Job Cuts at New York Times

According to an article from Editor and Publisher, executive editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, sent an internal staff memo describing plans to layoff 12 current newsroom employees as well as outlining the intentions of future management position “eliminations.”

“As we move into 2008, we will be rethinking coverage priorities and how we use our space and our people, but always in ways that preserve what The Times does best. In the future, as in the past few months while these matters were under review, we have worked closely with our partners on the business side, with a single shared ambition: to seek cutbacks and reductions that are as strategically focused as possible, and do nothing to damage our core journalism.”

This announcement shows that no publication is stable enough to survive the transition from print to web completely intact.

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Murdoch wants a free WSJ.com

News Corp. chairman, Rupert Murdoch, announced his intent to drop subscription fees to the Wall Street Journal’s website, making the site rely solely on advertising revenue.

“We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having one million, having at least 10 million-15 million in every corner of the earth,” Mr. Murdoch said, referring to The Journal’s online readership.”

New York Daily News joins Yahoo Newspaper Alliance

The New York Daily News, fifth largest newspaper in the U.S., has joined the Yahoo Newspaper Alliance, which enables Yahoo’s HotJobs to power the publication’s career site. By entering into the coalition, the New York Daily News will allow Yahoo to advertise on the site.

From the article Yahoo’s Newspaper Alliance Adds Major Player:

For newspapers, the Yahoo partnership represents a comprehensive strategy for tackling the Web after years of losing circulation and classified ads to the Internet portals and free listings sites such as Craigslist. But the industry continues to suffer steep declines in readership.

The consortium has been the center of controversy since its inception last year. Many analysts believe that the growth experienced within the program thus far cannot sustain itself over a longer period of time.

But Borrell and other analysts warn that it will be hard for newspapers teaming with Yahoo to sustain high growth rates over time. “They’ve basically relinquished ownership of the help-wanted advertising franchise,” Borrell says. “HotJobs now owns it in those markets because it’s merely using the newspapers to build up the HotJobs brand.”

The New York Daily News is but one of nearly 400 newspapers that have joined the consortium.

Related:

Fifth largest newspaper in U.S. joins Yahoo

Flashback: 176 Newspapers to Form a Partnership With Yahoo

McClatchy shares drop 69% since purchase of Knight-Ridder

Tuesday was a sad day for McClatchy with shares closing at an unholy $16.73, reflecting a 69% drop from $53.24 per share since the company’s purchase of Knight-Ridder in 2006. McClatchy reported a $1.3 billion loss for the first nine months of 2007, a drop of nearly $16 per share.

Gary Pruitt, McClatchy’s chairman and chief executive officer, said “The challenging business environment, coupled with the drag on our stock price, has resulted in our taking an impairment charge to write down the value of goodwill, mastheads of certain newspapers, and other assets on the company’s balance sheet in the third quarter. However, these are non-cash accounting charges, and nothing about them changes our operations or our ability to reduce debt.

When McClatchy took on Knight-Ridder for a total of $6.4 billion, the company assumed an additional $2 billion in debt. Not only did McClatchy possibly over-pay for the acquisition, but the mortgage crisis has affected ad revenues, particularly in the states of California where some of their major holdings, like the Sacramento Bee, reside. In addition, McClatchy owns nearly 50% of the Seattle Times, which the company valued at about $102 million at the time of the Knight-Ridder purchase, however, on Monday a report listed the publication’s value at a mere $19 million, reflecting a drop of nearly 80%.

31 jobs cut by Sun-Times Media Group

After the Sun-Times Media Group released its third-quarter results, over 30 staff members were told that their jobs were being cut. Sun-Times Media plans to combine the Daily Southtown and biweekly Star publications in order to save about $3 million a year.

“The newspaper advertising market in Chicago continued to be very tough,” Chief Executive Cyrus Freidheim told the analysts. “We are simply not where we wanted to be in the third quarter.”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to lose 6% of staff

Journal Communications Inc., owner of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, announced that it will lose about 6% of its employees, which have chosen a ‘voluntary separation’ with the company.

The [voluntary] separation program includes a cash severance component and a health care benefit component. It will result in a fourth-quarter 2007 buyout charge of approximately $3 million to $3.3 million and is expected to yield annual savings of about $3.9 million to $4.3 million beginning in 2008.

