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.

The New York Times will cut 100 positions in its newsroom by the end of the year, Executive Editor Bill Keller told staff on Monday. This is the second time that the paper has taken this unfortunate step, having cut 100 positions last year (though, as Richard Perez-Pena reported in his story on nytimes.com, other positions were added so it was not a net reduction). Thing is, the TImes already cut pay for journalists and other employees this year in an attempt to forestall cuts. So… it’s not good news, but it is fit to print. Here is Keller’s memo:

Colleagues,

I had planned to invite you to the newsroom and break this news in person today, but I’ve been hit by something that seems to be the flu. Though I strongly believe in delivering bad news in person, I don’t want to add insult to injury by spreading infection.

Let me cut to the chase: We have been told to reduce the newsroom by 100 positions between now and the end of the year.

We hope to accomplish this by offering voluntary buyouts. On Thursday, the Company will be sending buyout offers to everyone in the newsroom. Getting a buyout package does NOT mean we want you to leave. It is simply easier to send the envelopes to everyone. If you think a buyout may be right for you, you have up to 45 days to decide whether you will accept it or not.

As before, if we do not reach 100 positions through buyouts, we will be forced to go to layoffs. I hope that won’t happen, but it might.

Our colleagues in editorial and op-ed, and on the business side, also face another round of budget cuts.

In recent years, we’ve managed to avoid the disabling cutbacks that have hit other newsrooms. The Company has chosen to protect the journalism by cutting production and other business-side costs, and the newsroom itself has managed its resources frugally. These latest cuts will still leave us with the largest, strongest and most ambitious editorial staff of any newsroom in the country, if not the world.

I won’t pretend that these staff cuts will not add to the burdens of journalists whose responsibilities have grown faster than their compensation. But we’ve been looking hard at ways to minimize the impact — in part, by re-engineering some of our copy flow. I won’t promise this will be easy or painless, but I believe we can weather these cuts without seriously compromising our commitment to coverage of the region, the country and the world. We will remain the single best news organization on earth.

I doubt that anyone is shocked by the fact of this, but it is happening sooner than anyone anticipated. When we took our 5 percent pay cuts, it was in the hope that this would fend off the need for more staff cuts this year. But I accept that if it’s going to happen, it should be done quickly. We will get through this and move on.

In my absence, Bill Schmidt and John and Jill have volunteered to take your questions this afternoon. Feel free to bring additional questions to me as soon as I’m back, or check with Bill Schmidt or John or Jill privately, or save them for the next Throw Stuff at Bill session, which is in a couple of weeks.

We often — and rightly — voice our gratitude that we work for a company and a family that prize quality journalism above all. I hope you know that the company and the family, and I, feel an equal debt of gratitude to all of you whose sacrifice and loyalty have kept us strong.

Like you, I yearn for the day when we can do our jobs without looking over our shoulders for economic thunderstorms.

Bill

(Photo: Reuters)

It must be hard to churn out positive messages about the newspaper business when papers are losing their advertising revenue at alarming rates and the Internet is not yielding up any easy secrets for survival.

Don’t underestimate the Newspaper of Association of America’s ability to stay positive. Here’s part of a press release that it issued today:

Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 70.3 million unique visitors in June (35.9 percent of all Internet users), according to a custom analysis provided by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America. Newspaper Web site visitors generated 3.5 billion page views during the month, spending 2.7 billion minutes browsing the sites over more than 597 million total sessions.

“The newspaper audience continues to expand as publishers aggressively capitalize on their investments in digital properties, adding robust features and launching new products to attract a highly valuable consumer audience,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm. “Advertisers who want to reach consumers ready to make purchasing decisions continue to use the trusted newspaper brand to ensure their messages are heard through the crowd.”

Also:

The latest Nielsen numbers come as early data from a MORI Research survey of 3,000 adults, indicates that newspaper advertising remains the leading advertising medium cited by consumers in planning, shopping and making purchasing decisions. The study, part of a series entitled “American Consumer Insights,” also found that 82 percent of adults said they “took action” as a result of newspaper advertising - from clipping a coupon or making a purchase to visiting a Web site to learn more.

Along with that came this pitch from the NAA spokesman, Jeff Sigmund, a guy who could claim political asylum in most industrialized nations after the pain I’ve foisted on him for the past few years (I’m sorry, Jeff, I can’t help it!):

I think it makes a compelling business story - the research and Web audience figures coupled with the latest financial news from the industry (reports that ad revenues are beginning to stabilize, and that Gannett and McClatchy are poised to beat profit estimates for the next five or six quarters).

