First people thought Zell would just sell the Tribune's tower, then lease it back and keep the paper there. But no!:

But hold on. Sources said Zell, who has hired Eastdil Secured LLC to market the tower and a parking lot abutting it, is thinking big. They said Zell wants nothing better than to turn over all of Tribune Tower to a residential developer. Such an owner could use it as a Gothic ornament for new construction on the parking lot.

Sad Tribune breakdown: Nobody wants the paper. Nobody even wants the paper's building. But that parking lot is nice!

[Sun-Times]

This story is being updated as Bill Murray makes his skydive. Refresh this page often to make sure you're seeing the latest.

UPDATE:

3:21 p.m. Now he's moving away from the podium.

3:15 p.m. Murray has not yet removed his helmet. It doesn't look like he's going to speak for a while.

That's all the news now, but check back often. And buy some newspapers tomorrow!

DATE: August 14, 2008
TO: All Employees
SUBJECT: Wage Freeze
*********** continues to manage through an economic downturn that is having an unprecedented negative effect on revenues, and, therefore, our financial health. While we have taken many steps to reorganize and streamline operations to respond to changing business models and these economic challenges, we need to do more to control expenses.
As an important part of that effort, we are implementing an across-the-board, one-year wage freeze effective Sept. 1, 2008.* This means that if you are scheduled to receive a merit or salary review between September 1, 2008 and August 31, 2009, your review will occur one year later than scheduled. For example, if your next salary review date is March 1, 2009, the salary review will be postponed until March 1, 2010. You will, however, receive regularly scheduled performance reviews during this period.
This freeze is being instituted across all of McClatchy, including at corporate and McClatchy Interactive. Employees for whom salary reviews are pending or whose scheduled salary review dates fall before the September 1, 2008 effective date remain eligible for their reviews. The freeze doesn't affect salary increases related to promotions or minimum wage adjustments.
We have avoided taking this step as long as possible. We know this freeze comes at a time when the economy is putting stress on your personal expenses and when you are working hard to adapt to our changing business model. We greatly appreciate all that you do for **********, and we hope we can continue to count on you as we manage through this very difficult period. We are confident that all of the efforts and cost control measures being made will result in a far more stable and financially healthy company in the future.

If you can write three concise, timely and relevant posts each week in your topic of choice, then we want to hear from you. Just picture it now: your name in lights all over your city. Your mom will be so proud.

Oh, and we'll pay you for it. A little at first, but as your page views grow over time, so will your ability to make more.

Sound good? Then click the Apply Now button below. We'll ask you some questions and get some information we need to process your application, including the city in which you'd like to contribute and the category you think is most relevant. Not sure? Pick one and we can work with you later on getting it right. For example, if you want to be the Yoga Examiner in Des Moines, you will choose your edition: Des Moines and your category: Fitness. Your topic may have appeal in more than one category, but choose the one you think it fits into best.

Ladies and gentlemen, the future of media: today the Yoga Examiner in Des Moines is spamming you with Digg requests, tomorrow... oh, wait, this is the present of media, right here in New York.

(Also, they are not bloggers. "They are not bloggers, but Examiners, which means they look closely at topics and examine every aspect of them." Ok then.)

The promotional campaign kicks in next week so get excited! Get particularly excited if you're a traditionally paid staffer at an Anschutz paper (all six of you guys!), 'cause this seems like a dangerous experiment.

Newspapers nationwide lost more than $130 million last year in auto ad sales. Car ads have gone from 10% of national newspaper ads, to less that 3% in just three years. That's terrible by any standards. Magazines are experiencing a similar decline. So how to put this disaster in a good light?

Amid this gloom is actually good news for traditional media because the effects of the auto downturn suggest that the impact of the Internet on the business models of newspapers, magazines and broadcast television is being exacerbated by more cyclical forces. And cycles turn.

“If the economy were better, newspapers would be better, and we’d be having a slightly different conversation,” said Mr. Goldstrom, of the newspaper association.

If the economy were better, we'd be having a different conversation! And if newspapers were printed on $100 bills they would be more popular. Print media has come to realize that the internet represents a fundamental shift in their business model, not some temporary cycle. But they're clinging to the hope that the auto industry, of all things, is in a mere momentary slump.

