The Chicago Tribune and Tribune Co.’s other US newspaper titles will run a week-long experiment starting from next Monday by using as little Associated Press (AP) content as possible.
The trial is part of review into costs and follows the Tribune’s warning to the agency last year that it might drop the service.
Last year a group of newspapers in Ohio forged an alliance (the Ohio News Organisation or OHNO) to share their top stories in a move against AP copy.
This one’s zipping about pretty fast and doing the Twitter rounds (@arusbridger and @jeffjarvis just a few of the people to pick it up.)
“Few industries in this country have been as coddled as newspapers,” begins Michael Kinsley’s realistic look at life after newspapers. Here’s one extract:
“True enough, the industry missed a whole armada of boats. If newspapers had been smarter, or moved faster, they might have kept the classified ads. They might have invented social networking. But that’s all hindsight. I didn’t think of these things, nor did you. Judging from Tribune Co., for which I once worked, the typical newspaper executive is a bear of little brain. Until recently, little brain was needed. Even now, to say the newspaper industry has no problems that a busload of geniuses couldn’t solve is essentially saying that the industry’s problems are insoluable. Or at least insoluable without help.”
Publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times has filed for bankruptcy protection following in the footsteps of its rival, Tribune Co, which filed last December.
“It’s true that Tribune Co. is talking about outsourcing its national and international news coverage to The Washington Post Co.,” comments Editor&Publisher, but warns that ‘big sticking points remain and the two are not close to a deal,’ as Chicago Tribune media reporter Phil Rosenthal reported in his blog Thursday afternoon. Full story…
James Surowiecki posits his analysis of the current newspaper industry crisis. Regarding the Tribune Co., he says that ‘although Zell was making excuses for his own mismanagement, the perfect storm is real enough, and it is threatening to destroy newspapers as we know them’.
Employees’ retirement accounts are likely to be affected by Tribune Co.’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing, while ex-employees, who left the company in the past year, may be left as its creditors.
LA Times employee entrance, Dec 21 2007:
via Eric Ulken (former interactive technology editor at the LA Times).
‘Those signs seemed a bit disingenuous even then, given the structure of the deal to take the Tribune Company private. Now they seem, well, ridiculous’, he writes.
Following the news that the Tribune Co. has filed for bankruptcy, ‘journalist turned activist’ and former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News, Ron Kaye, writes on his blog that this is not the end of your daily newspaper.
“It’s just the beginning of the end for hundreds of newspapers and the collapsing of many others into single regional franchises that can survive as the only source of printed news and advertising on a daily basis.”
Kaye, who was fired by the Daily News seven months ago, says ‘Let the conversation begin.’
More on this tomorrow, but just to link today’s (Monday) news that the Tribune Co. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as reported here by the group’s own newspaper the LA Times, as well as numerous other news sources. The group also owns KTLA Channel 5, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun as well as nine other newspapers and 22 other television and radio stations across the country.
The group’s chief executive Sam Zell said in a statement (via CNNmoney.co.uk):
“Factors beyond our control have created a perfect storm – a precipitous decline in revenue and a tough economy coupled with a credit crisis that makes it extremely difficult to support our debt.”
“We believe that this restructuring will bring the level of our debt in line with current economic realities, and will take pressure off our operations.”
The groups says it is able to sustain operations while it restructures. Here, Editor & Publisher looks at concerns inside the newsroom.
Excerpts from Sam Zell’s memo can be read here.
The resurfacing of a six-year-old Tribune Co article, which caused a severe drop in share prices for United Airlines, is being blamed squarely on search engines by the publisher.
Tribune has said it asked Google to stop crawling its newspaper websites ‘months ago’.
The story came to light after a single user accessed the story on the Florida Sun Sentinel’s website at a period of low traffic, the publisher claimed.
This single user was enough to push the story to the top of the paper’s most viewed articles, where it subsequently came to the attention of Google’s crawlers.