My predicition? Pain

One of my favorite line’s from a bad movie comes from Clubber Lang (aka Mr. T) in the lovably bad Rocky II. When asked by a TV person about his expectation for his fight against defending champion Rocky Balboa (aka Sly Stallone).

“My prediction,” Clubber snarled. “Pain.”

What’s the prognosis for metro newspapers? Don’t take my word, listen to two private owners who have built media empires around the big-city paper. They recently indicated a belief it will be too painful to endure.

“The intentions of Copley Press and Advance Publications to explore the sale of two of their signature properties represents a discouraging new lack of confidence in the future of metro newspapers,” Alan Mutter wrote in an Aug. 4 Newsosaur post.

“The potential sale of the San Diego Union-Tribune and Newark Star-Ledger at the worst time in the history of newspapering can mean only one thing: The publishers don’t think the business will get any better.”

Mutter pointed out that the traditional newspaper response to a negative economic climate was to cut back wherever possible and then wait for the tide to turn. That they are looking to sell at a time when there will be few buyers and anyone interested will be offering far less than what would have been considered market value just two years ago.

“With the publishers deciding … to pursue potential exits at a time buyers are few and far between, the irresistible conclusion is that they foresee only a steady wasting of the assets they have held for multiple generations,” Mutter wrote. “Their willingness to consider dumping their papers at what most likely would be fire-sale prices amounts to a repudiation of the businesses that helped build their family fortunes.

“Because Copley and Advance do not appear to be under pressure to divest assets to raise cash to pay down debt, they would seem to be in a position to wait for a more propitious time to sell. Their lack of patience suggests a lack of confidence that better days lie ahead, at least with respect to these two properties.”

I’m not sure which is more depressing. Two major private owners moving, possibly, to simply eliminate newspapers that have been a cash suck. Or the slow, painful, and — ultimately — futile efforts by some of the major public chains to shore up their share prices by dumping more people. Gannett announced 1,000 job cuts across the country and got a modest boost in their bludgeoned stock price. That bump lasted less than a week and their stock closed yesterday almost $2 below the closing price the day before the layoffs was announced.

The following is from Gannettblog, an unofficial community that has sprung up to follow what is happening with the McLean, VA-based chain. It lists the share prices for GCI stock over the last week.

• Wednesday: before GCI confirmed layoffs: $19.26
• Thursday: after layoffs confirmed: $21.31
• Friday: $20.65
• Monday: $19.54
• Yesterday: 18.65
• Today: $17.40

Folks at the Star Ledger can at least look at the eventual demise of their employer as the result of financial losses. The paper reportedly lost tens of millions of dollars over the past two years. Gannett has been profitable until this year, though their collapsing revenues may put them in the red for 2008.

However, Newsosaur’s Mutter says the decision by Advance Publications and Copley to consider selling or closing papers means they have reached a conclusion not yet embraced by the publicly traded chains.

“Presumably, the Newark and San Diego papers could be operated indefinitely with lower margins than companies like Gannett, Lee Enterprises or McClatchy [which] need to pay dividends, cover interest payments and try to reverse Wall Street’s unprecedentedly negative opinion of their stocks.

“But the plan to explore the sale of the paper(s) explicitly signifies that the controlling family is not only approaching the limit of its charity but also has lost faith in the possibility of an eventual turnaround.”

Mutter predicts the vaunted San Francisco Chronicle may be the next major metro to be put up for sale or have its metaphorical head on a block.

What’s the up-side here? Is there any hope?

“While the short list of potential buyers would seem short indeed, it is conceivable that the Newark paper could be of interest to Cablevision, the new owners of Newsday, whose Tri-State cable-TV interconnect coincides relatively closely with the paper’s footprint in New Jersey,” Mutter wrote.

“A case could be made for consolidating the Star-Ledger’s operations with those of one or both of the New York Post or New York Daily News. This outcome would become more plausible if the dueling tabs move forward on their reported discussions about combining their printing, distribution and back-office activities.”

