They are dropping like flies

Ann Arbor will lose its print daily and three other Michigan papers are reducing the number of days they will publish: http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2009/03/another-daily-n.html

Got my Kindle

I'm checking it out. I started with a subscription to the New York Times site. My very first impression of the Kindle is very good, less so about the NY Times site which doesn't seema s easy to use as it should be.

After the weekend I'll remark more about both once I determine how much is operator thickheadedness and how much is platform deficency.

More furloughs

This time the parent company for the Orange County (CA) Register: http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003953811

Hearst also cuts 48 jobs in Connecticut

On the same day that it ended print publication of the Seattle P-I the Hearst Corp. announced that 48 people at its various Connecticut papers will be taking buyouts, representing almost 7 percent of the 700 employed here.

Considering that these are buyouts, rather than layoffs, I suppose that they represent the high end of the compensation scale and therefore the papers are probably saving more than 7 percent in salary costs.

Story: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hqmjbJ5V9S3U7ChySXogYL9wUrFQD96VU2U00

Another good essay on the Revolution

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.


and more ..

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable. That’s been a fine accident to have, but when that accident stops, as it is stopping before our eyes, we’re going to need lots of other ways to strengthen journalism instead.
When we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’, the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’ And what works today isn’t the same as what used to work.


The whole thing here: http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

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

Excellent must-read on the fate of newspapers and news gathering

Long, but worth a read: http://www.american.com/archive/2009/february-2009/preparing-the-obituary

Essentially, the news was turned into a commons, and everyone was invited to drop in a fishing line and hook some advertising dollars. The problem is not that an advertising model cannot support the production of news content: pre-Internet, the industry had revenues of $1000 per subscriber, 80 percent of it from advertising, and the Internet can provide a vastly improved product. The problem is that no mechanism exists to channel the ad dollars back into the news production enterprises. So, inevitably, more and more people will launch their boats onto the ocean of content, and rising resources will be devoted to competitive efforts to attach advertising to that $14 per subscriber worth of AP content.
However, the whole structure of Internet sites still relies on the newspaper industry, including the AP. Since the newspapers support the wire services, the more the content leaks out the more they are supporting their competitors’ free ride, and the more they enable the entry of still more competitors for the advertising dollars.

Fortune looks at "The End of Paper"

Interesting summary of the state of eReading

http://money.cnn.com/2009/03/03/technology/copeland_epaper.fortune/index.htm

Sometimes you have to take things personally

In this case, the effects of the downturn and the general distress of the newspaper industry. It's hard to know how much is one, and how much is the other, until the downturn becomes an uptick. But whatever the exact breakdown the consequence has been belt-tightening all around, including at my paper. All of us are taking a week off without pay. My week is this week.

It's obviously better than the alternative, which would be layoffs. But it's also obviously just first aid or damage control. Just as a tourniquet may stop the bleeding or flooding a magazine may keep a battleship from exploding, furloughs and layoffs are temporary measures that can't lead to long-term health.

What will do that is an open question. Until the economy turns around, though, it's really hard to tell how much the business model behind newspapers has been permanently changed. People will still be buying automobiles in the future, for example, and the current very low rate of purchase is unsustainable, but whether Ford or GM or Chrysler will be making them is questionable. Likewise, people will still be getting their news from somewhere, but which somewhere is an open question.

The Top 10 list newspapers don't want to be on.

Time Magazine lists the "10 most endangered newspapers."

For details on why they're on the list see:
http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1883785,00.html

The list
Philadelphia Daily News*
Minneapolis Star Tribune*
Miami Herald
Detroit News*
Boston Globe*
San Francisco Chronicle*
Chicago Sun-Times*
New York Daily News*
Fort Worth Star-Telegram*
Cleveland PLain Dealer*
* Two-newspaper market

1600 jobs to go

Details here:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ilSE0udp2avqEyU8jL65w2Qq6TXgD96R6JN80

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/