Courtesy of Tech Crunch:
1
Acording to the article:
Annual ad sales for American newspapers came in at a grand total of nearly $49.5 billion in 2005 and dropped to about $37.8 billion in 2008. If the decline rate keeps accelerating the way these first quarter results suggest, we could be looking at somewhere in between $26 billion and $30 billion in total ad sales revenue for this year.
But the author fears:
…newspapers haven’t even seen the bottom of the barrel yet.
According to editorsweblog.org, “The Newspaper Association of America has cut almost half of its staff and is to cease publication of the print edition of its magazine Presstime, reported Editor & Publisher. President and CEO John Sturm blamed the cuts on “industry economics” and wrote in a memo to staff that the steps were “to ensure we remain an affordable value to our members.” The Association is hoping to further reduce the cost of membership.”
The loss of Editor & Publisher, one of the core industry news journals and America’s oldest publication covering the news industry, is another in a long line of hard blows to the news industry. Luckily, the publication will continue in web-form, showing that the NAA hasn’t given up on the newspaper industry quite yet - especially in a time where news about the newspaper industry is so needed.
…so with the goal of cost savings set at around $20M, they would still be $65M in the red annually. Why would you WANT to keep the doors open if this was your business?
From The New York Observer:
“Times Co. threatens to shut Globe, seeks $20m in cuts from unions” read the banner headline in The Globe on Saturday morning.
The Globe—and later, The Times, in its own story—reported that at a Thursday meeting, Times Company executives said the union would have to find $20 million in cost savings at The Globe or the newspaper would face closure.
The news had come trickling into the Globe newsroom on the previous afternoon.
“At lunch, I was with an executive who had some knowledge, and there was an email sent to members of my union, which said everyone was going to keep what happened on Thursday confidential,” said Alex Beam, a columnist for The Globe.
Ninety minutes later, those efforts had demonstrably failed.
The article goes on to read:
Just how much is The Globe losing The Times? Executives told union leaders that the paper lost $50 million last year, and would lose $85 million this year.
But why did the Times Company threaten The Globe with a shutdown? It’s something we’ve seen a bit of recently: The Newhouses did it with The Star-Ledger in Newark; the Hearst corporation with the San Francisco Chronicle.
For a company as big as this, $20 million doesn’t seem like a make-or-break sort of cut, especially when the paper is supposedly losing so much more.
And, as Mr. Keller said, Boston is an elite market. The New England Media Group, with The Globe representing the biggest breadwinner, brought in $523 million in revenue last year—not exactly chump change. Can an organization with $523 million in revenue really be on its last limbs over $20 million?
Read the article here: http://www.observer.com/2009/media/times-beacon-hill-anyone
From Breitbart.com:
“We are mad as hell, and we are not going to take it any more,” said the chairman of the Associated Press, a cooperative of over 1,400 US newspapers, borrowing a line from the anchorman character in the 1976 movie “Network.”
“We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories,” Dean Singleton said at a meeting this week of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) in San Diego, California.
Read the article here: http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.bbd53bd17a5713678ea8bea533d92910.2a01&show_article=1
From the GenealogyBlog.com:
The following papers have been posted at NewspaperARCHIVE in the last 6 days. Note that I missed one day in there, so if you see some date skips of a day or two with some papers, that’s most likely the reason.
Papers for Alabama (1), Alaska (1) , Arizona (1), Arkansas (2), California (3), Connecticut (1), Illinois (1), Indiana (4), Iowa 15), Kansas (2), Louisiana (1), Maryland (1), Massachusetts (1), Missouri (3), Montana (2), New Mexico (5), New York (1), Ohio (1), South Dakota (1), Texas (7), Utah (4), Virginia (1), and Wisconsin (1) have been posted - in full digital format. (The numbers following the state names refer to the number of Newspaper Titles digitized. Iowa was the big winner in sheer numbers of titles this week.)
Please visit the GenealogyBlog at: http://www.genealogyblog.com/?p=3385
He has taken the time to share with his readers the new papers we have added to NewspaperARCHIVE in the last 6 days. He has listed them by state and title in his post. Hopefully he continues to share this information ….NewspaperARCHIVE.com adds over 500K pages to the archive each week.
