A 'home office' is not a 'corporate office'? Uhh ....

The president of the newspaper company for whom I work said that on this week's weekly conference call with publishers.

This just underscores other things I'm learning at my first publisher's job, and why I don't feel totally sorry for newspaper owners.

That's beyond Internet-related wounds, newspaper takeover overbuying 20 years ago and other wounds, at smaller groups as well as larger ones, being largely self-inflicted.

Look, I understand why you incorporate all the newspapers separately: It's for tax reasons. It's not to give us some magical extra degree of independence. Why this is of more benefit to the local newspaper than the local Wal-Mart, I'm not sure overall, other than most smaller and mid-sized newspaper chains are not publicly traded and incorporated in a stock-share sense; they're still privately held. So, we're in the world of LPs, LLCs, and other incorporation alphabet soup.

(As a starting point, add in that I'm speaking from one of the poorest counties in Texas outside the Rio Grande Valley, and one, that unlike those counties, has a declining population, but that's another thing altogether.)

But, please, that doesn't mean that the corporate office is a "home office" and not a "corporate office."

Otherwise, why am I part of a group within our company, with a group manager?

Or, if I tried to look outside our one daily newspaper for another place to get us printed, what would happen to me?

Or, if I decided to stop participating in these Friday conference calls, what would happen to me?

Or, if I absolutely refused to complete an audit that the "home office" signed up all newspapers in the group to do, that's probably a waste of money as well as time, and with smaller newspapers in the group is likely to hurt us more than help in trying to sell national advertising?

Or, I decide not to "get" to run a column, at a few bucks a pop, by a retired community newspaper editor and publisher, without the hassle of any decision-making on my part? Even though I'm being billed for it, not the "home office," which didn't offer me input as to whether or not I wanted it.

(And, said column is, by columnist's latest missive, apparently being used by just about zero newspapers outside my newspaper company. In other words, a $200 per week backscratching of some sort for an old buddy or something.)

Answer to rhetorical questions above? I'd no longer be working here. That simple.

Or, one to which I already know the answer. Can I sign a contract for a new level of service with a phone company , without "home office" approval? Nyet.

Can I not run a "self-syndicated" columnist whom the "home office" that is not a "corporate office" signed us up to run isn't doing it totally for his health? Probably not.

Can I skip out on "home office" meetings? I kind of doubt it.

If I talk about how previous salespeople "sold" stuff without always asking individuals, businesses or organizations if they wanted the ads or not, and therefore, billed revenue isn't always accurate, will my "special pleading" be given any credence? Probably not, and I already have examples to the contrary.

No, things aren't perfect here. That said, this is my first newspaper to be publisher. I'm learning things, including how much, and how little, the title means.

As for budgeting for the future year? When my current year, a political "off year," is compared to the year before? Sure, political ads weren't a huge amount of last year's budget, but they weren't insignificant by any means.

Add in that the company president says, now, that if we didn't think we could make last year's revenue without political ad money this year, we should have said so. Then, in the same conference call, he says that we shouldn't talking about "missing political revenue" when comparing last year to this year.

Again add in that sometimes, the accounting, or specific billing issues, for my mini-group of two small newspapers, gets screwed up. 

That's just crazy, and crazy-making if you let it be. I'm trying not to.

I'm frustrated and anxious at the same time. Is it any wonder why?

Anyway, the mishmash of types of incorporation by which newspaper corporations and their corporate offices try to pretend they're not corporate offices is laughable. And, while I'm not a tax attorney, maybe tax issues are part of why "home offices" that are really corporate offices don't want to be called stuff. It may jeopardize how they're incorporated and what tax status is available to them.

And, no, it's not just my newspaper company.

Take Advance, which continues to make metropolitan daily newspapers into nondailies, at least for home delivery. (And, I don't get the three/four-day-a-week for home but still printing daily for racks. If you really want to save money, just print 3x a week period and lay off a bunch of additional press people.)

Anyway, as it shows again, with going to non-daily home delivery at the Oregonian, every time Advance "converts" a paper like this, it creates new shell companies. And, if it's not doing that for tax purposes, then I'm a Republican.

