Wall Street Journal finds friend in Chicago
…And we’re not talking about Tribune Chief Executive Sam Zell. We Mean Coleen Davison, private citizen, and resident of Chicago, Illinois.
The Wall Street Journal turned a letter from Davison, a former Chicago Tribune subscriber, into an advertisement — that it tried to run in the Trib. Trouble is, that paper declined to run the ad. Now, it’s running in the Chicago Sun-Times, the Trib’s rival.
Here’s some of her letter:
Our growing discontent with the Tribune’s diminishing quality became intolerable after their redesign last fall, and led us to explore other news options. We settled on the WSJ after perusing several different newspapers, even though neither my husband nor I are particularly involved in the financial world. … While the focus is obviously on the business sector, there is so much to be gleaned about our world from your reporting. Your journalists/contributors clearly know their subjects. Articles are presented articulately and coherently. Your coverage of world news and your human interest pieces are insightful, engaging and thought provoking. And I LOVE your editorial pages-just when I had begun to think common sense was a lost art, I’ve discovered the WSJ!
The ad then offers readers two free weeks of the Journal, along with a 75 percent discount.
A Chicago Tribune spokeswoman declined to comment on the ad. I asked Sun-Times spokeswoman Tammy Chase what she thought about the paper agreeing to run an ad knocking its competitor, but not even mentioning the Sun-Times as an option. She said it’s a business transaction, but in the spirit of good business, asked us to deliver this message to Ms. Davison:
As for her choice of newspaper, the Wall Street Journal is an excellent paper. Sure, we’d love to have her as a customer and if she wants to get local news from Chicago’s best daily newspaper, she can call the Chicago Sun-Times anytime at (888) 848-4637 and we’d be happy to get her a subscription set up.
Online ads, creatively in your face
The Online Publishers Association got a bunch of Web publishers (including Reuters) to agree to test a new series of ad formats that it says will “stimulate a renaissance of creative advertising on the Internet.”
Renaissance? Indeed, says the OPA. The ads will:
- Inspire creativity and high-quality advertising
- Provide a greater share of voice for the advertisers
- Introduce a measurement to capture impact
- Enhance interactivity to build user engagement with brands
Or, roughly translated: The new online ad formats are supposed to work because there will be fewer of them, they will be larger, they theoretically could command a higher fee for advertisers who buy the space, and more people will buy stuff because of them.
Here are the formats:
- The Fixed Panel (recommended dimension is 336 wide x 860 tall), which looks naturally embedded into the page layout and scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls.
- The XXL Box (recommended dimension is 468 wide x 648 tall), which has page-turn functionality with video capability.
- The Pushdown (recommended dimension is 970 wide x 418 tall), which opens to display the advertisement and then rolls up to the top of the page.
This is intended as a way to succeed the era of banner ads because who, after all, looks at them except as a prelude to irritation? (No one, according to lots of studies)
Understandably, advertisements are needed to support the medium, but these in your face, flashing, spinning, obnoxious assaults demanding attention at every turn diminish the joy and satisfaction of reading. Presumably, we’re going to care more about the products for sale if the adds are larger and make more noise. I don’t think so; just going to make me navigate elsewhere –Newspapers are great, the adds are not animated and stay where they are, not jumping out of nowhere to annoy you. Too bad the internet is killing the local rag.
More work, same pay at New York Post
New York Post newsroom staff are grumbling about a new work rule that essentially pays them the same amount of money, but for more work.
Two sources told MediaFile that Rupert Murdoch’s daily tabloid has told reporters that their work week is now 40 hours long. That’s no big deal to most working stiffs, but that’s a change from the earlier 37-1/2 hours.
The upshot is that overtime pay, which once started as the clock struck 37-1/2, now doesn’t begin until 2-1/2 hours later. As many journalists know, it’s hard to break news on your beat unless you’re willing to put up with stories — and events — that happen at any time and don’t fit well into normal working hours. That said, journalists who don’t like this move say it amounts to a 6 percent pay cut because it’s more work for the same pay.
We’re still waiting to hear back from the Post. If you’re really ticked off, you could try quiet subversion — 30 minutes of checking Facebook each day adds up to 2-1/2 hours in one work week
(Photo: Reuters)
hey, if they don’t like it they can quit…also, on the ” quiet subversion “, they’re probably already doing that much more than 30 minutes per day.
Moody’s Bottom Rung – media edition
Moody’s published its “U.S. Bottom Rung” on Tuesday a list of companies that the corporate credit ratings agency thinks are at most risk of defaulting on their debt. There are 283 companies on the list, which is current as of March 1, including some near and dear names for people who love the media business.
