Another newspaper for whom to not work?

I saw an ad on JournalismJobs recently to be ME of a suburban weekly in a part of the country, and a metropolitan area, that I would like.

I applied six days after the posting, which did say the company, family-owned, was looking for a quick hire.

A response e-mail said I might be on the top end, or beyond, of qualification level for the position, but, I was asked if, with that in mind, was I really interested.

I got back a job description Word document in a response e-mail. In addition to pay scale, it also said, among other things:

But, by and large, we act more like a start-up than we do a traditional community newspaper. We are extremely swift to seek and seize opportunity. We welcome partnerships of all shapes and sizes within our community. We aim to be the best friend of local non-profits. And, we engage in our community – relentlessly.
That said, we also differ from most media companies in the way we tailor our compensation plans. We do not have a laundry list of special monetary incentives or perks, nor do we offer the traditional benefits that most companies struggle desperately with. We have no paid leave, no health insurance*, no retirement or cafeteria plan. Our wages do not set any records either; no one on our newspaper team can claim an above average salary.

OK, I've been at companies with no health insurance before, but not the other stuff.

So I e-mailed back a few questions:

No paid leave? As in no paid vacation? If I wanted a third week off a year, would that be problematic? What about traditional holidays? Is the managing editor an “employee” or a “contractor”? Am I responsible for all FICA taxes?

Serious questions. If it meant no paid vacation, and typical holidays weren't paid, that's a lot of $$ I have to knock off the base salary. Even more if the paper is trying to make the ME a contractor and paid self-employed payroll taxes.

Plus, there's a legality question on that, on which issue the Department of Labor has recently been cracking down.

Well, less than three business days later, I got a two-sentence e-mail response saying the position had been filled and offering me best wishes in my job hunt. None of the questions were answered.

Well, DOL's Wage and Hour division has received a query e-mail from me.

Why we don't use Comic Sans in newspapers

A great blog about a great font.

Newspapers getting greedy, or skittish, on hiring

In the past six months, I've had one job killed (at a weekly no less), after corporate had been pushing the publisher to fill it ASAP. Then, corporate, at Hartman Newspapers in Texas, pulled the job.

Meanwhile, in Los Alamos, N.M., the publisher there apparently considered his initial managing editor ad an excuse to float a trial balloon, then either get greedier on position demands, or else decide to get rid of somebody else and fold that work into the M.E.'s position. (Since he won't talk about the details of his re-advertising the position, I don't know which it is.)

Anyway, there is, or is supposed to be, such a thing as media ethics internally as well as externally, isn't there?

Laptop computers an enabler of bad reporting, or what?

Picture a paper that has two important local events, one a city council meeting possibly awarding an $8 million grant payout for a mixed-use development and the other an appearance by Maya Angelou, and the stories get done at 10 p.m., both, because, apparently, the paper has an issue with reporters using laptops ...

My, what a formerly unmotivated Today Newspapers employee can do

If Today Newspapers had had as many ads on its website as The Suburban now does, it never would have folded.

On the other hand, since it has no real, and definitely no really fresh, news on the site, those ads may be selling at bargain basement rates.

Anonymous sourcing means 'tweaked' quotes

Ed Cohen raises another valid concern about the rise of anonymous comments in BOTH old and new media. And that is that anonymous comments usually have the commenter "tweaking" the quote before it sees the light of day.

In other words, BOTH old AND new media that use anonymous sources are becoming ever more propaganda by the day.

'New media' can write misleading headlines, get journalism wrong

Bora Zivkovic, or Coturnix, is a very good science writer. And, he's an activist touter of the wonders of "new media." But, a Facebook note of his shows part of why I take "new media" with a grain of salt.

Start with the header "journalism" when he's just talking about academic journalism. Especially online, where there's no headline length limit, why the header didn't say "science journalism" or "academic journalism," I don't know.

The post is about whether or not public information officers do journalism. In academia, arguably, maybe they do. It's still iffy. Did the University of Utah's PIO do "journalism" after the Fleischmann/Pons "oops" of 1989? I doubt it.