From Reuters.com:
The Associated Press unveiled rate cuts on Monday to help member newspapers reeling from declining advertising revenue and said that it would sue websites that used its members’ articles without permission.
The changes the AP announced at its annual meeting in San Diego include a new $35 million in rate assessment reductions for 2010, on top of $30 million it had already instituted for 2009.
The article can be found here:http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE5355GE20090406?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews&rpc=22&sp=true
More on the recent news that the New York Times Company has suggested that they may close the Boston Globe unless certain “demands” are met. From Boston.com:
The New York Times Co. has threatened to shut the Boston Globe unless the newspaper’s unions swiftly agree to $20 million in concessions, union leaders said.
The article goes on to say:
Earlier this week, the Globe newsroom completed cutting the equivalent of 50 full-time jobs. But the deteriorating economy has made the paper’s financial outlook much worse. Management told union leaders Thursday that the Globe will lose $85 million in 2009, unless serious cutbacks are made, according to a Globe employee briefed on the discussions. Last year the paper lost an estimated $50 million, the employee said.
The Times Co. is seeking concessions from the union because the New York company, which is also suffering from the recession, can no longer subsidize the Globe’s losses, said the Globe employee who requested anonymity because the person is not authorized to speak publicly. The Times Co. posted a net loss of $57.8 million in 2008.
Read the article from Boston.com here:http://www.boston.com/business/ticker/2009/04/times_co_threat.html
From the Boston Herald:
“They’re nickel-and-diming people,” said a Globe union official who spoke on condition of anonymity, adding that top executives at The New York Times Co., which owns the Globe, “have ruined” the sagging broadsheet.
On Thursday, Times executives told representatives from the Boston paper’s 13 unions that they must trim $20 million from their budgets by May 1 or the Times would shut the paper down.
The move came days after the Globe reduced its newsroom work force by about 70 employees, full and part time, through a mix of voluntary buyouts and layoffs.
Read the whole article here: http://www.bostonherald.com/business/media/view/2009_04_05_Details_of_threat_to_close_Globe_emerge:_Storm_over_Morrissey_Boulevard/srvc=home&position=2
File this under “what was he thinking”:
According to the New York Post today, the New York Times editor equated saving his newspaper to a cause just as important as saving Darfur.
Huh?
From the article:
The bombastic broadsheet editor went on to equate the keep-the-Times-alive movement to the cause of starving African refugees, saying, “Saving the New York Times now ranks with saving Darfur as a high-minded cause.”
Keller said he had little use for Web sites like Google and Drudge Report: “If you’re inclined to trust Google as your source for news — Google yourself.”
Keller’s comments come as the Times sat down with the Newspaper Guild Wednesday in their first serious bargaining session to figure out how to extract $4.5 million in savings from the newspaper company’s unionized workforce.
For some reason I was reminded of Lennon saying that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now”. It is completely unrelated, but an unbelievable statement at the time (it was also the first event leading to the Fab 4 leaving the stage for good). This statement is as likely to be dissected and debated as Mr. Lennon’s comment in 1966.
Personally I find it appalling. The conflict in the Darfur region (in western Sudan) is a true human tragedy. By some accounts, the casualties are now over 1/2 million with nearly 5X that many displaced. Countless civilians, have been tortured, raped, and/or maimed. It is a human rights disaster spanning decades….
Now explain to me again how the BUSINESS plight of a dying newspaper in New York City can even be mentioned in the same breath as the atrocities happening right now in Darfur!?!
It is frustrating….
Was it taken out of context? Read the article and decide for yourself: http://www.nypost.com/seven/04032009/business/cash_starved_times_compared_to_darfur_162633.htm
Yet another victim of the troubled economy, the Ohio State Historical Society announced a significant restructuring of their organization that will start July 1st.
The press release from the OHS begins:
Facing a $2 million budget deficit resulting from the softening Ohio economy, decreased state funding and increasing inflationary expenses, the OHS Board of Trustees has approved a balanced budget of $20.9 million to support the Society’s activities in the 2009 fiscal year. These include managing a network of 59 historic sites and museums and preserving historic resources for Ohio. The approved budget represents a 3-percent decrease from 2008. The Society also will expend $4.4 million in state capital funds for various projects around Ohio.