Why do this? The Wall Street Journal offers some possibilities:
“Sounds like Moody’s may be trying to get out in front on defaults, given they were perhaps a little behind on subprime mortgages and commercial mortgage-backed securities,” said David Resnick, managing director at investment banking firm Rothschild Inc. which works on many corporate bankruptcies and restructurings.
Moody’s and credit-rating rival Standard & Poor’s Corp., were criticized by the Senate in hearings late last year about the effectiveness of the ratings agencies.
The Journal also says Moody’s enters risky territory by naming some companies that say they are in, as the paper put it, decent fiscal health.
That said, here are the media companies, along with their debt rating and outlook (don’t worry about the specific ratings – they’re all different ways of saying “junk”):
- Allbritton Communications Company (B3, negative)
- American Media Operations Inc (Caa2, negative)
- Barrington Broadcasting Group LLC (Caa1, negative)
- Blockbuster inc (Caa1, negative)
- Carmike Cinemas Inc (B2, negative)
- Charter Communications Inc (Caa3, stable)
- Citadel Broadcasting Corp (B3, negative)
- Emmis Communications Corporation (Caa1, negative)
- Freedom Communications Inc (Caa1, rating under review)
- GateHouse Media Operating Inc (Caa1, negative)
- Grande Communications Holdings Inc (Caa2, negative)
- Gray Television Inc (B3, negative)
- Hollywood Theaters Inc (B3, negative)
- ION Media Networks Inc (Caa3, negative)
- MediaNews Group Inc (Caa3, negative)
- Morris Publishing Group LLC (Caa3, negative)
- NV Broadcasting LLC (Caa2, negative)
- Penton Business Media Holdings Inc (Caa2, negative)
- Questex Media Group Inc (Caa1, negative)
- R.H. Donnelley Corporation (Caa1, negative)
- Reader’s Digest Association Inc (Caa3, negative)
- Regent Broadcasting LLC (B3, stable)
- Salem Communications Holding Corp (B2, negative)
- Sirius XM Radio Inc (Ca, positive)
- Source Interlink Companies Inc (Caa1, negative)
- Univision Communications Inc (B3, negative)
To be fair there is many names that have been on such lists for years! Especially Charter for example.
The report indicates some companies that are not doing too bad so its not all bad news I guess.
Tough times force ASNE to cancel convention
The only kind of party that most U.S. newspapers are having these days is a funeral party. This week alone we have seen:
- EW Scripps Co’s shutdown of The Rocky Mountain News
- USA Today publisher Gannett Co Inc’s 90 percent slashing of its dividend
- Hearst’s decision to try to sell and possibly close the San Francisco Chronicle (With a round of significant job cuts coming first)
- Bankruptcy filings for Journal Register Co and the parent company of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News
- One hundred job cuts at the Hartford Courant, which is owned by Tribune Co — which also filed for bankruptcy.
This is why the American Society of Newspaper Editors said on Friday that it canceled its annual convention. Here’s the memo:
ASNE’s leadership has decided to cancel our 2009 convention because of the challenging times we face. The text of the press release that is going out this morning follows this note.
The Convention Program Committee had put in place an innovative and relevant program, and I am very grateful to them. But it became increasingly clear in recent weeks that our attendance would be low because editors need to be in their own newsrooms during this difficult time. The board of directors will meet soon to deal with the financial implications of canceling the convention and map strategy for the coming year.
In the meantime, we will increase reliance on the Web to help editors share what they are learning as they reshape their news organizations for multiple platforms and operate with fewer resources. We plan to have our new Web site up this spring and we will produce more webinars and ramp up our recently developed newsletter, Editors’ Exchange.
Happy trails, Rocky Mountain News
EW Scripps Co’s decision to shut down Denver’s Rocky Mountain News as of Friday offers an interesting lesson about the value of news.
But first, a bit of background: It is not the first U.S. daily to fail as the economy falters. Scripps already put down two other papers in recent memory (Albuquerque, New Mexico and Cincinnati, Ohio, its home town). Having said that, it’s the biggest daily that I can think of to go under since the newspaper apocalypse crept in like Death in the Bosch painting. Not just bankrupt like Tribune’s papers, the Minneapolis Star Tribune or The Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and the whole Journal Register stable — and not just threatened with closing like Hearst has done with the San Francisco Chronicle and Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It’s really over.