But, in the second half of his post, Bora, through a couple of analogies, talks about general-purpose journalism, and is totally wrong there. Plus, his idea that an energy company should sponsor science pages in a newspaper? What idiocy in general. And that they should do it because newspapers are losing ad money?

Rather, Bora, and friends of yours such as Jay Rosen, that's argument for MY shibboleth — paywalls for online newspapers. Or, at a minimum alternative, delayed publishing of online content, at least that which is locally generated.

Anonymous sourcing: ain't just the MSM

Glenn Greenwald rightly bemoans what seems to be a worsening of the use of anonymous sourcing in inside-the-Beltway reporting.

But, as I e-mailed him, this isn't just a "mainstream media" phenomenon.

I’ll hold out Talking Points Memo as a prime example, since it developed from “just a blog” into doing its own news reporting.

A couple of months ago, for example (sorry, don’t have link), one of its staff reported the “latest” on Obama’s heath care push, with a couple of different angles from inside the WH. Nothing close to national security involved, of course.

But... At least five or six different anonymously sourced comments.

Well, I was, to be blunt, disgusted to some degree when I saw that, and I think a few other TPM regular readers were too. That said, neither the reporter nor Josh Marshall commented in response, said we’re sorry, etc.

I’ll venture a guess that as “new media” tries to get more and more into reporting, not just commentary, it will do more of the same selling itself out.

So, let’s not say this is just an MSM problem.

When I grow up, I want to be a bankrupt media mogul too!

Dean Singleton, the man who built up, then overbuilt, MediaNews, while simultaneously wrecking the Associated Press and undermining its connection to its traditional newspaper members in the Internet Age by letting AP whore after news aggregators, once again shows his moxie, bullshit level, or whatever.

As Media News' parent company (a shell organization, if you will — Dean-o was one of the first media moguls in on that idea) emerges from bankruptcy court, not only does the Deanster get to stay on as CEO of the newly reconstituted Affiliated Media, he does so with a nice $650K base salary, and his MediaNews co-founder apparently getting pushed out the door.

Meanwhile, we have the brown-nosing of billionaire Jon Huntsman Sr., father of the former Utah governor, callling Dean-o "a smart businessman."

Can we change that to "a bamboozling businessman"?

Yet more bad news for newspapers

Among the findings of an exhaustive Nielson survey about readers' attitudes toward paying for online media (exhaustive enough to interview 52,000 people in 27 countries!) nearly two-thirds said, in essence, that if they pay for the content, that gives them the copyright to the material, as well.

Sam Zell was sooo dumb when he kept the Chicago Trib and sold the Cubs.

More cluelessness about journalism answered

Per a survey about how many online readers "expect" free content to stay free, and some comments about that on a LinkedIn journalism group, I offer my extended thoughts:

In my opinion, one key problem at newspapers is the AP has an inherent conflict of interest between its traditional customers and its new ones, the news aggregators. Member papers need to figure out a way to push AP to charge the Googles, MSNBCs, etc., more for content, and to figure out a way to involve Reuters et al in this without collusion.

In my opinion, also, beyond this issue, the AP has been pretty clueless in dealing with a lot of online issues, starting at the top with Dean Singleton.

As for charging for content affecting readership, other surveys show that:
A. Many online readers are "casual" ones;
B. A paywall can be combined with collection of user data, which then allows advertisers to target ads.
C. Apropos the old hardcopy pay model, and contra Fred above, I wouldn't call 20-25 percent of revenue (the tradition for newspapers) "almost free."

Besides paywalls, another solution is simply delayed posting of online content, for as much as, say, 24 hours.

Couple of other comments.

Howard (a blogger who used to be a reporter and is trying to get more paying freelance gigs, and talks about his blog as a "brand" builder): Of course you're not going to get more. The fragmentation of the Net, plus traditional dysfunctionality of the journalism profession salivating for any jobs, have mashed up to feed off each other. Keep giving stuff away, and keep being part of the problem.

Building "brand"? Isn't that about as much a myth as Reaganomics?

