Tree House Media Project Debuts. Self-reliance for angry journalists, preached by a former member of the tribe. Plus: "Last gasp of the curmudgeon class." NEWSROOM ID EXPLODES LIKE FIREWORKS OVER INTERN'S UPBEAT BLOG POST. Newspaper revanchism 'splained.

I heard an hour of the 24-hour George Carlin marathon on XM Radio last week -- ah, the wonders of digital programming -- and that got me to thinking about taboos in the news trade. So, just what might be the Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say In Newspaper Buildings today?

Try these, and feel free to add your own:

• Newspaper: The word itself speaks of an almost bygone era.
• News: The news itself is problematic, as we all live in a news bubble in which the news finds us as much as us going out and finding it. Who can sell advertising around, well, "news." Advertisers want niches -- business readers, techies, health enthusiasts, action movie watchers, not perusers of "general news."
• Paper: That one's now worse than news. With Goldman Sachs, followers of the newsprint trade, today upping its estimate of year-over-year pricing increases to 30% from 20%, just forecast on May 27!, paper itself becomes a dirty word. And just why is it that all those Indians and Chinese have a newfound love of newspapers?
• Circulation: With the old-age disease of arteriosclerosis ("degenerative changes in the arteries, characterized by thickening of the vessel walls and accumulation of calcium with consequent loss of elasticity and lessened blood flow") setting in with ferocity (three percentage point declines each six-month reporting period for almost four years now), remember it's not circulation, it's readership.
• Staff: Pronouced like "staph". Reporters have always been a necessary pain in the butt, but now they're, well, less necessary. Less newsprint to fill, fewer dollars left to pay people, the staff cuts have now become breathtaking, almost 6000 this year in the industry, as logged by Erica Smith's Paper Cuts. See also "FTE."
• Editor: You remember, the guy who decided the news we'd see the next morning. Now as readers flee print, it's partly the fault of those arrogant editors. News companies replace one "e" with another; as AP and Gannett call in the ethnographers.
• Default: Consider this a double entendre. Default as in, we're not going to make that debt payment (see Philly, the Strib). And, as in, it's not my (de) fault.  It's not been Craig Newmark's fault, and soon Sam Zell will be telling us it ain't his. As the biggest blame game we've ever seen starts to set in on an industry, we'll figure out that there's more than enough to go around.

The news is out: Newspaper companies can no longer afford reporters and editors. Today's L.A. Times announcement is the latest to catch a news cycle of public attention. As well it should. A 17% cut -- 150 newsroom jobs -- is an unnatural disaster. It's the kind of news that shocks, if briefly. Because it is the L.A. Times, it's more shocking nationally than last week's cut at the Hartford Courant (25% or 58 newsroom jobs) and at the Baltimore Sun (about 20% or 55-60 jobs). All are Tribune-owned papers.

These cuts, and more at other Tribune papers, are a part of strategy, the new Tribune management tells us. It's "rightsizing" its papers to meet the economic realities of the day.

"Rightsizing" is one of those words management slings about when it wants to make it seem like it's making intelligent decisions in tough times. Sounds better than "panicking."

To describe the current round of staff cuts, though, there's a better word: Frightsizing.

Frightsizing means reckless cutting, hacking into one or both of the key elements of what news publishers will need to make it in the digital age. #1 is the newsroom -- or shall we say, content production -- staff. Content is what will make publishers money online, and as experienced, authoritative staff is lost, so will be lost some of the potential of what the new news company can be. #2 is the local sales staff, people who can grasp the out-sized sales/distribution opportunity of measurable, digital commerce and multiply publisher revenues. Frightsizing not only cuts deeply into near-term potential, it instills in the survivors fear and loathing, hardly qualities that win in hyper-competitive markets.

LAT Publisher David Hiller can talk about getting staff down to a "sustainable" size, but the truth is no one's got any idea what sustainability looks like. With increasing forecasts that the US economy will stay in the doldrums into '09, publishers are really just bailing water as fast as they can. The leaks (in print circulation, in print ad revenues, in newsprint costs and in slowing online revenues) are all widening. So all publishers are now cutting rapidly, with newsprint finding its predicted fate as an adjunct to the Internet, rather than to the opposite fiction too long held onto by news execs.