The auto industry is not in a momentary slump! Gas prices, global warming, etc. (Insert standard explanation here). GM was once one of the mightiest companies on earth. Now it can't pay its dental insurance. Besides this vague, unfounded optimism that things will turn around, there's not a shred of evidence in the story (even from marketing execs) that anyone is actually counting on car ads coming back to their earlier levels. Maybe when they invent viable electric cars, in 20 years or so. Until then: you newspapers better find someone else to sell to.

[NYT]

The story is still sneaking in through the cracks. McClatchy ran a "why isn't Edwards answering our questions" piece that will set the tone for future MSM stories on this terrible subject. Leno and Conan have mentioned the story too, which definitely suggests that the era when no one would've known about this unless the Times picked it up is finally over.

But now it is the internet's time to shine! Slate's done great by the story, with cranky Mickey Kaus justifying his insane anti-MSM crusade and Jack Shafer being his usual cantankerous and inarguably correct self. And hey, it's been good for Gawker too—nothing helps beat the August doldrums like a sex scandal that also allows for excoriation of Olde Media.

Of course, not everyone on the internet has performed so honorably. It's bannable to mention the story at liberal blog powerhouse DailyKos, the HuffPo is still mostly quiet on it, and the Wikipedia edit war is staggering into its second contentious week.

But now we have photos! Once there are pictures, the story is ready for television. If the Edwards love child was the Montauk Monster, CNN would've been all over it last week! And once the story is on television, the newspapers can finally go back and write about it, even if it's just a meta-media "oh dear what happened to the press on this one" kind of story.

John himself has played this stupidly, running from reporters and hoping they'll maintain their vow of silence as long as he keeps his mouth shut. They will, John, because they love your wife, but they can only justify this to themselves for so long.

Because, as you can see above, the photo is damning and ready-made for distribution on the internet or cable television.

6. The smaller the newspaper, the longer its life span in print (four exceptions: the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, Washington Post and USA Today).

Note the one major paper not included in that list: the LAT. He goes on to lay out exactly why Sam Zell and Co. are rather annoying and misguided managers, and includes this suggestion that is worth looking into for any mid-sized metro paper:

36. I’d take the very talented journalists I had and develop a SERIES of websites that provided the best information for that beat/subject matter. The Web is all about niches. The Times, for instance, could have the premiere sites for every professional and college sports team in Southern California. It could be THE place to turn to for news on City Hall, Los Angeles Unified School District, and Los Angeles Police Department. Not to mention Southern California environmental issues, LAX and the coast.
37. These could run under the banner: Another Los Angeles Times website/blog.

Somebody hire that man!

[Read it all at Lobdell's OC; pic via Flickr]

We are going to launch a FREE daily newspaper here in Los Angeles. We will also be developing a companion website. The initial circulation will be between 200,000 and 350,000 daily M-F, no Saturday edition and a 500,000 circulation Sunday edition which will be available nationally.

It will be distributed free of charge throughout the Los Angeles market through alliances with key retailers and vendor box distribution. Additionally you'll be able to subcribe to it and receive home delivery for $50 a year.

The financing is secure and the ownership (comprised of some remarkable wealthy Angelenos you probably have heard of) is eager to assemble a small idea team that may be comprised of some of our intial hires. The ownership team comes from a wide array of businesses exclusive of traditional media. So...

The goal is to make the paper sustainable within 30 months. Employees will profit share and the company will never be sold and never turned public without a majority vote of the employees.

We are looking for writers, web developers, photographers, editors (that can write), designers and seasoned sales professionals. If you have experience here in LA we know who you are, if you do not but are looking to break in, fine.

We've secured office space in the heart of the city. When we launch, our staff will likely number between 75 and 100.

Right now we are seeking people with ideas who are willing to share them in strict confidence. You will not be paid for this time now but, you may be considered for what will likely be the most coveted media jobs in the country.

The interest list is forming, are you in? Send us your resume, we'll let you know if we want clips.

[Craigslist]
[Via LA Observed]

The newspaper industry is in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The biggest kiosk seller this month was a highbrow liberal weekly that featured a tabloid satire of a presidential candidate and his wife. The biggest newsmaker this month was a supermarket tabloid that caught a former presidential candidate visiting his extramarital baby mama, and the major journals of record won't even blog about it. Surely this is the End Times of big media. What is to be done? Where are our journalistic standards headed? And how long before what you see above becomes an actual New York Times Magazine cover?

