This is an edited version of Rupert Murdoch's Boyer Lecture, The Future of Newspapers: Moving Beyond Dead Trees.

TOO many journalists seem to take a perverse pleasure in ruminating on their pending demise. I know industries that are today facing stiff new competition from the internet: banks, retailers, phone companies and so on. But these sectors also see the internet as an extraordinary opportunity. But among our journalistic friends are some misguided cynics who are too busy writing their own obituary to be excited by the opportunity.

Self-pity is never pretty. And sometimes it even starts in journalism school, some of which are perpetuating the pessimism of their tribal elders. But I have a very different view.

Unlike the doom and gloomers, I believe that newspapers will reach new heights. In the 21st century, people are hungrier for information than ever. And they have more sources of information than ever.

Amid these many diverse and competing voices, readers want what they've always wanted: a source they can trust. That has always been the role of great newspapers in the past. And that role will make newspapers great in the future.

If you discuss the future with newspapermen, you will find that too many think that our business is only physical newspapers. I like the look and feel of newsprint as much as anyone. But our real business isn't printing on dead trees. It's giving our readers great journalism and great judgment.

It's true that in the coming decades the printed versions of some newspapers will lose circulation. But if papers provide readers with news they can trust, we'll see gains in circulation: on our web pages, through our RSS feeds, in emails delivering customised news and advertising, to mobile phones.

In short, we are moving from news papers to news brands. For all of my working life, I have believed that there is a social and commercial value in delivering accurate news and information in a cheap and timely way. In this coming century, the form of delivery may change, but the potential audience for our content will multiply many times over.

The news business is very personal for me. For more than a half century, newspapers have been at the heart of my business. If I am sceptical about the pessimists today, it's because of a simple reason: I have heard their morose soothsaying many times before.

The challenges are real. There will probably never be a paperless office, but young people are starting paperless homes. Traditional sources of revenue -- such as classifieds -- are drying up, putting pressure on the business model. And journalists face new competition from alternative sources of news and information.

So we have a steady stream of stories such as The Economist covers declaring that "newspapers are now an endangered species". That's quite ironic coming from a successful and growing magazine that likes to describe itself as "a newspaper".

My summary of the way some of the established media has responded to the internet is this: it's not newspapers that might become obsolete. It's some of the editors, reporters and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper's most precious asset: the bond with its readers.

When I was growing up, this was the key lesson my father impressed on me. If you were an owner, the best thing you could do was to hire editors who looked out for your readers' interests and gave these readers good, honest reporting on issues that mattered most to them. In return, you would be rewarded with trust and loyalty you could take to the bank.

Over many decades in newspapers, I have been privileged to witness history being made and printed almost every night. Today I'd like to talk about what these experiences have taught me and why they give me confidence about the future.

My intent is to use my experience to illuminate the way we need to respond to the two most serious challenges facing newspapers today. The first is the competition that is coming from new technology, especially the internet.

The more serious challenge is the complacency and condescension that festers at the heart of some newsrooms. The complacency stems from having enjoyed a monopoly and now finding they have to compete for an audience they once took for granted.

The condescension that many show their readers is an even bigger problem. It takes no special genius to point out that if you are contemptuous of your customers, you are going to have a hard time getting them to buy your product. Newspapers are no exception.

I became an editor and owner well before I had planned. It happened when my father died and I was called home from Oxford. That was how I found myself a newspaper proprietor at the age of 22.

I was so young and so new to the business, when I pulled my car into the lot on my firstday, the garage attendant admonished me, "Hey, sonny, you can't park here."

That paper was (Adelaide's) The News. Its newsroom was a noisy place. But it was noise with purpose. The chattering and pounding of typewriter keys reached a crescendo in the minutes before a deadline that was stretched beyond breaking point by gun reporters determined to get the latest, freshest version of a story.

That background music created an urgency all of its own. When the presses began to run, everyone in the building felt the rumble. And when the presses were late, the journalists felt me rumble.

READERS want news as much as they ever did. Today The Times of London is read by a diverse global audience of 26 million people each month. That is an audience larger than the entire population of Australia, an audience whose sheer size is beyond the comprehension and ambitions of its founders in 1785.

That single statistic tells you that there is a discerning audience for news. The operative word is discerning. To compete today, you can't offer the old one-size-fits-all approach to news.