Bottom line is, if a newspaper ain't making money on the online portion of its business, priced out separately from its hardcopy business, then it needs to do something to change its business model. This isn't a supermarket able to offer an occasional "loss leader," if you're offering an **ongoing** loss leader. And, spending more on websites, and web editors, in hopes of getting more of those casual readers more involved, ain't the answer.

I don't know which is worse: clueless traditional newspaper management, or possible clueless online newspaper pundits/analysts.

Finally, no duh on the survey. If you asked, 85 percent of ppl getting anything free would want more.

Journalist naivete 101

I pity every under-35 journalist, even more, under-30 journalist, like this one, who thinks he, as compared to all the others now on his own, actually WILL "make it" as a-Net based freelancer.

Sheelah Kolhatkar tells a great story of the descent of all the Paul Smaleras:

You can tell when a print journalist has lost his full-time job because of the digital markings that suddenly appear, like the tail of a fading comet. First, he joins Facebook. A Gmail address is promptly obtained. The Twitter account comes next, followed by the inevitable blog. Throw in a LinkedIn profile for good measure. This online coming-out is the first step in a daunting, and economically discouraging,

transformation: from a member of a large institution to a would-be Internet “brand.”
Beyond that, writing a blog that amounts to little more than a search engine optimization tool?

Just as Google Ads is killing a lot of online advertising, the fragmentation of news/content/analysis and whatnot online is going to kill salaries, too.

Keep dreaming, Paul Smalera. Until you wake up. Or, until you OD on the Kool-Aid of the Jay Rosen types who keep hawking the Net, including the free-range, unpaywalled Net, as the salvation of media.

Read like this one to get more of a sense of how he's scraping and scrimping by. Paul, half the job dumps and revenue losses may be recession-related, but the other half? As long as print media keep repeating the same non-charging-for-online-content insanity, the other half is gone for good.

Mark Cuban calls Google a 'vampire' – and he's right

He's also right that newspapers — and, even more, press organizations like AP — largely continue to be run by people who are too inept, timid, and "old thinking" as well as old media in dealing with this.

Cuban has cojones, if nothing else. He made his comments at an online media conference, and as the keynoter, no less.

Not just that, he called newspapers cowards for being afraid to let go of Google traffic even as they remain clueless, in his words, about how to monetize said traffic.

Salon, as part of its own take on his comments, highlights the pull quote:

“Show some balls,” he said. “If you turn your neck to a vampire, they are [going to] bite. But at some point the vampires run out of people’s blood to suck.”

The problem lies not so much with individual papers (though those with their own news services, like NYT, McClatchy, etc., fall under the following finger-pointing) as it does with AP (and Reuters and AFP, to the degree my solution could dodge collusion issues).

AP is not charging Google, MSNBC et al enough.

Pure and simple. If AP would increase its contract charges about six-fold — YES, as in 600 percent — and could do a work-around on the collusion stuff, not only with Reuters, but NYT News Service, MCT, etc., it might be enough to force Google to paywall.

And, yes, I think AP could write its contracts in a way as to do a work-around on the collusion issue while leaving the door open for Reuters et al to cut similar deals.

That said, AP's chairman of the board, Dean Singleton, is so effing clueless about this that he ran his own newspaper company, MediaNews, into the ground of Chapter 11, so what should we really expect?

If nothing else, maybe more newspaper chains will reverse cutting back on DC bureaus, and rebuild them — with money they save from canceling AP contracts.

Calling Jay Rosen and Google's chief ass-kisser Jeff Jarvis. Have you already started attacking Cuban?

Technology poor in old media

How can a seven-day daily paper not supply laptop computers for reporters when they go to meetings?

Why the NYT is right to charge online

Yes, Times Select didn't "work." Actually, it showed that, if forced to pay for Maureen Dowd, a lot of ppl wouldn't. At least not at that price.

Anyway, Steve Brill crunches all the numbers and says just $2 per month per unique visitor would pay fantastic returns. He also, obliquely, explains why the phase-in will take a while, contra a few critics on that.

Oh, The Big Money agrees.

Take THAT, Clay Shirky, Jay Rosen, and other people, like perhaps Bora, who think the online pay model is wrong. (And, maybe I overly stereotyped Mr. Rosen's views, in part as a deliberate caricature. I don't think I got them 100 percent wrong.)