It may just be the economy, but all the apocalyptic chatter about the "death of the MSM" is starting seem prescient. For years, newspapers have been struggling to reconcile the Internet's up-to-the-second information spigot with old-fashioned standards of reporting. It's hard to keep track of how many "blogs" the Times now has, or how indistinguishable most of their substance and style are from what you'd find in the print edition. Apart from writing cloyingly and belatedly about the new media revolution and its cultural implications, what has the Gray Lady really done to ensure its continued relevance?

Judging by its books, not much—it actually asks more of its shrinking readership. By close of trading Thursday, the stock of the New York Times Co. was listed at $12.48 per share, half the price it was a year ago. The paper then announced it'd be increasing its daily newsstand price by 25 cents, beginning August 18. Oh, the company also posted double-digit losses in ad revenue this quarter, citing the worst month so far as June, with July fast closing in. Circulation is down (profits here are only up because of previous price-gauging), 100 reporters were laid off this year, and everyone's wondering whether the Sulzberger clan will simply call it quits and switch to a small soy agribusiness in northern California. It'd be more wholesome than acknowledging that this century's Huey Long got his freak on.

Other media empires are hurting, too. McClatchy Co., Lee Enterprises Inc. and E.W. Scripps Co. all claimed profit falls by almost half of last year's earnings. And most industry analysts expect the locust year to extend into well next. That must mean more bullshit trend pieces.

Meanwhile, remember how vilified David Remnick was in cyberspace, like, five minutes ago for allowing a lampoon of the paranoid reactionary's conception of the Obamas besmirch the handbook of East Coast liberal elitism? There was even talk of Conde Nast's firing him, despite his otherwise terrific stewardship of the New Yorker, once a cash hemorrhaging glossy like all the others. Remnick insists he didn't run the Blitt cartoon for shock value (judging by the look on his face after during all those late-night pundit inquisitions, he's telling the truth), but clearly everyone else was into it, and shock value may have been his saving grace. As New York Post reports:

The issue went off sale on Monday and preliminary estimates show single-copy sales surged 80 percent over average weekly newsstand sales, or around 75,000 copies, compared with average newsstand sales of around 43,000.

So that's how Eustace Tilley stays in the black. Don't count on Remnick even pretending to not know he's slumming it again, at least not anytime soon. But might this be a lesson for other publications high on their own brand supply: it pays to take risks when the only American ideology is taking umbrage. Blogs help magazines and newspapers by objecting furiously — and linking even more furiously — to what's being printed in magazines and newspapers. They're frenemies, and the dead-tree press should learn to exploit the relationship.

Take the case of American Media, the debt-ridden publisher of Star and the now kind-of-influential National Enquirer, which broke the major story of John Edwards' affair and love child with Rielle Hunter on Wednesday. Again, it was all over the blogosphere, which per force sent precious ad dollars the Enquirer's way at particularly crucial time in its accounting cycle. According to the Post, "While talks are at a sensitive stage and could still fall apart, American Media's owners, THL Partners and Evercore Partners, are working on firming up a deal that would reduce the publisher's debt by around $200 million and hand a sizable minority equity stake in the company to its lenders, sources said." Any guesses as to how that deal's looking right about now?

So a trash rag crawls out of the dumpster and into the spotlight, and the outlets that should be reporting misbehavior by public figures are simply refusing to. Slate's Mickey Kaus, who rang every alarm bell about the Edwards-Hunter rumors before they were photographically substantiated this week, has reproduced an email sent by L.A. Times editor Tony Pierce to his blog staff:

Hey bloggers,

There has been a little buzz surrounding John Edwards and his alleged affair. Because the only source has been the National Enquirer we have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations. So I am asking you all not to blog about this topic until further notified.

If you have any questions or are ever in need of story ideas that would best fit your blog, please don't hesitate to ask

Keep rockin,

Tony

Is this liberal media bias, Kaus asks, or a dying MSM mastodon's way of playing "gatekeeper" between juicy information and an eager public? We would add: Can the L.A. Times really afford to take such a magisterial attitude given its financial woes and shit-canning of 250 employees? Keep rockin' indeed, Tony.

[Photoshop credit: Steve Dressler.]