It’s a dim hope and may imply more confidence than almost anyone has at the moment that troubled US newspapers will ever return to any type of prosperity. But that’s what us dedicated newspaper folk do, we embrace dim hope even in the face of expected pain.

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Tags: newsbiz, stock, future of newspapers, hope

How to become a millionaire

An old joke is making the rounds for newspaper folks these days. It goes like this: Want to know how to become a millionaire? Invest a billion dollars in newspapers.

That bit isn’t funny to anyone. But it is true for people investing in newspapers these days. Newspaper stock values are crashing. McClatchy has lost 95 percent of its stock value since purchasing KRT. Gatehouse Media stock has essentially become a penny player. Journal Register company stock is basically worthless. Even the strong public chains have lost significant amounts of stock valuation (Gannett down 80 percent since the beginning of 2005, New York Times down 70 percent for the same period, Newscorp down 36 percent).

If one had invested $1 billion three years ago in some of the world’s biggest public newspaper companies, there is a good chance it would be worth less than $1 million today.

So what’s the good news? For those who like to see the world through a rosè-tinted wine glass, there is the possibility of a white knight. Or maybe just a gray one.

Alan Mutter writes at Newsosaur:

With a growing number of newspapers on the market at a time they most likely will fetch historically low prices, somebody is going to start buying some of them. But don’t count on the usual suspects.

Start thinking, instead, about such unconventional potential purchasers as the multibillion-dollar investment funds created by countries like Singapore or the sheikhdoms of the United Arab Emirates.

The upside is those non-traditional players all have multiple billions to pour into newspapers. The downside(s) — numerous. Mutter points out many, including both the agendas some of these investors might hope to push with their media properties and the potential backlash of having the local paper owned by a group of dimm fur’ners (as my Alabama relatives would say).

However, few traditional media players have the where-withal, desire or stock-holder backing to buy the newspapers that are (or soon will be) on the market. Most are cash-strapped, debt-laden or revenue challenged at the moment. But even those who aren’t would have to know something that has escaped the perception of most media analysts before plunking down anything for those rags on the blocks. That something would be how to stop the bleeding.

Mutter has some thoughts on that, as well. Maybe I will get to them tomorrow.

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Tags: newsbiz, stock value, newspaper investors

13 Things that piss me off

Thirteen things that piss me off about my newspaper.

1. We don’t know who we are, in print or online.

2. We talk local but chase national, even international.

3. We claim to know our audience, then discard the coverage of greatest interest to them.

4. We let attrition consume our local bureaus, we virtually cease covering high school sports, then we complain because our readers abandon us and our advertisers follow close behind.

5. We lack the courage to go all out, even on those things we insist our crucial to our continued existence. We dabble in hyper-local, we create half-assed web sites buried in the rising ash-heap of our online presence, we chase professional and college teams only if the teams are winning, we pretend that no one really cares about local sports even though there is little competition in covering them. We send people to the Olympics then don’t have the people or equipment to cover a story right across the street. We create online teams within our newsroom, but under-cut their efforts by refusing them authority, resources and personnel.

6. We insist we know better than our audience.

7. The people in charge can admit they don’t understand the internet, but they won’t get out of the way.

8. We dither rather than do. We talk projects to death. We create can’t-do excuses.

9. When we finally act it’s like silly schoolgirls at the beach. Stick a toe in the water then talk about whether we should wait to see if the ocean will warm up.

10. We focus on revenue as a reason not to do lot’s of things (if we don’t think it will make enough money, why waste the effort). Then drop wads of cash on things unlikely to ever find an audience, much less make money.

11. We act as if demoralizing our staff is our primary mission. Maybe people do work harder when they think unemployment is inevitable.

12. We talk about strengths newspapers can bring to the internet game, then proceed to drive away the young and enthusiastic as well as the older with any transferable skills as if keeping those who are too scared or unskilled to leave will help us transfer our inherent strengths to the web.

13. When the people in charge worry, it only seems to be about the bottom-line or posterity. They can’t seem to concentrate on what we can and should do now.

