"What's killing the newspaper business — with thousands of jobs lost and even the Washington Post Co.'s reporting its first loss in 37 years — is its inability to reach people like me." — Fast Company videoblogger Robert Scoble, in a column some Fast Company editor wrote for him, in which Scoble goes on to relate all of the ways he obsessively consumes newspaper articles online.
The only thing more foolish than joining a startup right now is staying at a print magazine. Portfolio's San Francisco-based deputy editor, Blaise Zerega, has left the Condé Nast business magazine. He's now the president and COO of Fora.tv, an online-video startup which collects clips of those boring public-affairs speeches we all dread attending, but go for the mingling and cocktails that follow. Not clear how Fora.tv will reproduce mingling and cocktails online. One other thing notable about Fora.tv: Its address, 1550 Bryant Street. That's the same building where Zerega and I worked at the old Red Herring, back when it was a respectable chronicler of the technology business.
Most bloggers seem to be mentally competing with the newspaper media model of The New York Times. Were they to visit the average newspaper office, they'd quickly realize what they really want: A glamorous magazine job. That seems to be Arianna Huffington's thinking, too. Gawker writer Ryan Tate has a long, delicious post about Huffington's workplace quirks. But his kicker applies to any blogging biz:
Adrian Holovaty is going to save journalism, darn it, if the industry likes it or not. And he may soon be doing it at Google. The search engine has long suffered from a tin ear in its relations with writers and editors — the people who create the content it indexes. Holovaty gained fame for linking up Google Maps with local crime statistics to create chicagocrime.org, one of the first mapping mashups. And he gained cred in the journalism world by melding programming and reportage at the Washington Post. Most recently, he's been pursuing the same goal at his own local-news startup, EveryBlock, which he funded by winning a contest held by the Knight Foundation. And now Google wants to buy Holovaty's startup, we hear. Holovaty says that he's had no conversations with Google, but did have lunch with a friend at Google's campus last week, which he stresses was "a social matter." The effort to buy his venture — there's no "deal," Holovaty tells us — has hit some kind of unusual hitch. It's not clear what the holdup is.Google's such a natural home for Holovaty, it's hard not to see the deal going through. Besides his journalism work, Holovaty's also the creator of Django, a set of tools for coding in Python, a programming language that's strongly preferred at the Googleplex. (Guido Van Rossum, the creator of Python, already works at Google.) If Holovaty does land at Google, expect him to transform Google News into a site that's more of a database of information than a news archive. He's long been critical of the newspaper industry's focus on stories, rather than information. A police-blotter news report, for example, is not as useful as a website which displays crimes on a map by type and date. If Holovaty's going to save journalism, he may have to do it at a search engine that many believe is killing the newspaper business. They can't say he didn't warn them.