The defining digital trend in content is the increasing sophistication of search. You can already customise your news flow, whether by country, company or subject.

A decade from now, the offerings will be even more sophisticated. You will be able to satisfy your unique interests and search for unique content.

After all, a female university student in Malaysia is not going to have the same interests as a 60-year-old Manhattan executive. Closer to home, your teenage son is not going to have the same interests as your mother. The challenge is to use a newspaper's brand while allowing readers to personalise the news for themselves, and then deliver it in the ways that they want.

This is what we are trying to do at The Wall Street Journal. The Journal has the advantage of having a very loyal readership -- a brand known for quality -- and editors who take the readers and their interests seriously. This helps explain why the Journal continues to defy industry trends.

Of the 10 largest papers in the US, the Journal is the only one to have grown its paid subscriptions last year.

At the same time, we intend to make our mark on the digital frontier. The Journal is already the only US newspaper that makes real money online.

One reason for this is a growing global demand for business news and for accurate news. Integrity is not just a characteristic of our company, it is a selling point.

One way we are planning to take advantage of online opportunities is by offering three tiers of content. The first will be the news that we put online free. The second will be available for those who subscribe to wsj.com. And the third will be a premium service, designed to give its customers the ability to customise high-end financial news and analysis from around the world.

In all we do, we're going to deliver it in ways that best fit our readers' preferences: on web pages they can access from home or work, on still-evolving inventions such as Amazon's Kindle (a wireless book reader), as well as on (mobile) phones or BlackBerrys.

I do not claim to have all the answers. Given the realities of modern technology, this very radio address can be sliced and digitally diced. It can be accessed in a day or a month or a decade. And I can rightly be held to account in perpetuity for the points on which I am proven wrong, as well as mocked for my inability to see just how much more different the world had become.

But I don't think I will be proven wrong on one point. The newspaper, or a very close electronic cousin, will always be around. It may not be thrown on your front doorstep the way it is today. But the thud it makes as it lands will continue to echo across society and the world.

Published in The Australian
Thanks to Adrian Monck for the link.

As a user, I love websites that point me helpfully in the direction of more information on the topic I'm reading about - maps, documents, background articles, related blog posts/news stories, definitions, how-tos, Wikipedia articles on economic theories etc.

News sites are often reluctant, however, to point people away from their websites, preferring to link to previous stories on their own site or, at a pinch, an external government document.

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has been having a blitz on the value he sees for news organisations in linking out. He's published a string of posts on the subject recently and is also tied up with Publish2.0, a tool for link journalism which lets you save links (related to your round, say), and share and publish those links. It looks interesting.




















In the spirit of link journalism, then, here are a bunch from my recent reading...

The first of Scott's recent posts to catch my eye was this one:

There are two main reasons why news sites are reluctant to send readers away by linking to third-party content. First, you shouldn’t send people away or else they won’t come back to your site. Second, a page with links that sends people away has low engagement, which doesn’t serve advertisers well. But if you actually look at the data, both of these assumptions are completely wrong.

How Newspapers Abdicated the Front Page's Influence and How They Can Get it Back by Linking

The front page of the newspaper used to set the news agenda. Extra, Extra, read all about it! But that influence has steadily waned through the TV and Cable News era, and the web now threatens to obliterate it entirely. So who sets the news agenda now?

Link Journalism in Action: Vols Game Coverage Roundup Most Viewed and Commented on GoVolsXtra.com

Yeah, fine, so Drudge gets lots of traffic for links, but we’re not Drudge, so it won’t work for our news site, right? Wrong. Here’s a case example from Knoxnews.com’s sports site GoVolsXtra.com.This roundup of links to coverage and commentary on the Vols’ loss to Florida was the MOST VIEWED article today on GoVolsXtra.com.

Why Every News Site Should Put a Continuously Updated News Aggregation on the Homepage

My post on Drudge beating all other news sites on engagement was an aha for many, which is interesting because the lesson of Drudge has been around for a decade. But the lessons of web publishing are all so utterly counterintuitive that I suppose they take a while to sink in.

Mainstream News Organizations Entering the Web's Link Economy Will Shift the Balance of Power and Wealth

The New York Times published an article this week about mainstream news organizations embracing link journalism and news aggregation. Gawker and others scoffed that they are late to the game, which they are, but that misses (predictably) the BIG story.

