Tuesday, August 27, 2019

No, free puzzle books won't save you either

This is true for both small daily and nondaily papers and the self-allegedly mighty Dallas Snooze.

I speak from experience on the former side of the coin. A previous newspaper, when moving from daily to nondaily publication, thought that adding a puzzle book to one of the triweekly print days would sweeten the downsizing pot.

(Sidebar: I have NEVER understood papers who, when they do downsize, don't do it in the smallest increment possible. That is, if you don't want to be a six-day daily, go to a five-day daily. Don't go to a tri-weekly, like this place did, or worse, other places that go from six-day to semiweekly. SMH.)

Anyway, no, that didn't work.

But, wait! In the tradition of the CueCat (or similar stupidity adopted by the papers of dumb fuck Deano Singleton), an initial failed stab at a paywall, a second failed stab with dual paywalls, including a premium paywall touted by a former Google VP who thought people didn't know what AdBlock was and that Snooze digital subscribers would pay more for an ads-free version, and various other online mistakes —

You get a 48-page puzzle book if you become a print subscriber.

(Sidebar No. 2 before I go on. I have also never understood papers who offered premium paywalls that offered a website free of ads as part of the inducement. Yes, digital advertising pays bupkis back to you and continues to decline, but at least in theory, "eager" customers behind a paywall are more desirable ones. In any case, you're telling advertisers you think their content is worth crap with a premium website. Plus, the typical newspaper probably does no advance number crunching to find out if they'll actually come out ahead on this deal or not.)

Anyway, that 48-page book is just monthly, not weekly.

BFD.

The previous paper I was at offered 16 pages weekly, at that little bitty triweekly.

I mean, if you do think this would boost circ, you run it every week. Otherwise, people who actually are interested in puzzles and don't do the NYT crossword online, or old ones for free online, buy just that one issue a month at a newsstand and that's that.

Once again, Belo Blows.

But .. it's the ULTIMATE Puzzle Book. Because it's from THE Dallas Morning News.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

Pacific Standard magazine shutting down

The news was announced several days ago; the last official day is Aug. 16.

I get employees being angry, per Daily Beast, especially full-time or contract editorial employees. But, I think managing editor Nicholas Jackson let his anger get the best of him when he told the terminated employees to "consider what sort of legal options might be available to them."

The story makes clear that its board, at least in their own comments, worked to do due diligence on severances and all other legal issues. It also seems like they were probably somewhat blindsided by founder and chief funder Sarah Miller McCune's decision to pull the plug.

OTOH, per the LA Times, even if she is a billionaire, I can't blame her. If 90-95 percent of the mag's revenue was from her largesse, via a foundation, you have to consider making that call, IMO.

It appears that PS Mag was the sole beneficiary of the Social Justice Foundation. Whether McCune, 77, is pulling the plug on the foundation entirely, or instead moving it in new directions, wasn't announced.

Saturday, August 10, 2019

Gatehouse-Gannett merging — maybe


Just wow. Here's the company announcement, here's Ken Doctor's initial take at Nieman, and here's his follow-up analysis, complete with the "maybe" becoming more serious now that Alden Global Capital, owner of Digital First Media, aka Dead Fucking Media, apparently missed over Gannett's earlier rebuff of its takeover attempt, is spitting in the soup by allegedly taking a 9.4 percent stake in the new merger.

In his initial piece, Ken notes the two companies had become more comfortable with one another, and in the follow-up, that some sort of merger kind of fit both. Fortress Capital, still the de facto owner of Craphouse, was seeing its investment strategy run out of steam. A big acquisition helped. Gannett, kind of puttering around even before Alden's attempted takeover, probably could use a gray, if not totally white knight, and one further down the digital "transformation" road than it.

Later on, in talking to USA Today, Doctor says he thinks Alden might be looking at dumping its papers. Color me skeptical, with it's milking the Denver Post not for money for other papers, but for flailing and failing non-newspaper enterprises it owns. (Unless it thinks the last easy dollar has been milked out of that turnip.) Another angle, which I think more likely, is that Alden will do its best to cock-block this unless the combined company takes its papers off its hands.

And, where will they get that kind of money from, other than a potentially extortionate loan from Alden? So, Dead Fucking Media and Craphouse could have a dual between their hedge-fund owners, which would include Gannett being the piƱata in a three-way bashing.

Now, the fallout?

First, Ken notes, the merged company (assuming federal approval) has to raise money to pay off loans.

Some of that comes through making two HQs into one. Some comes through whacking middle managers, especially, it seems, at Gannett.

Update, Oct. 9: Doctor has details on the chainsaw side. Expect a 10 percent jobs cut; he notes 3K lost jobs would equal McClatchy's entire workforce.

Advertising, production, finance and circulation will take most of the cuts.

