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!!

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.

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.

I'd like to read the Los Angeles Times manual on "how to deal with difficult situations." Though it's never been made public, it's clear it's been infiltrated by those disseminating disinformation. The result: no matter what seems to happen at the Times in the last several years -- old Tribune and new Zell-led Tribune -- we all get to witness some blow-out spectacle, the kind of spectacle such manuals are supposed to keep behind closed doors.

This week, of course, after Randy Michaels' newly announced Halfsies (50/50 edit/ad split) Strategy, the Times re-takes the spotlight. Word leaks out that the Los Angeles Times Magazine, one of the few remaining Sunday magazines, has been seized in a coup by the Times' business side. Its editors and writers are out  -- maybe there's a Planet Runway-like Journalist Elimination reality show David Hiller can sell to his new Hollywood friends (check out this good LA Observed piece on Hiller "being star-struck by the glamour of his adopted hometown"). Former InStyle and L.A. Style Editor Annie Gilbar will apparently head the new mag.

The decision to launch (re-launch) a new advertiser-friendly magazine in and of itself is no shocker,
and not a bad idea. The New York Times and the Boston Globe are just two of numerous well-regarded papers to plumb design, home, fashion and more, going after high-end and luxury dollars. Such magazines can be run by editorial departments; they can be run by advertising departments. The key is to clearly and prominently tell your readers who is producing the section. Readers aren't dummies; they take in the content for what it is.

But at the Times, of course, the situation had to blow up, handled in an unbelievably clumsy way. You'd think that the paper's recent historic memory over the secret Staples Center "sponsorship" and revenue sharing of and with a "special section" -- which cost the jobs of then-editor Michael Parks and then-publisher Kathryn Downing  -- should have been instructive, even if it did happen a year before Tribune bought the Times.

But, no, the Times managed to make the elimination of the L.A. Times Magazine (which had become monthly) and its replacement with an ad product another debacle. Why not close the L.A. Times Magazine, sending it to an eternal rest that most of its brethren have found in the last couple of decades. Then, have your business side launch all the high-demo magazines you want. It seems so simple.

Maybe, it's that Publisher David Hiller indeed wants to keep the name of the magazine intact, playing sleight of hand with readers. Maybe he's not sure yet. But he's managed to leave new (installed in February) editor Russ Stanton dangling in the wind, pleading that the name not being, shall we say, re-purposed. You could place bets on Stanton's half-life before this controversy, as the Times has managed an unprecedented turnover in its publisher and top editor ranks (well-chronicled here by Joe Strupp). Odds on Stanton's tenure shifted this week.

Why do things keep blowing up at the Times? My sense is that the place has two uneasy cultures, cultures that have always been uneasy with each other, but ones that are now colliding. 

On the editorial side, the Times newsroom leadership is famous for its institutional haughtiness and resistance to change, despite the changing needs of readers and changing demands of the web age. (Here, we understand Randy Michaels' point as his stats show LAT newsroom story productivity being 4-6X less than that of other Tribune papers.)

On the business side, we first saw Chicago-based and Chicago-bound Tribune execs unable to find a successful way to move the Times into the 21st century, resulting in one trainwreck after another. Now, with the hot breath of a $12 bill debt bogeyman bearing down, the new Zell-led Tribune is going to have less patience with resistance to change and less concern about the niceties of editorial and ad walls.

But this isn't just about our voyeuristic watchings of Times' misfortunes. This is about the increasingly rapid destroying of the Times' brand. Yes, you can poke all kinds of fun at its stodginess, but recall that we are talking about a paper that once proudly ranked in the top 10 nationwide, deploying reporters around the globe and the country, sending back great journalism.

Staples, musical chairs in the exec ranks, alchemizing editorial gold into advertising silver -- all these are noticed by readers. They scream Old Media, forgettable, dying old media, and media that just can't be known (even as it was loved or hated) for the Good Housekeeping brand value it used to have. Such brand value shouldn't matter just to journalists; ad sellers will tell you that well-known newspaper brands still fetch above-average ad rates.

Unfortunately, the Times brand is not the only one at stake. As the economic pressures mount at newspapers, the pressures to thin the line between editorial and ads is being felt in many newspaper buildings. (I'm not one that thinks Philly's recent Derrie-Air ad satire is a big issue; it's an ad.) I do recall my early days at Knight Ridder New Media (later Knight Ridder Digital), when the ad people started selling the editorial-looking "Ask the Expert," presenting self-serving realtor, plumber, insurance salesman content. We protested, but were told the web is different.

Yes, many things about the web -- and print newspapers going forward -- are different. But one thing's not -- telling readers whether what they are reading is being presented with, or without, fear or favor.

MORE RECENT TRIBUNE COVERAGE The Newest Barbarians, Bearing Spreadsheets, here. What's Wrong with Tribune's Math, here

In the mid-'90s, we called it "eating your own dogfood." In other words, using and participating directly in the medium in which you worked. Use your own website, actually read your own paper. Trying to enter an online classified. Submitting a community event online.

So, as I've come to become an industry analyst, I've learned a lot about our emerging digital world by actually blogging. As an analyst, I can write abstractly about the difference between stories and blogs, but being a blogger has taught me a lot about (self) editing, sourcing, web customs and ethics -- all things best learned by doing.

In that spirit, I've done a little multimedia here and there, learning what's different and what's the same, as compared to being a scribe. Here's the most recent example, subbing for Mark Fitzgerald and teaming with Jen Saba on the "Fitz & Jen Give You The Business" Editor and Publisher podcast this week. Be kind, if you listen; I'm a newbie.

So, it's clear, that Randy Michaels knows how to draw attention. His 50/50 ad/news plan isn't exactly revolutionary, but it's become a lightning rod for the news industry, as it comes to grip with near-death experience.

Two weeks ago, Rupert Murdoch opined that print would outlive him, lasting (print!) another 20 years. Today, we had Steve Ballmer providing the half-life of 10 years for the newspaper, though the combo of the self-serving nature of the comment and Microsoft's Internet track record hardly make us mistake him for Nostradamus.