Guardian Launches Full RSS Feeds, First Media Company Not To Suppress RSS Adoption

And you can't go pass Jeff Jarvis for more insight into the link economy.

The link economy v. the content economy

Links can be exploited and monetized; get links and you can grab audience and show ads and make money. Content is becoming a cost burden, what you have to have to get the links, but in and of itself, content can’t draw value without an audience, without links.

The imperative of the link economy

1. All content must be transparent: open on the web with permanent links so it can receive links. It’s not content until it’s linked.

2. The recipient of links is the party responsible for monetizing the audience they bring. In the old content-economy model of syndication, the creator sells content to another and the one who syndicates has to come up with the ad or circulation revenue sufficient to pay for it. Now in the link economy, it’s reversed: When you get traffic, you need to figure out how to benefit from it. As Doc Searls said at the event: this is a shift from “making money with” to “making money because.”

3. Links are a key to efficiency. In other words: Do what you do best and link to the rest.

It's a link economy, stupid

In part two of his seminar to the Guardian, as part of the Future of Journalism series, Jeff Jarvis argues that links are worth more than content. (Guardian video)

The question of whether or not newspapers are being bold enough in their efforts to adapt to the new publishing environment is one that comes up a lot.

I don't see evidence of particularly bold thinking in New Zealand yet, although to be fair papers here have a bit more leeway than their overseas counterparts given this is a less competitive market with relatively low broadband uptake (limiting, for the time being, the dominance of the web in a number of regions, especially rural).

This special report from Editor&Publisher looks at how US newspapers are adapting (regional as well as metro) and canvasses opinion on whether they're going far enough.

It's a nice wrap of the current market and hits on a few interesting points. Of particular interest to me was that while some newspapers are publising slimmer editions on slow days, others are cutting out slow days altogether. I've pulled out a few paragraphs below.

I once read a prediction, where I can't remember, that over time a lot of newspapers would evolve into weekly publications with daily news published on their websites. This has long struck me as a likely scenario. Is this the beginning of that process?

Tim McGuire, [a change expert and the Frank Russell Chair for the business of journalism at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications,] says his advice for newspapers now is to radically rethink what the newspaper looks like day to day.

Monday's paper might be just 16 pages, covering more sports than news. Tuesday, another loser for most dailies, might even drop sports. The Sunday paper would be almost unchanged, the product for mass distribution not only of ad inserts but as a "convener" of the whole community to have a conversation. And to get everybody in the door, he suggests dramatically lowering the price of that fat Sunday paper.

Some newspapers are already going the route of shrinkage. The San Jose Mercury News, for instance, is in the process of downsizing its Monday and Tuesday editions. "We are looking at trying to tighten up stories and see how we can convey more information in less space," says Editor/Vice President David J. Butler.

The Salt Lake Tribune, another MediaNews Group Inc. paper, is also greeting the beginning of the workweek with smaller papers, something Editor Nancy Conway says is a positive step: "The key is not to have fewer stories; the vision is to make them smaller."

The time could be ripe for fulfilling a longtime fantasy of some publishers — eliminating dog days like Monday, Tuesday, and Saturday. It's fueled by the obvious fact that in the U.S., at least, newspapers generally lose money during the week and coin it on Fridays and Sundays, says INMA's executive director Earl Wilkinson: "I know of newspapers that for 20 years have had blueprints for killing days of the week."

In recent weeks, two small GateHouse Media Inc.-owned dailies in Illinois actually implemented those plans. Tony Scott, publisher of the Daily Review Atlas in Monmouth, Ill., told readers that the paper had been thinking about eliminating Mondays for at least two years, and were finally pushed to do it by newsprint costs that soared 45% year-over-year and rising gas prices. Its sibling Kewanee (Ill.) Star Courier also dropped Mondays.

In Wisconsin, the Forum Communications-owned Daily Telegram in Superior went even further, announcing in July that come September, it was dropping four of its six publishing days while shifting daily reporting to its Web site. In making the decision to switch to a twice-weekly, paid-circ model, Publisher Ken Browall says all options were open for the 5,500-circ evening daily — from turning tabloid to going to free distribution.

INMA's Wilkinson is skeptical that larger-circulation newspapers will actually pull the trigger on the idea of eliminating Mondays. But Alan Jacobson, president and CEO of Brass Tacks Design, thinks it could become as widespread an industry practice as narrowing web widths.

