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.