Jay, you can diversify content all you want. But, any company that still relies on an advertising-only model to try to make money off that is run by schmucks.

Let's add to that. A Columbia Journalism Review story last year said that in a typical larger metro area (Baltimore was sampled in depth) the traditional newspaper still breaks 60 percent or more of the news. Next is TV, then radio. "New media"? Even in a halfway-techie area like Baltimore, it's still below 5 percent.

So, if you're still the primary purveyor, you have more incentive to charge, charge, charge.

Where media analysts of the "free Internet" stripe (and the more clueless old media moguls like Dean Singleton) miss the boat can best be illustrated by an analogy.

If Campbell's started selling its condensed soup in plstic screw-top bottles, while still selling in cans, and said it wouldn't charge for it because it could spit out soup much faster this way, we'd grab all the Campbell's we could while laughing at its stupidity.

As for the AP, more than a decade ago, buying into the "TV model"? That ignored newspapers themselves charging for circulation. In the TV world, it ignored cable, let alone premium cable.

Old media + big banks = stupidity squared

Looks like old Dean-o Singleton won't have much ownership anymore in Media News, though Bank of America is going to still let him run the company. (Thereby showing that the stupidity of big banks and that of big Old Media folks is probably about equal in the past five years.)


From the AP:

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
AP Business Writer

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Another newspaper publisher desperate to dump debt has filed for bankruptcy protection in hopes of recovering from an advertising meltdown that has obliterated much of the print media’s revenue.

Friday’s late filing by Affiliated Media Inc., the holding company of MediaNews Group, had been expected. The owner of 54 U.S. daily newspapers said Jan. 15 that it would seek to reorganize its finances in bankruptcy court.

MediaNews, based in Denver, says its newspapers, which include The Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News, and 8,700 employees won’t be affected during the bankruptcy proceedings. The company also owns four radio stations in Texas and a television station in Alaska.

Privately held Affiliated Media worked with its major lenders and shareholders during the past year to hammer out a plan aimed at shortening the company’s stay in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware. Affiliated hopes to emerge from bankruptcy protection within two months.

The plan calls for Affiliated’s debt to fall to $179 million from $930 million, according documents filed late Friday and early Saturday.

In exchange for this $751 million concession, a group of lenders led by Bank of America will become the company’s majority owners with 89 percent of the common stock, according to a disclosure statement filed Saturday. The remaining 11 percent goes to MediaNews’ management team, which is led by William Dean Singleton, who is also chairman of The Associated Press. The MediaNews executives will receive warrants that eventually could boost their combined stakes to 20 percent.

Heading into the bankruptcy filing, Singleton held a roughly 30 percent stake in Affiliated.

Richard Scudder, who co-founded MediaNews with Singleton in 1985, will relinquish his interests in the company to the lenders. Another major newspaper publisher, Hearst Corp., also will surrender a 30 percent stake it acquired in Affiliated’s newspapers outside the San Francisco Bay area as part of a complex $317 million deal in 2006.

Singleton will continue to run MediaNews, signaling the lenders remain confident in him despite the company’s recent struggles.

The decision probably stems from Singleton’s reputation as a hard-nosed businessman who has never shied away from cutting costs, said Alan Mutter, a former newspaper editor who blogs on the media business.

"Who do we know who can go in and run the hell out of a newspaper and make a buck?" he said. "The only answer is William Dean Singleton."

MediaNews spokesman Seth Faison declined to comment late Friday.

"By aggressively facing the challenges of the newspaper business, we will continue to deliver high-quality journalism and will prepare our newspapers for a promising future," Singleton said in a statement Friday.

Affiliated’s annual revenue has fallen by $270 million, or 20 percent, during the past two fiscal years, according to court documents.

To cushion the financial blow, Singleton has reduced Affiliated’s expenses by $385 million, or 31 percent, since the end of 2006, according to court documents.

Affiliated still lost $582 million as revenue fell 10 percent to $1.06 billion in its last fiscal year ending June 30, the documents show. That came on top of a $406 million loss in the previous fiscal year. The losses stemmed from accounting charges taken to reflect the crumbling value of its newspapers.

