Newspaper advertising is a joke, local TV stations are struggling to get ads of their own, journalists are losing their jobs and media executives are calling 25 percent revenue declines an improvement. It sounds like something might be amiss in the U.S. media world.

But don’t take our word for it if you’re the Federal Communications Commission, and you’re about to revisit media ownership regulations and see if they need some changing. See this item from Inside Radio:

[FCC] Chairman Julius Genachowski hires internet entrepreneur and journalist Steven Waldman to lead an agency-wide initiative assessing the state of media. Waldman will lead a team to conduct what’s promised to be an “open, fact-finding process” looking at how the economy is impacting media outlets and make recommendations for policy changes.

Waldman is the co-founder and former editor of the religious website Beliefnet.com, which was bought by News Corp. in 2007. … Waldman will join the Office of Strategic Planning and serve as senior advisor to the chairman. Genachowski says, “A strong consensus has developed that we’re at a pivotal moment in the history of the media and communications, because of game-changing new technologies as well as the economic downturn.”

Yes, but let’s make extra-special sure and hire a guy to check out the situation. You never know; everything might be just fine and we’re making a big mistake saying otherwise.

A string of Yahoo sales, engineering and product executives took the stage on Wednesday in the company's first full-day briefing with analysts since May 2006, all with a mantra that came down from on high: "Today is the beginning of a journey back to respect," said CEO Carol Bartz.

With page views increasing, Carl Icahn having drawn in his horns, and the company extending a deadline for finalizing a search agreement with Microsoft, the time was right for a love-in.

Finance Chief Tim Morse said Yahoo expects to achieve operating margins between 15 percent and 20 percent by 2012. After the third quarter's "pathetic" 6 percent, shareholders would certainly consider that a more respectful performance.

Another way to show their respect would have been to give specific details on the engineering involved in the promised prestige. Executives said Yahoo would achieve the new margin targets by accelerating its revenue in the next few years, but demurred from providing a specific revenue growth target.

The company said it would invest in editorial staff to produce more original features, and tweak its online products to keep users on the site longer and boost advertising revenue.

Hiring more staff and investing in ad search wizardry will certainly add to costs, so the need for a little more Internet alchemy could require a leap of faith to engineer the recovery in esteem Yahoo hopes to achieve.

Three years is a long time to go without having an analyst day, and it seems Yahoo decided to make up for lost time with a marathon seven-plus-hour briefing to Wall Street’s number-crunchers on Wednesday.

Perhaps having gotten a little rusty from non-practice, Yahoo dispensed with some of the customs of the analyst day ritual. Members of the press were barred from the event, and forced to watch the proceedings over a Webcast, with all the attendant technical difficulties and indignities.

Yahoo’s plug for analysts was simple enough: Yahoo got boring and slow-footed over the years, but the company still commands a massive online audience that’s extremely valuable to advertisers.

But the company’s delivery of the message did not always follow the standard analyst day script.

Specific financial targets were few and far between (Yahoo’s promise of 15 percent to 20 percent operating margins by 2012 was the meatiest nugget).

And one slide, during a presentation on advertising yield-optimization, seemed more suited to a blackboard at MIT than a briefing with financial analysts.

Questions?

Verizon Wireless and Motorola have unveiled what could be their best shot yet in the battle against Apple Inc’s iPhone — the long expected Droid. Motorola says Droid is the most technically advanced smartphone out there. Its promises:

• A speedy Cortex A8 ARM Processor and a Texas Instruments OMAP application chip that it says makes the device run 30 percent to 50 percent faster than other smartphones, including iPhone.
• First dibs on Android 2.0, the newest version of Google’s mobile software.
• A new free navigation service to battle dedicated GPS makers like Garmin and TomTom.
• A higher resolution screen that’s better than iPhone

“Once they see the display I think they’ll be hooked,” Motorola Chief Executive Sanjay Jha told Reuters.

Verizon’s Chief Marketing Officer John Stratton promised to spend more money advertising this device than any phone in its history. He said that it could be seen as a ”big risk” for Verizon,  which started working with Motorola a year ago, to bet on a handset maker that had been steadily losing ground.  But he said his company liked working Motorola so much that it plans to sell more Motorola Android phones in 2010.

“It almost looks like there’s a whole Droid army lining up,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at research firm Interpret. Gartenberg likes the phone’s design, but reserves criticism for how it syncs consumers’ music. Not easily, apparently.

Verizon and Motorola showed off the highlights of the device today.

We had a hard time finding the good news in Monday’s report that U.S. newspaper circulation has fallen more than 10 percent, based on an analysis of 379 daily papers. Thank goodness for the newspapers whose publishers helped them understand why losing hundreds or thousands of paying readers is good.

