The most popular story at the Los Angeles Times is the news of its demise

A screen grab from its “most-viewed” list:

No progress in Philly newsaper talks

Via Romenesko, a new memo from the Guild to its members. And it doesn’t sound good:

From: Guild Bulletin
Sent: Wed 10/14/2009 4:07 PM
Subject: Philadelphia Newspapers Insults Guild Members, Stalls Productive Bargaining in Apparent Attempt to Sabotage the Enterprise.

Dear Guild member,

Philadelphia Newspapers today turned a contract bargaining session into an assault on the Guild’s members and our work ethic. The lack of substantive bargaining on the company’s part suggests that it might be trying to sabotage its own bankruptcy reorganization plan and the entire enterprise in recognition that it may not prevail.

In what should be considered demeaning to every member of the Guild, the company’s high-priced out-of-town lawyer said that an online enterprise such as Philly.com has a different work ethic than what is commonly found at major metropolitan newspapers such as those that we have devoted our lives to. Another company official referred to our contract as a “burdensome industrial model.”

We also heard the company say our advertising reps’ performance goals and disciplinary programs are not strong enough to compete with other media operations.

The battery of unspeakable insults, a thinly veiled attempt to stall productive talks, came during discussion of the Guild’s proposal to make Philly.com a part of our bargaining unit.

The company’s failure to submit economic proposals to accompany proposals that already seek to destroy our contract is the opposite of constructive, good-faith bargaining. It appears increasingly clear that the company has no intention of actually reaching a contract with our Guild thus jeopardizing its own survival plan. The company’s own bankruptcy plan calls for having contracts acceptable to its Stalking Horse bidder (made up of company insiders Bruce Toll and the Carpenters Union Pension Fund, and philanthropist David Haas) before that group puts up any money.

While the company pursues bargaining proposals that strip our contract of seniority, claiming it is necessary to achieve an economic advantage in an increasingly competitive market, it continues to throw money at a costly and time consuming legal battle in the courts. This approach keeps draining assets from the estate, possibly in efforts to do further harm to the operation to spite the senior lenders in the event they take control.

The Guild and Philadelphia Newspapers have not set our next bargaining date.

In solidarity,

The Bargaining Committee of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia Local 10

Ain’t nobody immune from the newspaper downturn

The New York Times is cutting 100 newsroom jobs.

The end of an era in Emporia

About a decade ago, I was the city editor at the Emporia Gazette in Kansas. A couple of great years working at a historic paper. (I was lucky: The Gazette was the first newspaper I remembered growing up.) I didn’t realize — until NBC ran this story — that they’ve shut down their printing press. Scott Thomas, the lead press guy, worked at the Gazette about as long as I’ve been alive. He doesn’t have a job anymore.

This is not a case of the MSM imploding because of its liberal sensibilities, though I suppose a few people in Emporia might argue. Chris and Ashley Walker, the publishers, are good people. These stories are common, and getting more so every day. It’s necessary — the world and technology move on, after all — but it can be painful to experience and witness at times.

Will Obama bail out newspapers?

Apparently he’s “happy to look” at a tax break to newspapers that restructure themselves as non-profits. (I thought newspapers already WERE non-profits. Hachachacha.) If government is going to try to bail out journalism without making newspapers a wholly-owned subsidiary like the BBC, this may be the way to do it. The feds have long effectively subsidized newspapers and periodicals through lower postal rates; this seems to me to be an effort along the same lines.

Newspapers don’t seem to understand their competition

It’s hard to get anybody who doesn’t work for Rupert Murdoch to praise the man — especially if the person doing the praising is a die-hard liberal. Yet the Los Angeles Times’ Tim Rutten says Murdoch will be the “savior” of the newspaper industry by leading the way for papers to charge for online content.