Despite Affiliated’s troubles, Singleton says all but one of the company’s newspapers are profitable. He hasn’t identified which one is losing money.

But Singleton couldn’t figure out a way to cope with all the debt that MediaNews took on to expand into new markets. Like other publishers, Singleton borrowed heavily before the Internet and recent recession began to devour the newspaper’s main source of income — advertising.

Affiliated is bracing for more tight times ahead. In a disclosure statement, the company discusses possible savings from farming out some production, newsroom and administrative jobs and imposing permanent wage cuts at some newspapers beginning this year.

The reorganization plan calls for Singleton to receive a $634,000 salary and an annual bonus of up to $500,000 as Affiliated’s chief executive. He will also continue to be paid $360,000 annually under a separate agreement with The Denver Post Corp., according to court documents.

MediaNews - The latest old media woes

MediaNews, one of the nation's largest newspaper companies, is also the latest to file Chapter 11. As I e-mailed a friend, Dean Singleton may have done a great job of building up MediaNews, but as chairman of AP, he was pretty clueless about how to monetize online newspapers, and related matters.

Paywalling, for example, is one matter.

Point No. 1, even before Deano became AP's chair? When newspapers said look at the "TV model for online papers, did they forget there was such a thing as cable TV? Let alone premium cable?

Point No. 2, on specific, why didn't AP jack rates for Yahoo, Google, MSN, et al high enough to potentially force them to paywall content, therefore giving member newspapers protection to paywall?

Point No. 3 - As both owner of a major newspaper company and AP chairman, why didn't he recognize that, on this issue, AP and its member newspapers are somewhat at cross interests?

Issue No. 2 is general business management.

Point No. 1? If you're not going to paywall locally generated content as well as AP written news, why do you post it online even before your print newspapers come out? (This is not specific to Singleton, BTW.) If online newspapers aren't "monetized" yet, this is a handout. It's like if Campbell's started selling its soup in plastic bottles as well as cans, and said that because the plastic bottles were made more quickly, it would give them away for free.

Anyway, that's a few thoughts for now.

Vail Resorts' snow job gets reporter fired

Bob Berwyn was, until recently, a reporter for Colorado-based Summit Daily News. Seeing a former colleague, now working for Vail Resorts, by far the biggest ski company in Colorado, doing an interview with The Weather Channel, he suspected a snow job on snowfall on the Western Slope vs. the east side of the Rockies.

And did a column about it.

Despite the fact there's now a ski report iPhone app to keep folks like Vail Resorts in line and honest, Vail Resorts yanked all its ads from the paper. Summit Daily News' managing editor insisted Berwyn needed to grovel and when he wouldn't, he fired him.

Smaller newspapers have self-inflicted wounds, too

I got offered a job, then had it pulled back away, all in just six hours, yesterday.

I had a phone interview to be named the editor, and general manager in training, at a weekly paper near Dallas. Ideal!

Was tentatively offered the job over the phone, then the publisher said he'd like to meet in person just to give himself final assurance.

No problem, I said. I'll drive to Dallas this weekend.

Well, less than five hours later, I get this message in an e-mail:

The powers that be with the chain have decided to move things in a different direction.

Oh, and that was after being told on the phone five hours earlier that "the powers that be" had been pushing to get this position filled.

It's the second time in 10 months I've had an "interesting" interview situation with this newspaper chain. The first time, the company's flagship daily, on the west side of Houston (you TPA members, figure out who, I don't have the Heart to tell you) offered me a job -- a job somewhat inchoately defined as far as duties, and very inchoate as far as other things.

Like how much they were going to pay me. Whether it would be on salary or wage.

So, exactly what happened yesterday? Who knows. I do know, though, that I'd look long and hard at any other jobs this company advertises.

Nor is that the first time, or the first newspaper company, that hasn't been 100 percent up-front, or organized, or both, or whatever, about a situation.

That said, I don't know whether the track record is better or worse than other small businesses, small businesses as far as the individual outlets/franchises, at least. Maybe they're better, maybe they're worse, maybe about the same.