You can read MediaNews' Dean Singleton saying "It's time to get over it and move to a print model that matches the times." McClatchy's Howard Weaver, in a worth-reading Sunday post (the industry is really going 24/7!), was candid about the decline:

Revenues continue to be bleak, and it is increasingly apparent that fundamental shifts in competition and audience (combined with cyclical economic woes) demand permanent structural changes. Though many encouraging signs point us toward future success (total audience and online revenues are indeed growing at double-digit rates, for instance) the overall picture is undeniably changing.

Put it plainer: newspaper companies will make less money, get smaller and face greater competition. As a result, we’ll have to become more efficient, make smarter choices and allocate resources to our essential activities.

Overall translation: It's The End of the World As We Know It. Get Over It.

That's a big turning point, and it is now sinking in universally.

So now is the time to sort out real solutions from ersatz ones, an exercise that will consume many of us for a good while.

Which brings us back, most immediately, to Mr. Michaels' halfsies proposition.

I consulted one of my best sources, a highly experienced ad director -- we'll call him AdMan, to protect one of those still industry-employed.

He doesn't think much of the Michaels' plan.

"It's nothing new that he is proposing. I don't know how many long meetings I sat through, looking at sectioning, looking at how to run the paper more economically.....I'm skeptical he can take pages out [we believe Tribune wants to cut another 500 pages chain-wide each week] and do it in strategic ways. Fundamentally, he's right, but Macy's is going to say you're not going to put my ads in the B section."

So AdMan gives an ad view of page make-up that is highly instructive. First, let's start with this irony. For decades, newspapers have sold advertisers on the value of the A section. Most read -- let us show you the Scarboroughs. Advertisers lined up for the A section with page-dominating ads. They don't take kindly to being placed on "composite" pages, in which ad butt up against one another.

The irony: in the digital age, it's the traditional content of the A section -- national and international news -- that's least useful. That stuff is commoditized, universally available online, and offering practically no distinctiveness under the local newspaper brand. So newspapers have built a print business around their now least-valuable-print content. And yet when calls to re-section surface -- Carole Leigh Hutton's sudden disappearance from Singleton's Mercury News comes to mind -- they're dissed as "radical."

Anyhow Metro, Business and Sports sections have already slimmed down, and whichever advertisers that have screamed the least have been placed there. In many papers, there's just not much room left in the traditional sections of the paper.

So AdMan says that to achieve a 50/50 balance, compared to the more traditional 60 (news)/40 (ads), the choices are limited, says AdMan:

---"Flow" ads around Op-Ed page content, one of the few pages left untouched by ads;
---Whack stand-alone feature sections like Food, Health, Weekend, etc.
---Or make advertisers "do something different," meaning accept placement that seems less valuable to them

Door number 3 looks particularly perilous as ad buyers look for new rationales to move budget from print to online. Door number 2 drains away the kind of niche content that's useful to readers and most highly monetizable online. Door number 1 helps a little, but further diminishes the perception of a newspaper's strong community identification.

It's literally and figuratively true: the doors are closing. And "don't let them hit you on the way out" might be a message from the latest round of downsizings.

Something's going to have to give. We've heard the estimate that Tribune might save 18% or so on newsprint if it can implement the new ratio. But Goldman Sachs recently estimated that newsprint pricing will go up 20% in the second half of the year. That's a lot of hard work of cutting -- diminishing circulation and advertising necessarily at the same time -- to essentially stay in place, budgetarily.

Gawker, responding to my Monday post made its call: "Our BOLD prediction: "The four-day print edition (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Sunday) will arrive in mid-major cities in the next 5 years."

I think that's right. The new daily paper is the web and the print is rapidly becoming a mostly-daily, sometimes-on-Sunday niche.

Sam, I get it. You're being aggressive. When you add to Randy Michaels' aggressive talk about cutting newspaper size and staff that "I promise you he is underestimating the level of aggressiveness with which we are attacking this whole challenge," you seem to be proudly announcing that the newest barbarians may well be inside the gates. I'm not sure who that impresses aims to impress -- your employees are fairly shell-shocked already -- but it does capture attention.

What I don't get is why the aggressiveness seems to take us back to 1980 rather than forward to 2012? (Though 2012 may seem even further away to Zell and Michaels than it does to Hillary Clinton.)

It's little surprise to keen observers of the new Tribune that more draconian cuts had to be on the way. Zell relied on this trading acumen, and luck, to create an auction for Newsday, and that netted him tens of millions more than most people will tell you the paper is worth. The Cubs, Wrigley Field and cable network assets are next, but the deepening downturn in the industry (and as of Friday, maybe the cyclical economy as well) tell us that those asset sales may not even be enough to get Tribune through 2009.

What is surprising is that in publicly announcing cutbacks, Randy Michaels, Zell's radio guy-turned-Tribune czar, is focusing on, of all things, PRINT.

Take his notion of how to make the papers more readable and sell more of them.

Michaels saying the papers will become more USA Today-like, with: "a new look and feel in each market, emphasizing what people are telling us they want in the research: charts, graphs, maps, lists."

Wow. Great solution for 1992 perhaps, 10 years after USA Today turned the newspaper world, Pleasantville-like, from black and white to color. The problem with that is that USA Today is essentially flat last several years in circulation, and it's got a national base and multiplicity of hotel/travel programs to keep the numbers up. The biggest innovation of the last couple of years isn't the color weather map on USA Today's back page; it's Google's ability to map everything and anything, instantly -- at the customer's fingertips and choice, 24/7.

Which takes us to the bigger news that Tribune figured out that the problem is one of ratios, now believing that a 50/50 ratio of ads to news is right.

Michaels' reasoning:

"If we take, for instance, the Los Angeles Times to a 50-50 ratio … the smallest paper, Monday and Tuesday, [would be] 56 pages. That would be substantially larger than that day's Wall Street Journal. We don't think that's a bad value to the consumer. And we think that by doing that, and then by being able to produce less editorial content … we can save a lot of money by producing the right-size newspaper.

Let me hear that again. You're going to decide how much editorial content to produce by seeing how much will fit into the new downsized papers? You're going to ratchet down the amount of editorial content (and staff), leaving the decision of what you are going to give your print readers essentially in the hands of print ad buyers?

