that let the weaker paper (the P-I) move all its business ops over to the Seattle Times while retaining a separate newsroom.

These JOAs have always been controversial, but they managed to work well enough where they were tried to keep two newspaper voices in some cities where there would have only been one otherwise.

However, that was then, and this is now and with the survival of newspapers at stake even in one-paper cities, there's little justification for keeping the JOAs going and I would expect that all the current JOAs will come to an end fairly soon.

For the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the chances of finding a buyer seem grim. Owner Hearst is giving just 60 days to close the deal, which isn't a lot of time under the best of circumstances.

Buying a daily newspaper in the current market is "like buying an anchor that's already been thrown overboard," Wayne State University journalism director Ben Burns told The Denver Post last month. Quoted from a story in the Seattle Times.

A buyer did step up for the two Connecticut papers that went on the block this month (The Bristol Press and New Britain Herald) but those were smaller papers that did not have competition. The P-I is a bigger paper so more money would be needed and any buyer would be faced with trying to turn a profit in the face of competing with the Seattle Times AND in a market that's tough for newspapers in general.

I just don't see it.

Hearst conforms P-I is for sale -- within 60 days!

Hearst confirms on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer site that the paper is for sale -- and that a buyer has to be found within 60 days or the paper will close!

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/395463_newspapersale10.html

Seattle paper joins the endangered list

Heart Corp. is reportedly considering putting the Seattle Post-Intelligencer up for sale:

http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2009/01/report_seattle_newspaper_may_b.html

While a sale doesn't necessarily imply a newspaper is in trouble, I think it's safe to assume that in today's environment it probably is a sign of distress.

Most chain newspapers are burdened with excessive levels of debt from the speculative buying spree of the past decade or so. When the historians look back on that era they may very well conclude that the best chance the industry had to survive was squandered back then when still-profitable newspapers spent money on acquisitions instead of investing in technologies and marketing strategies that would enable them to survive the Internet age.

Whether of not the Seattle paper can find a buyer that can make it work will depend on the financial details and how much debt any new owner has to service. Unless the current owners are willing to take a short-term loss in order to staunch long-term losses from continued ownership it may be hard to make a deal that keeps the paper alive over the long term.