Would that it were so!

The research and Web audience figures are good, and point to the possibility of survival for traditional media companies — but not all by themselves. The fact is, print ad revenue is still off by 25 percent or more at many papers, with classified revenue down as much as 60+ percent in some categories, when comparing quarterly results to last year. Online revenue has a ways to go before it can make up for those print declines, and no one is sure that it will, so those numbers, while good, don’t change the perception of papers as being in mortal danger.

Also, publishers did largely beat profit expectations that Wall Street had for the papers, but not because their businesses improved. It’s because they cut costs so drastically that they managed to please Wall Street for one more quarter. That — and short sellers forced to buy back shares of newspaper publishers that they had sold in the hopes that they would fall further, thus letting them reap a big profit — are reasons why newspaper stocks have risen and stayed up. As I explained in a recent “analysis” story, that trend might not last long.

Remember what that really means: Publishers cut the heck out of their ad staffs, their newsrooms and the paychecks of those folks who still have a job. One imagines you can hear the echo of your footsteps much better in the hallway at your average daily paper these days — there aren’t as many people there to drown out the sound. That’s a compelling business story, but not in a good way.

(Photo/Reuters: EW Scripps CEO Rich Boehne, announcing the shutdown of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado, earlier this year)

You have to hand it to Sam Zell and his band of outsiders at bankrupt media company Tribune Co. They are going to remake the newspaper business if it kills them.

The gang got broiled for a front-page ad that the Los Angeles Times ran last week that looked like an article. After that outcry, the Tribune-owned paper did it again, this time with another an ad supplement for Paramount’s movie, “The Soloist.” That one includes an interview with Steve Lopez, the Times columnist who wrote the book that became the movie. The ad also ran under the LA Times’s own banner.

As it turns out, nearly everyone who cares enough to talk about these ads in public despises them. You could have said that LA Times employees were just kvetching when they circulated a petition voicing their opposition to the ads — broke down and dispirited by bankruptcy, and repeated waves of layoffs, they stuck to the old line that there needs to be a distinction between ads and editorial copy for various ethical reasons.

Now we can add LA Times Executive Editor John Arthur to the mix. Here’s The Wrap:

Arthur, who was on vacation last week, said he was blindsided by the ad…  The editor said it was initially envisioned to go down the right side of the front page, usually the space reserved for the paper’s lead story. “I’d been told an ad like that was coming, and before my trip I’d complained about it,” he said. “But I was told it was not imminent, that an ad of this shape was weeks or months away — May or June was mentioned to me.”

Arthur was also critical of a four-page advertising supplement about the upcoming Paramount movie “The Soloist,” which was published on Sunday under the signature Los Angeles Times banner. … “I thought the type font that was used in the words ‘The Soloist’ at the top was uncomfortably close to the font we use in section fronts,” Arthur said, adding that he did not know that the supplement was coming either. Lopez could not be reached for comment.

But Lynne Segall, vice president for entertainment advertising at the paper, retorted in an email to TheWrap: “Russ Stanton, his boss, the editor of the paper, approved both advertorial units. The ad department in this company is not in a position nor would we ever be allowed to go out in the market to sell units like this without editorial vetting and giving us permission first.”

The Wrap also noted that Eddy Hartenstein, the paper’s publisher, begged employees to understand that he’s just trying to keep the paper open.

We’ve gotten a bunch of people to talk about this already on another blog entry that we did on this last week. I’d like to bring up another idea, just for argument’s sake:

When we journalists worry that an advertisement in the paper looks deceptively like a news article, aren’t we insulting the intelligence of the readers? In turn, does that make us look like the interior decorators of the elitist ivory tower that so many people say we live in? I’m not saying it’s so; I *am* throwing it out there, however.

(Photo: Reuters)

The decision by the Los Angeles Times to run a front-page ad that looks like a news story has raised eyebrows in media circles. LAT staffers, meanwhile, are raising their pitchforks.

Horrified by what they see as a deceptive blurring of the line between paid advertising and news stories, some 100 employees at the paper have signed a petition to Publisher Eddy Hartenstein “strenuously” objecting.

“This place already had horrible morale problems with decimating layoffs, but now to have our publisher whore out the front page is more than we can stand,” one editorial staff member told Reuters. “It blurs the line between paid content and content that our reporters are producing.”

