United, Newspapers May Stand (News 'cartel' prescribed - Dinosaur Media DeathWatch™)

The New York Times ^ | March 8, 2009 | David Carr

[abb]

Back when I was a young media reporter fueled by indignation and suspicion, I often pictured the dark overlords of the newspaper industry gathering at a secret location to collude over cigars and Cognac, deciding how to set prices and the news agenda at the same time.

It probably never happened, but now that I fear for the future of the world that they made, I’m hoping that meeting takes place. I’ll even buy the cigars.

snip

My fantasy meeting goes something like this: a rump caucus could form where the newspaper industry would decide to hold hands and jump off the following cliffs together on the following actions.

snip

“It is time that newspapers are allowed to collude in the public interest,” said Mr. Mutter, who blogs at Reflections of a Newsosaur. “In order to keep as many feet in the street as possible regardless of how they are branded and preserve editorial voices, the new competitive environment has to be considered. The Chronicle competes against The Mercury News, but it also competes against Craigslist, Zillow and Auto Trader.”

snip

What is under attack is the fundamental machinery of the Fourth Estate, not just the local newspapers that some love to hate and others, including many young consumers, are indifferent to.

snip

[abb]

They've gone 'round the bend. Call out the men with the nets and the jackets with the buckles in the back...

[abb]

ping

[abb]

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid={77551DBF-A4BE-4A69-B763-357DE27818FC}&siteid=nbih
N.Y. Times closes $225 million sale-leaseback deal

[jpl]

Most of the newspaper business (with a couple of exceptions) already operates as a cartel controlled by the Associated Press.

[knittnmom]

Is this anything like the “non compete” agreement in Atlas Shrugs?

[abb]

http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/media/e3if926640132f1fcca05bc2bdd09f45f02
Buyers Demand Flexibility Heading Into Upfronts

http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=135101
Wary Marketers Cling to Budgets, Lean Toward Year-Round Purchases

by Brian Steinberg

Published: March 09, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — With the economy flailing, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that TV-ad sales for next fall’s prime-time schedule are primed to droop. Behind the scenes, however, lies something potentially more drastic. The dreary financial climate could trigger a permanent transformation in how shows such as “Lost” and “American Idol” are bought and sold.

Broadcast TV for decades has largely been a game of pay now and hope for the best later. Networks routinely sell between 75% and 80% of their ad inventory for the coming fall season during the glitzy “upfront” sales sessions that take place in May and June. As the recession deepens, however, it is becoming clear that marketers are being forced to keep their money in their pockets much longer. Putting down large chunks of change for ads that won’t run for months is a less attractive option.

[abb]

I’ve not read the book. But I suspect so.

What Carr suggests is not possible to do. He wants to go back to where it was when Cronkite said, “that’s the way it is” and everyone believed him.

[abb]

http://www.buzzmachine.com/
Conspiring to death

http://www.spalpeen.co.uk/2009/03/08/the-fahrenheit-451-approach-to-saving-newspapers/
The Fahrenheit 451 approach to saving newspapers

[Sir Francis Dashwood]

We need reusable newspapers just like we need reusable grocery bags...

[abb]

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/article/189608-Cablers_Bullish_As_Upfront_Talk_Heats_Up.php
Cablers Bullish As Upfront Talk Heats Up
But questions abound regarding economy’s impact on selling season

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123659457938769641.html
McClatchy to Cut 1,600 More Jobs as Part of Restructuring

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123630045519646881.html
Seattle Paper Advances Plans to Turn Into Online-Only Publication

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101475670
Where Were The Media As Wall Street Imploded?

[abb]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003949276
McClatchy to Cut 1600 Jobs — 15% of Staffers

http://gigaom.com/2009/03/07/is-rupert-losing-his-magic-touch/
Is Rupert Murdoch Losing His Magic Touch?