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Tags: newsbiz, identity, coverage, hyper-local

Fear and Loathing in the newspaper business

I’m no Hunter S. but …

There was failure in almost every direction, growing all the time. Not just across the publicly held chains, but up the gray ladies and down the suburban dailies all around the country. . . . You couldn’t strike sparks anywhere, even banging a rock on a hard place. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was wrong, that we were losing. . . .

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable doom from the forces of new and modern. Not just in a mean or commercial sense; we were better than that. We felt our energy simply needed to prevail. Without us, who would watch the animals, who would check the cages. Would anyone care if we didn’t? Would anyone notice if we were gone? Or is it all about Brittney’s panty-less crotch, her shaved-head madness, oh those poor children, those poor, poor children. Rachel’s lament as entertainment; Rachel’s lament covered by the National Enquirer . . . But there seemed no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. They had all the momentum; they were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. We were about to be swept beneath it. . . .

Bad news burden

Stuff I have been talking about for three years is coming to pass. Newspaper stocks are falling and newspaper revenues are rushing to catch up. Desperate journalists are trying to figure out if there is a future in their vocation or whether they should practice flipping burgers so they have a fall back. A guy in my newsroom periodically calls out: “Next window please.” He’s practicing for his next job.

People have long told me I am too much doom and gloom. Frequently a conversation concludes with: “Thanks Paul, now I really feel like killing myself.”

Funny thing is all of this doesn’t make me feel good. Quite the opposite, in fact. So I was right. What’s my reward? The death of the entire industry I have known and loved for 30 years.

I try to keep hope. There is still a chance after all. Though the desperate efforts of desperate newspapers remind me of a dying animal flailing, I want to believe somebody will find something that will make things work out in the end. What’s more, there are business opportunities in this, especially if you can be satisfied with profit margins of less than 30 percent. In fact, there may be some pretty significant business opportunities if, say, one could work out a syndication model for news that works something like Google ads, paying content creators something per view of a piece. That would reward those who make better content as well as the sites that package and promote it well. Most likely it will be a company like Google or Amazon that devise something like this. Few other sites have the yank to bring all newspapers to the table, the expertise to pull it off, and the deep pockets to pull it off. The rich do get richer.

Can that save newspaper journalism without the paper component? Not unless somebody invents it, surely. But possibly not even then.

It’s likely there is no single solution. It will be a bunch of little innovations coupled with the willingness of journalists to work for even less money and ever longer hours. Things like EveryBlock hold out the hope of a technological solution that will help people find the news most pertinent to their community or even neighborhood (though that may benefit bloggers more than newspaper sites). The reluctant venturing into niche web sites holds the hope of incremental revenue sources that will help offset the monumental losses of classified and national advertising.

But there is still too much uncertainty, too much stumbling, too much fearful hesitation, and far too much anger to be sure that many newspapers will survive. The overall U.S. economic malaise is just the icing on the cake.

Sure, I’m Mr. Doom-and-Gloom, but it’s not because I want to blow out the candles.

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Print first, think later

Buzzmachine takes note today of the new tack ordered at the ailing Philadelphia Inquirer. Put everything in print first. That will shore up the falling subscriptions at the financially free-falling newspaper.

Here is what the memo from the Inquirer managing editor says:

Colleagues – Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t post those stories online until they’re in print.

This isn’t about the rush to be first, as some commenters at Buzzmachine have suggested. This is about establishing a clear policy that the dead trees edition trumps all. Problem with those blanket statements is that they tend to stand in the way of a thoughtful decision-making process.

Here is what might be a better policy to establish — we will determine, beginning with the assignment of every story, whether it would work best in print, with photos, as video, including graphics or any combination of those things. We will likewise decide, as each story nears completion whether it should break first in print, online or in some other fashion. We won’t put print ahead of online or vice versa because putting the audience and the story first will eventually serve us better than any arbitrary decision-making process.

By simply deciding paper comes first, they are betting they can help themselves by forcing people to buy the paper in order to get the story. Parents eat their own children, story at 11. (Me, I love it when TV does that. I always stay tuned.) First they better hope their “investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews” are very, very compelling. Else-wise, would-be readers will simply shrug and look at something else. Evidence also is this is a pretty bad time for them to be making such a gamble. If they are wrong they are likely gone.