The company announced the program in October of this year, hoping to cut staff in order to allow for change within the newspaper industry and the Sentinel’s place within. Though, as stated in the above article clip, the company hopes to eventually eliminate a total of 100 staff members.

As the newspaper industry continues to show decline in subscriptions and advertising revenue, buyouts, lay-offs and staff-cuts will continue to effect the journalism community as well as the publishing industry as a whole. However, with web traffic rising, publications have the opportunity to re-align with current trends and the online community.

Audit Bureau of Circulations’ numbers show big declines

Numbers for more than 700 daily newspapers were released this morning and show decline in daily circulation in all but four of the top 25 newspapers. Editor and Publisher reports that the Boston Globe was hit hard as daily circulation numbers fell 6.6 percent and Sunday numbers dropped 6.5 percent. The New York Times showed a huge decrease in Sunday circulation numbers, however, the decrease is partially due to the Times’ recent subscription price increase.

As expected, circulation — at least paid circulation — continues to decline sharply. For the past several years, publishers, particularly those at major metros, have been whittling back on circulation considered to be less useful by advertisers. Those papers fall into the category of other paid, which includes hotel, Newspapers in Education, employee, and third party copies.

[...]For the first time, ABC also released comprehensive “audience” data — print readership, online readership, unduplicated reach, and monthly unique users — for roughly 200 papers. The industry is moving toward numbers that take into consideration all their products, including newspaper Web sites, not just paid circulation.

View the ‘top 25’ list: FAS-FAX: Top 25 Daily and Sunday U.S. Newspapers

Sacramento Bee acquires editor from North Carolina

After nearly 25 years as executive editor of the News & Observer from Raleigh, North Carolina, Melanie Still now leads the Sacramento Bee. Last month, Bee editor Rick Rodriguez resigned over a dispute involving ‘differences in opinion’ of the future of the Bee.

Though changes are on the horizon for the Sacramento Bee, Still believes her new position will not effect current plans.

“That’s the atmosphere in the news industry right now. On the journalism side, it’s a time of change,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “What I want to focus on is taking the great news values that the Bee has and finding new ways to do journalism.”

HighBeam Research to launch new website, Newser.com

UPDATE October 30, 2007: Newser — an Online News Service from HighBeam Research and Michael Wolff — Debuts Today

This Tuesday, October 30, HighBeam Reseach will release Newser.com, a news website that creators Patrick Spain and Michael Wolff hope will change the current trend of content aggregation.

Newser stories run approximately 120 words in length, and feature photos licensed from the Associated Press as well as links to the original story source. Readers can also determine their mix of hard and soft stories through a “slider box,” which Spain hopes will introduce “different ways of how to perceive news.” The site, which was designed by Chicago-based Duo Consulting, also features the top stories of the day and categorizes news by topic and publication date.

So what makes Newser different from others like Google or Yahoo? The answer: Humans. Instead of using “spiders” or “crawlers” built off of algorithms to gather information from the web, an entire staff has been hired to contribute to content found on Newser.com.

“Nobody is really aggregating news in a meaningful way,” said Spain, 55, who ran and sold business-information service Hoovers.com. “Google in a robotic way [aggregates stories] from hundreds of brands and sources. But it doesn’t have any editorial zest.”

Free Speech, Chicago, Laws and Litter

Last weekend, Warner Todd Huston of the Canada Free Press reported that Chicago passed a law that includes the prohibition of free newspaper distribution. The law, which was intended to aid in the control of ‘litter’ in the Windy City, was passed by a group of 50 individuals who are now coming under fire for the repression of the First Amendment – Freedom of Speech.

Warner Todd Huston writes:

Of course, the Aldermen who voted 50 to nothing for this law are scrambling to answer critics of the ordinance. It seems fairly certain that not a one of them even read the thing before they voted, something that isn’t unusual in this city. They all claim, of course, that this ordinance would never be used to stop a community newspaper from being distributed.

But just wait for the first incumbent Alderman who decides he doesn’t like what a paper has to say about him during an election campaign! Just wait for the first time King Daley doesn’t like what some small paper has to say about his trucking schemes or other alleged criminal enterprises. Watch how quickly a newspaper becomes “litter” then.