Most papers acknowledged deep declines in circulation, but explained it in one of the following ways:

• We had to clear out all the bulk copies sold at discount. (I’m still not sure how this one works because I recall publishers saying this a couple of years ago. How many deadwood readers are there?)
• We shrank our coverage area so of course we lost some circulation. It tells advertisers that they’re getting a BETTER quality of reader.
• We’re charging more for the paper so circulation revenue has risen, and anyway, who wants to rely on a business as fickle as advertising (the one that lined our owners’ pockets for the past 150 years.)?
• Readership is rising on the Internet.
• At least we didn’t get whacked as bad as the next guy.

All these statements are true, and they all are good business moves. What I can’t find among the numbers is what percent of print decline at many of these papers is because of the other reasons that you hear from people. Some are legitimate, some aren’t and some are just silly. All say one thing: Many people don’t pay for the paper anymore, which means there’s less money to keep them in business. (Don’t believe us? Ask the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer):

• I hate my newspaper
• My newspaper doesn’t have anything interesting in it
• News is boring
• News is free on the Internet
• My newspaper is biased to the right/left/middle/other Little League team than the one my kid is on
• My paper stopped running Garfield in the funnies. It doesn’t run Hints From Heloise anymore.
• You can’t get good TV listings anymore
• I don’t care about anything that happens in the rest of the world or outside my front door.
• There’s not enough local/regional/national/world news here.
• The sports section sucks.
• It always arrives too early/late for me to read it.

Here are samples of how some papers handled Monday’s news:

San Francisco Chronicle headline: Chronicle’s strategy shift starts to pay off

The Chronicle said Monday that reshaping the newspaper’s business model is paying off financially even though, as anticipated, it has resulted in a sharp decline in circulation. For the six months that ended in September, The Chronicle’s daily circulation dropped 25.8 percent to 251,782, compared with the same period in 2008, the steepest decline among major U.S. metropolitan papers. …

Frank Vega, publisher of The Chronicle, said the newspaper’s loss in circulation was an expected result of moving away from a business model that depends mainly on advertising and instead relies on readers for a greater share of revenue.

The Chron also adds that subscription price increases and other changes have given it some profitable weeks after losing $50 million last year.

The Detroit News: Detroit newspapers lose less circulation than other big dailies

The steeper losses at other newspapers boosted the Detroit publications’ rankings among the largest in the country. The News pulled ahead from 50th place to 46th; the Free Press jumped from 20th to 17th.

“We radically changed our delivery model and throughout the industry we have seen greater losses,” Janet Hasson, senior vice president of audience development for the Detroit Media Partnership, said in a statement.
The Des Moines Register: Newspaper circulation falls, including at Register

Register Publisher Laura Hollingsworth said much of the decline is due to strategic changes, such as eliminating discounts, reducing unprofitable delivery in far corners of the state and increasing home delivery and single copy prices.

“Our unduplicated audience reach in central Iowa is higher today than it was a decade ago,” Hollingsworth said.

As you can see, things are doing well, so please stop telling everyone that they’re not.

(Photo: Reuters)

MySpace, the online social network (can we still call it that now that it has ducked out of the Facebook/Twitter competition?), appears to be pursuing what I’ll call the “two-pronged news strategy.” You get used to it when you cover media and technology. For those of you who don’t enjoy this privilege, it goes like this:

• Pick a news outlet that you like and whisper things to them about what you’re doing. It doesn’t have to be interesting, it just has to be exclusive. If you’re in public relations, you don’t even have to know that someone in your company is doing this. It works well for you.
• Let the rest of the press read the story and bombard your telephone and e-mail with messages demanding to know if it’s true. Score a big hit on the news cycle. Because you either decline to comment or only want to talk “on background,” it heightens the air of mystery — and newsworthiness.
• The official announcement of the news, which will always resemble 90 percent or more of what you read in the first round of anonymously sourced stories, will get just as much attention as that first round. It’s a 2-for-1 deal that is irresistible to many companies.

I don’t know that MySpace is doing this, and wouldn’t be able to confirm it if I asked. It could just be that the reporters who get the breaking news have great sources and the reporter asked smart questions that would yield good answers. I’ll let you judge.

The first example comes from Kara Swisher, tech blogger at AllThingsD, which is MySpace’s cousin in the News Corp family. She reports:

Microsoft’s MSN is in preliminary talks with MySpace about using the social networking site’s music service, MySpace Music, to help power music offerings on the giant portal. …

Sources said Microsoft execs don’t think they can do as good a job as MySpace is doing and don’t see the point in striking needed but complex deals with music labels, which the News Corp. (NWS) property already has.

MySpace, Swisher adds, would get a “gusher” of traffic. I asked MySpace whether we could talk about this. From spokeswoman: “Off the record I can’t comment.” OK.