Surely, we can make good journalistic arguments about the folly of that. Journalism's never been mainly a quantitative business. But let's look broadly at "product." Would Randy Michaels, who rebuilt Clear Channel on a low-cost model, let the amount of radio ads sold determine how much programming listeners got? I don't think so; you've still got to have a consistent product for listeners or readers.

Readers are already fleeing newspapers -- and I'm talking about decades-long readers, not the young whom the industry too often blames -- because they see every day that less is less. This change, however it looks on a spreadsheet, will only hasten that decline.

That's a decline that is, at this point, inevitable anyhow. I give Michaels' credit in publicly announcing some thinking about how to justify cuts, but he could have put it more simply. People and paper are our two biggest costs, and we don't have enough money to maintain current levels of spending. That's less fancy, but more to the point.

What we'll soon see is "daily" papers becoming, uh, less daily. Monday and Tuesday editions are a sinkhole, with the latest evidence here, as MediaNews looks to those days as "quick-read" editions. Those days could soon be dropped completely, at smaller operations here and there. Anyhow, the whole notion of a daily newspaper is now obsolescent. It has taken way too long to get to 24/7 newsrooms and news output, but that's what the national players -- from CNN to the New York Times to the BBC -- have adjusted to. Even TBO.com, in Tampa Bay, has made a centerpiece of its new "Continuous News Desk" and committed a couple of dozen people (print, broadcast, web) to making it work.

The old daily paper is being -- as we watched Hillary Clinton's concession on Saturday and its instant analysis on TV and web -- replaced by the web.

Which brings me to a final point on Tribune's new math. Editors and reporters will never like the idea of scrutinizing editorial production by staffer, department or newsroom. As an old managing editor, I deeply understand that. At the same time, of course, the quantity of production (obviously aided by a quality gauge) does have value.

That value is never more evident than in the Internet age. And that's the Achilles heel of Tribune's Friday reasoning. Publishers can't decide how much staff they'll keep or how many stories they need on the basis of shrinking print. They've got to make those determinations on the Internet value of editorial content and of serving target audiences, local or niche. That content has lots of value -- short- and long-tail, on publishers' own sites and distributed on portal and niche sites, readied for mobile use and made more easily accessible through archives.

So, yes, think about the volume (always in tandem with quality), but think about web value -- ad monetization, syndication, licensing revenue -- and not just how much print advertising can be sold on any given day.

For Tribune -- and everyone in the industry -- I think it's back to spreadsheets. A content unit-based value system is a hazy idea, and it needs a lot more work to make journalistic -- and business -- sense.

More on Tribune here.

You've had the sensation. You DVR up last night's The Daily Show or Colbert Report, expecting some laughs and relaxation, and you get them. But you get more: You get news reporting, stealthy news reporting that pretends to be comedy, but is actual news.

Last week, I loved Jon Stewart's disarming grilling of toady-turned-confessor Scott McClellan. He wouldn't let McClellan get away with his week-long shtick that nobody was lying, just "misleading." Even the best of the card-carrying journalists doing interviews usually let go of the tough questions when interviewees give them non-answers, and that was characteristic of their McClellan interviews as well. Stewart didn't, and he made his point about the very nature of White House information management and duplicity.

Cool, I thought -- and entertaining. Then Colbert came on, with an interview of George Will,
whose body temp has apparently never exceeded 95 degrees. Still, through the brilliantly exchanged repartee (tennis for intellectuals), he got Will to talk about his agnosticism. Colbert's got one of the best poker faces in the biz, but you could see the combination of triumph and surprise on his face, when he elicited that one. It was an amazing moment in an otherwise curious discussion of basic American values.

That's stuff you don't see in many places.

The emergence of comedy as real news is now getting certified as the Pew people compared, in May, its impact on traditional news and made this recent conclusion:

“In its choice of topics, its use of news footage to deconstruct the manipulations by public figures, and its tendency toward pointed satire over playing just for laughs, “The Daily Show” performs a function that is close to journalistic in nature—getting people to think critically about the public square....In that sense, it is a variation of the tradition of Russell Baker, Art Hoppe, Art Buchwald, H.L. Mencken and other satirists who once graced the pages of American newspapers." David Weir's take on the stats and meaning behind that statement is worth reading here.

In April, David made a similar point in comparing Jon Stewart's take with that of the New York Times on the cozy embedding of military experts into media. David lambasted the Times' report as "so boring as to make sleeping pills outmoded". He then gave the BNET Media Industry Award for the Best Political Report on Television — in the Context of the Best Business Plan ( or BMIAFTBPROT-ITCOTBBP) goes to The Daily Show, concluding "...of course the award for the best business plan goes to everybody who’s thinking outside of the old media box, which in due time will be recognized as the coffin it is."

But it's not just comedy that's changing the nature of what we consider news, or journalism, or sometimes, more fundamentally, what we consider to be journalistic operations.

Another strong journalistic voice that is emerging is the radio version of This American Life, on NPR. This week's program took on the case of The Prosecutor, a brilliant exploration of how politics of the day have messed with fundamental notions of justice. And in early May, host Ira Glass put together the best piece I've heard or read on just how the subprime meltdown happened, in The Giant Pools of Money. It was elemental, colorful, understandable and mind-blowing.

As 60 Minutes proved in an earlier generation, news doesn't have to be boring, or only presented in traditional ways.

One more example of how the very nature of journalism is changing. Check out On the Media's segment on "The Olbermann Effect." It details how MSNBC took some time to find an identity. Its formula is now beating Fox News some nights, and it's got a clear edge on the other old networks, CBS and ABC. The formula: a newer media mix of the modern-day-Murrow Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews' Joy of Politics persona put together with the authority (what Les Moonves has called the ''voice of God") of Old Media stalwarts Tom Brokaw, Brian Williams and Tim Russert. That's recombinant journalism, and that's clearly the future of our craft.

"Multimedia journalism" is much more than adding moving pictures and sound to a basic print report put online. Multimedia journalism is being born in unexpected and exciting ways. Most print-based news organizations (and indeed most traditional broadcast-based news companies) haven't really understood that yet. As these worlds collide, energetically, ironically or mordantly, we'll see a new journalism being born that better fits our times.

