What will the newspaper of the 21st century look like? Can Tribune cut its way to growth?

What can possibly be done to cheat the death spiral its papers and those of the industry faces?

Tribune COO Randy Michaels offered one solution during its latest call with lenders:

“We went around to see what we could unplug. It turns out we were still maintaining the 1998 mainframe from Times Mirror. Nothing goes into it. Nothing goes out of it. And then we unplugged it and nothing stopped. So we’ve stopped the service contract, stopped the maintenance. We’ve actually disconnected about half of the equipment on the eighth floor. We have surplus air conditioning. While that may not be material, it represents the kind of opportunity that exists here. We’re busy changing the culture to save money.”

In other words, people don’t kill newspapers. Machines kill newspapers.

But not quite. People are to be blamed as well, Michaels suggested in the same breath, especially congregations of them:

“I realized that in the first few months here, I was always busy, but not getting a lot done … Twelve people would show up in the office. We had a culture of meetings. I’m sure they were informative and helpful. Everyone could stay busy going to meetings. We’re actively campaigning against meetings if something could be handled by a conversation in the hall or a quick email. We’re having a lot fewer meetings and getting more done.”

(Photo: IBM.com / Not the actual mainframe Tribune’s cost cutters unplugged.)

Digg gained plenty of press because it let its users determine the popularity of various news articles. A new website, NewsCred, is taking a different approach: it lets readers rank the credibility of the news itself.

The site has been up since May in a private “alpha” mode  and on Tuesday launches into an official “beta” version — Web terminology for something that’s live for the public, but not necessarily in its final form.

To find out more about NewsCred, I spoke to Shafqat Islam, 27, who was born in Bangladesh but lives in Geneva, and is one of the two chiefs who runs the site. Islam is a former project manager for financial systems at Merrill Lynch (he built systems there for traders and private bankers) who runs the site with Iraj Islam (no relation), 24, and a resident of Stockholm.

I asked Shafqat Islam what the purpose of the site is. After all, there are plenty of websites out there that present news from various sources all in one place. Besides ranking sites by credibility, he said he wanted to develop a modern news service that was not too difficult for people who are not techies at heart.

“For regular customers like my friends or my family, none of them had even heard about NetVibes or knew what an RSS feed was,” he said. “We wanted to create a news aggregating site where it’s just as simple as clicking the logos of your favorite websites. It’s for mainstream news readers.”

NewsCred capitalizes on the concept of the “community” in news presentation, something that traditional news outlets and other sites have determined is crucial to keep users interested in coming back. Making the ranking of credibility a mainstay of the site is something that he thinks will add a level of involvement among users that they don’t get right now on Yahoo’s or Google’s news sites.

“We want to give news readers a platform to voice their opinion. We really believe that being a news reader is qualification enough to give your opinion on a journalist or a news article,” he said. “We also want to encourage people to discover more news sites.”

The site is mainly in English, but already provides some links to sources from other languages, and will expand its offerings to include more regular helpings of French, English and Spanish — a polyglot angle that a number of other sites lack, but that seems natural to Islam, who besides English speaks French, Bengali, Arabic and Hindi.

So far, the site is self-funded, Islam said, but venture capital funding is not out of the realm of possibility.

Media coverage of economic troubles in the past 18 months has shifted repeatedly in the last year from a narrative about mortgages to one about recession, a banking crisis and now largely gas prices, according to a new report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington, D.C.

All this is good to know, but the bigger question is why it has progressed the way it has. Fortunately for us, PEJ digs right into it.(And before the meat, here’s the methodology: The PEJ study is based on an analysis of more than 5,000 economic stories from January 1, 2007, through June 30, 2008, drawn from 1,950 hours of programming on the three major cable news cable channels, 390 on network morning and evening TV, 910 on radio, and 468 days’ editions of 21 different newspapers, and the five leading news websites, some 48 different news outlets in all.)Here’s an excerpt:

[The] connection between media coverage and economic events has often been uneven. Sometimes, coverage has lagged months behind economic activity, when the storyline was dependent on government data. Other times, coverage has tracked events erratically, as with housing and inflation. … But when the story is easier to tell, as in the case of gas prices, coverage has been closely tied to what is actually occurring in the marketplace.