The second example is this story in The Telegraph from Monday:

Facebook and MySpace are in talks about sharing content across both sites, according to senior figures at the two companies. The move could potentially see MySpace music and video footage being shared on Facebook via its Connect platform, which allows people to log into third party sites using their Facebook ID.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, told The Telegraph: “Facebook is focussing on building the best technology which helps people share content, while at MySpace they are focussing on more a content-led strategy. We would like to have their content, as we already do with many other sites, shared across our network because it is good for our users.

On this one, MySpace CEO and former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta confirmed the talks on the record. But I’m in the position of only being able to refer you to that article.

On the record, MySpace wouldn’t comment. I suspect that the comments will come later when we rewrite the Telegraph’s story along with the rest of the press corps.

Monday’s newspaper circulation numbers please no one who makes their living from selling papers. That’s evident when you look at the top 25 dailies by circulation and see that the best performance came from The Wall Street Journal, which rose less than 1 percent. Considering that advertisers use these numbers to determine where to spend their money, there is little reason to rejoice.

Tribune Co’s two largest papers, the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, both posted steep declines on Monday, but the company is urging advertisers to look beyond numbers that it considers less relevant than they were before the Internet. Instead, it wants them to look at how many people they can reach through Tribune’s diverse lineup of papers, websites and television stations.

To make this easier, Tribune has started “Tribune365,” a “multichannel sales solutions group providing customized marketing programs to advertisers looking to reach consumers across a variety of media platforms.” (More on what this means — in English — below.)

“We want to change the conversation around both how we sell and how people perceive newspapers.” Print circulation,” said Vincent Casanova, Tribune’s senior vp of publishing operations “just doesn’t tell the whole story… The objective is to change the conversation from a narrow look at topline circulation results to a broader discussion of the power of newspaper advertising and how to deliver results.”

For Tribune365, that means no longer selling ads to national buyers through a bunch of different sales teams that sell different kinds of ads for this or that part of a paper or this or that part of a website or TV station.

Tribune365 President Don Meek cited a recent ad campaign for big-box retailer Target, which set up one of a 16,000 square-foot “pop-up store” in Chicago (Those are the temporary stores that spring up in cities for a few days at a time, sell a bunch of stuff, and move on):

“We were able to put together an integrated program on WGN, WGN-TV, the Chicago Tribune, RedEye, Hoy… The only thing we couldn’t deliver was the outdoor bus shelter advertising on Michigan Avenue. Not only were we able to provide real estate and promotional support, it was also a fully integrated ad program. They said it was one of the most popular programs that they ever did.”

Here’s another thing that ought to appeal to advertisers, thanks to AdAge’s article on Monday that includes a section on Tribune365:

Big newspaper companies are also looking at putting all their data about their readers, in print and online, to work for marketers. Tribune’s new Tribune365 unit is planning to introduce a universal registration system for all Tribune sites this year, with universal registration for mobile visitors in 2010. “We are getting such a fine degree of detail in terms of targeting that we will eventually be able to target a physical product to a household address, a digital product to the digital user in that household and a mobile product to the mobile user in that household,” said Don Meek, president of Tribune365.

That kind of project, of course, benefits from the biggest possible audience of registrants, something that charging for even unique, niche content could undermine. Mr. Meek declined to discuss prospects for pay plans at Tribune. “We’re going to try a lot of different things,” he said. “Which ones ultimately prevail, it’s too soon to tell.”

And that, dear readers, is really the bottom line.

Before this week’s dueling Google and Microsoft search licensing deals with Twitter, a recurring rumor in Silicon Valley had Google trying to buy Twitter outright.

So when Google co-founder Sergey Brin made a surprise appearance at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Thursday, the stage was set to finally put the record straight.

Showing that ten years in the media spotlight have not been wasted on him however, Brin displayed a deft command of language to duck the question.

Web 2.0 organizer John Battelle: Did you try to buy Twitter?

Brin: I did not try to buy Twitter.

Brin then added, “But if companies approach us we definitely consider any opportunities to buy.” But the resultant ambiguity about whether Brin was speaking about himself personally, or Google, effectively left the question unanswered. Nicely played.

Meanwhile, the list of Internet giants partnering with Twitter came close to growing to three companies, after AOL CEO Tim Armstrong opined about the role of real time data at AOL during his talk.

“I think those guys have done something very impactful,” Armstrong said of Twitter. “And if it works with our platforms and we can leverage it, I think we would be happy to do that.”

Armstrong offered a couple of other interesting tidbits, saying that AOL was in a good position to proceed with its plan to eject from the Time Warner mothership and saying that a guaranteed AOL spin-off was not a precondition of him taking the job at AOL.

