Where will it end? Broadsheet papers have gone tabloid. Tabs have gone Berliner format (18.5 x 12 or so). There is a great little daily newspaper in North Carolina that has been ahead of the trend for years: it’s 8.5×11 (The Tryon Daily Bulletin).

All this shrinkage is creating new challenges for newspaper designers. I wonder when we will arrive back at 1-column galleys as the final product…. What will designers do then?
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The other day as I was driving to my university to drag the uninterested through the issues surrounding the unread textbook chapters when I passed a group of inmates picking up the trash along the roadside. The warning sign said, “Prisoners Working.”

Suddenly my over-burdened mind hit upon a question that bugged me the rest of the day. Prisons and jails are both places where criminals are incarcerated, right. So why are “prisoners” the inmates, but “jailers” run the jails? Ah, the English language.

Decades ago I spent nearly four years at the P-T (Well, actually, the P-T was the afternoon paper at the time. I worked for the morning Independent.) I learned an awful lot about journalism, about writing, reporting, human nature, how to down drinks for dinner and still copyedit, and much more.

The newsroom then was not the clean, sanitized, cubicle-ized blah it is today. I worked the sports desk, and several of the guys (I can remember only one or two women in the entire newsroom and they were, of course, in the Lifestyle corner, protected from the vulgar, hard-drinking and harder-smoking newsroom) kept a flask in the bottom desk drawer and even smoked cigars across the desk from me. Unthinkable today.

Part of my initial job interview as copyboy (yes, boy) was to make coffee in one of those huge silver pots. The newsroom went through multiple pots nightly and it fell to me to keep it full, and it had better be good. I guess I made good coffee.

Despite all these and more idiosyncrasies — oh, the stories I could, and maybe should, tell my students — the experience was no doubt better than a degree in journalism (mine is in Creative Writing). I owe a lot to John Dixon, my sports editor, who taught me much about tight editing and ethical reporting.

So, first the Independent died in the early 80s, leaving only the P-T. Now the P-T is losing its editor and publisher and merging with a former competitor! All told 19 staffers from both papers will lose their jobs and probably end up falling into public relations (shudder). It’s like I am watching a beloved old friend lose body parts and slowly die.

I started in newspapers in 1967, back in the days of “hot type.” Then technology began to speed up and we went through “cold type” and then into computers. All these improvements were supposed to make things better, but technology can’t replace good reporters or compelling stories. The money saved should have been used to improve the product, but instead it went to shareholders.

The downward spiral of newspapers began and the Press-Telegram is just the latest to start slipping down the drain. Newspaper companies made more cuts. Circulation dropped. More cuts. The product has become so weak from overworked journalists that no one wants to read the papers when they can be wowed by the Web.

Newspapers are still making a reasonable profit, just not what they were hauling in during the glory years. Shareholders whine. Publishers downsize. The product suffers.

I am going to lift a glass tonight and toast not just my poor old friend, the P-T, but all newspapers. It’s all but over.

As with most good questions, the answer is: it depends.

For my money, if one is just spouting forth one’s own opinions, without reference to the source of factual information, that’s blogging. One could argue that the word journalist derives from the idea of keeping a daily journal, which sounds an awful lot like what bloggers do. But let’s not get lost in semantics.

Most blogs are just someone holding forth on some subject or another. Most of my posts on this blog are that. They are posted with little use of sources, little or no editing, and no bowing to some professional Code of Ethics. Caveat lector.

But other blogs — and even a few of my posts here — do good reporting or opinion-sharing, replete with sources. The fact that a copyeditor or fact-checker didn’t touch it doesn’t bother me. Based on the number of corrections and uncorrected errors in my local fishwrap, I’d have to say that most mainstream stories receive only a cursory glance from overworked and underpaid newsworkers on the copydesk anyway.

So I guess that for me the bottom line is intent. If the intent of the blogger is to simply natter on about something, then that is not journalism. But if the blogger uses reportorial techniques, such as using multiple sources and fact-checking, with the intent of presenting an accurate description, then that is journalism. Whether bloggers should be protected by shield laws and such is a tough one for me. I haven’t decided yet.

What I think is funny is that for years newsworkers have been lamenting the loss of multiple journalistic voices in cities and towns around the country. Now that technology has allowed those multiple voices, many have cried, “But that’s not journalism!”

I believe it is and I also believe that the sooner the MSM bring blogging into the fold the better.

Break a law, go to jail….no wait, break a law and be set free. I can be pretty agnostic when it comes to politics, but I have to believe the pundits on both sides will think it was a bad move. Can’t wait to take it all in tomorrow! Then back to bloggers and journalists.

Recently, I was watching NBC Network News and two of their top stories were basically quoting The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Man, those TV journalists work hard at getting a story! At least it is not (yet) as bad as radio news, which is basically someone reading stories from the local paper. The publisher of a paper I was redesigning in Wyoming a few years back had a good line: “It’s like [our newspaper] for the blind every morning.”