You would think the “brains” at newspapers would be past this type of thinking at this point. But I just had a long conversation with a long-time newspaper man at my place who still thinks we just need to wait out this “perfect storm.” Once classified comes back and the real estate market turns around then those with the patience to weather this little “down-turn” will be sitting pretty. Yeah, that’s a good plan, too.

Real journalist — will write for food

I got involved in a discussion at buzzmachine.com. Seems there is a tiff going on between the folks at Baristanet (a nationally known hyper-local news blog out of Montclair, NJ) and those in The Star Ledger newsroom. The fight is being played out, in part, via the new video venture underway at the SL.

Jeff Jarvis apparently asked Debbi Galant, one of the principles as Baristanet, to do a video for the SL.

“I thought the journalists there would benefit from hearing from someone who found life after print and so I suggested to the Ledger’s digiczar, John Hassell, that they get hyperlocal postergirl Debbie Galant to make a video for an upcoming episode of LedgerLive. It didn’t turn out exactly as I’d predicted but it did turn out the start of an entertaining discussion that captures the life-and-death questions journalists across the country are facing now,” Jarvis wrote.

Galant delivered a rather biting piece in which she took credit from some of the woes at the newspaper. Seems the paper needs major concessions from its union and a 20-25 percent staff reduction just to stay open. The paper’s response — also in video and viewable at the Jarvis site, Baristanet, and at NJ.Com (the newspaper’s web partner) — attempts to laugh off “journalists” like Galant. Unfortunately, it mostly serves to demonstrate just how clueless newspaper people are about this whole interweb thing. As a bonus, it may also serve to alienate the very audience the Star Ledger needs in order to survive.

Here is what I posted there:

Ms. Galant comes off rather cold. To her The Star Ledger is little more than toilet paper. Glad to use it when it’s available, gonna miss it when it’s gone. But … Success sometimes makes people rather self-assured. I don’t like her attitude, yet can’t really blame her — especially in the face of The Star Ledger response.

What do the professionals at the SL say: pooh-pooh on you, Debbie Galant. You don’t know what it means to be a “real” journalist. Being a real journalist means calling important people on the phone. Being a real journalist means going to meetings. Being a real journalist means “getting out on the street.”

Here is another: being a real journalist probably means looking for a another job.

Are the real journalists at the SL totally clueless or do they only appear that way? Debbie Galant has a successful site that turns a profit and obviously serves it’s audience. The SL has a confused and confusing internet presence that probably does more for Debbie Galant than it does for itself and its readers. Debbie Galant is talking about expanding her operation. The SL is close to shuttering theirs. If there is to be a snark shoot-out, then the SL is standing in the middle of the street with an empty gun.

The real pity is that the SL should probably be trying to figure out how to clone what Galant is doing. At the very least, SL employees should be studying her operation so they know how to start their own versions in their own towns come Oct. 2008. Maybe it isn’t journalism, but it might be a job. Perhaps Baristanet isn’t all that journalists should aspire to, but if it serves an audience, a community, and turns a profit, then its worthy of praise. Based on the public statements from the SL publisher, the newspaper can’t claim to be doing both of those things anymore.

The new newsroom may turn out to be a back porch or a back bedroom. But that is due as much to the failures of those in the old newsrooms as it is to the successes of those working in the new ones. To blame those who are succeeding only compounds the failure.

I, too, am concerned about how investigative reporting will get done from these new newsrooms. I am afraid that much of what is good and necessary from old-style journalism will largely disappear during the next few years. It’s hard to do a lot of this stuff without the clout, organization and support of a newspaper. Still, I’ve worked for newspapers that couldn’t really do it with those things, anyway.

The us vs them stuff doesn’t just make me tired anymore, it pisses me off. We in the newspaper world have no more time for this stupid argument. Besides, if we have to, we should be blaming our bosses for their failure to innovate rather than those rivals who figured out the future.