And, beyond the world of newspapers, and on to the larger world of politics.

This is further proof of how laughable the GOP wingers' claim is that we have such high corporate income tax rates. Rather, it's proof positive of how our effective rates are so low. But, this will never make the cut for legitimate tax reform issues.

I briefly wrote some earlier thoughts about this here. And, an issue about vacation time with same company here.

Finally, this is also more proof of how, not just in the newspaper business, but in general, titles are a crock of shit.

And, in the newspaper business, to be honest, between ad sales ideas that are often pitched to clients with overly generous assumptions and circulation numbers that are audited with a wink and a nod, we shouldn't be surprised if Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" is in abundance even when actual truth is not.

==

Nor, if that's the ultimate goal of this company starting to move to centralized pagination, am I interested in becoming more of a salesperson.

But MY column is different!

Dear thousands of people who email newspapers every day with "Here's my column, run it": Run it yourself. It's called a blog. It's the 21st century. As for $15 a week, join Google Ads when you start the blog. If you're lucky, maybe you'll hit $15 a year, and thus understand why a small newspaper ain't paying you $15 a week.

National Newspaper Week: Symbolic of a problem?

I just got done going to the website for National Newspaper Week, which is Oct. 6-12.

First, the cartoons.

Two of them specifically talk about the sports section, which is arguably one of the more problematic spots in hardcopy in daily papers, especially larger ones. There's that massive amount of space demanded for agate for box scores. Then, most papers continue to have a page 2 box that lists sports on TV and radio, something that's not done for science programs, either classical or modern music programs or anything else. And, the biggest dailies, like the Dallas Morning News, have dumped almost all of their high school stuff on paywalled websites now, for that reason, on issue No. 1.

It's also funny in another way, and sad in yet another.

Funny? All the ads that show a newspaper still show the old hardcopy; not a one has a person at a computer, tablet, etc.

Sad? All the ones that have people in them? All white folks.

Nostalgia dies hard. (Of course, a certain newspaper editor in Manchester, Conn., might like those cartoons. No, he didn't mention race, just single moms, but ... )

Especially when the week concludes with Newspaper Carrier Day, as if we're still celebrating kids throwing newspapers out of bags, and collecting the monthly dues later in the month.

The columns and op-eds?

Lamar Alexander? Puhleese. ANY U.S. elected official who has not robustly opposed the Patriot Act, NSA spying, etc., has no fucking business writing a column for this. Even worse, he explicitly mentions the First Amendment in his column.

I am officially disgusted, and appalled that the National Newspaper Association gave him this platform. And, I counted at least halfway to 10, then emailed relevant officials. (And as of yet, have not heard back from them.)

Beyond that, the rest of the op-eds are kind of fun. They do talk about what newspapers can and often do still do write. But, they're sad in another way, namely in the amount of "spinning" they do about financial-related issues.

The suburban Dallas dailies I was at for years didn't promote National Newspaper Week a lot. If we did anything out in Odessa, it was purely ad-driven, so I didn't built any pages for it. I wonder if other politicos have, sadly, been given column space like this before?

I mean, the whole thing is another "sign of the times."

It's not ironic, it's hypocritical in extremis to have cartoons, and maybe other columns, talking about newspapers as watchdogs, and as purveyors of public information, then this.

If centralized pagination stations are like centralized ad-building ....

This trend of newspaper consolidation of operations is not going to be perfect.

I work for a chain of about 20 papers, as editor and publisher of a small weekly and a very small weekly. We have a single ad-building department for all papers at the "home office" that isn't the "corporate headquarters," according to powers that be.

Given the volume of stuff they do, the error level probably isn't horrible. But, it's an issue of communication, when you're dealing with that many newspapers. Just like with consolidated pagination sites for that many papers, you're going to have an increased error level. Plus, because things aren't "local" any more, it's easier for stuff to kind of fall through the cracks.

And because a lot of these consolidation efforts are based on small, community-type dailies, and even more community non-dailies, don't think that the decline in ad revenue, circulation or both will be an issue just for big papers.