An acid test of newspapering is how a paper reports on itself. We're taught to be cautious, even leaning over backwards, to make sure that stories involving the paper, or its parent companies, are done according to basic journalistic standards, meaning fairly and with neither fear nor favor. It's sometimes a hard call. I remember many papers driving their publishers crazy in their early days of the web when they'd write about this great new thing called the Internet, where, could-you-believe-it, you could get free classifieds! Often times, newspaper people would glibly note Yahoo, AOL, Lycos, eBay, craigslist and the like and not even mention their own newspaper websites. That fairness gene, kicked unnecessarily into overdrive.

But then there's today's case of the Wall Street Journal. The Journal's long been one of my fundamental reads, and has bent over backwards in reporting on itself, especially during the drama of its sale to News Corp last year. That's why its story on "Real Time Stock Quotes Issued In a Nasdaq Test," stands out like a sore thumb.

It is un-bylined in the paper, the longest piece in today's 14-page Money & Investing section to get that treatment. Now online, Shara Tibken gets the byline.

The first paragraph lays out that Nasdaq is moving to make real-time quotes (no longer delayed 15 or 20 minutes) freely available on the web.

Second paragraph:

"The real-time quotes will be on WSJ.com, the online version of The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere after the Nasdaq Stock Market launched a new service that provides access to such data. The data are being offered in a six-month pilot program, as Nasdaq waits for definitive Securities and Exchange Commission approval".

Elsewhere? Elsewhere, we see in the next paragraph includes CNBC, Google Finance....."as well as Marketwatch.com and Barrons.com, both owned by News Corp., publisher of the Journal."

After a few more paragraphs of description, we learn that Nasdaq "partners" are paying a maximum of $150,000 a month for the service, but we aren't given the usual standard of Journal reporting to explain whether the number of partners is limited, or whether Journal readers will now see these listings real-time most everywhere. (In fact, it looks like the deal is non-exclusive, according to this more straightforward Reuters story).

Then we come to more self-promotion.

On WSJ.com, the real-time prices are presented along with the standard, comprehensive 15-minute delayed prices from the major U.S. markets. Comprehensive quotes reflect the "composite" quote for an issue. When no real-time trade is available from Nasdaq, readers will find composite quotes only.

These new prices are displayed in Quotes & Research on WSJ.com, as well as in the "rollover" quotes that are included in Markets Data Center, at WSJMarkets.com.

And how might Google Finance and CNBC be doing their implementations? No word of that.

Ouch. The Journal failed Journalism 101 here. It could be simple sloppiness, or it could be a long hand of News Corp, which seems challenged in understanding the difference between journalism and promotion. I hope it's the former, but fear its the latter.

Summertime and the livin' is far from easy. Now that we're past Memorial Day, let's speculate on the summer that will be. It's a long time til Labor Day for the news industry. We've seen Rupert Murdoch, ironically drawing stark attention to his own advanced age -- and the question of what will become of his emerging digital empire -- in recently noting that print will out-live him. ("Print will be there for at least 20 years, and outlive me.") The London bookies might be having a field day with that one.

But for most publishers, the times just turn edgier and edgier. I asked a keen observer about the major strategies news publishers are considering as they face the changed business landscape. "Strategies?," he laughed. "They're too busy burning the furniture."

Burning the furniture? In June? Well, the industry has had a hard time separating out cyclical change from structural change, but those still working might hope some wood's left for winter.

Here are nine of my questions about the summer ahead. What's yours?

---1. At the New York Times, it's going to be a tense summer. Buyouts and layoffs have now taken out about 100 jobs, as the Times increases its dividend to try to retain shareholders. The new Harbinger/Firebrand board members are now inside the tent, poking at its corners. How soon will the Times management heed their calls to bite the bullet, sell ailing newspaper properties (Globe, regional group), buy a little time, save a little staff and invest more in the great digital future, which is the Times' salvation?

---2. Love the photo with David Hiller (left) and Randy Michaels (center), in Crain Chicago Business story.
Hiller, tried-and-true Tribuneite, is the ultimate survivor, but the expression says even his tenure as L.A. Times publisher is limited. The Times' publisher and editor change dramas have been quite public, but consider they've been churning through ad VPs about yearly for most of this century. Think what that does to the numbers (and you see why Tribune's own numbers are disproportionately down). Will David Hiller last out the summer or the year?

---3. We hear the grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr grinding of teeth from large-player Gannett to small-player Gatehouse, down to a new low of $3.90 a share on Monday. As the Goldman Sachs report put it circumspectly: ""Our thesis that a focus on smaller, 'hyper-local' markets would serve as a counter weight to the cyclical and secular pressures negatively impacting newspaper industry revenue performance has proven only partially correct, as evidenced by the declining trend in same-story revenues over the last several quarters." In other words, is there no refuge out there?

---4. Why did US news publishers fail to follow other big US corporations in diversifying to international markets?  Look at the now-double digit decreases in US ad revenues -- 10% in ads overall in April; 20% in classifieds -- and you see that the US is the epicenter of the newspaper meltdown. UK, Europe and Japan are muddling along -- down a tad -- but much of the developing world from Eastern Europe to Latin America to South Africa to China and India is going gangbusters. Chains like the Irish-centered Independent News and Media and the Norwegian-based Schibsted saw this change coming and have invested way beyond their initial  comfort zones. Now they are diversified, and growing, while US chains see the double whammy of fewer ads and higher newsprint (expected to price up 20% year over year for the second half of 2008) costs.

---5. Will salvation be found in motherhood? "Soccer moms" might have been so last election, but momomania is sweeping news websites. Boston.com's ""Bomoms"," and the Orange Country Register's "OCMoms" are part of the profound move to niche. If general news still pulls in puny CPMs, sites are looking at profiliferating niche sites around them -- in this case, the fast-expanding, now dozen-strong Mama web chain (San Diego Mama, Houston Mama, DC Mama. The hard part - producing enough compelling content, engaging real community and getting the ad people sufficiently connected.

---6. How fast can we replace expensive staff-written stuff with user-gen? The economics are clear. Better to pay nothing for something that will get you 1000 page views than part of a professional salary. User-gen's not just about community engagement -- it's about cold, hard cash. As user-gen initiatives rage, look for more of them to get connected to newspapers' main publishing systems -- witness the recent Saxotech/Pluck announcement -- joining the two worlds of newsroom and user gen. One publishing system, monetized singly.