The press release goes on to say:
As a part of the restructuring 47 full and part-time positions will be eliminated, including 21 coming from unfilled job vacancies. Of the 26 employees affected by job elimination, 18 worked at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus and the remainder worked at other OHS sites. In addition, 49 employees were notified of changes in their hours. The annualized savings of these position eliminations after restructuring is $1.8 million.
A bit more information can be found at the blog of Alex Lloyd, found at http://brookswoodsqj.livejournal.com/5479.html , and it speaks of the impact to the Society ’s Archives/Library operations (edited for readability):
The Ohio Historical Society will suspend its in-house paper preservation operations …
And
While the OH Historical Society will keep its microfilm plan, the in-house microfilm operations will be (ceasing operations…). The Society is finalizing an understanding with (the) OCLC Saving Service Centers to render preservation-quality microfilming through a partnership with OCLC, a known leader in library and (preservation) services. By partnering with the OCLC, the Society will be able to furnish high-quality microfilming. (In addition), the Society will be able to (gain) efficiencies in pricing by functioning as a clearinghouse for microfilm activities in the province.
Please visit the OHS site to read the full release: http://www.ohiohistory.org/about/pr/041108a.html
From the Wall Street Journal:
USA Today President and Publisher Craig Moon announced his sudden retirement Tuesday, leaving the country’s largest newspaper with its top two jobs unfilled during perhaps the most difficult stretch in its 27-year history. He also said the newspaper has lost about 100,000 subscribers just from the slowdown in travel.
Mr. Moon said in an interview that the slowdown has resulted in a reduction of more than 7% in the number of copies of USA Today distributed through partnerships with hotel chains such as Marriott, which account for more than half of its circulation.
Read the article here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123854670808076289.html#mod=rss_media_marketing
April 1st brings with it a brand new quarter….and plenty of tongue in cheek humor.
From CNN.com:
The Guardian in London ran a story Wednesday announcing that, after 188 years as a print publication, it will become the first newspaper to deliver news exclusively via Twitter.
The joke continues in that they will also be retooling their entire archive into the new Twitter format (CNN.com) :
For example, Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 flight from New York to Paris, France, was condensed to: “OMG first successful transatlantic air flight wow, pretty cool! Boring day otherwise … sigh.”
Here is the whole thing: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/01/guardian-twitter-media-technology
Our friends at Newsbank have recently launched a new web-based product. They are starting with 9 major titles including The Times-Picayune of New Orleans and the Dallas Morning News. They plan on expanding on this offering in the near future.
From Editor & Publisher:
Readex of Naples, Fla., a division of NewsBank, has launched American Newspaper Archives — an expanding online collection that will offer access to major U.S. newspapers.
“The archives will provide users with fully searchable digital editions of historically significant and regionally diverse publications from the 19th century through the 1990s,” Readex states in a release.
From CBS2, in Chicago:
The Sun-Times Media Group, owner of the Chicago Sun-Times and numerous suburban newspapers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Friday morning, just a few months after rival newspaper titan Tribune Company did the same thing.
In a letter to the readers by the Chairman of the Board (and Interim Chief Executive Officer) Jeremy L. Halbreic:
Please be assured that this action does NOT mean the Company or our newspapers or online sites are going out of business. We will continue to publish and operate our newspapers and corresponding online sites, including the Chicago Sun-Times, the SouthtownStar, Beacon News (Aurora), Courier-News (Elgin), Herald News (Joliet), Lake County News-SunNaperville Sun, and Post-Tribune (Merrillville, Ind.); our weeklies published by Pioneer Press and Fox Valley Publications; our free shoppers and content on corresponding online sites, including YourSeason.com and Rogerebert.com. (Waukegan),
In a separate letter to Sun-Times employees that was published on the Tribune’s Web site, Halbreich wrote:
…despite steps to reduce costs and strengthen our organization, the current operating realities as well as certain legacy issues led us to today’s decision. Importantly, Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection provides us the best opportunity to resolve some of our legacy financial issues, stabilize operations, and further reduce costs. At the same time, we are pursuing a process to explore strategic options such as the sale of assets or potential investment in the Company. We firmly believe that this decision offers us the best path forward to ensure that our publications can continue to serve their communities and the millions of readers and advertisers in the Chicago area and Northwest Indiana who rely on us each and every day.