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/03/stations_in_the_balance.php
Stations in the Balance
Debt-Ridden and Independent Outlets Run Most Risk

http://www.kcbs.com/Decision-Day-Looms-at-the-Chronicle/3975363
Tough Decision Looms at the Chronicle

http://www.boston.com/business/ticker/2009/03/globe_shutters.html
Globe shutters its OT sports weekly

[abb]

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=101768
Agency Capos Debate Network ‘Currency’ Shift, Thompson Wants An Offer They Can’t Refuse

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=E7F9C248-18FE-70B2-A83D2C2A18FF1127
How Obama plays the pundits

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/08/AR2009030801933_pf.html
Obama Says Hola To a More Inclusive Press Strategy

[Melchior]

In the British fashion I can visualize the day when there are two major newspapers that service California, one from the right, the other the left. Then there would be one like The Guardian to serve the Trotskyites and Anarchists, and one like the Sun to serve the sex starved and Hollywood morons.

[VeniVidiVici]

This is actually an excellent idea. They could save money and it’s been done before! Look at the staying power over the period of almost a century of Pravda and Izvestia!

[abb]

http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/
Want to save your local paper? Read this first.

http://cancelthebee.blogspot.com/
Fort Worth Star-Telegram now advertising for “freelance writers”

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/
As Deadline Looms, Hearst Mulls Online-Only P-I

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/03/back-to-the-future-medianews-revives-print-your-own-newspaper/
Back to the future: MediaNews revives “print your own newspaper”

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/
Laid Off? 10 Tips For Suddenly Unemployed Journalists

http://graphicdesignr.net/papercuts/
2009 total: 3,718+ jobs
Layoffs and buyouts at U.S. newspapers

http://www.magazinedeathpool.com/
Movieline’s Hollywood Life: RIP March 2009

http://www.newspapertrails2.blogspot.com/
Monday, March 9, 2009
McClatchy Newspapers cutting 1,600 jobs

[truemiester]

Did you see what the headline in the New York Times was today?

No.

Nobody else did either.

(laughing)

[KarlInOhio]

This could be a way for all the newspapers to agree to charge for web access to their content. Since most newspapers just take AP articles and reformat them to fit the local printing space, all web readers need is one newspaper that doesn't limit web access to see what is essentially every newspaper's national news. They want a cartel to prevent leaks.

I've thought that a possible way for newspapers to survive would be to have a national newspaper (Like a USA Today) with a locally writen local news section added. That way each local paper just gets a digital feed for the first couple sections and print those plus their local addendum for delivery.

[abb]

The only way for such a system to work is in a totalitarian world. Been there, done that. Don’t work.

[a fool in paradise]

PRAVDA MEDIA BUMP

Back when I was a young media reporter fueled by indignation and suspicion, I often pictured the dark overlords of the newspaper industry gathering at a secret location to collude over cigars and Cognac, deciding how to set prices and the news agenda at the same time.

It probably never happened, but now that I fear for the future of the world that they made, I’m hoping that meeting takes place...

[abb]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/New-York-Times-sells-leases-apf-14580918.html
New York Times sells, leases back part of building
New York Times sells part of headquarters building to W.P. Carey for $225M, leases it back

[a fool in paradise]

We need reusable newspapers just like we need reusable grocery bags...

(Conservative figureheard) is waging a smear campaign against the DemocratIC Party. Today (Democrat Leader) said "I just want to get back to doing the job I was elected to do." Media Matters reports that, in a heavily redacted transcript,(Conservative figurehead) may have one time partially said...

[abb]

"I was taught when I was a young reporter that it's news when we say it is. I think that's still true -- it's news when 'we' say it is. It's just who 'we' is has changed"

David Carr (b. 1956), US Journalist. CNN "Reliable Sources", Sunday, August 10, 2008.

[a fool in paradise]

The radicals who rioted outside AND inside the 1968 Democrat Convention became the Party leaders and the anchors of the nightly news.