When it goes, William Dean Singleton’s Denver-based MediaNews Group will still publish the Denver Post. Still, half the printed news that Colorado residents have been used to reading will be gone.
Now, a source of mine who was involved with trying to keep the Rocky Mountain News alive, pointed out that sacrificing the paper means that Scripps is less likely to have to shut down its entire business, which would mean other papers from Redding, California to Memphis, Tennessee to Florida’s Atlantic coast. It also reflects, he said, Scripps’s ultimate commitment: shareholders.
Shareholders don’t like seeing what’s happened to their newspaper stocks. Some have lost 98 percent of their value in the last 12 months, because advertising is going away and might not come back as strongly as it once did.
I feel for those behind the scenes that lost their jobs. Not so much for the paper.
http://oakcreekforum.blogspot.com/2009/0 2/rocky-mountain-news-is-history.html
Thomson Reuters CEO: No paper, please
Thomson Reuters Corp, the company that employs me and runs this blog, posted fourth-quarter financial results on Tuesday. My colleague and I wrote them up for the wire, and you can see them here. Meanwhile, here’s something that didn’t make it in to the story that we wanted to share.
During a conference call with reporters, I asked Chief Executive Tom Glocer, who ran Reuters before Thomson Corp bought it, what the company plans to do regarding investing in news. I also asked if the company could ever be in the market for another print newspaper. Remember that Thomson Reuters likes to tout the fact that Thomson Corp long ago got out of the newspaper business, thinking there was more of a future in electronic information that you make people pay a lot of money for.
On news spending:
We’ve continued to invest in news and we think 2009 is a very good year in investment for us both in terms of having brought in some of the journalists who have joined from Thomson Financial, but also investments we’re making in new editorial systems, in the video, multimedia presentation of news. So I think one of the good things about the strength of our financial performance is that we can continue to invest when a lot of pure media companies aren’t.
On getting “back” into the newspaper business (I asked whether the Financial Times or The New York Times-owned International Herald Tribune would be good fits, specifically. But why not The New York Times? Everyone with more than a few pennies to rub together is a candidate to buy it these days.)
[Thomson was] so early in getting out of newspapers that now to go back in when our business model is so focused on professionals and so overwhemingly electronic doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. … If there were a fantastic information product that was 95 percent electronic and 5 percent a print output device, we would do it — maybe — if it otherwise made sense. I’m not convinced that we know how to run a newspaper any better than the ones running them today.
If newspapers keep cutting their print editions, it might not be long before the “95-5″ ratio is normal in big U.S. cities.
I guess print newspapers touch a lot of people, however the next boom which is picking up is information through mobile devices. It helps one to access any amount of news/information on the go. May be TR should be looking at investing in improving the content delivery through mobile devices.
Murdoch daughter disses dad
Courtesy of Richard Siklos, Fortune’s media writer extraordinaire, who just posted this on the website on Tuesday:
“In the weeks that Rupert Murdoch was locked in unsuccessful negotiations to keep his longtime No. 2 at News Corp., the media baron also had to accept his daughter Elisabeth’s decision to turn down a spot on the company’s board, sources told Fortune.”
That’s exciting, from a soap-opera-meets-financial-news angle, because Murdoch is letting longtime right-hand man Peter Chernin leave the company, in part because the media baron has a sense of familial duty. That is to say, many people say he wants his children to take over the company. The most likely choice is his son James, 36, who is active in the company’s UK and Asian operations. Having said that, Elisabeth is no slouch in the media department.
Here’s Siklos again:
On the one hand she has a sense of duty and is one of four grown Murdoch children who will one day inherit the family’s controlling votes. But she also has a conflict of interest with Shine, the big U.K. production company she has built up over nearly seven years. Under U.K. broadcast regulations, Liz Murdoch’s presence on the News Corp. board would have rendered Shine illegible for the 25% of programming budgets that big British broadcasters like the BBC and Channel 4 are required to spend on independent production houses that have no links to broadcasters. Two people close to Murdoch said that this pool of funding represents a large proportion of Shine’s business, and that there are other advantages to being an independent producer that allow Shine to more easily retain the rights to formats it creates. Being on the News Corp. board would be a conflict for Shine because News controls British Sky Broadcasting, the big U.K. satellite TV business, as well as numerous Sky and Fox TV channels that air there. Liz Murdoch owns 63% of Shine and another big backer is Sony Pictures Entertainment, which has 20%.
Dad should understand. After all, it’s just business.
WHY CAN’T PEOPLE JUST STAY OUT OF THERE FAMILY BUSINESS.