Then there is the “local” news on television. They don’t want to pay for actual reporters, so we get loads of canned video on usually odd or outrageous happenings from around the country, after the usual bleeding lead stories about shootings, stabbings, accidents and general mayhem.

Thank God for newspapers, sick as they are.

I have some posts backed up, but until this intense summer teaching session is over, I don’t have much time….

From the press release:

“In addition, on average newspaper Web sites have contributed to a 13.7 percent increase in total newspaper audience for the coveted 25- to 34-year-old demographic and a 9.2 percent increase for 18- to 24-year-olds (Scarborough).”

Compare those numbers to ones listed in an Editor&Publisher story:

“Bear Stearns analyst Alexia Quadrani noted slowing online growth in a brief to investors regarding Q1 results. She pointed to Yahoo’s difficulties over the past twelve months, The New York Times Co.’s About.com — where revenue advanced 26% in Q1 compared with 98% in Q1 2006 — and the revenue shortfall at E.W. Scripps’ Shopzilla as evidence of the slackening pace.

In Q1 2006, online advertising for the companies that Bear Stearns covers, rose 35% versus 22% for Q1 of this year. ‘A double digit revenue growth profile is still impressive,’ she wrote, ‘However, at 7% of revenues on average, the rate of deceleration is a bit of a concern as this online segment may not ever become a sizable enough contributor to offset losses in the print world.’ “

Granted, they are looking at different numbers, but there is not a hint of negativity in the NAA release. I visited the NAA site and poked around a bit and found the same thing. Reading through the site leads one to conclude that the newspaper industry, thanks in no small part to the NAA, is healthy and on the upswing. It is?

Just for chuckles, I visited GuideStar.org, which provides information about non-profits. (I visit the SEC site to get background on public companies.) I don’t know what the dues are for NAA, but the most recent IRS Form 990 showed some mighty high salaries — including nearly $1 million in total compensation for the president — for an organization whose hype is bigger than its help.

In 2006, a “bad” year for newspapers, publicly traded companies sported an average profit margin in the 17-18% range (1). Granted, that is down from the 2000 numbers, which were 22% to 29% (2). Both are above average for most industries: about 8.3% over the past 25 years ago (3). For comparison, ExxonMobil, which is being hammered for record profits while prices at the gas pump skyrocket, sported only a 10% profit margin in 2005 (3).

I have to admit I don’t understand how money, profits and the stock market work exactly, but it seems to me that trying to please shareholders is the main problem. That has led to cutting newsworkers as if they were simple workers on an assembly line. But newsworkers create the product in a way that assembly line (or other typical) workers do not. Cutting newsroom budgets is like cutting important ingredients that are critical to your product. Yet that seems to be the management answer. That’s good: cut the heart out and then wonder why the patient dies.

So I am all for the private people who are buying newspapers. Run smartly, newspaper companies can still make money if they don’t have to keep voracious shareholders happy.

(1) http://www.cjr.org/issues/2007/2/Kuttner.asp
(2) http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june01/profits_3-22.html
(3) http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0322-28.htm

“In addition, on average newspaper Web sites have contributed to a 13.7 percent increase in total newspaper audience for the coveted 25- to 34-year-old demographic and a 9.2 percent increase for 18- to 24-year-olds (Scarborough).”

Notice the wording: the web sites have contributed to the increase in the total newspaper audience.” I’d like to know how much that contribution is. My guess is that, in those particular demographics, most, if not all, the increase in audience is online. The dead-trees product is still flailing. The statement misleads.

Also, the online press release (which is absolutely filled with puffery that would make any flack proud — for shame!) said: The NAdbase analysis also shows the continued broad reach of the print audience from Scarborough, with nearly three out of four adults in the top 50 markets (115 million) reading the newspaper over the course of a week (5 weekdays/1 Sunday).

What does reading over the course of the week mean? It could mean that 3 of 4 adults read a paper once during those six days. Those numbers aren’t all that good. Also, to get picky, what does reading a newspaper really mean? Do all 115 million even look at every page, much less every ROP ad? I doubt it, though that is the bottom-line, unstated implication, the idea sold to potential advertisers. If your ad is buried on A-8 with a bunch of others, do you really think most readers see it? I am sure someone can drill down a bit in the data and find some of this information or do a study that really gets at what people actually see. But it probably won’t be NAA.

I believe in trying to save newspapers, but not with PR puffery. Let’s get good, objective research and better-written, non-puff press releases about that research. Oh, and I hope someone at NAA soon learns that the word data is plural.

The poorly written release (my editing students would be amused) is at http://www.naa.org/sitecore/content/Global/PressCenter/2007/TRADE-CAMPAIGN-2007.aspx?lg=naaorg

NAA is a non-profit organization serving the newspaper industry. http://www.naa.org
Some of what it does is good, but not in this case.