[abb]

http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2009/03/union_floats_proposal_to_buy_s.php
Union Floats Proposal to Buy San Francisco Chronicle

http://sfist.com/2009/03/06/chron_writer_takes_ad_out_in_examin.php
Chron Writer Takes Out Ad in Examiner

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Most of the newspaper business (with a couple of exceptions) already operates as a cartel controlled by the Associated Press.

Your beat me to it; hooray!

I only learned that journalism was anything but objective when I was nearly 40, back during the Carter Maladministration when I read the AIM Report. It took me until the Clinton Administration to figure out an economic explanation - journalism is negative ("No news is good news" because good news "isn't news") and superficial (There's nothing more worthless than yesterday's newspaper"). And it took until 2007 for me to seriously consider the role of the Associated Press.

Newspapers routinely were partisan affairs before the (1848) founding of the AP; for example Hamilton and Jefferson sponsored competing papers during the Washington Administration:

When President Washington's administration split into factions behind Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state, and Alexander Hamilton, secretary of the treasury, so too did the American press. In 1789, Federalist had helped John Fenno to launch a semiweekly newspaper in the capital of Philadelphia called The Gazette of the United States. Initially, with no advertising and few subscribers, the Gazette was kept afloat by public patronage; Fenno received printing orders from the Treasury, commissions to publish the federal laws from the State Department, and other jobs from the Senate. But as Fenno increasingly cast his lot with Hamilton, Jefferson became disquieted and, through Madison, urged Philip Freneau to come to Philadelphia to start a rival semiweekly. Jefferson lacked Hamilton's deep official pockets but arranged Freneau's appointment as clerk for foreign languages. Jefferson apologized for the minuscule annual salary of $250, but he added that "it gives so little to do, as not to interfere with any other calling the person may choose, which would not absent him from the seat of government." Jefferson and Madison acted as subscription agents compiling names of supporters and urging like-minded friends to take the paper.

The appearance of Freaau's National Gazette in 1791 aggravated the divide with Hamilton. The split went public the next year when Hamilton wrote pseudonymous letters to Fenno's Gazette, revealing Freneau's State Department employment and charging that Jefferson was "institutor and patron" of the new paper. Freneau dryly noted in print that his compensation was paltry next to Fenno's, but he felt obliged to swear in an affidavit that "the Editor has consulted his own judgement alone in the conducting of it - free - unfettered - and uninfluenced." Jefferson responded to President Washington's dismay, asserting (technically correctly) that he had never written or provided any direction to Freneau. Nevertheless, when Jefferson resigned as secretary of state in 1793, Freneau lost his clerkship, and the paper expired.

source: Governing with the News by Timothy E. Cook

The Associated Press transformed the newspaper business into journalism as we know it, with its pretense of objectivity.

[an amused spectator]

They could just print FAXes from the White House...

Oh, wait - they're already doing that...

[LS]

Yes, but AP didn’t do it in a vacuum: there was the telegraph, which “objectified” reporting so as to remove extraneous “value judgments” from reports: there was the “managerial revolution” that transformed owner-operated papers into businesses that needed to appeal to the WHOLE electorate, not just one party; and there was the impact of the Civil War in which people demanded facts, not just “rah rah” opinion.

[Lancey Howard]

Why won’t they hurry up and die?

I want everybody associated with the socialist Democrat newsrooms to lose their jobs, their life savings, their homes, and their families. For what they have done to America, they deserve nothing less.

[E.G.C.]

BTTT

[SanFranDan]

“In the British fashion I can visualize the day when there are two major newspapers that service California, one from the right, the other the left.

Then there would be one like The Guardian to serve the Trotskyites and Anarchists, and one like the Sun to serve the sex starved and Hollywood morons.”

BRAVO! and Oh so FUNNY THANK YOU!

[ken5050]

Ny Times has about run out of stuff to sell/mortgage.

[PGalt]

Thanks for the ping; post; thread. BTTT!

