Editor & Publisher Magazine

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 1:13pm on Monday, May 11th, 2009

Michael Wolff continues to trash newspapers, Editor & Publisher reported on May 7, 2009:

"Delivering the Thursday keynote at the annual E&P/Mediaweek Interactive Conference in New Orleans today, Michael Wolff -- Vanity Fair columnist, Murdoch biographer and Newser.com founder -- again predicted the "death of newspapers," adding that he'd been having "fun" pushing the proposition in recent months to the point of being considered a "Dr. Doom."

Newspapers "not only will go away but they should go away," he said, adding that today's talk would "cap" his statements and then he would "never speak of the death of newspapers again."

He said that newspapers going away would not be a bad thing and might even be a great thing, with replacements promising to more than fill the news role and hole. The problem, he admitted, was a financial model.

"So, how to turn this into a business?" he asked. "What is the next step for all of us? The answer is uncertain." But he proposed: "To make it work we need really, really, really large audiences." What he called "television size," maybe 50 million for a few sites.

What he sees coming and needed are giant "networks" -- a few major Internet players, like the TV networks with tens of millions of users."

The full story:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003970755

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 5:12pm on Saturday, May 9th, 2009

Greg Mitchell, the highly regarded editor of Editor & Publisher, calls newspapers to account for some serious shortcomings and wonders if the business can recover, in the story "When the Watchdogs Are Asleep, We All Get Robbed" published on May 5, 2009:

"In the wake of the financial collapse, I wonder if the remaining (if relatively low) public respect for the press is gone for good. Yes, the delivery platform of the future will change, but the content still has to be credible. And now it must be said: The media blew both of the major catastrophes of our time.

I speak, of course, of the Iraq war and the financial meltdown. I wrote a book about the first, calling it "So Wrong for So Long." I could write a sequel on the second disaster, and maybe title it "So Wrong Again."

The full article:
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003969297

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 10:46pm on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

Newsroom employment has dropped to a level not seen since 1978, Editor & Publisher reported on April 16, 2009:

"Newsroom employment at newspapers has plunged 11.3% in 2008, with the industry losing some 5,900 jobs, according to the American Society of News Editors (ASNE). It's the biggest drop the organization has recorded since it first started conducting its newsroom employment survey in 1978.

The number of jobs losses more than doubled in 2008 compared with 2007 when the industry shed 2,400 jobs.

The number of newsroom jobs is now at a level last seen during the early 1980s.

However, other findings from the survey include a 21% rise year-over-year in online-only journalists to 2,300, of which 19.6% were minorities.

"The loss of journalists is a loss for democracy," Charlotte Hall, president of ANSE and editor of the Orlando Sentinel, said in a statement.

For the 2009 census, 931 dailies out of 1,405 responded to the survey."

Mondo Times editors    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 5:03pm on Thursday, December 4th, 2008

On December 3, 2008, Editor & Publisher reported that a credit rating agency has predicted that 'Several Cities Could Have No Daily Paper As Soon As 2010:'

"Newspaper and newspaper groups are likely to default on their debt and go out of business next year -- leaving "several cities" with no daily newspaper at all, Fitch Ratings says in a report on media released Wednesday.

"Fitch believes more newspapers and newspaper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010," the Chicago-based credit ratings firm said in a report on the outlook for U.S. media and entertainment.

Fitch is generally pessimistic across the board, assigning negative outlets to nearly all sectors from Yellow Pages to radio and TV and theme parks. But the newspaper industry is the most at risk of defaulting, it says.

"Much of the business risk for the media sector is likely to continue to be concentrated within the newspaper sub-sector," the report says. "Fitch expects newspaper industry revenue growth will be negative for the foreseeable future as both ad pricing and linage will be under pressure within each of the four main components of newspaper companies' revenue streams: circulation and local, classified and national advertising. Newsprint costs could rise, and it could be difficult to offset revenue declines with cost cuts."

Fitch rates the debt of two newspaper companies, The McClatchy Co. and Tribune Co. as junk, with serious possibilities of default."