I don't have an answer for it, and I do know that it saves money. At least in the short term. But, if quality concerns in the longer term get serious enough, it may not be a long-term money saver.

At least the ad side isn't as bad as the pagination side, if you're doing multiple daily papers on deadline, and breaking AP news demands a change in front page and jumps at multiple newspapers at the same time.

Are journalists psychopaths?

So says a British psychologist. He ranks journalism as the sixth-highest profession, in terms of percentage of psychopaths.

His overall take:

Although people tend to think of psychopaths as killers—indeed about 15-25% of people in prison are psychopaths—in fact many people with psychopathic tendencies are not criminals.
Here are some of the traits of psychopaths:

• Self-confident
• Cold-hearted
• Manipulative
• Fearless
• Charming
• Cool under pressure
• Egocentric
• Carefree

He also notes that the idea of a "successful psychopath is largely not true, saying they earn less money than average.

Hey, there's a newspaper trait!

More seriously, I can think of three former bosses who fit at least the cold-hearted, manipulative, egocentric and carefree portions of the description.

I hate papers that readvertise jobs

I know it happens in other job fields, too, but with a declining industry like newspapers, I'm sure more and more publishers and HR offices are more and more tempted to do it, simply because they can.

It's not the first time it's happened to me.

What I really don't like, as in the current case, is when the company does initial interviews with people it indicates it has culled down from the resumes to at least a semi-finalist list, with hints that the next step is in-person interviews for the last couple of candidates, then kind of says nothing on the first query or two about the "process," then finally, oh, about a month after that set of interviews, says ...

"Oh, hey, we went out for more resumes."

If I should actually make the cut for an in-person interview, I'll ask questions related to this.

Update, July 23: I didn't make the cut. The Cortez Journal hired somebody else.

Note to self: Next time a paper "readvertises," don't only mentally remove yourself from the running. Actually do so with the newspaper, especially if it's not only after an initial interview, but after some sort of dangling hint that I might make the cut for the next round, or whatever.

Adobe, cloudy reasoning, and the local paper

If you've heard the recent news about how Adobe is going to move all future releases of its Creative Suite software program bundle to the cloud, and you're also a newspaper fan, especially of smaller community newspapers, you should be concerned.

This will be an additional price burden for said community newspapers, and it's not yet clear how much.

Meanwhile, Adobe's InDesign desktop publishing program took off as quickly as it did, even though its predecessor, Pagemaker, was A: Pretty crappy; B: Designed to work best on PCs, not Macs, because the competition, Quark XPress, rightfully got a bad reputation, mainly in the customer service field. It didn't respond well, or quickly, to queries or complaints, first. Second, its updates didn't generally offer all new services customers wanted, even after InDesign started gaining ground. And today, Quark appears content to rest on its legacy background along with "trapped overhead costs" of many newspapers, hoping they don't want to spend the money to switch, if they haven't.

First, if you're a smaller newspaper, and you haven't switched, you shouldn't.

Second, if you're still running pre-Intel Macs, and you're realizing you're eventually going to have to face the upgrade wall, you have options.

That includes buying Windows 7 PCs while they're still around, but dirt-cheap. Quark 7 or 8 on Windoze works well. Depending on the size of your paper, you may be able to buy a couple of copies of older versions of Photoshop as a stand-alone and work with them.

Or, look at Photoshop Elements. Or a non-Adobe photo-editing program. Anything up to the size of a 7-day daily of less than 25K circ doesn't have to go hog-wild on the latest and greatest version of Photoshop. (Or the same for either Quark or InDesign.)

The latest edition of Publishers' Auxiliary, the monthly newspaper for the community newspaper industry from the National Newspaper Association, goes into this issue with a lot of detail. Here's their lede piece.

Anyway, if you have a small newspaper or small mag, explore your options.

And, this could lead more to consider other options.

Like finally making the transition to digital only. Of course, that will be digital in an HTML sense. Not an e-edition, as without either InDesign or Quark, you're not creating PDFs, unless you want to try to creatively downgrade to Microsoft Publisher. .