A truly innovative new approach to delivering the news….. from the former staff of The Rock Mountain News!
Many longtime Rocky Mountain News writers and columnists have already joined the cause, including business writer David Milstead; sports reporters Sam Adams, Aaron Lopez and Chris Tomasson; reporters Kevin Flynn, Tillie Fong and Bill Scanlon; columnists and bloggers Gary Massaro and Mark Wolf; and arts writers Lisa Bornstein, Mark Brown, Mary Chandler and Marc Shulgold. More Rocky favorites will be added before the May 4 launch.
The site is still in BETA, but if they have 50K subscribers by April 23rd, they plan on launching the full blown site May 4th.
When we reach 50,000 subscribers and the full
INDenverTimes.com launches May 4, only subscribers will have access to these features:
- Perspective and insight pieces from our writers.
- Daily live chat on the INsider Channel.
- Comments and commentary on all our stories.
- Your news, your way, including daily e-mails, alerts, a customizable home page, access to future applications and tools, plus many more INsider functions.
- Need more reasons? Read our FAQ here.
This new “web2.0″ approach is very freash, and I like the spirit of it. Many news outlets (and a certain newspaper archive) would be wise to take a few hints from their social network integration and approach to community building.
Please visit their site here: http://www.indenvertimes.com/
Poynter.org recently posted an essay by John Walter (one of the founders of USA Today and the editor of the Journal-Constitution). Mr. Walter wife discovered this essay on his computer after his unfortunate passing last year.
Here is an excerpt from his essay:
So newspapers are going to go out of business. Journalism will survive, no doubt, but we’ll just have to figure out the economics of it as we go along. Some of it will be painful, and some of the business people who are buying the big newspaper companies these days will undoubtedly help figure out the way.
But big metro newspapers themselves? They are out of here. I want to say that there are three people in the world responsible for their demise, and — because I have always loved newspapers, even when they weren’t on my porch or in my driveway — I want to say I’m mad at them about it. And, therefore, I want to record for posterity who they are, and why we should be mad at them.
I don’t necessarily share Mr. Walter’s views on this subject (however, he did get me thinking, and it makes for a better argument than the same rhetoric the “blame Google” crowd has been giving us). I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it makes for a very interesting opinion piece. The essay is a bit on the lengthy side, but well worth the read: http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=160817
On the National Post’s website today, you can find a very interesting article about the loss of on-line access to the archive of the Ottawa-based Paper Of Record. Paper Of Record (the web brand of parent company Cold North Wind) sold its digital archive of newspapers to Google two years ago. The agreement was to transition the historical content (part of a paid service) to a Google property, and make it free.
Recently that content has disappeared from the web altogether….a situation that is frustrating a great number of researchers.
From the National Post:
Google has been “organizing the world’s information” for more than a decade, but a group of historians has accused the search engine giant of making a big mess in its little corner of the globe.
In the middle of the dispute is a tiny Ottawa-based Internet venture that sold its archive of digitized historical newspapers to Google two years ago.
The content of PaperOfRecord.comhas recently become unavailable on the Web, as Google seeks to transfer it to its own properties, but the move has stymied the researchers who use it. Karolyn Smardz Frost, a professor at York University has recommended the site for years to students of her African-Canadian History class because its holdings included the anti-slavery newspaper the Voice of the Fugitive, which was published in Canada before the American Civil War. She herself used POR extensively to research her 2007 book I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land, which earned her a Governor General’s Award for non-fiction in the same year.
Read the article in it’s entirety here: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=1443151&p=1
Please take time to listen to the latest podcast from The Genealogy Guys… NewspaperARCHIVE.com is discussed a few minutes in to the broadcast… good stuff about everything we have going on!