Really, given their company structures, they have little choice. You can see the must-pay checklists in front of publishers:

• Operating costs, with staff as the biggest and newsprint and ink coming in second;
• Capital costs, as they struggle to modernize production systems to meet new multiple-platform realities -- and still buy trucks to deliver the legacy product that still produces 90% of their revenues;
• Payments on debt;
• Dividend payouts to shareholders, payouts that most companies have increased (in the vain hope of satisfying investors) as their fortunes have declines;
• Funds to buy back a few shares here and there, again in vain hope of bolstering share price.

It's a daunting list, and one that nobody can meet with today's revenues. It wasn't always this way. Recall that three years ago, the profit margin in the industry still stood at about 21%, a number lusted at by many other companies in many other industries. Most companies had some semblance of an opportunity to make a bold moves, halving that margin and creating a real strategic plan to make a transition into the digital age with their companies largely intact.

They could have made better decisions to play the transition. Instead the transition is now playing them.

Certainly, the New York Times, the Washington Post, McClatchy, Scripps, Gannett and Belo come to mind as companies that are trying hard not to panic, not to frightsize. The cuts at all those companies are real, but you have the sense that there's an appreciation of retaining key assets.

Tribune, with its unconscionable $12 billion-plus debt, is the poster boy of frightsizing. Calling the new Tribune an employee-owned company is high parody, when those "owners" are being shown the door in massive numbers. You can place bets on whether the frightsized Tribune paper employees will outlast the real estate being shopped out beneath their feet. But for now, it's a horror show without a Hollywood ending in sight.

Related Content Bridges:

"LAT Madness is Brand Suicide"

"What's Wrong with Tribune's Math"

More Tribune, here

Yahoo's announced reorg prompted more huhs than huzzahs last week. For instance:

• "The statements from both Sue Decker and Jerry Yang sound sort of like B-school jargon with the soothing tone of a dentist’s assistant, none of it really acknowledging that anything is wrong at the company." (Joseph Weisenthal, Paid Content)
• "Let me keep it short and sweet: Decker is a charmless Wall Street type who's bad at managing people. Patel's main skill, one that has kept him at place in Yahoo for 12 years, is managing up. His second talent: making excuses for the fact that he's rarely seen on campus before 10:30." (ValleyWag)
• "They replaced one highly ineffective model with another highly ineffective model," said Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. "It's not clear from this what it's intended to achieve. It seems to be a greater centralization of power and structure that's been tried many times by other companies in the Internet space, particularly AOL, and it never works very well."

One big impact of the re-org: the further ascendancy of Hilary Schneider, to head the new "U.S. go-to-market group," a move that I noted last week would signal continued substantial resources for the newspaper consortium. Schneider will have Scott Moore's Yahoo Media group, reporting to her. That raised some eyebrows among the legion of Yahoo watchers, which Hilary dismissed in a PaidContent interview, suggesting that Moore and she will be of single mind, literally: “It’s a Vulcan Mind-Meld.” More spooky than Spockian, but it suggests the real new Yahoo strategy, hinting at how the new (really!) Yahoo can embrace Trekkie mojo to find a path to independent survival. For instance:

• Hearing Wall Street's increasing skepticism about Jerry Yang's rosy projections in the out-years, Yahoo replaces revenues, uniques, RPMs and time spent on site, with a new metric: warps!

• There may be some truth to the rumor that Yahoo countered Google's offer of Sergei Brin-sponsored space travel with free rides in the teleporter. Media News Dean Singleton was seen with a broad smile on his face as he mouthed, "Beam Me Up!"

• Clearly, no one at Yahoo has yet mastered "Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Final Unity," the Spectrum Holybyte game. We know that because the big announced re-org left a major job un-assigned, the head of a new Insights Strategy team, just the team charged with the meager task of unifying strategy and understanding across Yahoo's too-many platforms.

• Over the weekend, Photoshopped pix of Carl Icahn as The Borg began appearing in Yahoo break rooms.