The economy has been the No. 2 story so far in 2008 in the U.S. media, moving ahead of the Iraq war but behind the presidential campaign. (Economy takes 8 percent of the space available for news; Iraq takes 3 percent; The campaign takes 37 percent) Often the press coverage has lagged behind economic events, sometimes by months. … The only change in the economy that reliably predicts more press coverage in the last year has been rising gas prices.While public attention to economic news does not always translate into more coverage, more coverage of the economy can be correlated to deepening public worries.

We’re not only looking for the easy stories, we’re also constantly behind, the study finds:

One gets a sense of a news industry curious about what is occurring in the economy but with limited handles to grab on to the story. The government data are one handle, though often months behind. Congressional testimony and statements by government officials in press conferences are another. The reaction of the private sector, through the stock market, quarterly earnings reports and the financial health of companies is a third. Yet all of these may tend to leave the media narrative lagging months behind what is going on in people’s lives.

When it comes to gasoline, however, we are there with bells on:

Not only are gas prices an easy story to spot, they also represent an easy story for the media to tell and perhaps also for the public to understand. There are no confusing sets of conflicting data or complex economic jargon to parse, no indices made up of multiple elements to explain.

One last intriguing question: do our nervous-Nelly natterings make people feel worse about the economy? The study concludes:

It is neither a clear case of media reflecting nor manufacturing public worry, but there are evident correlations between increased coverage and growing public anxiety. … even if the media did not manufacture that public concern, more coverage may have reinforced those worries and confirmed for people that their fears are justified.

Conclusion: It’s OK; blame the media.

(Photo: Reuters)

Now this should be one good duel.

The New York Times is reporting that T-Mobile will be the first carrier to offer a mobile phone powered by Google’s Android software. And it will go on sale… soon!

Talk about anticipation. This is right up there with Apple’s introduction of the new iPhone, which, of course, is only appropriate since the two high-end phones will directly compete with one another in an Olympic-worthy battle. 

From the New York Times:

The phone will be made by HTC, one of the largest makers of mobile phones in the world, and is expected to go on sale in the United States before Christmas, perhaps as early as October.

The high-end phone is expected to match many of the capabilities of Apple’s iPhone and  other so-called smartphones that run software from Palm, Research in Motion, Microsoft and Nokia to access the Internet and perform computerlike functions.

The report says that the phone will have a touch screen that slides out to offer a five-row keyboard. It also says that one person who has seen the HTC phone confirms that it matched the one in a recent video on YouTube.

And here’s an early review from Silicon Alley Insider:

Someone who’s actually seen the gadget — similar, if not identical to the one in the photo — tells us that both the hardware (from handset-maker HTC) and Google’s Android software suffer from a similar problem: They’re technically powerful but not as elegant as Apple’s iPhone and OS X.

Specifically, the phone — apparently a hot item to show off in Google’s cafeterias these days — is big and bulky, and not as sleek as the iPhone. And Android, while extremely powerful, has a less-elegant, less-user-friendly interface than the iPhone (AAPL)

Does this mean it won’t sell well? Of course not. There’s a lot more variables, like device and contract pricing, software and services, etc. that will help determine its commercial success.