Congress, Rutten writes, needs to exempt newspapers from anti-trust laws so that they can collude to start charging their online audience:

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal already does so, but the Australian-born media magnate understands that what’s required for serious — which is to say expensive-to-produce — journalism to survive is that all the quality English-language papers and news sites agree to charge for Web access and then mercilessly sue anyone who makes more than fair use of their work without paying a fee. For such a scheme to work, the papers’ owners need to agree on when to act and what to charge. (Murdoch and his digital strategist, Jonathan Miller, believe the Journal’s existing website model offers a place for what the latter calls “premium” journalism.)

This suggests to me that Rutten and Murdoch — and Brian Tierney of Philadelphia Newspapers, it should be noted — fundamentally misunderstand the new media marketplace. These newspaper guys seem to believe that they’re competing against themselves, that people are (and will continue to) get their news from newspapers and newspaper-backed websites. And that’s not necessarily the case.

Because newspapers’ online competition isn’t just other newspaper websites. It’s websites of news-oriented radio stations. And TV stations. It would be one thing if those websites simply offered archived audio and video, but they don’t. They — like newspaper sites — offer text, as well.

And I don’t think radio stations are going to start charging for access to their websites.

The comeback from newspaper advocates is likely to be that radio and TV stations rip them off. (There’s long been griping about the “rip and read” practice of radio broadcasters reading, essentially, news directly from the paper. Lawsuits over this kind of thing are rare. Is Rutten ready to start?) But here’s a question for them: Do you think your audience is likely to care? If they have a choice between paying for original journalism and getting the ripoff for free, which are they likely to choose?

The newspaper folks will counter, rightly, that they can provide more in-depth coverage than their broadcast competition, even online. But anybody who has spent time above the reporter level in the media industry has seen readership studies showing that most readers get — at most — a headline and a few paragraphs of a story before moving onto the next page. (That’s one reason why the Philly papers both have the “At A Glance” page summing up the paper.) If that’s the case, will most readers notice or care if they’re getting the “At A Glance” version from a radio station’s website if they can get it for free?

And it’s not even necessarily the case that you’ll get cut-rate journalism from Radio and TV sites. NPR.org has revamped itself to provide a more complete reading experience — is anybody going to make the (nonideological) case that National Public Radio doesn’t offer good or in-depth reporting? Not convincingly.

Hey, I love newspapers. Spent my adult life working for them. I don’t want to see them go away — and for reasons more complex than the fact that I don’t know what else I’d do to earn money. But if newspapers step back and recognize that they’re not the only news organizations providing text-based news and information online, they’ll realize their job is bigger than getting together with other newspapers to start charging. They’re not just competing against themselves.

When in doubt, I whip it out: Got me a rock n’ roll band. (Or: The sad end of Ted Nugent’s newspaper career.)

It looks like Ted Nugent has lost his position as an op-ed columnist for the Waco Tribune-Herald. The paper’s new owners — they put “In God We Trust” on the front page every day — had asked him to tone things down a bit, make the column a little more thoughtful and respectful.

But as everybody knows: You can’t tame the Nuge. He wrote a rejected column comparing his new bosses to Nazis and was fired. His editor wrote this column explaining the controversy:

The irony of this disagreement with Nugent is that I have been one of his biggest defenders.

Two years ago, I sustained a strong attack from the left that demanded that I pull his column after a concert he had in which he held up what appeared to be some semi-automatic weapons on stage and unleashed on candidate Barack Obama, “You might want to suck on these, you punk.”

Then he turned his wrath to candidate Hillary Clinton and said, “Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless b——.”

I wrote a column criticizing his antics on stage but steadfastly refusing to pull his column from the Trib because I believe strongly that a diversity of voices is important.

Notwithstanding my love of “Free For All” — a song I believe is the epitome of ’70s-era classic rock — and my belief that newspapers should have lively and diverse opinion pages, I’m not going to shed too many tears for the Nuge’s departure. He can blog and Twitter like all the other celebrities do.