• New Yahoo talking point: We're not capitulating to Google; we're just joining The Federation!

• Responding to the exodus of those execs departed or re-orged, Yahoo announces the use of its new Exec Replication technology, acquired in the semi-secret Pink Lithium buy. "We don't have to pay benefits or spend lots of money on training them on the Yahoo way. We just make more of people like us!"

• Last resort: Borrowing William Shatner from Priceline, a company with an unambiguous business model,  to revive the Yahoo! Yahoo!!

Something may have been lost in this week's brief media frenzy over "seat-gate" -- the much discussed incident where Comcast hired people off the street to keep out the public from this Monday's FCC hearing in Boston. Comcast's Sleeper CellBut while Comcast's seat-warmers slept, a collection of Cambridge scholars, Internet advocates, industry leaders, engineers and policymakers nearly all agreedTimothy Karrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile

During a Friday briefing in the chambers of the House Commerce Committee Tim Wu, Ben Scott, Marvin Ammori, Jef Pearlman and Markham Erickson laid out the central struggle in our campaign to save a free-flowing Internet. At stake is whether the Internet will be open, neutral and accessible to all or a closed network -- controlled by a handful of gatekeepers with monopoly tendencies. Neutrality vTimothy Karrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile

Don't always believe the purveyors of conventional wisdom in Washington. Some of these DC pundits are so steeped in their own "knowledge" that they get stuck spinning their wheels when faced with evidence to the contrary. This was the case for a few of Washington's finest who recently hunkered down behind their laptops to convince the world that Net Neutrality was dead and gone. Greatly Timothy Karrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile

You may have missed it in the fine print of your agreement. Phone companies like Verizon and AT&T reserve the right to block your free speech and terminate your cell phone services "without prior notice and for any reason or no reason." That's chilling enough, but here's the shocker. There are no laws that prevent these giant companies from censoring your speech on their networks. That's right -Timothy Karrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile

We just released this game. As news of Murdoch’s Fox Business Network is making the rounds, we wanted to frame the issue as a problem of consolidation -- and do it in a way that's fun for all. The main point is this: When we let a few giant conglomerates control so many outlets, quality journalism turns into junk partisan media, and our democracy suffers. Hopefully, this will draw more Timothy Karrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile

Originally published at Huffington Post Phone companies have opened a new front in their campaign against the free flow of information. This time they've found a powerful ally in the White House. AT&T and Verizon have already shown their disdain for free speech and Net Neutrality, and their eagerness to let government spies lurk on our phone calls. Now, their lobbyists have teamed with Timothy Karrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile

Originally published at Huffington Post If you thought phone companies were simply supposed to get you connected, think again. Over the last week we learned that the nation's two largest telecommunications firms want to get into the business of censorship as well -- blocking the free flow of information over phones and the Internet. Verizon's notion of "progress" may not agree with your notion Timothy Karrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile

You may have missed it. A couple of weeks back, Washington Post senior business writer Steve Pearlstein took a shot at blog readers who support Net Neutrality -- calling them "economically illiterate." I fired off a letter expecting a circular filing -- but three weeks later ... = = = = = THE POINT OF NET NEUTRALITY Saturday, September 29, 2007; Page A17 In his Sept. 9 commentary "Whiny Timothy Karrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile

"Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable."

The Times’ move to bring the International Herald Tribune website into the brand fold certainly makes sense. The change will add about 7 million uniques to NYTimes.com's 58 million, a nice 12% boost.

One question is why it took so long – the Times arm-wrestled the Washington Post out of its IHT stake back in 2002. The IHT is not a spectacular business, but it has a good foothold in Europe. That foothold is key to the Times’ biggest hope for a stable, prosperous future – making The New York Times a truly global, multi-platform brand.

The other question is why it is leaving the IHT brand on the paper, which is in midst of redesign. Certainly that brand has much history and resonance for its English language, European readership, but it's the Times brand that says "future," while "IHT" speaks much more to tradition, and therefore the past. Would IHT readers leave the paper if it were Times-branded; I doubt it. Would the paper attract new readers, and offer even more congruent multi-platform promotion, with a Times brand; I think so.