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Tags: Exploding_TV, ledger, live, networkedjournalism, newbiznews, newsinnovation, newspapers, ledger live, star ledger, baristanet, buzzmachine

Bad news, good news, bad news

First the bad news: Advertisers are deserting newspapers at an alarming rate. Not just classified advertisers, but also those who have traditionally bought display ads.

The good news? The advertisers fleeing newspapers are going online. Many newspapers have relatively popular online sites. Thus they have the potential to get that migrating advertising. Sure those ads don’t bring in as much revenue as they did in print. But it’s better than nothing, right?

Now the really bad news: Newspapers aren’t getting that advertising. In fact, they are getting less of it now than they did before (After some promise two years ago, stats from local media researcher Borrell Associates show that newspapers’ share of the local online market is now 27.4 percent, down from 35.9 percent in 2006, even as the total segment has seen 57.2 percent gains last year). Why? There reasons are numerous and highly dismaying. The following are from a July 30 post by paidcontent.org.

1. Newspaper advertising sales teams either can’t or won’t sell online. “Unfortunately, salespeople and media buyers, who in most cases rely on commissions, have a reason to dislike online ads because of the lower dollar amounts online brings to the table,” according to the paidcontent piece.
2. “When newspapers do sell ads on their sites,” the paidcontent post goes on, “they typically look for larger marketers to buy banner ads. But much of the growth in online ad spend is being driven by small, local businesses like pizza places and plumbers who want to attract customers looking for area services. And since search is key to attracting those local customers, that’s why internet companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Local.com have taken a 53.3 percent share of local online ad sales.”

At my place the print sales people have multiple dis-incentives to selling online ads. First and, perhaps, foremost is that they aren’t allowed to sell online. They can sell print and then must refer the buyer to an online seller from our web organization. Second, they will have to share commissions from any deal that involves online advertising.

Despite the dire financial situation being faced at my newspaper there has been little effort to integrate the print and web advertising sales teams. This week, after a major workforce reduction initiative was launched, the paper carried ads for advertising sales people who would bridge that divide. Nothing like waiting until the last moment.

But the other reality is that those advertisers likely to buy a print ad are totally different than those likely to buy an online ad. Fortunately for us, we don’t have much hyper-local going on, so there are fewer of those plumbers and pizza makers for us to deal with. Is that good news or bad news?

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Tags: Advertising, Companies, Media, Newspapers

Making the right decision

I just ran across a blog by William Lobdell called Lobdell’s OC. What caught my attention was a post called 42 things I know. In that the author details a number of things he knows about the newspaper business that culminated in his departure from the Los Angeles Times just a few days ago (beginning of Aug. 2008).

I’ll get to a few of the things he knows in a moment. But this blog is salient to me because it is evidence of a few things I have been talking about for a while. Among those would be that the future of journalism lies with those who are abandoning newspapers. At his blog Lobdell is aggregating Orange County, CA news. The post today is about the Irvine Tattler, which is, in Lobdell’s words:  “Filling the gap left by the retreating forces of the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register.”

He adds that Stephen Smith, who runs the Tattler, “has developed a wonderful muckracking site focused on Irvine politics. He’s broken several big stories (for instance, he recently reported that “councilman and mayoral candidate Sukhee Kang used a California Public Records Act (CPRA) request in August 2006 to obtain an estimated 90,000 records with personal information about Irvine voters, including birth dates, home addresses and e-mail addresses).”

Apparently Lobdell left the LA Times after 18 years working there, including 8 years as editor of its sister paper(s) the Newport Beach/Costa Mesa Daily Pilot. He has few good things to say about Sam Zell, the billionaire real estate mogul who took over the Tribune Co., which currently owns the LA Times. But, number 20 on his list is this: “Sam Zell isn’t the ultimate villain. Though I originally thought he might be the kick in the ass we needed, I can’t stand the guy. But in the long run, he’s just an accelerator for a downfall that is happening naturally.”

