Philly Guild riled over publisher Egger

The Philadelphia Inquirer Guild is pissed at publisher Terry Egger.

No wonder.

After 11 years without a pay raise he promised them one, but reneged.

Then caved to the Teamsters and gave them a pay raise, a signing bonus and contributions to their pension fund. All things denied the Guild.

Egger was PD publisher from 2006 till 2013.

He was named Editor & Publisher’s Publisher of the Year in November.  Obviously , the Inquirer Guild disagrees.

To read the article, click on

http://www.bigtrial.net/2019/02/inky-staffers-declare-no-confidence-in.html

Boston Herald offices to move 13 miles to Braintree

The Boston Herald, founded in 1846 by a group of Boston printers, will be leaving Boston in November or December.

Publisher Kevin Corrado told employees in a memo that the newspaper will be moving its offices to Braintree, 13 miles south of Boston, later this year.

The Herald filed for bankruptcy in December 2017 and later was bought by Denver-based Digital First Media, which owns hundreds of publications.

The Herald has 8 Pulitzer Prizes. It was converted to a tabloid in 1981.

The Herald absorbed the Boston American Eagle and the Boston Daily Times in 1847 and the Boston Journal in 1917.

Post-Gazette to print only 5 days a week

Pittsburgh will hold the distinction of being the largest city in the U.S. without a daily print newspaper after the city's Post-Gazette informed readers it will cut its production schedule from seven days a week to five beginning this weekend.

 

The Plain Dealer is down to 4 days of delivery. Although The Plain Dealer will still be published 7-days a week the paper has cut back home delivery to just Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays

 

Average minutes per visit for the top 50 U.S. daily newspapers, based on circulation, is about two-and-a-half minutes.

Younger generations get their news from their SmartPhones. Ouch!

Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial cartoonist since 1984, was fired because, as former BJ cartoonist John Derf Backderf put it, “he refused to draw pro-Cheeto cartoons.”

Hillary got 75% of the Pittsburgh vote for President.

But John Robinson Block, whose family has owned the Pos-Gazette since the 1920s, and also owns the Toledo Blade, is an avid Trump supporter.

So the guy who owns the football decided who gets to stay on the team.

Ironically, Rob was curator of this 2003 national cartoon exhibition: “Too Hot to Handle: Creating Controversy Through Political Cartoons.”

In 1999 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

He is past president of the Association of American Political Cartoonists.

8 chains own 1,100 newspapers in America

Eight companies own about 1,100 newspapers, daily or weekly, in America.

There were only 1,331 daily newspapers in 2014, probably fewer now since there were 1,408 dailies in 2008.

If the owners of those eight companies sat in the same room and decided the identical wording of a story today, what would that do for informing America’s citizens?

Just like an octopus that controls America’s newspapers, the eight tenacles are:

GateHouse Media, the largest newspaper chain in the country with nearly 450 papers in the U.S. including the Akron Beacon Journal.

Gannet, the second largest newspaper chain with more than 220 newspapers

Digital First Media owns more than 170 papers nationwide

Kentucky-based Paxton Media Group owns nearly 60 papers nationwide

Ogden Newspapers has 50 newspapers

Newhouse’s Advance Publications owns newspapers in 25 cities and towns across America and is the country's largest privately-held newspaper chain.

Rupert Murdoch family controls 120 newspapers across five countries.

Warren Buffett, as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, owns about 70 dailies today.

And most of the newspapers that survive have skeleton staffs since newspaper employment went from 458,000 in 1990 to 25,000 today. That’s an astounding loss of 433,000 jobs . . . a 95% freefall.

Newspapers making more money from readers than advertisers

The times they are a-changin’ 

Title of Bob Dylan song

Particularly for newspapers. In a surprising way.

Advertising used to provide up to 80% of a newspaper’s revenue. Now newspapers are making more money on circulation (subscriptions) than on advertising.

Wow!

That’s the word from the annual World Press Trends survey released by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers.

Readers, not advertisers, are the big source of revenue. A reversal of a century-old business model.

There’s a catch, as there are with most statistics. It’s not that circulation went up; it’s mostly static. It’s that advertising revenue has gone down so much that it freefell below the readers’ subscriptions payments.

Check for yourself by clicking on http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2015/06/01/world-press-trends-newspaper-revenues-shift-to-new-sources

 

 

 

 

 

 

World Parress Trends: Newspaper Revenues Shift To New Sources

2015-06-01

A profound shift in the newspaper business model, evolving for years, is finally here.

Global newspaper circulation revenues are larger than newspaper advertising revenues for the first time this century, according to the annual World Press Trends survey released Monday by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).

"The basic assumption of the news business model -- the subsidy that advertisers have long provided to news content -- is gone," said Larry Kilman, Secretary General of WAN-IFRA, who presented the survey at the 67th World Newspaper Congress, 22nd World Editors Forum and 25th World Advertising Forum in Washington, D.C. "We can freely say that audiences have become publishers' biggest source of revenue."

Newspapers generated an estimated US$179 billion in circulation and advertising revenue in 2014 -- larger than the book publishing, music or film industries. Ninety-two billion dollars came from print and digital circulation, while 87 billion came from advertising, the survey said.

"This is a seismic shift from a strong business-to-business emphasis - publishers to advertisers - to a growing business-to-consumer emphasis, publishers to audiences," said Mr. Kilman.

Throughout the 20th century, advertising brought up to 80 per cent of revenues in some markets. The ratio varies from market to market: in some European and Asian markets, advertising might bring 40 per cent of revenues.

But the survey showed that newspaper advertising revenues are falling nearly everywhere, while circulation revenues are relatively stable.

"Print used to be one of few traditional marketing channels and often the one that was the most ubiquitous for branding and logical choice for all marketers," said Mr. Kilman. "This direct relationship of mutual dependence no longer exists. Advertisers nowadays have more than 60 different advertising media channels available to them."

"However, in 2015 it is clear that the story of the newspaper industry is not one of doom and gloom and decline. Newspapers around the world are successfully proving their value to advertisers despite booming competition. They are discovering new markets and new business models that are today as pertinent to news production as advertising and circulation revenues. From print newspaper businesses, they have transformed into true multiplatform news media businesses."

Though newspapers are now ubiquitous on all media platforms, the measure of their reach and influence continues to be mired in the 20th century, largely relying on print circulation and a variety of separate, non-standardized measures of digital reach. The challenge for the industry is to measure reach of newspaper content on all platforms with new metrics.

The World Press Trends survey includes data from more than 70 countries, accounting for more than 90 per cent of the global industry’s value. The data is compiled through an enormous undertaking by dozens of national newspaper and news media associations and generous support from global data suppliers: Zenith Optimedia, IPSOS, ComScore, the Pew Research Center, RAM, and the ITU.

The survey, presented annually at the global summit meetings of the world’s press, revealed:

The Future is Mobile

Eight out of 10 smartphone users check their device within 15 minutes of waking up. It’s a fight for audience’s attention and mobile has it.

-- Globally consumers spend an average of almost 2.2 hours per day with mobile (97 minutes) and tablet (37 minutes), which together account for 37 per cent of media time, ahead of television (81 minutes), the desktop (70 minutes), radio (44 minutes), and print (33 minutes), according to the InMobi mobile media consumption report.

-- App usage represents about half of mobile engagement, with leading media now seeing 30 per cent or more of their monthly audiences coming exclusively from mobile platforms.

-- For the first time, desktop audience numbers are falling. Time spent using smartphones now exceeds web usage on computers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Italy. For 19 of the top 25 US newspaper sites, mobile traffic exceeded desktop by at least 10 per cent, according to Pew Research. Those who use only mobile devices to consume newspaper digital content increased 53 per cent in March 2015 from the same month a year ago, according to a report from the Newspaper Association of America.

"When it comes to new revenues, we have been talking about the year of mobile for the last 10 years," Mr Kilman said. "It has finally happened. In 2014, desktop Internet usage globally decreased in favor of mobile. And mobile app usage is becoming the majority of all digital media activity in the United States."

 

While dozens of people were dying and hundreds fleeing from California’s devastating wildfires the Arizona Republic ran a promo atop the front page about a food section article with this inappropriate headline: “Fiery Feast.”

Honest to God.

Isn’t anyone responsible for checking out the front page of the Republic, the Phoenix newspaper?

Explains former BJ management and columnist whiz Stuart Warner, who worked there until a few years ago:

“People who design the page work for a different division of the company ... that's the world we live in.”

The headline/montage for this article shows clearly how Ben Maidenburg would have reacted. He would have come thundering out of his office and shouting: "What idiot did this!”

The California wildfires are no joke. They have been raging for days, with people suffering horrible deaths and nearly 4,000 homes and businesses turned into ashes.