Keep an eye on:

• Gannett Co Inc plans to eliminate 1,000 positions from its local newspapers around the U.S. because of declining advertising and circulation revenue (Reuters)
• After the Olympic Games, the naming rights to China’s “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium go up for sale (WSJ.com)
• The release date for the sixth Harry Potter movie, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” was pushed back July 2009 from its original slot in November 2008 (Reuters) 
• U.S. video game sales rose 28 percent in July from a year earlier, boosted by continued strong demand for Nintendo’s Wii console (Reuters)

(Photo: Reuters)

The Newhouse News Service, which serves news from the nation’s capital to newspapers in the Newhouse chain, will close down after the U.S. presidential election in November, the Associated Press reported on Tuesday. Why? Its member papers can’t afford to pay for it anymore.

Here’s what the AP reported:

“The decision to close followed the direction of our clients, the editors of our papers,” said Linda Fibich, editor and Washington bureau chief. “They felt they could not afford to pay for a central Washington bureau at a time when they were steering all available resources to local coverage back at home.”

I spoke briefly to David Starr, senior editor for the Newhouse papers, who confirmed the story. “Like all the other papers in America, they’re cutting staff here and there and they felt they couldn’t support the central Washington operation at the expense of their local coverage.”

A short note about newspaper wire services:

Newhouse was one of a goodly number of wire services run among local U.S. newspaper chains. When I worked on Capitol Hill, I remember running in to reporters all the time working for similar operations run by Gannett, McClatchy, Copley and Scripps-Howard. Services like these provide valuable local angle for their papers in the reporting that they produce from Washington, D.C., and ones like McClatchy also have brought home some remarkable stories from Baghdad. These services are among the offerings that newspaper publishers are turning to as a possible place to cut costs, of course.

On a side note, Starr, who turns 86 this week, is a man with some real long-term perspective on newspapers. He started working for Newhouse’s Long Island Press (now defunct) in 1939 as a part-time copyboy and joined the company on a full-time basis as a reporter in 1942. As he observed: “I’ve been with Newhouse for a lot longer than you’ve been alive.”

(Photo: Reuters)

Tribune Co is making good on its promise to use its own reporters to break news about Tribune. It’s not the company’s fault if that news is depressing.

Chief Executive Sam Zell held a conference call with reporters at its papers on Tuesday, prompting a profusion of press coverage in Tribune-owned publications on Wednesday. Some of the most interesting excerpts showed up in The Hartford Courant:

Tribune Co. CEO Sam Zell Tuesday defended his decision to order large cuts at newspapers across the chain, including The Courant, saying that no one could have predicted the dramatic drop in advertising revenue that followed his takeover of the company seven months ago.

Zell, in a conference call with Tribune reporters, said newspapers are confronting “some of the worst advertising numbers in the history of the world,” and said the only alternative to eliminating employees and cutting the size of the papers would be to allow the businesses to fail.

“The reality is, what’s my choice?” Zell asked. “Do I try and create a business that can be viable and preserve two-thirds of the jobs? Or do I let all 100 percent of them go by the wayside because I’m not willing to confront the realities of the environment?”

What about his desire, expressed earlier this year, that he not make the business all about cutting jobs?

“I don’t believe it’s fair to hold me to the sentence that I expressed when I was [in Hartford] six months ago,” Zell said. “I don’t know that anybody has a frame of reference on advertising revenue destruction that, in effect, is as bad as this, going all the way back to the Depression. So I think the circumstances are dramatically worse than anyone could have possibly predicted.”

More coverage here:

The Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania)

Newsday (Long Island, New York)

Chicago Tribune

The Sun (Baltimore, Maryland)

For reporters who cover Tribune, this is all very interesting stuff. Here’s hoping cost cuts don’t force those papers to cut the Tribune beat.

(Photo: Reuters)

The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism just published a 36-page study called “The Changing Newsroom: What is Being Gained and What is Being Lost in America’s Daily Newspapers?” The upshot? This little number and this one would make good visual analogs.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction:

“Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008. It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.”

And financially speaking:

“Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years.”

The next 35 pages go into more depth on this, and even if you think you’ve read this news before, the Project offers a good deal of insight because of in-person interviews with journalist Tyler Marshall that were conducted in late 2007 and early 2008. It also was based on a survey sent to the editors of 1,217 daily newspapers (only 259 responded).