"Staffing a newsroom seven days a week has been tough," he says. Newspapers, Jacobson figures, will drop a day following the same logic many papers are using in lopping off feature sections for low-circ days. "Reporters spend a lot of time on those feature stories," he says. "You eliminate that section, and you just bought yourself three days of reporting time — if you still have that reporter."

From the Mastering Multimedia blog, in a post about the quality versus quantity debate, comes a list of 10 questions to ask yourself about how you're using video on your news website.

It's an instructive list, I think, and the post's worth a read too.

• What is the overall vision for video in your newsroom?
• Why are you doing video in the first place?
• Is quality video valuable to your viewers?
• Has video gained traction on your website over time? If not, why?
• Has your paper invested in training that empowers your video producers to be able to tell and edit a story effectively?
• Do you have (need) a web-savvy management structure in place to filter out bad video ideas and is an advocate for video based storytelling?
• If you are producing lots of video, do you have a website that showcases this valued web-only content?
• Can viewers find your videos quickly if they land on story page and not of the home page?
• Can lower levels of video quality be acceptable if they meet a high news value bar?
• Should small papers with dwindling resources really be adding poorly produced video to their already bleak shovelware websites?
  

For the nostalgics among you, here's a cracker of an educational video from the days when women worked on the social pages, typesetters ruled, sub-editors wore visors and syndicated copy was mimeographed.

Not at all surprised to read tonight that ReadWriteWeb has done a deal with the New York Times to provide syndicated technology stories.

It's a terrific achievement for ReadWriteWeb, showing it's well and truly come of age as an authoritative source of technology news. And it's a smart move by the New York Times to accept it can't be all things to all technology readers and join forces with another supplier.

The deal follows a similar one a couple of months ago between the Washington Post and Techcrunch.

This is how ReadWriteWeb announced it:

The New York Times announced today that it will syndicate ReadWriteWeb content, as part of a re-designed Technology section on its website. Over the coming weeks you will see ReadWriteWeb content incorporated into the Technology section front.

This is great news for us, because it brings our brand of web technology news, reviews and analysis to a much wider audience. It also means that the innovative and often little known startups we write about daily get a chance to be seen in a mainstream publication. The New York Times has a reputation for quality and in-depth journalism, attributes that we strive for on ReadWriteWeb - so we're excited about this partnership.

This is also further vindication that blogs are increasingly being accepted as mainstream news and analysis providers. Indeed the NYT is beefing up its own tech blog, Bits - it's being "more prominently displayed, highlighting its role as the main spot to find breaking tech news and analysis on NYTimes.com."

Along with ReadWriteWeb, The New York Times will also syndicate content from our friends at VentureBeat and GigaOm. The New York Times re-design is now live, although syndicated content won't go live until October.

Congratulations all round.

I've been meaning to point to this for a while. It's a post from Justin Williams, workflow guru and assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group in the UK.

He talks about the decline of the role of sub-editors, or rather an evolutionary blurring of the lines between what a sub, a news editor, commissioning editor and web editor does.

"If I was a reporter now and an old hand sidled up to me and suggested that I might like to retrain as a sub, I’d run a mile. And as for joining one of the nationals’ subbing schemes for graduate trainees … fugeddaboutit."

And he makes some recommendations for how working and would-be sub-editors can start updating their skill sets. Here's a few....

1. Accept that your job is not a long-term or even a medium-term proposition. You’ll find that acceptance of reality is an enormously liberating thing.
2. If subs start being co-opted onto the newsdesk to work with the editors, hassle and cajole whoever does your rotas to be given the same chance. If this is happening, it won’t be an experiment, merely the start of a process which will see the two roles - news editor and sub - become one and the same.
3. Learn to use your company’s content management system (CMS). Do this in your own time if you’re not offered formal training. Come in a couple of hours early for a week. It’s a blast.
4. Learn about search engine optimisation (SEO). Become an expert on it. Constantly check the most popular section on Google News to see what’s playing well. Use Wordtracker to find the most-searched-for terms and tell the reporters and the desk when they’re getting it wrong.
5. Sign up to Digg, Reddit and six or seven of the other aggregators and start seeding your website’s content. Build networks of friends on the aggregators. Make sure you seed plenty of other stufff, too - you’ll find that other seeders will ignore you if you only propagate one site’s content.