The ad, which runs down the left column of the front page, is for the new NBC police drama “Southland.” It’s topped with the headline: ”Southland’s Rookie Hero,” followed by the sub-head “A ride-along on an officer’s first day.”

The ad is surrounded by a black border and has the NBC logo and word “advertisement” above it, but resembles a news story.  Along the bottom of the front page is a more conventional, banner-style ad for the show, announcing that it premieres tonight.

“The NBC ad may have provided some quick cash, but it has caused incalculable damage to this institution,” the petition reads. “This action violates a 128-year pact with our readers that the front page is reserved for the most meainingful stories of the day. Place a fake news article on A-1 makes a mockery of our integrity and journalistic standards.”

Newspapers are pushing the boundaries between advertising and editorial content as they struggle to compete in the Internet age.  Many used to run front page ads way back at the beginning of the 20th century, and some, like The Wall Street Journal, are trying it again.

This tends to annoy reporters and editors who say it’s wrong to devote valuable front-page space to ads. They also don’t like gimmicks like this because it could confuse readers and drag down the paper’s reputation.

The argument from the other side typicaly boils down to “desperate times, desperate measures.”  The LAT is owned by a bankrupt publisher and run by a group of people who do not have ink running in their veins

They say that if they can raise big cash by charging for a front-page ad this way, particularly when the ad market for papers is shrinking, maybe they can keep the paper alive and stop laying off employees.

What do you think about ads disguised as news? We’d love to hear from you.

Photo credit: Reuters/Fred Prouser (The Los Angeles Times building in downtown Los Angeles)

It’s no secret that the International Herald Tribune is part of The New York Times Co, so why not flaunt it? Visitors to nytimes.com and iht.com saw evidence of this thinking Sunday (or Monday, depending on where you are).

When you visit the IHT website, you now see a Web link on your Internet browser that says this: http://global.nytimes.com/?iht. The flag at the top of the page now reads: “International Herald Tribune: The Global edition of The New York Times.” The layout of the website also has been adjusted to resemble that of nytimes.com’s homepage. If you visit nytimes.com, a banner across the top of the page invites you to “try the new global edition,” which, of course, is what iht.com used to be. If you’re a regular Reuters reader, you can’t say you’re too surprised, as we told you last June that this was coming.

We’re curious about whether bringing the IHT closer into the fold allows the Times to cut its costs in any significant way, and will update this blog entry once we get some clarity on that. The Times is dealing with falling advertising revenue and also has had to take other steps such as selling its interest in its headquarters building and borrowing money at a high interest rate from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to help pay off debt. It also cut 100 jobs in its business operations, it said on Friday, and said it is cutting staff pay by 5 percent (and in the case of union workers in its newsroom, is asking them to agree to that pay cut to avoid news staff layoffs).

Here, meanwhile, is a quote from Global Edition Editor Martin Gottlieb that was included in the press release. Somewhere in here is a “cost saving”:

Working together with The New York Times, we have been able to look at the overall balance and direction of our coverage afresh. By consolidating Web operations and improving design processes, we are freeing up editorial energies to focus on delivering the accurate reporting, thought-provoking writing and sharp analysis that our international readers need now more than ever.

There also is an advertising case to be made here, which comes courtesy of a quote from Jean Christophe Demarta, international advertising director for The New York Times Media Group:

The new online Global Edition and the new-look newspaper have generated a wealth of new opportunities for advertisers looking to reach our influential, international audience.

We like the way that NYT Executive Editor Bill Keller said it in his memo last year. He said the move would cut advertising competition between the IHT and New York Times websites and boost total international readership.

Finally, as Demarta mentioned, there are changes to the print edition. We haven’t gotten our copy yet this morning, but will update to reflect any interesting changes we find. One that the IHT mentioned in its press release is that the business section (which features Reuters copy, we should note), will be anchored on the back page Monday through Friday.