Seriously, this is another option for newspapers and magazines. Depending on what version of Creative Suite you have, how likely it is to get continued Abode debug support and for how long, and how long it's going to be able to handle files (like until Abode gets dickish and creates extensions like "tifx" or "inddx" to force your hand) you have a few years to plan details of a move to digital only.

And, if you have to have creative tools, there's alternatives. If not Photoshop Elements, there's GIMP,  the German photo editing program Photoscape and more. Anything halfway like Photoshop that has good work with layers and a decent filter set is an option. Illustrator? Corel Draw's the easy alternative. And, on InDesign? You can go back to Quark, or suck it up enough to figure out a way to do something with Publisher if you have to.

And, then, at some point, go web-only.

Plus, there's Abode's lie, I believe, of saying they're doing this for a more steady revenue stream. No, it's an anti-piracy measure, which will probably just up the piracy wars.

Meanwhile, if it's smart, Corel bundles PaintShop, Draw, and Word Perfect, and looks at creating its own desktop publishing program to bundle with that. It could aim at the lower end of the market, say something about as bells-and-whistles as Quark version 3. A lot of non-daily papers would find that whole suite fine if they've not upgraded to Office 2007 or later on the Windoze side. Add in that Corel has basic-level video editing software and more, per its Wiki page and its home page,  and there's potential indeed. Or it could buy Quark; after all, Corel itself is a "built-up" company; all of its main products were acquired by acquiring companies.

In short, Corel could become a new "player" in multiple software games, and also give a lot of people a new way to say "Eff you" to Adobe (and a bit of sideswipe "eff you" to Microsoft in the process, and to Apple in a way, as well).

Do you really want to work for for People Newspapers in Dallas?

Creative help wanted ad in the newspaper biz, or a ME who's stuck on himself? Could be some of both, but you rookie reporters, beyond doing the research for the application, I'd also research WHY somebody left this guy a profane voicemail. Here's the ad:

People Newspapers, an affiliate of D Magazine, is looking for a reporter to join its team covering Dallas' most affluent neighborhoods. This is a great opportunity for a recent college graduate or a rookie reporter who's itching to move up to the big city. Prove your reporting chops to managing editor Dan Koller by telling him in your cover letter where he went to high school, what TV show he once appeared on, and the name of the maniac who recently left him a profane voicemail. Your cover letter should be written in the body of an email sent to editor@peoplenewspapers.com. Your resume should be attached as a Word document, and your three best clips should be attached as PDFs. If you can't follow these simple instructions, you will have taken yourself out of the running.

Teh Google tells me the profane voicemail was not at all deserved. But, that's besides the point.

And teh Google also tells me that, two weeks ago, Koller was listed as a reporter at D Mag, not ME at People Newspapers. So, rookie would-be reporters, you're working for somebody new.

As for high school, who cares? But it probably was Highland Park. And, hellz yes, teh Google tells me I'm right. Lucky guess? No. Having lived in Dallas long enough, and already having a feeling about this guy, it was a well-intuitioned guess.

So, we're batting 2-for-2 on snobby and stuck up on himself, even if the voicemail he got from Sheridan was undeserved.

And, the first two took about 30 secs of Google time. 

Three minutes didn't give me a hit on what TV gig he did, but I'm sure it's at least as self-centered as the first two. The whole announcement drips with a fine drizzle of condescension.

Anyway, he was AME at People Snoozepapers before going to D. So, he won't be totally new.

That said, he will be new to a new level of power, authority and control, and stuck on himself. And, that AME title at People didn't mean a whole lot, I'm venturing, based on my own experience in suburban weekly newspaper groups. And, I'm venturing you'll be underpaid at People, compared to the $$$ of the most affluent neighborhoods" you'll cover.

Maybe you can commute from ... Cowtown!!!

So, "rooks," here's your real research.

Find out why the previous ME left People Newspapers.

Find out why Koller was hired as the replacement.

Find out why he's so stuck on himself. (Other than him being bred and born in Highland Park.)

Will established newspaper owners be as honest as Buffett?

Warren Buffet said he expects the group of smaller daily and weekly papers he bought recently to have a 10 percent profit margin.

Sounds fair enough, doesn't it? After all, before the rise of the Net, smaller papers had smaller margins than the big dailies, but many still ran at 20 percent.