This is worth a read. It gives a good insight into current thinking at the Telegraph, one of the more pioneering media groups in the area of web-first publishing and newsroom integration, and raises plenty of grounds for discussion.

It's a question newspaper sites eventually face: do we or don't we charge for access to our archives? Assuming, of course, that they have a searchable archive.

Times Online, the website of the Times newspaper in the UK, launched its archive in June on a free trial basis and has just announced it is putting much of it behind a paywall, according to the Guardian:

An email to users described the first three months of the archive as the "free introductory period" and explained that although featured articles on the archive homepage would remain free, access will be charged at £4.95 for one day, £14.95 for one month and £74.95 for one year.

"On Thursday September 18, the free introductory period will end, so we're writing to let you know how you can continue to enjoy this wonderful resource," Times Online told its readers.

"All the featured content on our archive home page and on Times Online will remain free to view, but if you wish to search the archive there will be a charge to view the results."

Times Online editor-in-chief Anne Spackman said,"The trial allowed us to see what [kind of content] people were coming in for."

The archive attracts around 80,000 unique users each month, she said, with each visitor accessing between seven and eight pages on average.

Spackman said between 3,000 and 5,000 articles would be available for free at any one time, linked from an index page that connects archive stories with current events, such as the Wall Street crash.

"The only people who will be paying are the people pursuing a personal journey," said Spackman, adding that the new rates for the archive would be less than the Guardian with special offers for existing newspaper subscribers.

The 200-year archive includes news stories from 1785 to 1985 including the Battle of Waterloo, the arrival of convicts at Botany Bay and the execution of Marie Antoinette, all in the original page layout.

Times Online, as with other online newspapers, has had to decide whether to monetise its extensive archive by opening pages for free and relying on advertising, or whether to stick to traditional business-to-business revenues from libraries.

Introducing paid access to consumers means sites can preserve their existing contracts with library firms, while keeping the service available to consumers and is likely to be seen as a more stable revenue stream in the current economic climate.

The move follows a major announcement by Google last week, which is working with 100 newspaper partners, mostly in the US, to digitise and index their archives.

I like Jack Shafer and this piece of his has some real resonance for me. He talks about how newspapers traditionally offered readers a form of social currency (explained more below) that's increasingly being lost to social networks such as Facebook.

Not that long ago, the daily newspaper was an indispensable coiner of social currency, and it gave its readers piles of the stuff in each edition. The phrase, which comes from sociology, is often used to describe the information we acquire and then trade—or give away—to start, maintain, and nurture relationships with our fellow humans.

Take, for instance, the voluminous results of newspaper sports pages. Terrific for sports fans, of course, but the sports pages have been used to grease sales calls, break ice on first dates, and fuel water-cooler bonding for a century. Even folks who don't care for sports skimmed the sports pages for a little something about the games and athletes so they could engage in essential small-talk.

For as long as anybody can remember, the newspaper has been the primary info-hub through which people interacted. Oh, people might have talked to the shoe-shine man or their broker about what they heard on the radio or saw on television, but nothing could beat the newspaper as a source for socially lubricating conversation. How many times have you heard a conversation start, "Didja see that article ..."?

... Other institutions do far better jobs at issuing social currency these days. What is Facebook but the Federal Reserve Bank of social currency? And it's all social currency you can use! Like cocktail chatter, a Facebook posting—be it a link, a list, a photo, or travel plans—conveys the message, I am here. Listen to me.

A well-executed Facebook presence, like a superb pontification at the bar or a great phone-in to sports talk radio, demonstrates one's status within one's existing social network. If skillfully wielded, a Facebook page can increase a person's status by attracting "cooler" or more influential friends. These days, you can't raise your status more than a bump by carrying the Wall Street Journal under your arm.

Shafer also points to a great post from UK blogger Adrian Monck who lays the blame for the decline of newspapers squarely at the door of lifestyle changes (as opposed to anything inherently wrong with the way journalism is being carried out):

The crops did not fail because we offended the gods.

The problems journalists are confronting are to do with the changing social habits of people who once purchased newspapers and were thus appealing to advertisers.

I agree with Adrian and think his post is well worth a read.