They even mention NewspaperARCHIVE.com’s very own Steve Carr (author of the Daily Perspective). There is also talk about Facebook Connect integration with NewspaperARCHIVE.com (plenty of hints on things to come …soon!)
This week’s news includes: Ancestry.com has added new content; MyHeritage.com has added more than 150 new databases in the last week of February; NewspaperARCHIVE continues to add new digitized and indexed newspaper content, and has added blogs, social networking interfaces, and Twitter; the Library of Michigan has just added Michigan death certificates spanning 1897 to 1920 at Seeking Michigan at http://www.seekingmichigan.org; Dick Eastman welcomes new English writer and genetic genealogy expert Chris Pomery to Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter (http://blog.eogn.com); Steve Danko has just returned from the Family Tree DNA 5th International Conference on Genetic Genealogy for Project Administrators, and he has a great report at his blog at http://stephendanko.com; and Maureen A. Taylor, the leading expert on evaluating and dating photographs, author, and lecturer, has an excellent blog on the subject at http://photodetective.blogspot.com.
This week’s email includes: Henry asked about digital camera reviews, and George responded that he had written an article for the 22 February issue of Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter on that subject; Steve shouts out some positive kudos for the new RootsMagic Version 4 beta edition of its great genealogical database software package; and Lisa asks for tactful ways to tell someone that they probably have wrong information.
View article…http://genealogyguys.com/index.php?post_id=444842
I really like their show. It is overflowing with good stuff. NewspaperARCHIVE.com may have to explore sponsorship opportunities with them.
Thanks to Chris Murders at NewspaperARCHIVE.com for sharing this with me:
Found at: Forbes (courtesy of the AP):
The publishers of the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News offered free copies of their newly slimmed-down editions on newsstands Monday, looking to jump-start a bold experiment in the economics of the U.S. newspaper industry in which both papers will be delivered to subscribers only three days a week.
Read the whole article at: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/03/30/ap6228420.html
In the last 10 years free newspapers have been introduced in almost every European country and in several markets in the United States, Canada, South America, Australia, Asia and Africa. These newspapers are read by at least 80 million people each day.
Several articles from the Newspaper Innovation blog have recently piqued my curiosity, and now I find myself returning to Dr. Piet Bakker’s site everyday. (http://www.newspaperinnovation.com/)
The most recent article focused on the incredibly successful free publication, the Metro in Canada:
From the article:
Free daily Metro is the second-best read newspaper in Canada with 1,143,800 daily readers (in 6 markets), just after the Toronto Star with 1,145,800 readers in 19 markets. The Globe and Mail is third with 902,800 readers, while free daily 24 hours is fourth with 798,900 readers in 5 markets.
The site goes on to say that in all other major markets, however, the free papers are third, fourth or fifth in the market.
Another Canadian free newspaper also has a very impressive circulation in Canada (according to this article):
Total circulation of 24 hours/heures (Sun Media) is 653,000 copies in six markets.
In Toronto the paper distributes 265,000 copies, in Montreal 141,000; in Vancouver 128,000; in Calgary 46,000; and in both Ottawa and Edmonton 36,000 copies.
But this is not just a Canadian success story, and it is not all that recent of a phenomenon. It is a model used in the US and abroad. According to the site, there are 44M copies of free newspapers distributed daily, in over 56 countries. In some countries, more free than paid newspapers are distributed daily. In fact, I understand the most read paper in all of Switzerland is a free newspaper. It is only one example of the many successes of this model. The Metro UK for instance is the “most profitable free newspaper in the world” according to this post:
Monday 16 March Metro UK, “the most profitable free newspaper in the world” (2008 Annual Report), will celebrate its 10th anniversary. Metro UK, owned by DMGT’s Associated Newspapers division (The Daily Mail), is also by far the biggest free daily published in one country (the total of the joined Metro International editions is higher).
Speaking of the UK, the Newspaper Innovation blog references a recent article from the InPublishing website that recently explored “The UK free paper battle field”:
The article “The UK free paper battlefield” covers the history of the several free dailies that has been published in the UK since 1999 (by Associated Newspapers, Metro International, GMG and others), how the London battlefield developed and why the war isn’t over yet.