I AM A GENERAL CONTRACTOR AND HAVE WORKED FOR THE FAMILY FOR YEARS.
THEY ARE GOOD PEOPLE.
Chernin parachutes, Murdoch keeps flying
News Corp President and Chief Operating Officer Peter Chernin’s perks after he leaves News Corp at the end of June are basic compared with some legendary golden parachutes, though they’re still worth more money than I make in a year. Or 10 years for that matter.
In addition to his Fox studios production deal, Chernin’s creature comforts include 50 hours on News Corp’s jet ($1.65 million value), corporate car ($210,000 value) and possibly personal secretary services ($1.05 million value). See the proxy statement for more details.
That might not send the image of a cost-cutting corporate culture at a time when News Corp’s stock is down 70 percent and the bottom looks further away as its most can-do executive quits. Then again, maybe Chernin’s doing the right thing, all things considered. Check out this little-noticed excerpt from Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch’s memo to employees:
Achieving our ambitions will require change and renewal. So throughout 2009, I will continue to work closely with all of our companies to make sure that we are organized and resourced in the best way to take advantage of this extraordinary point in time. We will press our advantages and invest in our great franchises. And, of course, we will keep our eyes on big prizes, some of which may arise only once in a generation. [Emphasis ours -- ed.]
Wait a minute. Didn’t he already do that with The Wall Street Journal and its parent company Dow Jones? What’s it going to be next? Michael Wolff, who wrote the Murdoch tome “The Man Who Owns the News,” published late last year, thinks that Murdoch has it bad for The New York Times. Of course, the Times’s ruling family, led by Arthur Sulzberger Jr, has said the company and its legendary paper are not for sale.
But then again, it’s a generational issue — just like the word Murdoch uses in his memo. Younger Sulzbergers can’t be that happy that the TImes suspended the dividend that some of them depend on. Could they put enough pressure on their elders to sell? Maybe they could if Murdoch decided that some of his $5 billion would be money well spent on enticing the family with a larger-than-life offer, just like the Times. He said he’s not interested in becoming more of a “public enemy” by chasing the paper, but even media moguls are allowed to change their minds.
With investors in News Corp getting more annoyed for Murdoch’s attachment to newspapers (including the New York Post where he just axed longtime gossip columnist Liz Smith), it’s easy to imagine that Chernin — News Corp’s ambassador to Wall Street — might not be able to defend one more once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Baltimore Sun feels Tribune cost cuts
Suburban bureau reporters at The Sun in Baltimore, Maryland, are about to learn the true meaning of the word “mobile.” The Tribune Co-owned paper is shutting down the last of its three suburban bureaus and bringing their reporters back to the main newsroom in Baltimore proper, sources told MediaFile on Tuesday.
The paper will outfit them with laptops and Blackberries and will send them back into the field to do their job by car or however else they can get to the story. It is part of wider changes going on at Tribune Co, which is in bankruptcy proceedings because of some $13 billion in debt that it has been unable to deal with because of the increasingly grim advertising sales plaguing newspapers.
Tribune’s chief executive, real estate magnate Sam Zell, was unhappy with the amount of empty space that The Sun has in downtown Baltimore, especially when considering all the space that the paper was renting in the suburbs, one of our sources says. The three bureaus that The Sun will shut down are in Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Howard counties. The Sun’s bureaus in Carroll and Harford counties already closed in the past year. It’s not clear if the two are related, but the three bureaus shutting down now are traditional turf war zones with The Washington Post, which recently said it will begin cooperating with The Sun on some coverage in the counties.
Shutting down bureaus must feel a little like a retreat. On the other hand, it must be nice to not be chained to a desk all day long, as we suspect more mobile journalists — or “MoJos” — are discovering..
The news was delivered in an off-record employee meeting, which also included the news that more buyouts and layoffs are on the way, likely sooner rather than later.
Speaking of personnel issues, Tribune Co Chief Administration Officer Gerald (Gerry) Spector had some bad news for employees: Salary freeze for non-union employees are coming this year. And if you’re in the union? Management will work it out in collective bargaining agreements. This is similar to what News Corp did at Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal. It also comes on top of mandatory furloughs at Gannett and other publishers, not to mention a variety of other ways to stay afloat in increasingly stormy seas.
Here’s Spector’s memo, released Monday and obtained through a source:
WHAT? Rupert Murdock owns the WSJ? Oh wait… you mean Rupert Murdoch! Criminal of us to fail to mention that…