Here are a few more:

• Newspapers were unbelievably slow in embracing the Internet, even though younger reporters have been pleading with their bosses for years to embrace the Web.
• Amazingly, it took until 2005 for top editors at The Times to realize the Internet not only wasn’t going away but might lead to the demise of newspaper.
• Prior to that, the Internet operation at The Times was used as a place to hide reporters and editors who had fallen out of favor.
• For a news operation filled with journalists with a mostly liberal bent, few people embrace the kind of progressive change necessary to save, or at least delay the fall of, the franchise.

Except for the bit about using the internet operation as a gulag, that sounds exactly like my place. The difference with our operation is that the internet arm and the print people are so completely separate that neither would ever accept anyone from the other. Until only a few days ago both mostly believed they could survive without the other. In all likelihood, the web folks will soon find out if they are right.

Lobdell is even-handed in his assessment of what brought the Times to where it is today. But what really struck me were his thoughts for the future. Thoughts that he probably had to leave the company in order to voice without fear of reprisal. Thoughts which likely no one at the LA Times wanted to hear while he was there.

First, “I’d get realistic estimation on the size of The Times’ future work force and then make one large cut to get it there (good sources say another 150-200 layoffs are on the horizon). An internet operation can’t support a huge newsgathering operation, and morale would improve if everyone knew no more major layoffs loomed. People can deal with reality; it’s just this surrealistic no-man’s-land that make it impossible to move forward and has good people bailing out.”

My newspaper has been dying the death of a thousand cuts for quite some time. There have been numerous buy-outs, a hiring freeze that has lasted for years, and the looming threat of layoffs (though they haven’t hit yet). Every work force reduction is followed within months by another memo from the publisher about how we have to find new ways to live within our means. It would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying to suppose how one can ever live within something that is disappearing more rapidly than even our brightest business types are able to suppose.

Perhaps, also, the LA Times is like my place where no one seems to have set clear priorities (what should we cover, local news or that big story in Iraq, high school sports or the Olympics) and no one seems able to make the hard decisions about the coverage and personal that will help us focus on the elusive goals of living within our means while still serving our core audiences.

Lobdell hits another pet peeve of mine with this one: “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.”

I was just speaking to some people at my place about this. For years newspapers knew that most readers threw away, every day, 85 percent of the newspaper. Yet most newspaper sites attempt to duplicate in content and organization, that news on paper. Newspaper people talk about branding and comprehensiveness and a whole raft of other bullshit. They should simply admit what they already know and build web sites around that knowledge. Most readers don’t want all five pounds of newspaper every day. They won’t wade through even one pound in search of what they want. They just want the 8 ounces of greatest import to themselves. Newspapers seem completely unable to recognize this or serve these people. That’s why online news aggregators do so well.

It makes sense on so many levels. Identify the biggest or most devoted audiences that your paper has. Most papers have them. At my paper they are the folks that buy for high school sports. Then build a site dedicated exclusively around serving that audience. A site that serves that audience like no other site can. A site with all the stuff you can find in print as well as tons of stuff you can’t. A site with ever growing depth but pre-defined width. And, perhaps most important, some method of allowing the community to be involved — to make it their own — besides space for comments.

Such an approach has many benefits. It taps into an existing audience. It targets an audience that can be recruited (they already read your frickin’ newspaper, dummy, so use it like a billboard). And you don’t need any back-end software or registration devices to help identify the audience so you can deliver them to advertisers. You already know who they are and what they want because they are going to a site that does only one thing.

Develop web sites for every such audience. Make them independent, stand-alone sites. In some instances, don’t even identify their affiliation with the larger newspaper. Then, take the best of the material from those sites and pull it into your big umbrella site for those folks who want the whole 5 pound experience.

Lobdell says something very similar in number 38: “You could combine all these different blogs/websites under the www.latimes.com banner, but make it simple for readers to navigate to the sites they want to become attached/devoted to.”

He concludes with these last three things:
• I have no doubt my newsroom colleagues who I left behind can adapt to the challenges of the New Media environment.
• But I’ve seen no evidence that other parts of the company — especially the “leaders” — are willing, able and competent.
• And this is ultimately why I left The Times. Though the paper has been in business for 125 years, it had become riskier to stay than to go.