But alas, not even the free dailies are immune to the current ills that face the newspaper industry as a whole. One could easily argue that they have an even more difficult challenge. This article (once again from the Newspaper Innovation blog) speaks of a free paper in Italy set to close it’s doors:
Free Italian afternoon daily 24 Minuti, published by business paper Il Sole 24 Ore, will close down April 1. Giancarlo Cerutti, chairman of the Il Sole 24 Ore group said that “the current market conditions of the free press do not permit us an alternative”. (Asca)
And this article that talks about the death of a free Swiss paper:
Swiss free business paper CASH (Ringier) will print its last edition on 23 March according to Persoenlich. The online version will continue (see also previous post).
For a facinating look at the history of free newspapers, please visit the “About Free Dailes” section of the Newspaper Inovation blog. It can be found here: http://www.newspaperinnovation.com/index.php/about-free-dailies/
The question remains, however: What are the archival plans for these extremely valuable and relavent titles?
Cera Hartig from NewspaperARCHIVE.com sent me a link this AM, and I felt it is a site certainly worth sharing:
VERY interesting website to use.
Just select the global region map you want, click on a city almost ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD… and the current day’s local newspaper front page appears. The page may be made larger to enable easier reading.
http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flash/
Hope you can use & enjoy this.
I have spent time on this site before, and I was really impressed (not only with the content, but the site itself is very well designed). I must warn you….it is easy to lose track of time exploring this site. Enjoy!
The Hope Chest: Bad News from the Past is a blog of old newspaper clippings, mostly from the 30s.
Great examples of the bizarre and a healthy dose of true crime. Check it out:
http://mrparallel.wordpress.com/
The author of The Hope Chest blog is currently researching microfilmed tabloid newspapers of the 1930s. He notes on his site:
My progress is greatly impeded by my inability to scroll past unrelated “human interest” stories, most of them tiny nightmares like something out of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (which you should read immediately if you haven’t already). Anyway, I’ve started this blog as a place to memorialize these spectral and transient tragedies.
I found the following article at B&C (Broadcasting and Cable) website:
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Pelosi met with representatives of the paper last week after hearing that they might have to close down or sell it. She followed that up with a letter to the Justice Department asking it to consider allowing Bay Area news papers more freedom to merge to remain in business.
In the letter, Pelosi tells Attorney General Eric Holder she is sure that in addressing concerns that any proposed mergers or “other arrangements” in San Francisco, it will “take into appropriate count, as relevant, not only the number of daily and weekly newspapers in the Bay Area, but also the other sources of news and advertising outlets available in the electronic and digital age,” saying that would reflect “market realities.”
Read the entire article here: http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/190157-Pelosi_Asks_Justice_To_Take_Broader_View_Of_Competitive_Landscape.php?rssid=20103
More information about Gannett’s invitation for potential buyers to visit the Tucson Citizen can be found on their site:
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/local/113084.php
From AZcentral.com:
Gannett Co. Inc. has invited potential buyers for the Tucson Citizen to visit the newspaper and interview employees next week, the Citizen reported on its Web site Friday.
McLean, Va.-based Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper publisher, had announced in January that it would close the Citizen by March 21 if it didn’t find a buyer for certain assets. The company later extended that because of continuing negotiations with two interested buyers.
So far, it appears as if the two most likely suitors are Mike Hamila, owner of UNIsystems Mainframe Systems LLC and David Ganezer, publisher of the Santa Monica Observer. According to the article at AZcentral.com:
Both declined to comment Friday, citing nondisclosure agreements they signed with Gannett, the Citizen reported.
The article goes on to say:
Gannett spokeswoman Tara Connell told the Citizen and The Associated Press on Friday that the paper remained on day-to-day status. She declined to identify the potential buyers when asked by the AP.
Gannett announced Jan. 16 it was selling “assets” of the Citizen, which it defined as the Internet domain, the archives and lists of advertisers and subscribers.
Read the entire story here: http://www.azcentral.com/business/articles/2009/03/27/20090327biz-TucsonCitizen0327.html
