the newspaper business

There are large protests in Venezuela. So what you may ask. Those Latin American are always in the streets protesting something or other.

Here’s what makes this protest unique: they are protesting the loss of one of the freedoms we enjoy and take for granted.  The freedom of speech.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened to shut down the country’s last opposition television station as students took to the streets for a third day, protesting what they say is a crackdown on free speech.

Chavez said he had “no fear” of criticism he might face for closing Globovision, a 24-hour news channel that he accused of trying to instigate his assassination. The threat follows the May 27 shutdown of Radio Caracas Television, Venezuela’s most- watched TV network.

It makes me wonder how far our government could go before Americans took to the streets. There are columnists, bloggers, radio talk show hosts and TV talk show hosts that would be happy if National Public Radio went away.  They would be happy if the New York Times and other major metro newspapers went away.

What would it take to move you to the streets in protest? If the government took CBS off the air?  How about NBC?  CNN? ABC?  Would you like it if Fox News was the only source for television news?  What if the Washington Times was the only newsaper in our nation’s capitol?

How about limiting access to MySpace.com and Youtube.com?

It’s not just schools that are trying to limit access to such sites. The federal government is currently considering legislation that would restrict access in public libraries as well, unless the student has parental permission.

What if Western Kentucky University shut down a newspaper critical of the administration.

In June 2005, the full 7th Circuit ruled 7-4 in Hosty v. Carter that a school official at Governors State University in Illinois was not liable for effectively shutting down the Innovator, the student newspaper that had published several articles critical of the school administration.

 Freedoms are taken away slowly.  What would it take for people to move to the streets to protest the loss of freedom of speech?  I hope for all our sakes, it doesn’t happen.

In our democratic system governed by the rule of law, government must be accountable to the citizenry for its policies and actions. Under our constitutional system of checks and balances, Congress can impose a direct check on executive action by oversight and legislation. But citizens can do so only indirectly, either by voting the president out of office or by invoking the powers of the courts to review executive action. For either approach to work, citizens must know what the executive branch is doing, must have the right to go to court to challenge unlawful actions, and must have judges willing to compel the executive branch to obey the law.

David C. Vladeck
Associate professor, Georgetown University Law Center

I wonder why the so-called developing nations are so far ahead of the U.S. in newspaper readership?
I find this fact astonishing: In one year, 2,100 newspapers were started in India. There are already 60,000 newspapers being read.

Here in the capital, a bustling megalopolis with 15 million residents, two new dailies have hit the streets in the last four months, angling for their share of a market already divided among more than a dozen competitors.

In 2004, there were 1,456 newspapers in the United States. You can count on one hand the number of new dailies that came on the scene, and those were usually tri-weeklies that made the jump to six or seven days.

People in the world’s biggest democracy still respect newspapers; they count on them for information and read them in numbers that would make publishers, editors and advertisers in the United States drool.

One can make the argument that internet penetration is much much lower compared to the U.S., and that would be correct. But total U.S. newspaper circulation has been declining for decades, even with the launch of USA Today.

Time will tell if the expanding middle class in these countries eventually will change how they get their news.

In the meantime, newspapers in the U.S. have to keep their noses to the grindstone to figure out ways to attract new readers.

No, not in Bowling Green, or even Kentucky, or even the U.S.  It’s in South Africa! The editor is blogging about the process and you may be interested.

Macy’s quarterly earnings were down for the quarter and it cut it’s second quarter outlook.

Maybe they should reconsider their advertising strategy. This year Macy’s is planning to spend 40% less with the Daily News than last year. We were not alone in this drastic cutback.

A newspaper and technology blogger summarizes Macy’s ad strategy.

Paul Ginocchio, a securities analyst at Deutsche Bank provided this detail:

In Paul’s hypothetical analysis, he estimates $254 million of the money pulled from newspapers would go to additional TV advertising, $22 million more would fuel online advertising and $40 million would be left to fatten Federated’s bottom line.

Paul says the operators of major metro papers – the New York Times Co., Tribune Co. and Washington Post – are the most vulnerable to a potential shift in Federated’s media mix. Chains in smaller markets not served by Macy’s or May – like Lee, Gannett and Media General – have less to lose.