Keep an eye on:

• Which online video site is the fairest of them all? It looks like Disney feels like Google’s YouTube might be a better option for ABC than the News Corp-NBC-Providence Equity Partners-owned Hulu. PaidContent was all over the back-and-forth this weekend. (PaidContent)
• Former AOL-er Jonathan Miller is about to find a new home as digital poobah at News Corp. The story leaked out all over the place over the weekend. (Reuters)
• The Washington Post is getting ready to see how readers like its new version of the paper, ie, the one that comes without its own business section. There will be live online chats with top editors. Why not pitch in? (The Washington Post)

(Photo: Reuters)

Washington Post Co Chairman Don Graham wrote a more than 2,000-word letter to shareholders for his company’s latest annual report. I managed to cut it down to the 587 words that I thought were really worth reading. Graham is the kind of chairman and CEO that you want to cover as a journalist because he seems to rely exclusively on straight talk instead of obfuscation — particularly when the news is bad for the company and for shareholders. Here are the 587 words, with the parts that I found even more interesting than the rest marked in bold type.

We could do without more years like 2008. … In past years, I have rattled on in these letters about our Company’s relationship to our shareholders. Generations of top managers at The Post Company have reiterated: we’re focused on the long run; we’re committed to building value for our shareholders. My own assets are more than 90% concentrated in the stock you own. All of these remain true, but I am in the embarrassing position of writing you after a year in which Post Company stock declined by more than 50%. Comparative results (”you should see what happened to the other newspapers”) offer no solace.

…

It’s central that you know this: in 1998, about 75% of the Company’s revenue came from The Post, Newsweek and our television stations. In 2008, almost 70% came from Kaplan and Cable ONE.

…

Many CEOs’ annual reports will say more about their balance sheets than they have for years; this one is no exception. Our Company for many years has had $400 million of notes outstanding; unfortunately, these came due in February. The Post has an A1 credit rating from Moody’s; we are told that ranks us in the top 10% of nonfinancial S&P 500 companies. Nonetheless, the coupon rate when we refinanced our debt was much higher: 7.25% in 2009, compared to 5.5% in 1999. We still have enough cash and marketable securities to cover the debt. The Company can handle the added interest cost. But to have no debt at all-unless for a very compelling reason-seems wiser than ever.

…

Able managements… did not keep our two print media companies from sliding into the red in 2008. The Post’s numbers will get quite a bit worse in 2009. We are willing to lose money (as we did at Kaplan from 1994 to 2001) if the losses are on a path to a healthy, profitable business.

Newsweek management has a plan it hopes will change the direction of the business and put the magazine on a better and more profitable course. The Post has a harder challenge this year. The familiar problems of the newspaper industry-declining readership and the loss of classified-are now made worse by bankrupt advertisers. The newspaper will lose substantial money in 2009. Some will be non-cash accelerated depreciation because we will be closing a printing plant. Most will be real losses…

So what’s the future of the newspaper and newsmagazine businesses? I have no answer to this question. … Today, it isn’t obvious that even the best-run, most successful newspaper can be consistently profitable. But The Post will get every chance. … We are willing to lose money… if the losses are on a path to a healthy, profitable business.

…

Are we investing in The Post and Newsweek as a public service or because we feel their business models can be fixed? Emphatically the latter: it is universally understood that we must move toward profitability at The Post and Newsweek after what we hope will be a low point in 2009. But how we’ll get there is not clear. We must cut costs; but we must (and will) continue producing excellent newspapers and magazines. Then, we have to continue to find new sources of revenue (at a time when some of our customers will be cutting back because of their own financial problems).

Ten years from now, it is highly likely that customers will be getting news from profitable institutions staffed by talented reporters and editors. We’re going to try to show a way.

(Photo: Reuters)

I spoke late last week with the chief executive of EW Scripps Co, the company that got its share of hisses and boos for shutting down the Rocky Mountain News this past February.

Rich Boehne, a journalist back in the day, is in charge of navigating a chain publisher of U.S. newspapers through the most difficult time that it ever has had, not to mention all the employees of the papers that the company owns. And let’s not forget the local television stations that Scripps also operates.

Boehne and I talked about the future of newspapers for a story that I was working on about the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s 2009 report on the state of the news media. I included some of his remarks in a story that I wrote about ideas that the report had for saving newspapers, but our conversation ranged beyond the story at hand.

Here are some thoughts that Boehne shared with me. I prefaced a few of them with paraphrases of my own questions to save you the trouble of reading the whole transcript.

Here is Boehne speaking about how newspapers will persevere despite a decline in advertising revenue that is making some of them less viable than they ever have been before.

We really tend not to look so much at just newspapers. We tend to look at local media and what’s the opportunity for local media. In most markets there are hundreds of millions of dollars of local available ad dollars, and just because you have models today that don’t necessarily work in that environment doesn’t mean there won’t be very profitable robust local media models in the future… I guess we’re maybe a little more fundamentalist in our approach. We try to spend no time looking in the rear-view mirror.