The other giant lie perpetrated by publishers is that they were bushwhacked by the Internet... For almost thirty years, the tree-killing, oil-wasting publishers knew the days were numbered for their manufacturing plants. Sure, they built Web sites, generally pretty awful. And they became excellent at portraying themselves as victims of Craigslist, Google, and the rest of the Internet. As the newspaper circulations plummeted, the advertising rates soared—what a deal for the publishers! Even better, they could fire (pick the euphemism) all of those non-revenue-producing, pesky journalists.

But at least some sacked journalists have learned from the experience, like the recently-fired Jim Spencer, formerly of the Denver Post:

I have learned a lot in the past year. I have learned that exemplary work at the Virginian-Pilot, the Chicago Tribune, the Daily Press in Newport News, Virginia, and the Denver Post carries little weight where profit margins rule. I have learned that friends at other papers—even those with executive titles—are powerless to help me, because of the state of the industry. I have learned that being a columnist apparently keeps me from being hired as a reporter or feature writer, even though I was both before I took up commentary. I have learned that a six-month temporary assignment running a newsroom of sixty-three reporters and editors does not count as management experience.

(Frustrated journalists, take note—they're looking for contributors.)

Parting Thoughts [CJR]

The "moose in the room" is one of those unbearably stupid management book stories, in which a moose ends up at a dinner party or something and no one at the table has the nerves to ask why the moose is there. See, the moose represents big problems that no one wants to talk about. So you are always supposed to mention the moose in the room. Get it? The whole thing is asinine.

Of course, Sulzberger is big into management fads and business book bullshit (as we said, buffoon). And back when the Jayson Blair scandal was rocking the Times newsroom, he did this (per Seth Mnookin's Hard News):

Now, though, he thinks that was maybe a mistake.

In an infamous incident, Mr. Sulzberger showed up at a company crisis meeting holding a toy stuffed moose. It was a gimmick meant to symbolize things that people were afraid to say, but nobody was in the mood for goofy shtick.

He wouldn't repeat it. "Obviously not," he said. "The anger that came out of that meeting, it was so palpable that the moose wasn't a necessary tool, it became clear," he said. "It just wasn't. Now, it had proven necessary in other situations, but it wasn't in that one, so no.

"But look, if that's the biggest mistake I make as leader of The New York Times Co., this is a good thing."

Ha ha "the moose wasn't a necessary tool." And you should know about useless tools, Pinch! It's a testament to Pinch's unwavering ability to miss the point that he doesn't realize the Moose Incident wasn't one bad decision but rather a lovely symbol of how incredibly out of touch he is—with his own newsroom, with the state of media today, with the national mood. Former Times reporter John Darnton just published an entertaining murder mystery set at a newspaper that bears some resemblance to the Times. Here's how he paints the publisher of his fictional newspaper:

The prizes and revenue poured in. it was like standing on the bridge of an aircraft carrier and believing that you, not the ocean were actually keeping the damn thing afloat. But now, with the Internet, the blogs, MSNBC, fifteen minute news cycles, giveaway papers in the subway—Christ, you turn around for a moment and the whole damn world is different. A cliché, maybe, but it's true. Just two days ago, he asked Rosen, one of his two sons, a computer geek, to introduce him to some sites; he read a smattering of them (superficial.com, gawker.com, defamer.com) and he was aghast. Where the hell did it come from, this abiding compulsion to read about breakups and breakdowns of third-rate celebrities? To pursue them into restaurants and nightclubs as they turned bulimic or cheated on their partners or adopted African babies? And written in a spirit of such spite (he didn't know the word schadenfreude). "That's the whole point, Dad," his son had said laughing condescendingly. "You've got to be snarky."

But in this book is the seed of the actual good news for Times reporters. The paper is still a great springboard to actual media success. They've taken recently to building personalities out of their contributors. It's a break from Times tradition, and a welcome one. Does it matter whatever Warren St. John's actual salary and position at the Times are? No, not so much. What matters for Warren is how effective the paper is at promoting his book, and his brand. What is David Carr? A film vlogger...? And now addiction memoirist? He's whatever the hell he wants to be at the New York Times, which is good news for people who enjoy his writing, and good news for his Amazon ranking.

Is it good news for the Times? Who the hell knows. Pinch sure doesn't.