But the whole “diversity of voices” argument is most often made on the op-ed page in service of people who write, well, crap. (Surely you can think of some Philadelphia examples of this phenomenon.) Most people who suggest that a president — or a presidential candidate — should “suck” on the end of rifle get visits from the Secret Service. If you’re a rock n’ roll star, you get a newspaper column. “Diverse voices” are important, but so is credibility. The Nuge has none. But he made a couple of great songs, once upon a time.

Podcast: John Temple and the future of news

Ben and I spoke with John Temple, the former editor and publisher of the Rocky Mountain News and the man who hired us to moderate RedBlueAmerica.com, about the future of the news media. Temple, who has turned to blogging with gusto, recently wrote a provocative 10-part series on what he would do to revive newspapers’ flagging fortunes.

Temple is as provocative in the interview as he is on the blog. “If you’re not adding value you shouldn’t do it in print,” he told us. “Because there’s no way you’re going to be reporting the news in print, unless you’re the one making the news.” Among the other questions we tackle in this edition:

• Is it enough for newspapers to merely be newspapers?
• What shouldn’t local newspapers be covering?
• Is the crisis that’s affecting media organizations merely the result of dumb business decisions?
• What did the glorious failure of RedBlueAmerica teach us?

Music heard in this podcast:

• Excerpts from Ferde Grofe’s “Tabloid Suite,” including “Run of the News,” “Going to Press,” and “Sob Sister.”

Find the podcast here. Or go to iTunes and find it here.

Newspapers are betting on Kindle?

So says the New York Times:

Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens.

Unlike tiny mobile phones and devices like the Kindle that are made to display text from books, these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.

Call me dubious. Yes, people pay to get books on their Kindle — because they pay to get books anyway. Although libraries exist, you generally can’t pick up the latest bestseller for free. You can, however, get today’s headlines for free. Asking people to pay a few hundred bucks for a device so that they can then pay for something they’re already getting free on a device they already have? It’s an unlikely business plan.

Will Bunch makes a good point here:

It smacks of what newspapers were thinking and trying to do in the late 1990s and early 2000s — get the Internet off my damn lawn! Rather than integrate with the devices that people already have and use for multi-tasking — cellphones, laptops, etc. — newspapers want people to pay for a separate device where they have more control over the content and the flow of information, and they can once again demand that people pay money for the content.

Newspapers are no longer in a position to get the audience to come to them. They have to go to where the audience is.

Will Bunch wants to buy you a tiny computer

Over at Attytood, Will Bunch has an idea for saving the newspaper industry — or, at least, the Daily News. He wants the paper to partner up with a charitable foundation and start giving away thousands of free or cheap netbooks to poor and working-class families on the wrong side of the digital divide:

What if the cost for these devices really comes down to $99 (and less if purchased in bulk). Do the math: A $1 million annual program could provide netbooks to some 15,000 families, and a 10-year program would close the digital divide in a large city like Philadelphia for good.

News orgs and their new philanthropic partners could leverage this effort in many ways. There surely could be an overt effort to link the computer giveaway to increasing readership of the news Web site. The netbooks could come programmed or even hardwired to automatically make Philly.com its homepage, or the data — like email addresses — collected through the project could be used to promote readership by blasting out major news stories.

This is a great idea — except for the part where it doesn’t work.

Because imagine that you’re one of the poor or working-class people Will Bunch is giving a new netbook to. You open it up, push the power button and the browser appears. Then what? You’re probably not getting any Internet because, even with the right equipment, you can’t afford (for example) Comcast’s monthly fee for Internet service. And it’s not like “Wireless Philadelphia” actually works. And since you live in a neighborhood with a lot of other poor people, it’s not like you can — or would — sidle down to the local Starbucks and tap in there. At the end of the day, that tiny, cheap netbook in your hands does as much for you as if Will Bunch had bought you a brick to read.

Bunch’s heart is in the right place on this. But the digital divide isn’t only about a lack of access to computers. It’s also about the ability to make those computers access the Internet. He’s only halfway there.