---7. How big a bandage will we need to blot the paper cuts? Much has been made of the news industry covering its own demise (that's what we do). But you have to admire the Google mapping/color-coding of the rampaging layoffs and buyouts by Erica Smith, here.

---8. How much workouts will the whiteboards get? Structural change is an order of the day. Sometimes highly strategic, perhaps, and sometimes Titanic deck-chair-like. Belo and Scripps have split themselves in halves, the Washington Post is re-doing print/online orgs and the San Diego Tribune is trying a grand experiment of putting it all together.

---9.  How loud will the Yahoo! be by summer's end? With AMP being touted by Yahoo as a salvation to newspaper consortium members' audience/ad targeting woes, its arrival by end of summer at MediaNews properties, among others, may be a cause for whooping it up. Of course, it is bound to be a  summer of High Anxiety (shout out to Harvey Korman)
at Yahoo and for those partnered with it at the hip and wallet. With Google gaining search ad market share, Yahoo and Microsoft, abetted by matchmakers like Carl Icahn, are being forced to do something. Yes, Microsoft's making a bunch of moves, but expect it to circle back around to Sunnyvale., especially given today's revelations that Jerry Yang may have rejected an earlier $40 a share Microsoft bid. Nothing's stopping Yahoo from moving on AMP and its implementation for now, but a Yahoo uncertain of its own future just adds to the newspaper summer worry pile.

If you've seen a bit of Bloomberg TV or heard Bloomberg Radio or been in front of one of its terminals, you may have recently wondered: Why isn't it doing more with what it has?

Its reporters are some of the fastest moving on the web, and know data better than most covering the news industry.

So what might today's announcement that news industry veteran Norm Pearlstine is becoming "chief content officer" of Bloomberg mean?

My quick take:

* Right now, Bloomberg derives almost all its revenues from Corporate markets. With Pearlstine at the hub, it plainly will look at leveraging its assets beyond Corporate, most directly to B2C markets. I hear that has made recent forays into Legal markets as well, competing with Reed Elsevier's LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters' West Publishing.
* Key question is one familiar to all legacy news companies. Can it keep its grip on stable (in this case, installed terminal) revenue, while competing in markets new to it. It faces risk of commoditizing its core business, unless it executes a Free Web B2C strategy smartly.
* Business advertising draws among the highest CPM rates, more than $100 CPM for business news video and above $50 CPM for graphical ads, for high-branded content. But the overall pie of online business news ad revenue is still small -- that's why News Corp decided against eliminating wsj.com subscription wall. There's simply not enough money in web business news advertising to make up its online sub revenue loss.
* Pearlstine's experience tells us that this is all about leveraging the content assets across all modern media platforms. So expect Bloomberg to go where the growth is -- advertising. Web advertising is still growing around a 20 per cent rate, and Bloomberg should cash in there.
* The new Bloomberg view should be more global. According to Outsell research numbers, it drives 47% of its revenues from the US, 38% from EMEA and only 10% from Asia. Asia should be bigger. So look for Bloomberg to become a more global player, both through acquisition and greater use of partner distribution channels.

In sum, I think there are three words that define the Pearlstine announcement:
---Consumer
---Advertising
---Global

Bloomberg sees a similar opportunity as Rupert Murdoch saw in buying Dow Jones -- the global business news opportunity leveraged over all platforms. Today's announcement means more competition for Dow Jones -- and Time Warner's business magazines, McGraw Hill's Business Week, Forbes, the New York Times and the Financial Times.

Let the new business games begin.

I've long compared the cable and phone companies on the one hand to the newspaper companies on the other.

Newspaper companies saw there business being upended by the Internet, made small bets and have lost out on the big ad growth the web has generated.

Telephone companies -- the successors of monopoly Ma Bell -- first consolidated and then saw that old vanilla phone service was disappearing, well, almost as fast as newsprint-based news. They moved into internet service provision and then into more lucrative broadband, acing out the many small companies that had at first parted the waters (some of which, including Infinet, were owned by newspaper companies). They invested heavily (and often clumsily) in mobile and have figured out how to wring many new dollars from all of us.

Cable companies saw that they were reaching a saturation point in their own penetration, and then felt the hot breath of the formerly telephone companies moving to offer .... cable TV. So they've gone after both internet service providing and local voice, understanding that boomers still want the comfort of the old landlines.

Triple Play, once a novelty, has become the standard. Cable + Internet + Telephone.

Now Cablevision's stuck out its neck, $650 million worth, to swing for fences.

Cable + Internet + Telephone + Newspaper. A combo that could give Cablevision an edge against Verizon, its biggest competitor.

A home run?

My betting is that it's one of the best labs for everyone in the news industry to watch.

What stands in the way of a big Cablevision win? In a couple of words: strategy and exectuion.

In strategy, Cablevision must move beyond the hazy notion of Long Island Convergence (some say the Dolans may have had a bit too much Long Island Tea in offering $70 million more than their competition for Newsday) to a true strategy. That strategy, in a nutshell:

---Create a new ad vision of how Cablevision/Newsday can serve local advertisers, from its Long Island home base to metro New York to southern Connecticut to northern Jersey. Providing advertisers reach to mass and targeted niche audiences, through cable, newspaper and internet is what must be done.
---Create a new content vision for how Cablevision/Newsday can serve local news readers, sports lovers, business observers and entertainment seekers. The company will have a newsgathering/production force of more than 500. The goal has got to be to get out of text/TV/audio silos, creating text and multimedia content, distributing that content to become dominant in its key geographic areas
---Connecting the ad and content engines to the wider web distribution world. The new independent-of-Tribune Newsday may well move out of its Tribune partnerships (nothing in release one way or another on CareerBuilder, Classified Ventures, QuadrantONE, etc.) and look at joining the Yahoo News consortium, among others. The Daily News is in it, but has no market exclusivity.

The Execution? Tougher than the strategy. It should be streamlining as many of the cost centers of both companies as possible, but doing that in a way that builds the company for success, rather than crippling it.

Yes, ad staffs and selling propositions can converge and yes, scribes and TV producers are really members of the same species. But the human dimension here is what's tough. Habit, tradition and skill set are all obstacles. As I wrote last week, someone is going to surmount them; Cablevision's just one of the newest and potentially most interesting to try.