He elucidated on the tide of bad-news stories about newspapers going bankrupt, newspapers threatening to close, newspapers actually closing and what newspapers will do as ad revenue disappears.

What I just struggle with every day is reading all the stories about the newspaper industry, and what is just so perplexing is that we feel like we’re asking the wrong questions. The right question is what business models will support local journalism.

Boehne on the idea that daily newspapers could cut back on having a print edition every day of the week. This could save publishers money by letting them stop printing papers on days where there are too few advertisements to support the cost of printing the paper. Monday is that kind of day for many papers.

Is that in any way trashing our mission?… I grew up as a reporter. Much of the business was built on utility. Seven-day a week classifieds, sports scores, stocks, school lunch menus… Most of that was not journalism. It’s stenography, a service. What’s the business once you decouple the utility and the service and say, ‘How do you build a business around the journalism?

If newspapers regain their footing, can they still provide local journalism that people will want to read, even if the ad model disappears?

I think you’ll have editorial departments that are even as large as you have today — professional, talented and very well compensated, and you’ll have an ad sales staff that will have the same thing… We’ve been here 130 years, and intend to be an industry leader for another 130 years… Any way this goes, however this plays out, you have to bring resources to product. You’re now in a highly competitive market. There’s no certain audience every morning. We have to not rely on the utility concept, box sports scores [and such] that do much better on the Web. The future belongs to the storytellers.

(Photo: Reuters)

The Project for Excellence in Journalism published its sixth annual State of the News Media report on Monday. The report, at 800 pages and 180,000 words, is a monster. The news media that it’s analyzing, however, is turning into something quite a bit smaller.

The group, along with its chief, Tom Rosenstiel, has provided a snapshot of where the news industry is today, though with an industry so large, a snapshot this size is impossible to condense into one little blog, let alone a story for the wire. If you’re looking to wallow, dig in to the specifics, follow this link.

Here, meanwhile, are some of the introductory remarks and top findings of the study, mostly in the study’s own words. Warning: These findings are not suitable for your friends in journalism who are struggling to maintain their sense of self-worth.

• Newspaper ad revenues have fallen 23 percent in the last two years.
• By our calculations, nearly one out of every five journalists working for newspapers in 2001 is gone, and 2009 may be the worst year yet.
• In local television, news staffs, already too small to adequately cover their communities, are being cut at unprecedented rates; revenues fell by 7 percent in an election yetar — something unheard of — and ratings are now falling or are flat across the schedule. In network news, even the rare programs increasing their ratings are seeing revenues fall.
• The number of Americans who regularly go online for news, by one survey, jumped 19 percent in the last two years; in 2008 alone, traffic to the top 50 news sites rose 27 percent. Yet it is now all but settled that advertising revenue — the model that financed journalism for the last century — will be inadequate to do so in this one.
• The hastening audience migration to the Web means the news industry has to reinvent itself sooner than it thought.
• The recession? The numbers are only guesses, but executives estimate that the recession at least doubled the revenue losses in the news industry in 2008, perhaps more in network television.

So what are the new trends emerging in 2009? The PEJ tells us:

• The growing public debate over how to finance the news industry may well be focusing on the wrong remedies while other ideas go largely unexplored. (i.e. Stop worrying about micropayments: Try a cable TV model, or letting people buy things from local merchants through websites instead of just getting annoyed by advertisements for them)
• Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions. (About time!)
• On the Web, news organizations are focusing somewhat less on bringing audiences in and more on pushing content out.
• The concept of partnership, motivated in part by desperation, is becoming a major focus of news investment, and it may offer prospects for the financial future of news.
• Even if cable news does not keep the audience gains of 2008, its rise is accelerating another change — the elevation of minute-by-minute judgment in political journalism.
• In its campaign coverage, the press was more reactive and passive and less of an enterprising investigator of the candidates than it once was.

Here are some other findings from the report.