He also hinted at a mysterious new content technology platform that he said AOL has been developing internally since this summer, and which would provide a “secret sauce” to the company’s variety of media properties.

“It’s a broader platform with more information around content and the creation of content,” Armstrong said.

Another answer with plenty of ambiguity, but in this case, more details will likely come soon.

Microsoft highlighted new multi-touch features on the range of new PCs as it launched Windows 7 in New York on Thursday.

Here’s a clip of a photo managing program, which allows you to sort through snaps and manipulate them manually, and a shot of the new Kindle application from Amazon, which lets people read a book onscreen, if that’s what they want to do.

The Windows 7 launch event was quieter than previous versions, focusing on slick new hardware and consumer-oriented features such as watching TV on the PC, creating home networks, making videos and playing music.

Early reviews of Windows 7 have been positive, but it will be a few months before it becomes clear if consumers really take to the new operating system.

It’s a good thing when the journalists write press releases. Today’s launch of the Chicago News Cooperative is something that we can share with you pretty much by cutting and pasting the press release. Unlike the jargon-filled missives from many companies, this is easy to read.

A few points first: The CNC is a new nonprofit reporting organization supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and comprises former Chicago Tribune journalists and other editorial staff. This is the latest foundation-sponsored news operation, a way that growing numbers of experts say could point the way to the future for financing U.S. journalism. After all, advertising isn’t working out as well as it used to, and people keep dropping their print subscriptions to read it for free online.

A report out this week from former Washington Post editor Len Downie Jr and Columbia professor Michael Schudson approaches this topic and even suggests a U.S.-style BBC to make sure that journalism doesn’t disappear just because Wall Street investors and advertisers don’t like the declining profits and circulation they’re seeing at your hometown paper.

Speaking of profits, the Times sees a profit opportunity here. It will use news from the CNC to feed its own local edition pages in Chicago, similar to what it’s doing in San Francisco. In the process, it will go up against two Chicago stalwarts, the Tribune and the Sun-Times.

One question we have: Why won’t the group disclose how much money it’s getting? Guessing it has to be disclosed somewhere sometime, either through its own tax papers or through the other donors’ filings.

Now… here’s the press release:

A group of Chicago journalists committed to public service journalism announced Thursday the formation of the Chicago News Cooperative (CNC), an organization designed to provide high quality, professionally edited news and commentary to the Chicago region on the Web, in print and over the airwaves.

CNC Editor James O’Shea, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, said CNC’s official start coincided with the acquisition of its first customer, The New York Times. CNC journalists will provide two pages of CNC branded news and commentary to The New York Times twice a week in its Chicago editions on Friday and Sunday. The coverage is scheduled to start Nov. 20.

“At a time of declining resources in newsrooms across the nation, journalists must adapt to new technologies and devise some creative, innovative ways to fulfill our obligations, ” O’Shea said, “so we can hold our government accountable to citizens and restore to our journalism the standards desperately needed in these troubled times.”

CNC will operate a stand-alone newsroom while developing arrangements to collaborate with other media in Chicago to share resources and, over time, jointly produce content. During CNC’s start-up phase, Window to the World Communication, a long-standing, tax exempt educational organization and the parent of WTTW 11, Chicago’s public television station and a founding partner to CNC, has agreed to serve as the coop’s non-profit 501(c)3 base of operation.

In addition to providing content to The New York Times and its collaboration with WTTW, CNC is developing a Web site to be called Chicago Scoop that will provide news, commentary and investigative reporting about the city and the state. The site is expected to go live in early 2010 with regular reports from an expanded staff that will also appear on the news programs of WTTW Channel 11. CNC is in discussion with other potential partners such as WBEZ, Chicago’s award-winning public radio station, about potential journalistic collaboration.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is a major funding source for CNC’s initial operations. MacArthur’s media grantmaking supports programs on U.S. television and radio and, increasingly, on the Web to help ensure a diversity of viewpoints and expand the availability of high-quality news and documentary programming. CNC is creating a network of additional supporters among individuals and foundations and plans to solicit membership in the cooperative as it expands its reach. The New York Times will pay CNC for its journalism as it does other news services whose work appears in the pages of the newspaper and on nytimes.com.

Besides O’Shea, James Warren, a former Tribune managing editor and television commentator, will write a regular column for CNC that will appear in the New York Times Chicago pages.

The coop’s advisory board will be chaired by Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs books, who has a background in journalism, publishing and social entrepreneurship. “CNC is exactly the kind of multi-platform news gathering enterprise with multiple revenue streams that can reinvent public interest journalism,” Osnos said. “CNC now joins the lengthening list of entrepreneurial media initiatives that recognize the problems and are devising ways to solve them.”

(Photo: Reuters)