For Rupert-watchers, the sale is something of an enigma. Why did it go this way less than a week after his public boast that he'd win the prize? Questions to be answered:
---Did Tribune's latest double-digit declines convince him that it really wasn't a prize at all, that the the Post's $50 million loss really wouldn't turn to profit, given both a bigger Newsday pricetag and the detiorating newspaper ad market?
---Is News Corp thinking that further investment in newspapers just won't pencil out?
---Back to the overpay question. Did Rupert overpay for Dow Jones and did the Dolans overpay for Newsday?
Both are long-term investments, and you can't make judgments based on today's pressures and short-term trends. This is all about real convergence and its value.

Consider the new Big City American journalism and the emerging cast of characters owning it. It's a page right out of the history books when a few well-heeled titans controlled the press, and its new incarnation could have all kinds of implications for the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, for AP and for the journalism start-ups near and far.

If Rupert Murdoch indeed knows more about who the next owner of Newsday will be than the rest of us, and I'd have a sense he does, that would make him Prince, if not King, of New York. Pending what may be obligatory regulatory review, given the anti-trust and FCC thinking of the moment, he'd own Newsday, the Post, WWOR-TV, WNYW-TV and the solidly NYC-centric Wall Street Journal.

Chicago is Sam Zell-land, as Sam bought the title King of Chicago along with the Tribune, WGN TV and Radio, Chicago Magazine, Redeye and CLTV.

The Bay Area is Dean Singleton's, by far the largest newspaper owner out here, owning about everything daily other than the Chronicle, which is owned by Hearst, his key business partner in many other markets.

Dean is also chair of the AP board, and Sam and Rupert have just joined.

I bet we'll see more. As the new Tribune peels off Newsday, and stares down the next debt payments, eyes are bound to turn to L.A. And there, too, might not a new Big Man in Town buyers emerge? Recall that David Geffen, Eli Broad and Ron Burkle were all in the hunt earlier for the Times.

In Boston, it's just a matter of time before the Times says good-bye to the Globe (paging Jack Welch); it's got to deal with the emerging threat to its core NY Times flagship by.....Murdoch, whose company is talking of synergizing his London Times and the Journal. (By the way, in a recent interview, former Times editor Howell Raines spoke of how the Jayson Blair scandal shelved plans to re-brand the International Herald Tribune with the Times nameplate. Great idea -- the Times now wins or loses as a global news franchise -- and why haven't the plans proceeded? There's little time to waste especially as the Murdochian armies mass.)

It's funny, isn't it, that pundits hypothesized that the Internet and associated technologies would democratize media and here we are back to the landscape of the early 1900s. Hearsts and Pulitzers and the rest changed journalism, started wars and elected presidents. Now undoubtedly, our media is much more diverse, but arguably getting more concentrated at the top end, where most of the ad revenue is and where the greatest bullhorns are heard.

Yes, daily newspapers' businesses are in a world of hurt, but those able to buy low, leverage the assets synergistically with emerging media or subsidize them to meet other business and political goals are in a great position. The brand value associated with the the L.A. Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune and Newsday, just to name a few, is still great, and can be harnessed in any ways new owners see fit.

What kind of impacts might such rapidly changing ownership portend:

---All roads may lead to Yahoo. With 40% of newspapers (by circulation) in on parts of the consortium deal and increasingly betting on the Yahoo AMP ad platform to provide one of their greatest growth opportunities, Yahoo has major importance. With Steve Ballmer out of the picture for now, new suitors will come knocking. One of those who has wooed Yahoo before and who undoubtedly will again is Rupert Murdoch. Remember his plan to swap MySpace for 25% of Yahoo, and then subsequent talks after Microsoft came bidding? Now News Corp, with its increasing newspaper heft, sees more ways to synergize news assets with Yahoo and more ways to synergize Fox Interactive Media as well.

So what if News Corp bought or had significant control of Yahoo? That would put Murdoch in the catbird's seat of US journalism.

---AP may be a pivotal chip in the new game. AP has moved as smartly as a cooperative can, embracing the ideas of web 2.0 and trying to get its member/owners (all the daily newspaper companies) to come along. It's been a tough slog. Now big questions sit on the AP horizon. Will it be the kind of coop envisioned more than a century ago, or will key players be more interested in the question, "What can AP do for us?", change or constrict its mission. It's a vital question made even more relevant because AP's become more important to national and global reporting as major metros have reduced their coverage in those areas, focusing on local.

---Personifying the new corporate ownership should give "public interest" journalism a new way to assert itself. I've written about a lot of sprouts of public interest journalism, most non-profit, some for-profit, but all small and funded in small amounts. In a new age of easily identifiable Big Man in Town journalism, would member-supported local/regional and even national news media find new life?

It's easy to get lost in the current era of Big Man in Town Journalism. Zell. Singleton, Murdoch. Tierney. Harte. So much of the recent drama in newspaper ownership change has been driven by personality, as keep-it-in-road, rationale profit-seeking companies turn up their noses at the prospects of buying newspaper companies. It takes an outsized ego, an outsized wallet (your own maybe, but preferably someone else's) and a perhaps outlandish optimism to grab onto the horns of the bull and take off for a wild ride.

One current installment of that drama is playing out in Long Island, home of once-proud Newsday, a paper that innovated ahead of its day and then saw its fortunes cascade through the Times Mirror and Tribune funhouses. As Sam Zell stares down his first balloon debt payment, Newsday's hit the block, and an unusually crowded one it is. Isn't it great to see a bidding war for a newspaper company? It is highly enjoyable, if unique to market circumstance. With Murdoch's Post and Mort Zuckerman's New York Daily News in lethal competition, both have a hard time imagining the other getting Newsday and using it as cudgel in the war.

The weapon for each in that case is, of course, cost reduction -- a relentless streaming of cost in all departments -- ad, circ, production and printing and finance, not to speak of how newsroom synergies might be achieved. It's the other bidder in this case -- currently the high one -- that I think paints a more interesting picture of what the local "press" may become.