Of course, 10 percent may not sound like enough for owners of other smaller newspapers. Like a CNHI, still under a mound of debt but not declaring Chapter 11.

That said, that's only half of his honesty.

Buffett added that he expects those profit margins to continue to decline. (And, let's not forget, he's indicated paywalls are coming to most of these newspapers.)

And, one larger Australian chain expect to trump Advance and be out of print papers entirely within 10 years. If not sooner.

“Print revenues have been going down and are going down faster now,” Greg Hywood recently told the annual World Congress of the International News Media Association in New York. To the extent print newspapers have a future, he said, they will be “expensive, bespoke and narrowly distributed.”

That said, Hywood says papers need to cut, cut, cut further on "legacy" costs before making this move. And, since his Fairfax Media owns Australia's flagship paper, the Sydney Morning Herald, Hywood probably has some background whence he speaks.

So, are established newspaper owners willing to practice some degree of "acceptance"?

Meanwhile, while going digital first means cutting legacy costs, Internet readers' continually-growing expectations means expanding digital costs on a regular basis, if larger daily papers are serious about this.

Light at end of tunnel for papers, and more new ideas for smart paywalls

Earlier this week, I blogged about how Matthew Ingram at GigaOm appears to have a Jeff Jarvis/Clay Shirky/Jay Rosen paywall-hating burr up his ass.

Well, per Ken Doctor at Nieman Labs, that’s a good description, because Ingram, a blind follower of the Three Musketeers of Gnu Journalism (deliberately ripped off, with same snarky intent, from Gnu Atheism) details several specific ways in which he and they are wrong.

First, especially at non-daily papers, the light is not only apparently at the end of the tunnel, but profits may actually pick up next year. As a result of that, newspaper stock prices (albeit from in-the-toilet lows) are soaring.

And, yes, even some non-dailies have paywalls. The light for dailies, definitely for smaller ones, and possibly for mid-sized ones, is at least probably getting near to a flattening out point.

Second, and directly related, Doctor details the economics of paywalls. There’s a variety of ways to skin the paywall cat. Most new adopters are going with fewer freebie reads than, say, the New York Times, and also a lot less leakiness. That includes not just small companies but as big a boy as Gannett. Doctor says opt-out provisions, in which hardcopy subscribers are automatically charged at least a nominal fee for digital access, are also growing. (I hate opt-out provisions in general, including this one, but … the idea is, nonetheless, growing.)

Third, the truth is what the Three Musketeers and hangers-on won’t tell you: paywalls are growing internationally, too.

But, even there, Doctor starts with the US side of the equation:

By the end of this year, figure that about 20 percent of the U.S.’s 1,400-plus dailies will be charging for digital access. Gannett’s February announcement that it’s going paywall at all its 80 newspapers galvanized attention; when the third largest U.S. newspaper site, the Los Angeles Times, went paid (in March), more nodding was seen in publishers’ suites.

But, that’s his takeoff point to note that (as of March) more than a dozen European dailies also had paywalls.

That, then, leads to the more significant issue. Doctor notes most paywalls are neither flaming successes nor flaming failures. So, why?

So if charging for digital access — a too long phrase, but one that’s most accurate than paywall — is neither a panacea nor a tombstone on the way to the inevitable, what is it? It’s a building block, and it’s a way to re-envision the business.

And, that’s a good point. 

Isn’t that type of creative thinking and re-envisioning what the Three Musketeers laud?

Short answer? Yes, as long as it’s done for free online.

That’s because they deliberately practice a selective quoting of only one of two sentences from Stewart Brand’s famous “Information wants to be free” comment:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Note carefully that first sentence.

Then, also per Wiki, and partially reflected on its original link, there’s the question about whether Brand meant free in terms of cost, or free in terms of access.

That, then, gets back to many critics of the Three Musketeers noting that two (Jarvis and Rosen) are paid academics, and at public, taxpayer-funded universities, no less, and therefore can easily afford to tell newspapers to let people be online leeches. Until 2010, Shirky was at the public Hunter University, so ditto on him. Let’s also not forget Shirky’s consulting for Libya’s former strongman Moammar Gadhafi, and his naivete about how autocrats could use social media to their own ends when queried about that consulting.