Here are what the PEJ considers its key findings. I’ll offer some of the nuggets that I found interesting afterward:

• Metro papers are suffering more than smaller papers.

• U.S. papers are narrowing their reach and their ambitions and becoming niche reads, particularly by cutting back on overseas, national and business news.
• Newsroom culture is increasingly dominated by the young, who are hungry and energetic, but lack the wisdom of their elders. Editors describe the change as exciting, extraordinary, nerve-wracking and tumultuous.
• Newspaper websites=hope. They also=fear. They offer lots of advantages, but also require too much energy to produce material of limited or questionable value.

Here are the other findings that jumped out in the study, with handy headings provided by Media File:

Sometimes travel pays. Just not all the time.

• Larger papers have closed most of their overseas bureaus, but in some cases, that’s a defense against pack journalism. “The Philadelphia Inquirer closed the last of its foreign bureaus in November 2006, yet it still maintains money in its editorial budget for staff foreign travel. Inquirer Editor Bill Marimow said this money is tapped when editors conclude a staff reporter can add significant value to a story.”

Cut Iraq if you must, but do NOT mess with my crossword.

• These sorts of cuts have frequently been met with intense reader protest… Conversely, more draconian measures, such as cutting off foreign news, eliminating or merging features sections, laying off the staff science writer or downsizing the editorial pages have produced comparatively modest reader reaction.

Sometimes cutting is not starving.

• “The editor of a large metro daily said he still sent his paper’s movie critic to cover out-of-town film festivals, but now limited the assignment to only a few days instead of the full event. ‘We still have the coverage,’ this editor said. ‘But instead of the full ten days, we’ll go for five.’”

Multitask or die.

• “Reporters who once concentrated on one beat or specialty now frequently have two or three. … In interviews, editors of newspapers that had undergone significant newsroom cuts repeatedly found themselves hard-pressed to name beats that had been abandoned completely, but they agreed the coverage had become thinner and, because of that, its quality had diminished.”

This story looks accurate. Let’s run it.

• “The ranks of editors who check stories prior to publication are thinning. Four out of ten newspapers reported that they have reduced the number of copy editors in the last three years, while just 12 percent have increased.”

Drunk on ink, dry online.

• “Convincing newspaper advertising sales staff to become more active in selling to the web is also viewed as an essential, overdue step… In interviews, newsroom executives complained that advertising departments traditionally have been far more resistant than their editorial counterparts to the changes brought by the Internet age.” That’s because 90 percent of Internet revenue is still print, so that’s where the big deals are.

Grab an oar, start rowing.

• “Fully 97 percent of editors responding to the survey said they were active, at least to some degree, in the search to develop new revenue streams.” In other words, the historical wall between news coverage and selling ads is dissolving. More than half of newsroom editors told the PEJ that they were unconcerned, or at least not very concerned, about this.

Editors are insane.

• “Many of the editors express a remarkable — at times almost eerie — optimism despite the adversities they have faced.”

(Photo: Lightning strikes the New York Times building. Courtesy: Reuters)

Here’s a hot one we found on the Romenesko journalism business blog: A reader is suing The News & Observer, McClatchy’s paper in Raleigh, North Carolina, for cutting staff and the size of the paper.

Keith Hempstead, a Durham lawyer, filed the suit last month in Wake Superior Court. He says he renewed his subscription in May just before the paper announced on June 16 the layoffs of 70 staff members and cuts in news pages. The paper, he says, is now not worth what he signed up for and therefore the cuts breached the paper’s contract with him.

Hempstead — a former reporter at the Fayetteville Observer — told Friedman that he likes the paper, but hates all the staff cuts that he says hurts their quality and is antithetical to the way the newspaper business ought to be run. He is seeking unspecified damages and attorneys’ fees, but added that he’s in it for the love, not the money.