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Yes, but AP didn’t do it in a vacuum: there was the telegraph, which “objectified” reporting so as to remove extraneous “value judgments” from reports: there was the “managerial revolution” that transformed owner-operated papers into businesses that needed to appeal to the WHOLE electorate, not just one party; and there was the impact of the Civil War in which people demanded facts, not just “rah rah” opinion.

Sure, there was the telegraph - and there was the AP, aggressively monopolizing its use to transmit news stories to newspapers. The AP was so successful in that that it is scarcely an exaggeration to refer to the telegraph and the AP interchangably, IMHO. You as a historian do of course have some authority to give me pause. But it just seems that the AP is a still-extant organization which was a crucial element in the transformation of the public discourse from a debate among equals to a debate refereed by a partisan of one side of the debate.

If the AP vanished today, the journalists would still collude out of habit. By now it is in their culture.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

What is under attack is the fundamental machinery of the Fourth Estate

under the Constitution no such thing as a "fourth estate," since under Section 9 of Article 1

"No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States,"

and the strata of

• first estate, Lords Spiritual - the clergy in France and the heads of the church in Britain
• Lords Temporal, second estate - the nobility in France and the peerage in Britain
• third estate, Commons - the common people
• fourth estate - the press, including journalists, newspaper writers, photographers

have no application here. Here, there is only "the government" and "the people. The term "the press" has been distorted by those who claim that they have special rights not contemplated in the Constitution. "The freedom of . . . the press" is not a right only of those who own presses now, it is the right of the people to spend their own money to buy presses at their own pleasure. Indeed, those of us who own computers and printers, or photocopiers, may be said to own presses. So the claim that journalists are a separate class mentioned in the Constitution under the rubric "the press" is fatuous.

[abb]

It is very instructive to see how “the people” in a few short days have managed to plan and organize nationwide tea parties WITHOUT use of the old media. No newspapers, tv. Only the internet and talk radio.

More to come, in my opinion.

[abb]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/402818_Joel09.html
Who will speak truth to power?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/08/AR2009030801620.html
Scene: The Newsroom, Just Before the Lights Go Out

[abb]

http://independent.com/blogs/capitol-letters/2009/mar/08/update030809/
Reflections On The S.F. Chronicle

[Grampa Dave]

A CAP AND TRADE TAX on NEWSPRINT for daily and weekly newspapers!:

Whereas the production of newspapers causes trees to be cut down, hauled by polluting trucks to polluting paper mills, and hauled from paper mills to pulluting and large carbon foot print publishers.

Whereas the production of newspapers requires toxic ink and solvents and energy wasting machinery and large amounts of expensive carbon foot print electricity used for each edition.

Whereas the distribution of newspapers requires the use of dirty internal combustion engines.

Whereas a large portion of every landfill is used for discarded newspapers. Of course the used newspapers must be hauled to the landfill by dirty/energy wasting trucks with huge carbon foot prints.

Therefore:

Be it resolved that a Newsprint tax, of $1,000.00 per pound, be charged to EVERY newspaper sold via a subscription or sold via vending machines within the United States!

[abb]

http://cancelthebee.blogspot.com/

Sacramento Bee publisher says 128 full time positions eliminated at the Bee

Publisher says Kansas City Star will cut about 150 positions, reduce wages

[Enterprise]

McClatchy to cut 1,600 jobs nationwide

It's not enough! Cut them all!

[abb]

http://www.nptimes.com/09Mar/npt-bnews090306-1.html
DMA Cuts Staff, Chief Exec’s Salary Grew

[Birch T. Barlow]

N.Y. Times closes $225 million sale-leaseback deal

Too bad. This gives them quite a bit of cash now. I was holding out hope they would have to sell the Red Sox at a discount and still struggle to meet their debt obligations this year. Maybe next year.

[abb]

I still think it possible they bankrupt this year. Revenues from advertising are still decreasing rapidly - at ALL newspapers - never to return. No amount of cost-cutting or financial rejiggering can fix it.