Update, May 3, 2013: I probably spoke too soon. 1Q 2013 numbers for most major papers show that hardcopy advertising continues to slump, and that digital advertising isn't (yet? ever?) offsetting it. Paywalls are adding some money, but they may be not much more than digital dimes, until (ever?) AP (and Reuters, and AFP) up their rates to Google et al, enough to force wire service news to be paywalled, too. And, Saint Warren of Omaha expects newspaper revenues to continue to decline, even though he became a buyer last year.

When a sales proposal is laughably wrong

OK, I'm in publisher, not editor, mode, right now, at my small town paper.

Somebody from corporate drafted (for my predecessor, actually) details for a sales proposal presentation to one of the two new car dealers here in town.

It said that, if you the dealer bought X amount of advertising, you'd need just one new car sale to more than pay for the ad campaign.

What was wrong?

It assumed that the dealer gets 100 percent of the car sales price.

And the dealer ain't looking at it that way, of course.

He's looking at his net. Smaller community, fewer luxury vehicles sold, with the partial exception of a "loaded" SUV or truck, and we'll say his average margin is 6 percent.

That means he's got to sell 15-16 vehicles or so to pay for that ad campaign -- 15 or 16 that he's reasonably sure he wouldn't have sold without it. (This doesn't count any increased volume in used cars, service contracts, etc., so I may be skewing things a bit heavy his way.)

That said, you get the general picture.

And, this is coming from somebody from higher up my food chain.

Sorry, even if coupons aren't great, and people don't always bring them in, I can see how, on a higher-dollar product, especially, a business is looking for some way to track metrics. And, if I use one of those lines as a sales line, that people sometimes forget coupons, or don't always remember where they saw a special, and use it too openly, then I'm actually discounting our newspaper's potential ad reach even more.

Being a publisher at an independently incorporated newspaper

But one that is still corporately owned?

I think it's like having one testicle.

My guess is that individually incorporating newspapers, or small groups, is for tax reasons and little else.

I think it means little to nothing as far as any degree of additional independence from HQ, while possibly meaning that the buck stops even more with you the publisher at times.

Well, that's life.

I'm not a 1 percenter.

If things change, they change.

I had had forgotten why I left this newspaper company before

Any company, not just a newspaper company, that only offers one week paid after one year, and never offers more than two weeks paid, should not be surprised if it does not necessarily generate long-term staff loyalty.

Of course, I am glad to have landed on my feet from my previous newspaper company which, less than five months after replacing me (and having been "pushing" me before that) is now looking for the replacement for my replacement.

Folks, in any industry, high turnover isn't good.

I am also grateful for what I'll be learning on the publisher side of stick. I hope it includes skills that, if necessary, will transition outside the newspaper industry.

Oh, and I forgot ... telling a pregnant employee she is eligible for up to 6 weeks unpaid leave. The FMLA says 12 weeks. Now, technically, this employee has been here less than a year and is ineligible for FMLA, but .. if she had been here a year? Would be the same, I'm sure.

Media pay rising? NOT! Huff Post NOT real journalism

One Caroline Fairchild at the Huffington Post, who must be an actual paid staffer if she's got a HuffPost email account, claims media wages have shown their biggest climb since 2006.

Ahh, but she forgot, or didn't analyze, this the nut graf (emphasis mine):

The job category, which comprises public relations jobs [and] media and communication workers as well as entertainers and performers, saw a 4.6 percent increase in wages, outpacing the national average wage increase of 3.5 percent for the year and far surpassing any wage increases in the industry since 2006. 

Let's be real.

If you worked in an actual media job, your pay remained flat. If you worked in PR, it went up.

As a commenter there notes, a lot of the PR/communications hike was possibly election-related, too.

If you worked in an actual media job, your pay stayed flat — unless your job disappeared.

More refutation of Ms. Fairchild?

In Philly, the owners of the Inquirers and Daily News are threatening to shut BOTH and liquidate if they don't get "major concessions."