N&O Executive Editor John Drescher has quite the witty riposte:

“We’ve had some really good papers recently, and they’re worth more than the 36 cents a day that Mr. Hempstead is paying us,” Drescher said.”In fact, he owes me money,” Drescher continued. “So when he gets a lawyer, he can work with my lawyer and figure out how much he’s going to pay me for the excellent coverage he’s been getting recently.”

It may be nothing more than a way to raise awareness, but if Hempstead wins, he may end up killing the paper.

McClatchy is cutting about 10 percent of its 14,000-strong staff in a bid to trim costs as advertising revenue, the lifeblood of its business, declines. Still, the stock market is killing the company and other newspapers. How badly? Today, the stock is down 5 percent. At $5.05, it’s at half the price it was three months ago, and has lost 81 percent of its value in the past year. You could argue that they need every penny they have at this point.

One of the top parlor games among undertakers reporters covering the newspaper business is figuring out who would buy The Boston Globe if The New York Times Co ever decided to sell it.

That game might get harder to play, now that the top candidate is out of the running. Here is the Globe’s competitor, the Boston Herald, with the scoop (see the second item):

A group of Boston businessmen that included Connors and former GE chief Jack Welch had “expressed interest” in negotiating with the New York Times Co. to buy the Globe. Welch and Connors were willing to pay between $500 and $600 million, but the Times wasn’t interested.

…
Connors told MediaBiz he’s retired and Welch is showing signs that he wants to spend more time in New York. “I’m fully retired now and engaged in a lot of philanthropy,” Connors said, “and the industry hasn’t gotten any healthier.”

Rack up Connors and Welch with Cheryl Chase, whose family-owned real estate development firm Chase Enterprises had been the only group to step forward to buttonhole Tribune Co for the Hartford Courant. She told Reuters in May that the business isn’t good enough to make a purchase worthwhile.

Then look at the other development in newspaper M&A this week: Rupert Murdoch said that News Corp unit Dow Jones & Co would sell the remaining local papers in the Ottaway chain, but those papers reported that he’s pulling back.

Conclusion: You know things are bad in the newspaper business when it’s cheaper to keep the albatross.

(Photo: Reuters)

So Tribune Co is cutting jobs at The Sun in Baltimore and Hartford Courant.

Not to sound callous, but by this point should anyone be surprised by news that a publisher is getting rid of jobs? After all, this is shaping up to be one of the worst years in memory for the newspaper business.

The upshot: The Sun will lose 100 jobs, 60 of them in the newsroom, and the Courant will cut about 60 jobs. (Don’t forget, Tribune is also cutting jobs at the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune)

But it’s not just Tribune. It seems everyone is cutting jobs as advertising revenue plunges thanks to the one-two combination of a weak economy and competition from the Internet for marketing dollars.

Here’s what the union had to say about Tribune’s cuts:

“Baltimore Sun employees are being punished for Tribune’s mismanagement,” Cet Parks, chief negotiator for the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, said in a statement. “Tribune’s answer to solving declining circulation and readership is to slash employees from the payroll and cut the news hole, salaries and benefits.”

Perhaps that is their answer — but is there a better one out there? So far, nobody seems to have found one.

Keep an eye on:

• WPP Group chief Sir Martin Sorrell is warning that Google is trying to do an end-run around ad agencies. But French rival Publicis is keen to partner with the search giant - and just about anyone else in the online realm (NY Post)
• Video games are known to improve hand-eye coordination but can they help someone quit smoking or lose weight? (Reuters)
• NBC has settled a lawsuit filed by the family of a man who killed himself when confronted with cameras for the documentary series “To Catch a Predator” (NY Times)
• It costs less to run run ads during “The Office” on Hulu than NBC.com. But keep in mind you can’t buy individual shows on Hulu, just demographics across a number of shows (Silicon Alley Insider)

(Reuters photo of Tribune Tower)