Newspaper Layoffs: The Daily Planet is Melting

Are our Bay Area daily newspapers grinding to a halt the same way that arctic glaciers are melting just out of our sight?

I had breakfast with a friend who reports for the San Jose Mercury News and he said that they are bracing for a 25% reduction in their 250 person news team. Last October they negotiated a temporary reprieve from any layoffs and as of July the pink slips can start tumbling off the printing press. Time flies when you're running around investigating and writing stories to inform the public.

Three weeks ago at the San Francisco Chronicle, they announced a similar 25% reduction that has already begun. Both papers have closed down their Peninsula Bureaus (tho the Chronicle did it a few years ago). John Curley, a Chronicle editor who spent 25 years there and is a sophisticated Web 2.0 guy, was one of the ones who was pushed out. You'd think they'd be promoting the folks who can blaze the path for the paper to prosper with web services.

It's unclear whether any execs at these papers have a plan other than the tried and true corporate cost cutting scenario of recent decades. (I've never understood how mass layoffs actually work in any industry assuming that most employees were working hard at something the company produces to stay competitive.) At a newspaper, will it translate into something like The Weekly Reader, that we got in grade school? Will the Merc and Chron end up merging somewhere down the line into a regional McNewspaper? Who's going to want to major in journalism anymore, let alone practice it? What am I going to put under my cereal bowl that simultaneously keeps me informed, entertained, and out of trouble for making a mess on the table?

John McManus seems to have an inside track on these events in his blog at Grade the News.

photo credit: dickie at flickr.com http://www.flickr.com/photos/simplethingsuask/42917792/

A Future for Newspapers?

I guess I won't be applying to any newspapers for work even though I have a Masters degree in Broadcast Journalism and am sort of in the job-seeking market. At a forum put on by the Stanford University Department of Communication, Bill Keller, Executive Editor of the New York Times, Gary Pruit, CEO of The McClatchy (Newspaper) Co., and Harry Chandler, former co-owner of the LA Times all agreed that there was no roadmap for the hemorrhaging newspaper industry - victims of the internet and general cultural shift away from reading news - and times would get bleaker before they get brighter. Papers get 85% - 90% of their income from ads and Craigslist alone has siphened off a huge amount of that revenue stream.

Chandler, whose family sold the LA Times said there were four likely options for newspapers:
1) A dramatic amount of layoffs and buyouts
2) Diversification (for example the Washington Post bought the Kaplan SAT-Test company)
3) Leverage the brand (big newspapers have credibility that should be valuable to some other business ventures)
4) Ownership will shift toward the pro sports model where many owners do it for the ego boost etc. rather than profits

One telling statistic (relative to cutbacks) was given by Keller, who said that when the war in Iraq was just underway and Saddam was ousted there were 1,000 reporters there. Now there are 45.

Pruitt, of McClatchy, was most optimistic saying that papers have been through the same sort of cataclysmic paradigm shifts before, when radio and then TV came "online." He's confident that newspapers will find new life on the web, albeit not as profitable as the last half of the 20th century.

Writeup in the Stanford Daily

Two months ago, I organized an evening lecture/conversation with former Tech Columnist turned Citizen Journalism activist, Dan Gillmor. He was asked a similar question about the future for newspapers and was similarly vague about the immediate future before new paradigms emerge. Here's a video clip with his full response: