Jeff Williams, former city editor of the Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune, has been monitoring the number of pages, local story bylines and number of sections in the title over the last four Februaries.
His results suggest ‘a dramatic drop’ in content.
The LA Times and Chicago Tribune are pooling their foreign reporting operations to serve all Tribune newspapers. The operation will be run from Los Angeles.
Even the Newseum, the news museum in Washington DC, isn’t safe from job losses. The organisations was forced to make 13 job cuts last week as a result of funding cuts, reports Mediabistro (via WTOP.com).
Free weekly, the Sopris Sun, is being run by seven volunteers and one paid editor/reporter, Trina Ortega.
The paper was launched by concerned residents after local title, the Carbondale Valley Journal, folded after 34 years.
“Ortega, 40, has received a small stack of resumes from writers and photographers willing to work for free,” says the article.
The Washington Times has announced plans for a new syndicated radio show featuring the paper’s investigative reporting and accountability journalism.
The three-hour show will be carried by Talk Radio Network.
AdweekMedia has published its annual ‘hot list’ for US magazine titles:
“Inclusion in AdweekMedia’s annual ‘Hot List’ is based on several factors, including: ad page and revenue gains; performance within a magazine’s competitive category; circulation gains; interviews with media buyers and consultants, and AdweekMedia’s own editorial judgment,” says a release.
Here’s the top 10 compared by circulation and advertising revenue (in millions of dollars) using Many Eyes’ visualisation tools (click on the images to see more):
Circulation
Advertising revenue
Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, co-founder of Apartment Therapy, confirms that the New York Times has withdrawn a take down notice for articles and images used by the blog network.
Paper Cuts, which maps US newspaper job losses, has gone past the 6,000 mark for 2009 (via Fading to Black).
Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has released its State of the Media report and – unsurprisingly – the annual evaluation of the US media scene makes for particularly depressing reading this time around.
As the report points out, the problems created by growing online audiences for legacy news organisations have been excerbated by a simultaneous economic collapse.
“Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder,” reads the report.
The report in full, including individual sections on magazines, newspapers, online, local TV and network TV, can be read at this link, but below are some key findings:
Newspapers
In numbers:
On survival:
“Papers still make roughly 90% of their revenue from print and, although the numbers vary by paper, the cost of printing and delivering the printed newspaper averages 40% of costs. For now, it doesn’t add up to sacrifice potentially 90% of revenues to save 40% of costs.”
Hope for the future?
Online
Special analysis of citizen media and new journalism ventures is also offered in the report. Contributor to the newspaper section of the report, Danna L. Walker, blogs here; while the Columbia Journalism Review has created a ‘guess the year of the report’ quiz game.
Journalism.co.uk will give you the full low down on the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s annual ‘State of the News Media’ report later today, but for those who want to read the assessment of the ‘state and health of American journalism’ in 2009 in full, follow the link below.