I enjoyed this rant from music blog The Lefsetz Letter which has a go at newspaper executives who are "online ignorant, even if they can speak the language, they’ve got no insight, because they don’t utilize the damn thing". (Thanks to Charlie Barthold for the link)

He starts by noting how cross newspaper executives are with the likes of TradeMe and CraigsList for stealing their lucrative classified ads (Fairfax bought TradeMe to get them back again, although whether they're properly leveraging the deal is another story).

Then he goes on to talk about reading more news than ever online:

Yes, today’s supposedly ignorant younger generation? Its members are more up on what’s happening in the world than you ever were at that age. Because the news is at their fingertips. Online. Updated, in depth, constantly. Whereas the newspaper is firm, calcified as of yesterday.

Actually, you can read the newspapers today. On the west coast, the "New York Times" and "Wall Street Journal" go live, in their entirety, at 9 PM. The "Los Angeles Times" at midnight. I get all three physical newspapers, but not for breaking news, only secondary stories. Breaking news lives on the Web. Just like twenty four hour cable news killed network news, the Net is killing newspapers.

And newspapers cannot respond. Oh, they’ve got the right, just not the capability. Online custom states the newest story is first, and in descending order are all the old stories. None of the newspaper sites utilize this structure. They all look a bit like the physical newspaper. Give me the breaking news at the top. Give me clickable sections on the left. The newspaper giants are proving to me, just like their record company brethren, that they’re online ignorant, even if they can speak the language, they’ve got no insight, because they don’t utilize the damn thing.

And now papers have bloggers on their sites. I’ve got to ask you… When I can go directly to most bloggers’ pages, do you really think I’m going to dig down deep on a newspaper’s site to find some blog written by some old school fart beholden to the old game?

Boiling that down to a few points... do you agree that:

1. Young people are more informed than previous generations because they have news at their fingertips?
2. Newspaper websites are modelled too much on newspapers and not enough on web usability
3. Newspaper executives don't spend much time online so they don't 'get it'
4. Newspaper blogs are well and good but are effectively buried and difficult to find

My answers would be:

1. Not sure, but I'd like to think so
2. Yes they are. They need to evolve and quickly.
3. Absolutely true. If you only log on for email and Google there's no way you can understand the nature of the threat/opportunity the web is bringing to your doorstep
4. Yeah, they're buried and that could be improved. Also true that some aren't worth bothering with. But some are and it's a step in the right direction - if nothing else the individuals who are blogging will become more web-savvy and understand the threat/opportunity facing the company they work for.

Via Silicon Alley Insider:

In 1975, if someone died you would have read about it in the paper - having scanned the death notices (along with births, engagements and weddings) for familiar names.

But what about in 2008? I know my Mum used to check the death notices before scanning the headlines and doing the crossword and I think my aunties do too.

But I don't and nor do many of my friends (a lot don't buy newspapers anymore). Nor do any of the colleagues and students I canvassed yesterday.

I'd say we're not alone. My Mum died a few weeks ago and we got a few kind phone calls after the fact from people who'd heard she was sick and wondered how she was doing.

Close friends and immediate family get a phone call. But if my extended circle of friends and colleagues don't check death notices, how are they going to know I've died?

I remain relentlessly optimistic about the future of journalism, believing that it will outlive its current institutions and models - and I'm not alone in this judging by a few conversations I've stumbled across online recently (on Twitter and blog comments - too hard to link to just now).

For a start, I still read a lot of quality journalism. It's just that much of it is in non-fiction paperbacks, specialist magazines and blogs. Nothing wrong with that.

But in case you were in any doubt that our current, familiar news institutions - daily newspapers, for example - were in a spot of bother, here's the latest round up of gloom that landed in my inbox from the INMA (International Newsmedia Marketing Association).

• A.H. Belo to Cut 500 Jobs Across Its Newspapers
• Detroit Media Partnership Decides Against Layoffs When Buyout Offer Fails to Meet Its Goals, to Seek Cost Savings Elsewhere
• Telegraph Media Group Plans to Move Printing Work to News International's Plants Could Cost Up to 140 Jobs at Its Own Facilities
• Associated Press Reduces Rate Structure, Saving Member Newspapers Roughly US$21 Million in Fees
• Survivability Behind the Cuts at the Tribune Company as the Company Struggles With Steep Drop in Revenue
• Copley Press Exploring Sale of the San Diego Union-Tribune
• Newspaper Publisher Mecom May Sell Off Its Norwegian Unit, Edda Media
• Northcliffe Media Revenues Drop 7% in 2008's 2nd Quarter
• New York Times Company Profits Slip 82% in 2nd Quarter as the Print Advertising Market Declines
• Metro International Planning Expansion in Latin America, Asia, and Russia as the Economy Cools in North America and Western Europe
• Revenues Grew at the Daily Mail and General Trust's Business-to-Business Division in 2nd Quarter 2008, Offsetting Slipping Advertising Income at Its Publishing Arm

This piece about Harold Evans is a nice read (thanks to Chris Bourke for the link).