Ken Pimlott, chief of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said: "We are literally looking at explosive vegetation."

And apparently no one at the Arizona Republic was looking at its own front page.

How SF Chronicle returned to being profitable

The San Francisco Chronicle lost money for 12 years -- $50 million or more per year in 2008 and 2009 alone.

Today the Chronicle has four consecutive profitable years – about 4% per year increases.

How did its leaders do that in this era of troubled, staggering newspapers all over the country?

An improving Bay Area economy, cutbacks made during the lean years, a willingness to try new things on both the editorial and business sides and a renewed commitment to journalistic excellence. And having the paper printed elsewhere, which many newspapers are doing.

And put a woman in charge: Audrey Cooper, then 37, 39, editor in chief for more than 2½ years. She put together an investigative team that came up with startling stories and turned up the heat on government excesses and crime.

The print newspaper has around 220,000 paid Sunday subscribers and 163,000 weekday subscribers, both down from more than 500,000 in the early 2000s.

Read about it for yourself at https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/san-francisco-chronicle.php

News photographer shot by police

Now the hazards of being a newspaper photographer include encountering a policeman who thinks a camera on a tripod is a weapon.

New Carlisle News photographer Andy Grimm, near Springfield, Ohio, was taking photos of lightning during a storm at 10 p.m. Sunday.

Clark County Deputy Jake Shaw was on a traffic stop, saw the camera on a tripod and though it was a weapon, firing at and wounding Grimm, who underwent surgery at Miami Valley Hospital and is expected to recover.

Grimm and Shaw know each other. Grimm said he hopes Shaw doesn’t lose his job over it.

Village Voice ends print history

New York City’s famous alternative weekly, The Village Voice, is joining the ranks of newspapers NOT publishing print versions.

The Village Voice was founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and author Norman Mailer. It has three Pulitzer Prizes -- Teresa Carpenter in 1981, cartoonist Jules Feiffer in 1986 and Mark Schoofs in 2000.

In 1982 the Voice began domestic partner benefits for gay couples on its staff.

The slide began in 2005, when New Times Media bought the Voice. At least a dozen key leaders were fired or quit by 2012, when Village Voice Media executives Scott Tobias, Christine Brennan and Jeff Mars bought Village Voice Media's papers and associated web properties from its founders and formed Voice Media Group.

BJ 6^th in circulation in Ohio

Dayton paper has 54% more staff

Interesting comparisons:

Audited and reported circulation figures.

1.The Plain Dealer – 246,571

2.The Cincinnati Enquirer – 146,511

3.The Columbus Dispatch – 136,023

4.The Blade – 94,215

5.Dayton Daily News – 93,425

6.Akron Beacon Journal – 88,040

7.The Repository – 56,789

8.The Vindicator – 45,012

9.The News-Herald – 32,493

10.      The Lima News – 29,120

So the BJ is 6^th in circulation in Ohio, 5,421 lower than the Dayton Daily News, where I was in the sports department as the No. 2 man for 13 years.

Today, the BJ, according to the staff listed on its web site, has 63. The Dayton Daily News, according to the staff listed on its web site, has 97. That’s 54% more staff than Ol’ Blue Walls.

Don’t shoot the messenger.

BJ scooped on its own reporter’s story

BJ  popular culture writer and jack-of-all-trades in today’s newspaper environment Rich Heldenfsls wrote an article about 1940 presidential candidate Wendell Willkie being a former Akron resident with no previous political experience who ran for the office long before Donald Trump … about seven decades ago.

That was a month ago.

After the Seattle Times ran it, apparently because someone at the BJ put in on the wire even though Ol’ Blue Walls held the articles for weeks, the BJ rescued it from its musty computer files and ran it.

John Higgins, a former BJ staffer, posted it on Facebook.

So the BJ got scooped by its own reporter in a state far, far away in the newspaper galaxy.

Selling newspapers a slam dunk . . . with right story

Who says newspapers can’t sell their product?

All you need is the first Cleveland major sports title in 52 years.

The Plain Dealer’s editions about the Cavaliers winning the NBA, ending a drought that began after Jim Brown’s Browns won the NFL, ran off 480,000 copies.

And had trouble keeping the shelves stocked.

The Beacon Journal printed 57,000 extra copies.

Hopefully, the BJ and PD won’t have to wait 52 years for a story that draws a demand for extra copies to be printed.