Reductions At The Courant

It’s a sad day for journalism, for print media, for Connecticut.

Someone just passed a memo to me, no more than an hour old, from the publisher of the Hartford Courant to his staff. News pages will go from 273 to 206 per week. Subscribers will only be getting 75% of what they get now in quantity. The newsroom will go from 232 to 175. The reduction there is also to 75% of current levels. There will be voluntary buyouts and forced layoffs.

All this comes on the heels of the heavily leveraged purchase of the Tribune Corporation, the Courant’s owner, by Sam Zell. It’s a sad day for journalism, for print media, for Connecticut.

There is little public support for newspapers or print in general. The problem is, newspapers still perform an extremely valuable service. No one else provides the depth of reportage papers do.

The Courant’s memo follows after the jump.

Continue reading “Reductions At The Courant”

Valuing News By The Pound

The struggling company has looked at the column inches of news produced by each reporter, and by each paper’s news staff. Finding wide variation, they said, they have concluded that it could do without a large number of news employees and not lose much content.

As hard as economic times are for TV, they’re worse for newspapers and other print outlets.

So, what do you do to get the bottom line up? I don’t know, but I suspect it isn’t this. Here’s a story from The International Herald Tribune. Michaels is Randy Michaels, CEO of the Tribune Corporation, now owned by Sam Zell, and heavily in debt.

…the struggling company has looked at the column inches of news produced by each reporter, and by each paper’s news staff. Finding wide variation, they said, they have concluded that it could do without a large number of news employees and not lose much content.

Michaels said that, after measuring journalists’ output, “when you get into the individuals, you find out that you can eliminate a fair number of people while eliminating not very much content.” He added that he understood that some reporting jobs naturally produce less output than others.

He said that The Los Angeles Times produced 51 pages of news for each journalist there, while the figure for two other Tribune papers, The Baltimore Sun and The Hartford Courant, is more than 300 pages.

Michaels had been CEO of Clear Channel Communications. When he left there, Radio Ink reported:

…industry message boards were swollen with vitriolic postings vilifying both him and Clear Channel. Various diatribes claimed that Michaels was everything from “the antichrist of Radio” to “a blight on professionalism” to “representative of the heinous crimes perpetrated by Clear Channel.”

Today, it seems Michaels is valuing content the way a butcher values meat – by the pound. But in the real world content is not equal word-for-word. You would hope some of the LA Times lower word count has to do with the depth its stories contain.

It will be sad to see newspapers disappear. I’m afraid that’s going to happen… and sooner, rather than later.

Right now, TV is incapable of providing the depth and story count papers do (though TV kills print in immediacy, emotion and a number of other categories). Few of the Internet news sites really produce their own content, and those that do seldom produce local news.

My daughter and her generation don’t read many newspapers nor do they watch much TV news. No one has yet figured out how to make traditional news more attractive to them.

It’s all very sad.

Tough Times In The Biz

The problem with the Internet is, it’s tough for conventional businesses to compete with something being given away for free! The entire cost/revenue structure of the Internet is crazy compared to traditional businesses.

tv-camera.jpgThere’s a big headline, in red, on Drudge tonight: “CBSNEWS IN TALKS TO CONTRACT OUT REPORTING TO CNN.” It’s actually just a link to a New York Times story which says CBS is thinking of outsourcing much of its news gathering.

I’m not sure what’s going on in my business all of a sudden. I suspect it’s not good.

Last week CBS started taking a hatchet to it’s owned and operated TV stations. For five decades, these O&O properties have been cash cows. No more.

Anchors and reporters, people whose services were fought over a few years ago, were dismissed without a blink. Some of these folks were making seven figure salaries. All were household names in their own communities.

For example, in Minneapolis, meteorologist Paul Douglas was let go. Paul had been in the market over twenty years. If he wasn’t making a half million a year, he had to be close.

He was gone before he could say goodbye.

“The simple truth: Like many other CBS employees, I was a target at a time when there are systemic, long-term challenges. No attempt was made to negotiate a lower salary; it was pretty cut and dry. It’s just business, dollars and cents — I get it.”

Writing in an online bulletin board for meteorologists, a former on-air met said:

NO TV weather job is safe. Longevity makes you even less secure (since you make so much more than anyone else in the building). Make sure you have a backup plan and a solid amount of savings (minimum of 6-months) to tide you over. Live frugally now and put away EVERY PENNY in case you are slashed in the next round of cuts which are inevitable.

I’m not sure I’m ready to go that far, but the business has changed. My competition isn’t just the local stations, or The Weather Channel (always a minor player in the general scheme of things), but weather.com, wunderground.com and every website with a forecast… which seems to be all of them.

The value of high profile talent, people who could draw an audience to a station, seems to have dropped rapidly. If these CBS firings have little or no negative impact on ratings, other managers will be emboldened to chop away too.

The Internet has changed many expectations. That’s fine, and as it should be.

The Internet has freed information from a schedule. Virtually everything is available on demand. And, at the moment, the Internet reports the news without reporters, shows video without production staffs, and sells products without stores. Companies that pay people say, “why?”

If at some point the Internet drives newspapers and TV stations out of business, where exactly will local news come from?

The Internet resembles the oxpecker, an African bird that lives on rhinoceroses.

“Although the birds also eat blood from sores on the rhino’s skin and thus obstruct healing, they are still tolerated.” – African Wildlife Federation.

The problem with the Internet is, it’s tough for conventional businesses to compete with something being given away for free! The entire cost/revenue structure of the Internet is crazy compared to traditional businesses.

Last year, Google had $16 billion revenue with 18,000 employees. That’s around $900,000 revenue per employee. Their ‘real’ operating expenses were only $2.7 billion, with another $2.1 billion thrown in for research and development. Their pre-tax net was close to $6 billion.

Is Google or Craigslist responsible for what’s going on to newspapers and broadcasting? Maybe. Maybe it’s the appearance of hundreds of channels, each with a tiny audience… but it’s tiny times hundreds!

Maybe it’s the Wal*Mart’ing of America; the disappearance of hundreds of stores in favor of one… and the disappearance of hundreds of local advertisers as well.

It’s not one thing. It’s a variety of things, but they’re reaching critical mass.

At the moment, you can buy two shares of Journal Register (publisher of the New Haven Register and other papers) stock for about the same price as a copy of its newspapers!

Journal Register just announced they’re exploring their ‘options’. I don’t know a lot about finance, but is there anything left to sell?

Sam Zell, who heavily leveraged his recent purchase of the gigantic Tribune Corporation, is now rumored to be selling some of their papers. That’s something he originally said he wasn’t going to do. He needs the cash to pay the debt.

The funny thing is, newspapers, radio and TV stations still make a lot of money, as long as you don’t factor in the financing used to buy them. Many were purchased at what now looks like inflated prices. The assumption was their value (and revenues) would rise. It’s similar to what’s gone on in the housing market.

Tonight on IM, a friend in the business said

Sorry to say this, because this is your income, but, Local TV is DOA.

In a way, I’m glad you are at this stage of this career and this isn’t happening in 1980.

You have many things you can do

Again, I think that’s a little heavy on the melodrama, but times are definitely tough.

I am very lucky to be under contract right now.