Even after last year's cutbacks, our local rag, the San Francisco Chronicle, has some 300 editorial employees and managers. You'd never know it from reading the newspaper, which seems mostly filled with wire copy these days. Online, too, evidence of the Chronicle's bench strength is scant. Consider this note sent to subscribers to the Chronicle's "Top o' the Bay" newsletter:
New York Times music reporter Jeff Leeds, who had reported on stories such as Apple's behind-the-scenes fight with Universal last year, was given the newspaper's version of a layoff — a "buyout" — earlier this year. Leeds is now editor-in-chief of Buzznet, the music community site that also bought Idolator from Valleywag publisher Gawker Media. What we'll find out in the next few weeks: Can Leeds get the same kind of well-placed sources to talk to him now that he doesn't have the Times backing him up? Here's the full press release:
Philip Anschutz's reimagined Examiner newspapers are like Melissa Gira Grant's escort friends: The status-conscious feign ignorance and contempt, then pick one up when no one's looking. Anschutz is a billionaire Republican and a devout Christian, but up until now he's proven more interested in making money in a post-Craigslist local ad market than in trying to save San Francisco from pot-smoking gay abortionists. That's why today's cover, which endorses the GOP's John McCain and Sarah Palin ticket the day after McCain's "huh-what?" suspension of his campaign, seems to be a classic case of election emotions spun out of control. It's like Hollywood celebs who vow to leave the country — except with consequences.Slate media critic Jack Shafer, who used to edit the SF Weekly, has obsessed over the Examiner's "mash-up of short local stories by staffers, brief wire pieces, and abridged articles from the New York Times and other newspapers" into a daily 20-minute read for an Internet-fed world. "Tabloid format. Not tabloid journalism" the Ex claimed in one of its ads. I usually wait until partygoers have a few drinks before conducting an ad hoc poll: Invariably, more middle-class technorati confess to reading the Examiner than the San Francisco Chronicle or San Jose Mercury News. Not because of the glossy online edition, or the built-in Digg and Fark buttons on every story, they say, but because the lightweight, free newspaper is easier to pick up and hard to put down. The Examiner's politics have pushed nothing near a far-right agenda. Instead of a David Brooks or Michael Savage on the opinion page, we get right-of-center everyman Ken Garcia, rescued from the soft-sinking Chronicle. He's kind of hard on Gavin Newsom, but nowhere near Bush-team material. After all this careful seduction of local readers, today's front-page endorsements in both the San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Examiner seem clumsy and pointless. Is anyone going to change their vote because of the paper? Endorsing candidates on the front page is a relic of the time when newspapers were the dominant voice on the street. It's a throwback to The Examiner's original owner, William Randolph Hearst. I expected that by now, the editorial and marketing minds who've convinced me to openly read The Examiner in front of the New York Times-toting snobs at Whole Foods would come up with something smarter than plastering their partisan politics across my front page. And yes, I'd feel nearly as stupid carrying around a front-page endorsement of Obama.
Want to know why newspapers are dying? Because they've been running boring cover stories about that confusing economic meltdown on Wall Street instead of what Americans really care about — stuff like wizards, cupcakes and sex toys. Bristol Palin headlines can stay above the fold, though. Online searchers love them some pregnant teenagers with high school-dropout baby daddies. [Mother Jones]
CBS CEO Les Moonves pontificated at the Mixx conference in New York today, saying that he loves the Internet, really. Departing from the party line of other networks, Moonves pointed out "The Internet is not cannabalistic; it is only additive," presumably referring to audience attention share between television and the Web. So how's CBS going to capitalize? The plan is go after what's left of the newspaper industries advertising with CNet and local affiliates. [MediaWeek] (Photo from Andrew Mager)
TimesPeople is a new feature on the Times' website that lets logged-in members "share articles, videos, slideshows, blog posts, reader comments, and ratings and reviews of movies, restaurants and hotels." It's been in beta as a Firefox plugin for months, but will go live as a built-in website service and a Facebook app Tuesday morning. Having not tested the real thing yet, I have no witty insights to add.