Paul bases his projection on the way such national chains as Wal-Mart, Sears and Target spend their advertising dollars. But there may be a reprieve for newspapers.

Rather than buying advertising to generically tout its stores as great places to shop, Macy’s historically has used its ads to promote individual products to drive sales. To date, newspaper advertising has proven to be the best “call-to-action” medium for Macy’s, Kohl’s and other merchants employing this strategy.

You have no doubt heard that said before, perhaps even said it yourself. It’s usually in respond to what one might consider a controversial headline of photograph.

This is one of the bromides that may have a kernel of truth for a very limited number of newspapers.

Those newspapers are in major metro areas that depend heavily on commuter traffic where more than once newspaper is available at at newsstand or vending machine. A reader may decide  to purchase the newspaper based on a headline.

But since about 90% of our newspapers are sold by subscription, it really doesn’t make any difference what’s in the headline or front page photo, those papers are already sold.

While the Daily News circulation declines (see previous post) traffic to our online newspaper is growing at a fast clip, up 30% for the month compared to last year.

Walter Hussman, Jr. publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette says this is How to Sink A Newspaper 

Newspapers initially created their Web sites with the best of intentions. After all, newspapers are in the information business. And rather than fight the new medium, the Internet, why not embrace it? Wanting to be the leading information providers and thereby have the most popular Web site in the community, they posted all of their news online for free.

He goes on to make his case by comparing his newspaper’s circulation gains compared to the industry declines. he also explains the economics of the print newspaper and the online newspaper. It’s expensive to run a newsroom, Hussman admits and he’s concerned that more free local news will jeopardize the strength of newspapers.

The newsroom layoffs are most troubling, as less news with less quality, context and details results in more declines in readership and later, declines in advertising. If the $7 billion spent covering news becomes $6 billion, and later $5 billion, it is not just the newspaper industry that gets hurt. Journalism will be diminished in America with less investigative and enterprise reporting; indeed, less reporting of state houses, city halls, school boards, business and sports. Clearly a lot is at stake.

His premise makes for his newspaper, because they never did give away their local news. The Democrat-Gazette has always charged readers to get their local news online.

But they are in a very, very small minority.  The question we are facing now is what do we do now that the horse is out of the barn?

Almost all daily newspapers are audited by an independent agency called the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) Twice yearly they release circulation statements by publishers that conform to ABC accepted practices.

It’s one of those times of the year.

Editor and Publisher is the newspaper business’s oldest and only independent trade magazine and they have summarized the top 25 newspaper’s circulation.

Industry wide, circulation slipped more than 2% daily and 3.1% for Sunday.

The Daiily News circulation for the six months ending March 31, 2007 declined 1.5$% for Monday through Saturday, and 1.9% for Sunday.

The best performance in the state was the Owensboro Messenger Inquirer with an increase of 2.4% daily and .9% Sunday. Henderson was the only other paper in the state showing a gain in both daily and Sunday circulation.

After the number of pages are established (see previous post) the next queston is: where does the news go? Again, the answer is determined primarily by advertising.

Late, morning, the day before publication, the process begins.

There are certain pages that are off-limits for ads. Editorial, comic, sports agate, some section fronts, etc. As before, some ads have to appear on certain pages because of color capacity, advertiser request and aesthetics. The person who does the layout tries to leave enough space on the page so that the copy editors can design attractive pages.

If we chose, the paper will be laid out by computer, but we choose to do the procedure manually because in our case it has proven to be more efficient.

The newspaper layout with ad sizes place on the page are printed on a reduced version called a dummy. Each page has its own dummy.

The dummy is then distributed around noon to the production departments and the news departments and the next day’s newspaper begins taking shape. At 11:30, day of publication, the final page moves to the imager and plate-maker and at noon the pressrun begins. (This is our Monday through Friday schedule. Saturday and Sunday are different because we got to press in the late evening for morning delivery.)

So if you happen to be in the office and hear someone refer to the dummy, hopefully they are talking about tomorrow’s newspaper layout.