It is a Times-branded, global presence that is, at this point, the sole promise that fosters hope at and about the Times. It is a hope that most local and regional US dailies cannot share. The 1500+ dailies’ drive to the future is local --- hyperlocal in many cases. But for the Times – and the Journal – it’s a different game.
Both are newspapers, but they increasingly have less and less in common with their newspaper brethren. Scale and reach define their business strategies. How can they get to the almost one billion English-speaking news readers out there? How can they become a top-three, go-to source for readers on every continent?

It’s the Night Before Christmas Strategy. On paper. On desktop. On cellphone. On cable. On satellite. On social net. To the top of the porch! To the top of the (digital) wall!

No one’s close to getting the strategy done yet. CNN and MSNBC have the labeling right  --  TV, Web and Mobile fronting their TV branding, but curiously absent at the top of their websites. 

The BBC and Guardian have crossed the pond, understanding the value of new business colonization in the states.  News Corp gets it and is moving on its master plan, in part noted by the recent announcement of a single, multimedia platform for Journal, Marketwatch and Barrons properties, signing up with EidosMedia. Thomson Reuters, AP and even ABC are making their plays.

So the Times’ IHT web move makes a lot of synergistic sense. NYT Europe needs to build the same kind of momentum that the Times periodically shows, embracing and integrating multimedia, bringing high-end civilian bloggers under the Times brand, and better packaging content. Its Politics panel, for example, combines video, news, live blogging and contextual news into one easy-to-take-in whole. (Memo to NYT: now take this panel, consider it a giant, endlessly configurable widget and syndicate the hell out of it.) Its European product needs to build on the same mojo, while maintaining the IHT's Eurocentricity. Getting it done right is high-end nuance.This appears to be one step.

The Times says it is still working through various internal issues before making the change.  Certainly those issues existed – slow internal decision-making has bedeviled the newspaper industry even as layoffs and buyouts burgeon. My bet, though, is that finally it is the hot breath of Rupert that will end up closing the deal. Rupert hasn’t wasted a minute in going for the Times’ head. Anything – and everything – the Times can do to meet the threat and build the same kind of primacy in cyberspace that it has in print must be done now.

The IHT move is a small one in the scheme of Times' ones. A bigger one is what to do about the Times' local papers -- a business that makes increasingly less sense for the company to stay in, as I wrote in Februrary. Today there's an item about what will happen to the Times' ownership in the Boston Globe, with Arthur Sulzberger saying he "can't get into the whole thing." It is complex - trying finding buyers out there now amid news of default -- but more urgent a matter each day.

More NYT Coverage, here

As Yahoo burns, the newspaper industry watches, hoping it won't get singed.

The Google/Yahoo search ad agreement has drawn lots of comments over the past couple of weeks, but its impact on newspaper consortium members has gotten little attention. The deal itself, if implemented, won't have much immediate revenue impact for newspapers, but its strategic game-changing impact could well present a new headache for the throbbing industry.

Yahoo appears to be in freefall.

Its execs are bumping into each other, heading out the door in the latest reorg.  The softening online ad market doesn't bolster the company's hard-to-believe projected growth. Steve Ballmer is going hot and heavy after Yahoo engineers, and indicating that his once-and-future prey's value is declining by the Internet minute. Amid it all, CEO Jerry Yang has gone Yahoo shirt in hand, traveling through the halls of Congress, explaining that his proposed save-Yahoo-partner-with-Google plan really won't create an online ad monopoly.

In old times, newspapers would find this all great sport. They'd cover it big as the fascinating business story that it is, and that would be the extent of their interest.

Now, though, more than 40% of US dailies by circulation have hitched their 2009 growth wagons to Yahoo and its emerging AMP ad platform. AMP is the most important part of the newspaper's consortium's deal with Yahoo.