According to Wall Street estimates, the entire American newspaper business is worth $20 billion and sinking fast — and that includes the non-newspaper business like test prep, television and radio holdings. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's cofounders, are worth nearly $16 billion each according to Forbes (though that number has been shrinking of late as well). No wonder fishwrap publishers hate Google so much. [reDesign] (Photo by Joi Ito)
Denver's Rocky Mountain News is having more trouble with the newspaper's grand experiment in using Twitter as a reporting tool. Reporting tool? Twitter is for oversharing and posting links to ninja cat videos on YouTube. Even before the fishwrap was sending reporters to tweet updates from a child's funeral, it had set up a Twitter feed to let reporters send updates from the action at the Democratic National Convention. One hack from Scripps Howard sent an update that included the word "fucker," and to scrape the term from the site editors had other reporters flood the site with tweets to push the obscenity off the page. At least we won't have to worry about a reporter cussing mid-funeral.It wasn't public outcry that convinced the editors to stop asking reporters to post morbid 140-character updates. Instead it was a staffer with a sense of discretion and a little humanity who raised concerns that experimenting with new medium during a memorial service for the victim of a tragic accident isn't in the best of taste. (Photo by Evan Sims
The Dow Jones Industrial Average is more like the "Down Jones" this week, with major financial firms folding left and right. But there are two big winners — the websites of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. While the Journal might not have picked the most auspicious time to launch a redesign, its site racked up record traffic on Monday. As did the Times on Tuesday. [Beet.tv]
The World Association of Newspapers, a group of more than 18,000 newspapers in over 100 countries, is rallying together to decry the Google-Yahoo ad deal already under antitrust scrutiny. Aroused by the notion that Google could control 90 percent of the online-ads market, giving them "unwarranted" power, print newspapers will continue to do what they've always done with rapid technology changes: ceremonious wringing of hands. [Tampa Bay Business Journal]
Selling ad network RealCities didn't earn newspaper publisher McClatchy enough to keep its current headcount. The Sacramento Bee publisher says it plans to cut another 1,150 jobs in addition to the 1,400 it said it would slash in June. Half the cuts will come through layoffs, the other half through buyouts and not replacing departing employees. McClatchy also halved its quarterly dividend. [FT]
"Yes, there are going to be times we make mistakes, just as we do in our newspaper," Rocky Mountain News editor John Temple explains of his paper's decision to have reporter Berny Morson send public Twitter updates live from the funeral of three-year-old Marten Kudlis, who was killed when a driver crashed into an ice cream shop in Aurora, Colo. Temple stops well short of apologizing for any lapse in judgment. But the people he should apologize to are the paper's owners. Newspapers are a business, and if children bleed, the story leads to a lot of advertising inventory. When the print business model is dying, why is it giving away pageviews to Twitter instead of liveblogging on its own website?
The custom battery design that cost hundreds of thousands in Chinese R&D. The refrigerated trucks used to haul the magazines from Mexico to Kentucky. The fallback to finding a sponsor to defray costs — in return for an animated ad. If the managers at Esquire publisher Hearst Magazines want to spend time and money on a project that Wired probably already rejected as not worth it, that's their business decision. But the mag's blinky 75th anniversary cover is a massive letdown. Instead of a new slogan for the ages, the million-dollar signage simply says, "The 21st Century starts now :)." Yes, they put a freaking smiley on it. Party like it's 1999. (Update: Reader Keymaster corrects us that the icon some of us mistook for a smiley emoticon is actually an arrow done in reverse foreground/background from the letters.)
Most people don't know that The New York Times Company owns a newspaper distribution company, called City & Suburban, that it founded in 1992. City & Suburban distributes the Times, the Wall Street Journal and about 200 other newspapers and magazines to newsstands, cafes and stores in the New York metro area. The Times created City & Suburban to reduce its dependency on the powerful, sometimes violent deliverer's union that once controlled in-town deliveries. Things have changed in sixteen years. "Wholesale distribution is no longer an economical business for the Times Company," NYT president Scott Heekin-Canedy said in a prepared statement. What he didn't say: Union clout has fallen enough that the Times can eliminate City & Suburban's 550 union jobs in favor of cheaper, non-union third-party distributors — that's how the Times already delivers nationwide. (Photo by AP/Mark Lennihan)
A tipster writes: "Big cuts at CMP/Techweb this week also... Light Reading lost a couple, InfoWeak... death of print!" TechWeb, an infotech trade publisher formerly known as CMP, is best known — if you can call it that — for its flagship print title, InformationWeek, and also runs a collection of websites and events.
A tipster writes: "PC World continued its slide into the trashcan of history yesterday; 6 more employees were laid off yesterday; a couple in art, a couple in editorial and a couple of support staff." The IDG-owned print monthly has held up better than its main rival, PC Magazine, but beloved editor Harry McCracken left in May to launch his startup, Technologizer. Anyone know more?