The blog, TellZell.com, got a sympathy writeup in the NYT this weekend. And while it has some fire in it, it's ultimately a sad relic of the once-mighty newspaper industry. A recent post, for example, contains a bunch of farewell letters from Tribune staffers:

Perhaps I hid behind the smallness of my cog's place in the big machine here, or the fact that I worked in what is perhaps the best photo journalism department in the nation kept me from feeling too worried, but with the loss of talent over the last year or two and the seeming lack of any vision in regard to the future of true journalism (other then to hold to the cliff's edge for as long as possible), I feel that I need to say something, however insignificant it may be.

I'll add to the chorus of goodbyes with an adios y un dicho de mi abuelita: "No hay un mal que por un bien no viene."

The Times literally changed my life. I came here as a musician who occasionally wrote and I'm leaving as a guy looking for work as a writer (not that I, the son of a composer, could ever stop being a musician). I'm proud of having contributed to this paper.

SAD. It really is a quality blog, if you're into that sort of thing. Unfortunately its only chance of impacting Sam Zell is... well, there's no chance.

[TellZell.com]

"Why doesn't David Geffen provide a proper amount of backing for an online newspaper out of LA and why doesn't he hire the staff of the LA Times en masse and let them keep putting it out under a different name? That way Geffen would have the pleasure of owning LA's paper of record, the staff might have the opportunity of doing their jobs without worrying if their names are going to come out of the hat at the next round of cutbacks, forests of precious trees would be saved and no one would get their hands or light suits stained with ink while reading about current affairs."

That's kind of a great idea! And then why doesn't David Geffen buy some closed steel mills and textile factories in Ohio and pay all the workers to keep making all that steel and those textiles too? Then he can give everyone welfare. Oh wait, did we say capitalism? We meant handouts! WHAT HAPPENED TO PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY?

Weymouth, in addition to coming from that famous and wealthy family, also comes from the business side of the Post, and she's already demonstrated a tendency to criticize editorial decisions like Page One stories and photo selection while also promising not to interfere with her editors and also not to be Sam Zell, who she also thinks is shrewd and not crazy. Hmm.

Her job now that she's installed a new editor will be to force the newspaper and its independent online division to get along. This will not be easy. Oh, and also she has to reverse the industry-wide trend toward plummeting ad revenue and circulation. Here is a graph about that:

Good luck Katharine Weymouth!

paidContent was founded (in a STUDIO APARTMENT) by Rafat Ali, who still publishes and edits the site. Ali used to work for former Blog Mogul Jason Calacanis! Calacanis sold his Weblogs Inc (encompassing like 100 separate blogs [admittedly only a third of which were actually regularly updated]) to AOL back in the day for (A MEASLY) $25 million. Now Ali sells his four sites for even more money! Internet success story!

"the empire struck back and laid me off. fuck the merc. fuck medianews. newspapers deserve to die. i left today with my at-at under my arm."

Flickr]

The US market is kind of a drag. It's crowded, competitive, expensive to enter, and even more expensive to grow in. Expanding to other first-world markets like the UK is pretty standard, when a company has a good product. But the second—or even third—world is where the money will be in the future. Consider this unwittingly perfect sentence from a Variety story about Fox's infiltration into Argentina: "Fox TV Studios and Rosstoc are also developing the script 'Feo' (Ugly)."

Heh.

Fox is "launching several international productions that will simultaneously be developed in the U.S.," meaning that the company can get a much broader audience with what will probably be a much smaller investment than they have to make in US-only shows. Foreigners work cheap! So "Todos Contra Juan" (Everyone Against Juan), a "dark comedy about an actor attempting to reclaim his fame," is coming to Argentina, and an English-language version is coming to America. There's also the aforementioned "Feo" (heh), and a bank robbery show, and a show about "a poor girl who ends up running a big city." (Not the "Anna Wintour Story," though, zing).

And India: did you know that print media is actually expanding in India? It is! It's like bizarro world. Everybody's not on the internet there, yet, so I recommend investing every nickel to your name in Indian print media companies for the next decade or so. Trendy!

[Variety, Guardian]

• 
  Victor Ganzi, Hearst CEO—Ganzi quit this week, in a move that came as a shock to some. Though Hearst is not doing poorly, signs are there that it may be on the decline. Ad page counts at its top magazines are creeping downwards. Ganzi may have seen the writing on the wall.