Cablevision has offered $70 million more than either Mort or Rupert, currently at $650 million, $150 million above its original offer. With Rupert and Sam increasingly better buddies (formally on AP board and informally, we can only guess), I would have put my money on that deal (and agree with Alan Mutter's notion of a potential Murdoch/Zell endgame, here). But $70 million is quite a differential, and for now, Rupert is saying he isn't going up. Further the potential of FCC review of his increasingly entangling NYC-area cross-ownership (the Post, WWOR-TV and WNYW-TV, Dow Jones and Newsday) would at least slow down and bring uncertainty to the deal. Sam Zell's bankers don't like uncertainty.

So that may leave us with a new attempt at....synergy. In fact, it could turn the emergent idea of Triple Play -- TV cable service, Internet service, local phone service -- into a Home Run, adding "newspaper" to the diamond.

In this new synergistic interpretation, we'd observe what new owners would see as complementary in combining Cable News -- including News12 Interactive.com (its cringe-worthy tagline -- "only in cable  not on phone company tv or anywhere else"; you need a password to get in unless you are a local cable subscriber) -- with Newsday. It's been done before you say, and you're right. In fact, Cablevision and Newsday themselves jointly produced a one-hour cable news program years ago. But it was too early and didn't pencil out. It's been done elsewhere as well, with mixed results.

What's changing now, I think, is that the time is coming back around to do it right and to make it pay. Is it a "TV-centric" time, as someone close to the Dolan family, who control Cablevision, said? TV-centric misses the point. It's more video-forward than TV-centric. News video is now here to stay. More than half of the US population has watched video within the last month; already in Britain, that number is now more than 90%. We're getting used to seeing video first, on our time, time-shifted, Apple TV-enabled, and through the Internet. The much-maligned pre-rolls and their children, "in-video" ads, are still highly sought after and fetching $25-35 CPMs, on average. We do like to watch. 

Look at most newspaper sites, and you see dabbling. The AP Online Video Network is so far populated on about 1800 sites, newspaper and broadcast. On too many, though, it's relegated downpage, and seems like an after-thought.

So what happens, in this new, coming age of convergence -- in which easily watchable video marries quick-read text and always-on opinion -- if you combine the resources of a Newsday and a Cablevision, which, too, counts hundreds of journalists in its newsrooms that span from northern New Jersey to southern Connecticut.

There's no doubt that web newsies want the best coverage in one place -- words and pictures. There's no doubt that if some bright-eyed market entrant were to start a news-gathering and ad-selling operation, she'd do it as a single operation, not as separate "TV" and "newspaper" businesses.

That of course is the challenge of synergy. Combining existing staffs and hierarchies, with their skills and skills deficits, is in reality much harder than a white-board exercise. But someone is going to make it work, and Cablevision may be the next to try.

What does synergy mean?

I called Phil Balboni, the man who created New England Cable News, a Cablevision-like operation. Balboni, who has won accolades for his operation, recently left NECN to found Global News Ventures, an international news start-up to watch.

"I think Cablevision and Newsday make a fit here....Video can populate the Newsday website. There is a substantial upside. It stresses the overall proposition that Cablevision has invested in the community."

My sense is that there is lots of potential around putting a strong local newspaper together with local cable news. Balboni ranks those synergies in this order:

1. Joint ad sales.
2. Synergistic news-gathering and production.
3. Monetizing cable-produced news video through Newsday's site.

There is lots for newspaper people to chew over in this kind of deal. Adding the Dolans to the Zells, Singletons, Murdochs and Tierneys brings with it all the same concerns about what Big Man in Town journalism looks like. The Dolans have been true cable innovators in New York and have also been much in the news themselves for years, as they've bought into local sports franchises (Knicks, Rangers, Madison Square Garden) and tried to lead a management buyout of their public company.

For newspeople though -- wondering whether a newspaperman like Murdoch or a swaggering non-news outsider like Zell -- it's just one conundrum on a long list. Who's going to come up with a formula to save a critical mass of journalism jobs and right the sinking ship?

 

How fast can you paddle?

That's the unabated message of today's ABC FAS FAX circulation numbers being reported. They cover the six-month period, through March 31. Overall, the water keeps rising: 3.5% down daily, and 4.5% down Sunday. Those are in line with what we've now seen for more than three years. The waves aren't subsiding, but rising a bit more. Worse, there's not much relief in sight.

As paper-specific reports filter in, we can expect to see more explanations that "we didn't want the circulation anyway."

That's the heavily discounted circulation, next-to-freebie stuff that many dailies have used to prop up numbers for years. Of course, there's some truth to the statement, but it raises a couple of problems:

---As an explanation, it's getting a bit long in the tooth. When circ began to go substantially south more than three years ago, publishers offered the "cutback to quality circ" argument and said they'd cycle through that within a year or so. In Year Four, it seems like less compelling a reason. Just how much how low-quality circ is out there, anyway, or is the definition of it a rolling phenomenon?

---Selling audience to advertisers is in major change, and in that change, newspapers take on new risk. For instance, in Editor and Publisher this a.m., Jim Moroney, publisher of the Dallas Morning News is quoted as saying "We are trying to get out of the churn business." The Morning News is pulling back on its discounted copies. The paper cut one discounted category -- more than 25% but less than 50% paid -- by 75% daily and 80% on Sunday. What did the cut mean? Massive loss with daily circulation down 10.5% to 368,313 and Sunday down 7.6% to 520,215. Metro dailies' market position has long been offering the mass market better than anyone else. Now as household penetration dives toward 40% of households in many metro areas, that mass argument is harder to make. True, newspapers are making more of a niche argument, but niche is a game that internet marketers are having an easier time winning than those who peddle poor non-interactive browsable paper. In the transition from mass to niche, more ad dollars are put at risk to competitors from Google to Spotrunner.

They aren't many winners out of the numbers released today, but you can almost feel the grin of Rupert Murdoch.

His nemesis, the Times, saw a bottom drop out and his Wall Street Journal showed a .35% gain. The Times Sunday number -- down 9.26% or 150,000 copies -- to 1,476,400 is particularly scary. (It was down 3.85% daily.) The Times attributed two-thirds of the Sunday decline to "the elimination of bonus days" and the familiar "third-party bulk." Last year, it took a gutsy price increase to its readers -- and has been showing positive circulation revenue growth, an oddity in the industry. These circ numbers are the first since last year's increase. If they continue to trend significantly down, the make-the-high-demo-niche-audience-pay-more-for-quality strategy -- one watched by the industry -- will be seen as a loser.