No surprise, in various ways.
  • Advertising? I'd joked about CrapHouse having the idea of centralized programmatic ad sales. Might not be a joke now.
  • Production? Most of Gannett's copy editors and graphic artists will be told to apply for jobs at CrapHouse design hubs.
  • Finance? Centralized billing, which will surely get fucked up. CrapHouse may, at this size, make its collections all in-house. (And then peddle that as a service to other papers.)
  • Circulation? Dunno how much actual savings is there, but stand by.
Back to the initial story.

And some will come from selling semi-orphan papers and concentrating on areas where one or both chains are already somewhat clustered.

Ken lists Florida, Wisconsin and Ohio. I see that.

But, why he missed Texas, I don't know. Gannett already had a number of properties here after its Journal-Sentinel takeover. Gatehouse, ditto, even before the Statesman buy in Austin. Combined, they'll own every 7-day west of I-35 except Plainview, Midland and Odessa. They'll have several five-day and six-days in North Central and West Central Texas.

Hearst owns Midland and Plainview. Dunno if it will sell or not. AIM Texas Media owns Odessa; all of its other papers are in the Valley. Would they swap Odessa, and maybe a little cash, for Alice? Would they sell out entirely, to the new chain owning Alice and Corpus now? Would Hearst swap Midland, or Midland and Plainview for Corpus, which would let it cluster more than now in Gulf Coast (plus San Antonio) Texas?

Finally, which of the two corporate cultures (assuming Alden remains spurned) wins out? Read Ken for that. But let me offer some thoughts, too.

First, the Gatehouse takeover of the Statesman was such a shocker because their MO had been community dailies and non-dailies before that. (IMO, this also shows that, for whatever reasons, Cox had become desperate to unload the Stateless.)

Gannett, on the other hand, is still a "big dailies" type of company. Those seven-day dailies in Texas? All but Austin are Gatehouse properties, though it does own a few five and six-day dailies of decent size (Sherman-Denison the biggest).

Those different focuses will be difficult to merge, themselves. And if Alden wedges its way in, more difficult yet.

As for the cost-cutting? It will be middle managers more than top brass, even with the two HQs merging. They'll get their own on golden parachutes. And, although things have changed somewhat since 2007, big newspaper chains still get their own off the top.

As for whether this will "work"? From Deano Singleton's stupidity on the "TV Model" to AP being run earlier this decade by a bunch of CEO failures doing more stupidity, and the AP further prostituting itself more recently, it's hard to say.

More thoughts of mine on pagination hubs here.

For you the employee?

Given that Craphouse has had its design shop for years, and from what I know, it sucking about as bad as Granite Newspapers' small one sucked (and yes, I believe it was done to spin off Gatehouse), if you're a graphic artist, you'll lose your job. You may be given "first-in-line" status to apply for the new (and lower paying) ones that Craphouse will create in Austin, but that's it.

Given that Craphouse was aggressive enough on expanding its pagination shop to take on the Snooze on contract even before buying the Stateless, the same's going to happen to you as a copy editor. On, and their layout is get-it-out-the-door crappy.

I assume Craphouse may create one or two other hubs in Ohio and Florida.

Oh, and insider pro tip? If you're a minority, and maybe also if you're a woman? At least as of a few years ago, you don't want to work for Craphouse's design hub.

==

Sept. 28: The two companies say they have US regulatory approval; Craphouse adds that it's already been cutting jobs in anticipation.

Monday, August 05, 2019

The Snooze slouches further toward Gomorrah

At the Dallas Observer, Stephen Young has the details.

Yea, it made a $17M profit in the second quarter, but that's including the sale of the Belo Building and its nearly $26 million in closing net profit on that, on which it took a haircut from its initial asking price anyway. So the faux silver lining itself is actually leaden.

So really, it lost $11 million this quarter vs one year ago where it lost $500K. Ouch. Here's the actual report.

Other teh sucks, or other faux silver linings?

Yeah, it saved money on print costs.

That's because it prints fewer pages.

That's because it sells fewer ads.

Out here in the hinterlands, where they apparently just yank the biz section but don't re-letter the comix or other sections that come after that, it's bad. Tuesday, July 30? A 13.5 percent adhole on 30 pages. Thursday, Aug. 1? Slightly better, with a 15 percent adhole on the same number of pages.

Outside printing revenue dropped from no longer printing ... the Observer, among other things. Maybe the Belo Bunch worried that printers were reading Young and Jim Schutze more than their own paper?

The Snooze is also, according to Young, ditching its current content management system for the website and adopting that of the Washington Post, which reportedly allows more flexible paywalling. Not that I'm going to pay for it in general. (Circ revenue, despite the Snooze having a hard paywall [IIRC it was still somewhat leaky in 2Q 2018] dropped 5.1 percent.)

Supposedly, using Arc, in partnership with the Post, will give the Snooze more digital ads, too.

Even as digital ad prices continue to fall. (Ad revenue was down 1.8 percent.)

Wait, wait.

All these new ads will surely mean new business for Belo's digital marketing shop, which Bob Dechard will spin in some nutty new way.