• 
  Jack Kliger, Hachette CEO—Kliger lasted nearly a decade at Hachette, but stepped down this week. He leaves a company with an unsure future—layoffs, a questionable digital strategy, and stagnant ad growth will go down as big parts of the legacy of the end of his reign.



• 
  Jane Friedman, HarperCollins CEO—Friedman was sent packing from the publishing giant earlier this month, replaced by a man more than 20 years her junior. She spent nearly 30 years at Random House before coming to HarperCollins in 1997, and had a good deal of early success. But she was done in either by corporate infighting, or poor performance.



• 
  Peter Olson, Random House CEO—the book-loving, erudite bean counter was replaced last month by Markus Dohle, a robotic numbers guy who many feel will focus on earnings at the expense of "the romantic idea of literature." Uh, yea.

It's a bad sign when these companies' core product (daily papers) is far less successful than a tangential spinoff product (magazines), but at this stage they'll take what they can get. New figures show that Sunday supplements recorded the biggest advertising gains of any sector in the entire media during the first quarter—almost a 20% increase, while newspaper advertising itself was down more than 6%.

The WSJ's new weekend magazine is on the way, and Murdoch-controlled paper is rumored to be planning as many as three more magazine titles, which makes sense when looking at the ad numbers above. The LA Times just went all the way with its Sunday magazine, turning the entire operation over to the business side of the paper and losing any pretense of editorial content. The success of that move remains to be seen, but stronger investment in weekend mags is a certainty until they prove themselves as dead as papers themselves.

Laid-off newspaper journalists, send in your applications today!

[WWD]

Without providing specifics about how it might be accomplished, Schmidt said DoubleClick's system for serving up online display ads could generate "significant" revenue online for newspapers.

Still, he acknowledged the boost probably won't be enough to restore the hefty profit margins that newspaper publishers historically have enjoyed from print advertising.

It's sad to see the people who killed print have these regrets so publicly. They probably wake up in a cold sweat after terrifying dreams of bloody broadsheets calling their names—"you killllled meeee!" But seriously, it's too late, Eric. Not only is this ad thing a slap in the face, but Google has a nasty habit of aggregating and indexing lots and lots of newspaper content without paying anyone. So give it up and embrace your role! You are become death, destroyer of print! You made $16.6 billion in revenue last year!

At least Craig bought the newspaper industry a little going-away present. This empty talk is just sad.

Google CEO: "Moral Imperative" To Help Newspapers [HuffPo]

[LAT Publisher David] Hiller declined to discuss specific plans for the magazine, but said Annie Gilbar, a former editor of InStyle and L.A. Style magazines and a onetime host on the Home Shopping Network, was "the leading candidate" to be named the top editor. Gilbar is also an author of several advice books, including "Wedding Sanity Savers."

She's also the author of The Penny Whistle Christmas Party Book and The Penny Whistle Party Planner. So at least the magazine's funeral party should be decent.

[LAT]

[UPDATE: The Home Shopping Network HSN PR machine writes in: "Please update your files to note that our proper name is HSN, not Home Shopping Network and since HSN is not an abbreviation, even the first reference to our company should be HSN. Thank you for helping us to maintain consistency with regard to our name and brand." My pleasure!]

Carroll, who is spending about $2.5 million on the launch, says he is targeting a largely untapped demographic—one with "$500-$600 billion in spending power," he says. "From Disney to Wall Street to the Bronx, this [magazine] is going to be about the business of hip-hop."

"It's going to be [like] the Billboard of Hip-Hop," Carroll continues. "It's a void that needed to be filled."

Two things: Billboard isn't doing so hot itself right now. And it has all the music industry to sell to. And isn't this idea about, oh, ten years too late? If this magazine had launched in 1998, it would have been poised to ride the cultural and economic wave that swept hip hop music into a prime position in American pop culture. Now, it's just prepared to swallow $2.5 million of the publisher's money.

Also: I love creative methods of calculation that can produce results like the one that says Hip Hop Business Journal is sneaking into an untapped $500 billion market. Truly imaginative accounting.

I wish this magazine luck. But Queen Latifah on the premiere cover? If they make it through the year, it will be a testament only to the power of C.R.E.A.M.

[Folio]