I can't help but wonder about the contribution of Times Select's termination here. As it ended, the Times counted about 470,000 paying customers who received Times Select for "free," as long as they were print subscribers. That called to attention the print/web connection. Take it away, and you give readers pause -- do I really need to take that non-green pile of paper when it's all unambiguously free?

Looking at today's numbers, we see a couple of other intriguing trends:
---Optimistic Buyers of Big-City Metros Beware: Both the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Minneapolis Star Tribune -- both bought within the last couple of years -- were down significantly. The Strib: 5% daily, 7% Sunday and The Inqy: 5% daily and 6% Sunday. New owners had counseled optimism that new approaches -- marketing forward -- could turn around those papers.
---Flat is the New Growth: The Strib's competition, the Pioneer Press (my alma mater), was essentially flat. Its fellow MediaNews property -- the Mercury News -- somehow managed to gain 1.7% despite its turmoil, newsprint and staff cutbacks. (Other gainers, here.)
---Seattle's About the Only Place Circ Was Up: Starbucks down; news reading up? Particularly dreary, bone-tingling winter?

Today's news, combined with the spiraling downward trends in print ad revenues, only means more misery. With new layoffs announced in Raleigh, we may see the buyouts/layoffs of 2007 simply as prologue. I think what we're seeing, unannounced, is the radical restructuring of the newspaper industry. The drip, drip, drip of change is now becoming a torrent.

Top 25 list of numbers at Editor and Publisher, Sunday and daily.

Last week, I talked to a veteran reporter wondering -- of course -- who might buy his struggling metro paper. We went through the possible names and then arrived at Murdoch. "At least, he's a newspaperman," the reporter hopefully offered.

That's what we're down to -- guessing games and choosing the least worst of evils. None of the above applies neither in newspaper ownership nor politics in the US.

Zell selling Newsday, after saying he wanted to keep the Tribune empire alive. No surprise.

Murdoch buying Newsday. No surprise there either. Zell and Murdoch are now tied at the hip, fellow newspaper titans and lately on the AP board. Rupert Murdoch can do a lot more for Sam Zell than Mort Zuckerman, owner of the Daily News, could.

Well, Murdoch is a newspaperman. The question is what kind?

We'll ask Marcus Brauchli, soon as he's free, which with today's news looks like it will be soon. The WSJ managing editor replaced by a hand-picked Murdoch editor. Of course. You'd like to laugh when you recall all the hand-wringing and speculation last year within and without the Bancroft family about what Murdoch ownership would mean. Would he "interfere"? Recall the board that's set up to maintain the paper's integrity, and how mushy that seemed to some of us. Well, now it's deciding if it has any say in who the new m.e. is.

Please, Murdoch owns the paper. He'll do with it what he pleases. Produce some great journalism, sure. Use it as weapon to bludgeon the Times, sure. Make resource decisions that determine the journalism and the fates of his friends, sure.

That's the way it is. The question will be how much of 21st century robber baron journalism comes to pervade the industry. Sam Zell's bought himself some time, for now, but those balloon payments and the effects of a  recession won't leave him much time to catch his breath. For the rest of us, it is lots of sighs and heavy breathing.

I'm little surprised by the results, though I wish I were. The Times is barely profitable. (See comments at end of post from NYT spokesperson Catherine Mathis to this point.)

With ad spending overall down just under double digits at 9% for the first quarter, the New York Times' results -- most likely foreshadowing those of Gannett (April 21) and McClatchy (April 23) -- are the result of the double whammy afflicting newspaper companies. The two-headed assault on revenues -- a recession-like pullback in spending compounding the already-in-progress movement of dollars from print to interactive marketing.

We know advertisers are pulling back. Gross estimates are trending downward, with the latest projecting 3.7% ad dollar growth in the US, that from Zenith Optimedia on March 31. That projection knocked .4 off an estimate made just a few months earlier. Expect, in this gyrating economic landscape, for it to go lower still. That 3.7% -- in an otherwise stable time -- might about match inflation, but it's not a stable time for newspaper companies.

The biggest factor of course is where those $21 billion dollars in US interactive revenues (2007) is coming from, and we know many of them are coming out of print hides. Will it get worse? I'm inclined to agree with Eric Schmidt, with his admittedly self-serving statements that recession-caused ad dollar movement will aid Google. Newspaper advertising is still disproportionately expensive. Companies are more prudent with their spending in perceived downtimes, just as consumers are.

The Times reported an 11% increase in Internet revenues. Barely double-digit, below the growth of web advertising overall -- and of course insufficient in volume to make up print declines.

Beyond the immediate impact of the year, newspaper publishers have to ask themselves whether dollars that are going to the new medium, and being spent in other experimental ways, will come back to print, as the economy turns more positive. Or is this a one-way street: out?

The bigger point of this morning's announcement pops out of two continuing dramas at the Times Company:

----It is in public anguish about its newsroom cutbacks. The 7.5% cutback (100 of 1300) is the biggest deal out of all the newsroom cutbacks we've seen. It's the New York Times cutting back. Now, we've seen enough reports to know that too few will accept buyouts, and layoffs are appearing inevitable. The Times is not a stable ship.
----Second, of course, is the coincident boardroom drama. Two outside directors are joining the Times' board. The impact has got to be a more urgent review of asset sales -- the Globe and the regional newspaper group. With significant layoffs in the Times' newsroom and this further turndown in earnings, the urgency (noted here in February) for action is even clearer than it was when Harbinger/Firebrand began its push on the Times.

From Catherine Mathis, NYT spokesperson:

Comment:
While The New York Times Company had a challenging quarter, I don't think that saying we are barely profitable really tells the story. There were a number of items that made this quarter unusual -- a writedown of assets, a shift in the timing of equity grants, a negative foreign currency translation and expenses for the consolidation of two printing plants. In 2007 the Times Company earned more than $200 million and Wall Street analysts estimate that 2008 will be another profitable year. Is this a tough time in the media business? Absolutely. But I think it's important to also remember that these are businesses that are making money.

Content Bridges' NYT posts, here