Yes, traffic programs and providing site search are helpful. It's the AMP promise, though, that newspaper CEOs talk about when asked where the growth is coming from. In short, the promise of AMP is that of sophisticated, behaviorally based, audience-targeting ad delivery system. The hope: $10 CPMs will become $20 CPMs, as new targeting (in hundreds of categories from Boston-based young, SUV-driving moms to empty nester, small-town Midwesterners) improves ad effectiveness.

At this point, AMP is supposed to roll out, first at MercuryNews.com and SFGate.com by the end of 3Q. It would then move through the consortium ranks, being in place at most sites for most/all of 2009, promising tens of millions of dollars in new revenues. Amid a year of incredible Yahoo turmoil, signs still point to substantial Yahoo investment in getting the new system in place.

Most immediately though, here's what at stake:

• Though Yahoo has talked about clearing $250-450 million annually from the deal to have Google to provide some search ads, newspaper companies are unlikely to see any additional search ad revenue out of the deal.  That's because publishers got search revenue guarantees out of Yahoo as part of their multi-year deal. The guarantees didn't ramp; they were set at certain levels, depending upon assumptions of search traffic and search ad rates. So publishers' guarantees have been exceeding actual earned revenues, at least for the most part. So even if Google is able to double ad rates, most newspaper revenues wouldn't change. Midsize sites currently take in Yahoo search revenue in the four digits monthly.

• Put the arithmetic aside for a moment though and consider that newspaper publishers aren't sure whether they'd be part of the Google search ad program.  At this writing, Yahoo's unsure whether the Google ads would be provided to newspaper partner sites (as opposed to Yahoo.com, the core destination of the ads) and newspaper partners are waiting for that answer, though, given the arithmetic above, it may be mainly an academic question.

The Google deal though raises two other big questions for all those newspapers -- owned by MediaNews, McClatchy, Belo, New York Times Regional Group, Scripps, Hearst, Gatehouse, Media General, Lee, Cox and more.

#1 is what the Google deal portends for Yahoo's advertising strategy. As Ballmer has recently said in summing up the Google/Yahoo search ad deal: "Google's won." So if Google has won the search ad game (which accounts for 42% of the online ad market, according to IAB), then where does that leave Yahoo?  Yahoo has increasingly talked about its lead in display ads (21% of the ad market), the kind of ads that AMP is intended to bolster.

Even Yahoo, though, has acknowledged that the line between search ad revenue and display ad revenue is a thin one, and one that may disappear.

Take this statement out of Yahoo, in a recent response to Microsoft's offer, to buy just Yahoo's search business, when it said it was no longer interest in the whole company.

"A deal for Yahoo search] would not be consistent with the company's view of the converging search and display marketplaces."

Separately, of course, Jerry Yang and Sue Decker have made the point that display and search are two different worlds.

It's hard to have it both ways.

Clearly, I think, Google with its mojo, its DoubleClick acquisition and the foibles of its two closest competitors (Yahoo, Microsoft), is becoming a monopoly in the online ad game. Recall that MSN has a little less than 10% of the search ad market, leaving the new Google/Yahoo partnership with 90% or so. That's Boardwalk, Park Place and lots more, including it would seem all of Panama. After MSN, all that's left for search marketers are companies like Kanoodle, Miva and Looksmart, each clearly in a second tier, and unable to satisfy the marketing needs of big advertisers.

To the question of whether search and display ads are really different worlds, a savvy industry exec put it simply: "At the end of the day, it's all just real estate. " In other words, as ad and audience tracking technologies get better and better, it's all about maximizing yield. If you've got a place on a web page for commercial messages, your technology should tell you whether a search ad, a display ad, or for that matter a video ad or gasp -- even editorial matter that may spur more page views -- is the best way to make money.

That argues for unified ad systems. Maybe Yahoo's AMP is better than whatever Google's working on, post-Double Click, but letting Google onto Yahoo pages is not the greatest harbinger that Yahoo could eventually win ad battles with the online ad leader.

#2: Beyond the intricacies and impacts of the Google/Yahoo deal (and whether in fact it musters anti-trust review on two continents and even Congressional Republicans talking up anti-competitiveness), Yahoo's precarious state overall is most worrying to publishers.  This year's double-digit decline in print revenues and the halving of newspaper digital revenue growth rates has raised publicly the ugly word, "default."  As the lights dim, publishers' bet and reliance on Yahoo gets bigger and bigger.