The former UK Sunday Times editor whose books on editing, typography and layout inspired a couple of generations of journalists/designers in the UK and beyond, talked to the Independent on Sunday about newspaper design, now and then.

A couple of key quotes:

"...don't dismiss the classic news photograph in black and white; don't exaggerate the use of colour; and do think, as well as the visual appearance, 'What the hell is it saying?'"

"Design can't be considered without the context, the information. Design is absolutely no substitute for content."

From a Washington Post media piece about still-declining ad revenue and "hiring freezes turned to buyouts and then to layoffs" come these two rather grim quotes:

“Never in my most bearish dreams six months ago did I think we’d be talking about negative 15 percent numbers against weak comps,” said Peter S. Appert, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. “I think the probability is very high that there will be a number of examples of individual newspapers and newspaper companies that fall into a loss position. And I think it’s inevitable that there will be closures in this industry, and maybe bankruptcies.”

Slightly less bearish but no cheerier:

Since the fall, when Media General, the owner of a major newspaper chain in the South, set its 2008 budget, “We have pulled our thinking down twice with respect to revenue,” said Marshall N. Morton, the chief executive.

Over the next few years, he predicted, “There’s got to be some assimilation,” with some major American newspapers going out of business or merging. At the corporate level, he said, “I would guess that rather than bankruptcies, you’d see combinations.”

I read the story in a newsletter sent out by the INMA, The International Newsmedia Marketing Association, who can usually be relied on for good news about newspapers even while everyone else is muttering dire predictions. But it appeared alongside a slew of stories about cuts in newspapers in the US:

• Washington State's Olympian to Lay Off 17 Employees as Part of Corporate Parent McClatchy's Cutback Drive
• 
  
• Outsourcing of Printing Work at the Boston Herald to Lead to the Lay Off of 130 to 160 Workers
• 
  
• Germany's Berliner Zeitung Cutting 30 Positions as Part of Cost-Saving Programme
• 
  
• News Corporation to Merge Marketing, Advertising, Online, and Circulation Functions of the Times and the Sun
• 
  
• Restructuring at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to Cost 21 Jobs in the Information Technology Department
• 
  
• Oregon's Register-Guard Cutting 30 Jobs Following Budget Shortfalls
• 
  
• North Carolina's News & Observer Cutting 70 Jobs and to Jointly Produce Sports, Politics, and Features With the Charlotte Observer
• 
  
• Journal Register Said to be Considering Sale or Outside Investment
  
• 
  
• Reorganisation of Editorial, Administrative, and Sales Roles at Central Counties Newspapers in the UK Could Cost Up to 34 Jobs
• 
  
• Newsquest Cutting 8 Editorial Jobs at the York Press and the Gazette and Herald

Even in Taiwan:

• Taiwan's China Times to Cut Staff and Page Count as It Deals With Difficult Market Conditions

Just in case you were in any doubt that the newspaper business is in trouble.

The online consumption of newspapers has risen by 20% in the last year and by 100% over the last three years, according to research released at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference. Journalism.co.uk has the story:

The World Digital Media Trends report - collected by 71 research companies and covering 232 countries – also suggested a 13.77% rise in the number of newspaper websites in the world bringing the total to 4,500.

52% of readers who view newspaper websites spend the same amount of time reading newspapers, according to the stats; while 35% say the time they spend with either print or online newspapers has increased.

Figures presented for print circulation worldwide presented an equally positive picture.

The circulation of paid for print dailies rose by 2.98% last year with the total number of titles increasing by 27.22%.

573,235,00 paid and free newspapers are distributed every day and 1.75 billion people read a print edition a day.

Print circulation in China, India and Latin America also showed growth.