• The ethnic press, a growing sector the last few years, saw its audience numbers become more complicated. The circulation for most of the African American papers declined. For Spanish-language dailies, results were mixed, while Spanish television stations gained. Online, the ethnic media made more strides than in the past.
• Perhaps the bleakest news came in for the American weekly news magazine. According to a survey, less than a quarter of American adults said they read a magazine of some kind the day before — down from a third in 1994.
• Even while online ad spending grew about 14 percent through the first three quarters of the year, most of it benefited Google and other search providers. Revenue from the sale of banners and other display ads that news websites depend on increased just 4 percent, and estimates are that it declined by the fourth quarter.
• We [the PEJ] estimate that roughly 5,000 full-time newsroom jobs were cut, or about 10 percent, in 2008. By the end of 2009, the newsrooms of American daily newspapers may employ somewhere between 20 percent and 25 percent fewer people than in 2001.

In an interview with Reuters, Rosenstiel offered one big caveat. Here it is:

We do not believe that the death of American newspapers is imminent. People often get the notion from reading about their difficulties that newspapers are on the brink of extinction, and that’s going too far.

Why?

Were the industry in a different position where its audience were vanishing, that would be a much darker scenario. There are newspapers in bankruptcy, but the newspapers in those companies [that filed for bankruptcy] are making a profit. There are newspapers that are dying, but… those were papers that were already legally deemed to be failing many years ago.

Why is that so when we’re hearing about Hearst possibly closing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and San Francisco Chronicle? (And don’t forget the newspapers that are starting to deliver a print edition fewer days a week)

Because, Rosenstiel said, the recession is having an outsized effect on newspapers. Sure, they already were in a race to find a way to get their huge audiences online to pay for the content as they deal with falling advertising revenue, but the recession at least doubled the problems that they are having. Once (if) that passes, perhaps the clock will give them a second chance.

Keep an eye on:

• San Francisco Chronicle’s largest union agreed to let the Hearst Corp-owned paper cut at least 150 jobs and eliminate various benefits and rights, hoping the moves will help keep the newspaper open (Reuters)
• Yahoo hopes to have found a sustainable model for making original video online, in part by explicitly not competing with television. (New York Times)
• Tim Armstrong sends his first email to AOL employees (AllThingsDigital)

(Photo: Reuters)

Here’s a contribution to the newspaper files from my colleague Phil Wahba, born and raised in the city of Montreal:

With the Seattle Post-Intelligencer potentially closing its print edition or shutting down entirely next week, The New York Times wrote today that it is possible that a city of 3.3 million people, and other large cities, might only be able to support one paper.

Contrast that with Montreal, a city with 3.7 million people and four dailies, three French and one English.

According to the Canadian Newspaper Association, three quarters of Montrealers read a printed daily paper every week in 2007. (That rate, in line with the Canadian average, jumps to 82 percent in Winnipeg.)

Montreal’s papers are getting a reprieve from the forces shrinking the newspaper business elsewhere in North America because of the city’s fragmentation. With two major linguistic groups, French and English, and the city split between pro-Canada federalists, and sovereigntists who advocate Quebec’s separation, the newspapers have their niches. That might not last forever, though. Read on:

- The Gazette: Owned by Canwest Global Communications, is the only paper serving Montreal’s 600,000 English speakers. Its Saturday circulation was 150,000 copies in 2007. (In Canada, the largest weekly edition of newspapers comes out Saturday, unlike in the United States where Sunday is the big day.) But circulation has been dwindling for years, and with Canwest, the owner of the largest newspaper chain in Canada, considered a possible bankruptcy candidate, the Gazette’s prospects are uncertain.

- LaPresse: A broadsheet catering to Quebec’s French-speaking, pro-business readers, is read by 280,000 people every Saturday and owned by the deep-pocketed PowerCorporation. But even LaPresse has had to contend with downward drifting circulation in recent years.

- Le Journal de Montréal: The city’s answer to the New York Post, the tabloid is Montreal’s most read newspaper with Saturday circulation of 320,000 copies. But the paper, owned by Quebecor, is in the midst of a lockout because management wants to lay off 75 employees and reduce benefits to save money in the face of falling ad revenue. Quebecor also will drop its membership in the Canadian Press news cooperative (similar to The Associated Press in the United States).

- Le Devoir: The smallest of the papers, the independent Devoir caters to Quebec’s nationalist intelligentsia, but only has a circulation of 45,000. The paper has come to brink of closing several times in its history, and could conceivably suffer the same fate as the New York Sun, the small paper serving New York’s conservative readers that folded in September after investors tired of pouring money into it.

They are also contending with growing free dailies — read by 726,000 people each day– and falling ad revenues, meaning Montreal could become a one-paper town someday.