Each week, it seems there's another "summit" of newspaper consortium members -- top sales teams (VPs, directors, managers) with Yahoo consortium execs -- all focused on making the most of the emerging Yahoo-fueled sales opportunities, both on newspaper.coms and local Yahoo pages. (MediaNews was in to Sunnyvale just last week.) So any interruption in that sales momentum would be the worst possible news for the news industry.

The list of what could interrupt that momentum is lengthening.

The depletion of Yahoo's staff, if accelerated, could slow down AMP development and implementation. We don't know what's going on inside Yahoo, but recent defections signal that lots of people might be taking their eye off the ball.

Further, Jerry Yang's tenure has got to be coming to an end, and where will that leave his #2 Sue Decker? The exec leading the newspaper consortium build has been ex-Knight Ridder Digital head Hilary Schneider, who's gained power in lockstep with Decker. If Decker ascends, well, maybe that wouldn't hurt.

But given the blood being called for by Carl Icahn and other increasingly upset and litigious shareholders, don't bet on Decker moving up.  What's more likely is new leadership, leadership called upon to reorient the company mightily, or as likely, prepare it intelligently for sale. New management certainly means at least a rethinking of the substantial resources Yahoo is devoting to the consortium.

The short-term negative:  a confusion about priorities that slows AMP development down.

The potential longer-term positive: with national and search advertising growth both slowing, maybe local advertising really is the major growth opportunity Schneider's been touting and new leadership doubles down on it.

Place your bets.

David Cohn is moving on to figure out if crowd funding can be made to work for news. Another young web-savvy journalist is moving in: Patrick Thornton. He's going "scour the Web for the people who are pushing the practice of beat reporting."

OffTheBus and NewsTrust.Net ran a little test two weeks ago. It's a crowdsourced week in review feature for high quality John McCain coverage, June 2 to 9. Here's the background and results.

There are two kinds of newspaper stories these days. One kind is the old-fashioned one that tell us something we don't know. The others --- now feeding on themselves in near-frenzy -- tell us about the unabated decline of the newspaper trade itself.

Sometimes, the cross paths, as if in irony, or in warning of how closely the two kinds of stories are connected. (On the timing, it seems like it is coincidence. Says McClatchy VP/News Howard Weaver: "While the timing of the Guantanamo project is of course inadvertent, I do think it's a worthy counterpoint.")

Take the first kind of story. McClatchy's Washington Bureau released Day One of a five-parter on
"Guantanamo: Beyond the Law" for Sunday publication. It got a good ride on Page Ones around the country and was well picked up on broadcast. Its summary minced few words:

An eight-month McClatchy investigation of the detention system created after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks has found that the U.S. imprisoned innocent men, subjected them to abuse, stripped them of their legal rights and allowed Islamic militants to turn the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba into a school for jihad.

At first read, it looks deeply reported, well-told and plainly on point to last Friday's Supreme Court ruling.

Then take today's story: McClatchy is cutting 10% of its staff, company-wide, with deep cuts at the Miami Herald (17%), the Charlotte Observer (11%) and even at corporate flagship Sacramento Bee (8%). That's 1400 employees total. The revenue declines are described well by Alan Mutter, here, who argues they probably won't be enough.

The Tom Lasseter-written Guantanamo series reminds us of the sterling contributions of the Knight Ridder bureau in the earlier days of the Iraq War. After the New York Times had stumbled in its own war run-up and war coverage, the KR bureau distinguished itself by asking the tough questions, doing the tough analysis and devoting sufficient resources to the story of the decade.

So what's happening now in that Washington Bureau, recalling that McClatchy merged its own bureau with KR's after it bought the company in 2006?

I traded email on this busy morning with Howard Weaver, whose own explanation of today's cuts is worth a read.

In short, today's McClatchy bureau is well down from the combined total of KR and McClatchy. And it is has many challenges, but Howard paints the picture of a bureau struggling to get out the best journalism it can, as evidenced by the Guantanamo series.