I can never resist a bit of doomsaying from Silicon Alley Insider's Henry Blodget. This time he's arguing that within ten years newspaper circulation and advertising revenue will be a quarter what it is now:

Why? Because:

• As circulations and ad revenue continue to fall, print economies-of-scale will reverse, cutting further into already shrinking print margins.
  
• As "green business" practices take hold, a new generation of consumers will come to view the newspaper industry as a horrifically wasteful polluter that eats forests, gobbles fuel and electricity, and farts untold amounts of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere--all to deliver information that might have been interesting yesterday.
  
• A generation of newspaper ad salespeople and ad sales buyers will gradually retire or quit, and advertisers will increasingly ask themselves why they are spending billions on ads they have no idea whether anyone looks at.
• As financial and environmental pressures increase and a better grasp of reality sets in, more papers will opt to do what the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, did last weekend: Shut down their print businesses, fire a third of their staff, and put what's left online.

As ever, Blodget sparks some lively debate and the comments are worth a read.

Advertising sales on US newspaper websites are in good shape, according to a Borrell Associates survey of 3,000 sites in various-sized markets.

The survey, reported by Publicitas, found newspaper sites earned more than $2bn from local online ad sales in 2007, which gave them 27 per cent of the total local online advertising market and put them ahead of Yellow Pages and television sites.

"The largest newspaper websites achieved a majority of revenue from non-print advertisers for the first time, developing a broader base of customers to generate new revenue streams. The online-only advertisers accounted for 59 percent of the total ad revenue generated by newspaper sites."

Interestingly, "websites who employ at least one salesperson dedicated to selling online advertising averaged 87 percent more revenue than sites that relied solely on print representatives to sell online ads."

I've had a number of people tell me that print sales teams often don't yet understand the online ad space and miss opportunities to educate and enthuse clients on its merits. This survey suggests bringing in specialised online staff may be an interim answer. Any thoughts?

It's not every day you find a joke about split infinitives in the opening sentences of a novel. But Peter O'Donnell provided just that when he transformed Modesty Blaise (think Emma Peel combined with Lara Croft) from a cartoon character into a full-flesh master criminal turned special agent extraordinaire in the opening book of a series.

'I would suppose, sir,' he said cautiously, 'that Modesty Blaise might be a person awfully difficult for us - er - actually to get.' He blinked towards the big, grey-haired man who stood by the window, looking down at the night traffic hurrying along Whitehall.

'For a moment,' Tarrant said, turning from the window, 'I hoped you might split that infinitive, Fraser.' 'I'm sorry, Sir Gerald.' Fraser registered contrition. 'Another time, perhaps.'

Well, it was 1965, so I suppose your average pulp fiction reader would have got the joke, having learned grammar at school. Unlike those of us who fronted up at school after 1965, by which time rote teaching of grammar had fallen out of favour with the result that generations of students have graduated without the faintest idea what an infinitive is, split or otherwise, let alone a dangling participle or the subjunctive mood. Myself included.

My saving grace was picking up a style guide when I got into journalism. Style guides are created by publishers to set writers straight on matters of grammar and syntax and ensure they observe common spellings, styles, use of numerals and names. The idea is that consistency makes life easier for the reader and creates a sense of trust - if the publication gets the little details right, the big details must surely be right too.

There was a time when you had to work for a news organisation to get your hands on a style guide. Then some organisations started publicly publishing theirs as hardcover books. The first one I read cover to cover was a battered, borrowed Economist Style Guide. I say borrowed, but I just found it in a box of books - with Modesty Blaise and a pile of other 50s and 60s paperbacks accumulated somewhere along the way - so I guess it was more of a gift, given that I can't now remember who gave it to me. Oops.

Next came the perennial The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers and the elegant The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. Both of which remain useful reads, the latter proving a particularly long-standing companion thanks to gems like this:

"Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unneccessary words, a paragraph should contain no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subject only in outline, but that every word tell. - The Elements of Style, Strunk & White

Nowadays many newsrooms publish their style guides online for anyone to use, and they can be very useful indeed. So here's a couple to be getting on with: The Economist, The Guardian, The Times and The Daily Telegraph. I'd be glad to hear from you if you have links to any others.

As for the stylish Modesty Blaise - smart, elegant, discerning, rich, athletic, deadly - it must surely be time for a comeback (if only to give that Twittering Chuck Norris a run for his money).