Before the KR purchase, the McClatchy (then 11 papers strong) bureau had 15 staffers. Knight Ridder's (31 papers strong) had 45 staffers. Today, the McClatchy bureau -- with 30 papers in the company after various divestitures -- has about 47 staffers.

"The emphasis was different; under KR regional reporters were tied to their papers (KC, Miami etc) and simply housed in the bureau," says Weaver. "Ours are full-fledged bureau staff, although chiefly responsive to their paper."

The pressure is evident.

"We have put two foreign positions on ice," explains Weaver, "filling Mexico City [the office remains open with local staff and hosts rotating journalists from McClatchy papers] and delayed opening a planned new bureau in South Asia (Islamabad or Mumbai were prospects)...Neither is considered "off the books" but both are on hold." Weaver says recruiting is underway for two other open jobs.

In addition, McClatchy is taking the scalpel to the management. Says Weaver: "David Westphal, our Washington Editor, will not be replaced when he leaves later this summer to follow his wife to her new post at USC/Annenberg; current bureau/MCT management and I will take up that slack, which enables us to keep more firepower on the front lines."

The front lines. They are easy to forget about as the other kind of story dominates. Yes, McClatchy may have more cutting to do, but today -- this week -- it's refreshing to see one US newspaper company making news for its journalism and not just for its cutting plans. There is no one way out of this jam, but, in the end, journalism businesses have still got to believe that the journalism adjective is still an important one.

By Robert Niles: After a decade, the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication has suspended publication of OJR. One of OJR's goals over the years has been to help mid-career journalists make a successful transition from other media to online reporting and production. I'm pleased to say that USC Annenberg will continue to provide support in that area, through the Knight Digital Media Center. I encourage OJR readers to click over to the KDMC website and its blogs, if you are not already a regular reader there. I am hopeful that OJR will continue to live at the KDMC, and that the publication might be revived under the KDMC's blogs. The decision to suspend OJR for now means that I have left the University of Southern California. But I am not going offline. I will continue to write, daily, about new media and journalism at my new website, SensibleTalk.com. I hope that many of you will click over and visit me there. Finally, on behalf of OJR, I want to thank you. Thank you for your readership, tips, corrections, kind words and support. And I want to wish you success as you work to build engaging, informative and sustainable websites, to better serve your audiences. So... in that spirit, I suppose that I will borrow a classic sign-off from the world of journalism, one that's been borrowed by another recently: Good night, and good luck.

By Robert Niles: The past decade has brought the journalism industry some of its darkest moments. On the business side, management teams that grew used to local monopolies could not react swiftly enough to protect their market share as thousands of online competitors emerged. Revenue tanked, readership declined and layoffs became a seasonal task at many newspapers. On the editorial side, many newsrooms blew or missed one major story after another, from the Whitewater "scandal," hitting the snooze button on the global warming alarm, the emergence of al Qaeda before 9/11, the Bush administration's phony case for war in Iraq, to the abandonment of mortgage lending standards that inflated a housing bubble. But not every news organization blew it. Indeed, as journalism has suffered some of its darkest moments over the past decade, a few news organizations stand apart for their bright triumphs. On the Washington beat, perhaps no single news organization so often has gotten the story right as the McClatchy Washington bureau. From providing one of the few domestic voices to consistently challenge the Bush administration's bogus claims before the Iraq War (The New Yorker being another), to dogging the administration over the politicalization of the U.S. Justice Department, the bureau, and its website, www.mcclatchydc.com have become the must-click destination for readers thirsty for clear, accurate, spin-free reporting. The bureau will publish this weekend an in-depth investigation of the situation at Guantanamo Bay, where the United States has been holding alleged terrorists, in violation of due process rights, according to a Supreme Court ruling this week. I spoke with McClatchy Washington Bureau Web editor Jim Van Nostrand by phone this week, and asked him why McClatchy's had such success, and why the bureau took the unusual step of launching its own, stand-alone website. An edited transcript of our conversations follows.