Unfortunately, that sounds like an epitaph that will be heard from many newspaper people in the next few years.

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Tags: JOURNALISM, LOS ANGELES TIMES, NEWSPAPERS, Lobdell’s OC

Newspaper stocks crashing

My attention was recently called to a July 15 blog post by Alan Mutter at Newsosaur. He notes the collapse of the stock prices for most newspaper companies. Here are the highlights.

: A.H. Belo (AHC) today is worth $119 million, down 58% from $282 million when it began trading earlier this year as a free-standing newspaper publisher.

:: GateHouse Media (GHS), worth $59 million, down 95% from $1.2 billion at its curiously strong initial public offering in October, 2006.

:: Journal Communications (JRN), worth $266 million, down 78% from $1.2 billion on Dec. 31, 2004.

:: Journal Register Co. (JRCO), worth $6 million, down 99% from $746 million on Dec. 31, 2004.

:: Lee Enterprises (LEE), worth $145 million, down 93% from $2 billion on Dec. 31, 2004.

:: Media General (MEG), worth $248 million, down 83% from $1.5 billion on Dec. 31, 2004.

:: McClatchy (MNI), worth $387 million, down 93% from $5.7 billion on Dec. 31, 2004.

:: New York Times Co. (NYT), worth $1.85 billion, down 67% from $5.6 billion on Dec. 31, 2004.

:: Scripps (SSP), worth $522 million, which was newly launched as a pure-plan newspaper company on July 1, 2008. More details below.

:: Sun-Times Media Group (SUTM), worth $32 million, down 98% from $1.3 billion on Dec. 31. 2004.

The only companies not on the above list are:

:: Gannett (GCI), worth a bit less than $4 billion, down 79% from $18.5 billion on Dec. 31, 2004.

:: News Corp. (NWS), worth $37.2 billion, down 36% from $58.4 billion on Dec. 31, 2004.

:: Washington Post (WPO), worth $5.5 billion, down 24% from $7.3 billion on Dec. 31, 2004.

My thoughts? Publicly traded newspaper companies have helped bring the news industry to this place. They are NOT solely responsible for everything that is wrong, but they established the concept that serving shareholders is job one. How do they serve shareholds? With something that can only be maintained under monopoly-type conditions: high-profit margins. Gannett’s target for annual profits has been 29 percent. They have essentially determined everything that they do — from corporate to staffing at local papers — based on hitting that target. They have apparently hit that number pretty consistently for quite a few years.

Not going to happen any more.

Now to drag out my crystal ball. At least 60 percent of newspapers currently operating in the US will cease to exist in the next 5-10 years. I don’t mean simply stop printing on dead trees and move their entire operations to the web. I believe they will go belly up and die.

Companies such as Gannett, while looking fairly healthy compared to their brethren at the moment, will have to get out of the newspaper business (i.e. leave all of their papers to die lonely deaths) or have them suck down the entire company. The worship of profit over everything else would almost dictate my prediction. Their shareholders demand nearly 30 percent in profit. The “newspaper” business of the future will be lucky to achieve 5 percent profit.

What does the future hold? Private ownership of newspapers (although that term will likely soon be anachronistic, since news on paper will be gone). Some of those private owners will be rich people with axes to grind. They may succeed in spite of that. Many will have no newspaper business sense and simply pour some millions into the “paper” and eventually get out (a la the Philadelphia Inquirer). Many former newspaper people will take up the local news slack by starting their own online “papers.” National organizations will take over much of the government watchdog role.

What will get lost? Investigative journalism at the state and local level for many areas. The watch-dog role of newspapers, which some may arguably have not performed very well anyway, will now become largely non-existent. Hopefully the American people will eventually realize what they have lost and support some system that comes along (10 years or so into the future) to support such things.

If it weren’t for the things that newspapers could do, like throw 20 people at wading through a mountain of documents to try and find out how a mayor systematically looted a city for three decades, then I might not miss them. I, too, am sick of the old boy network that blocks innovation and their tunnel vision regarding what is a story (it isn’t news unless I say it’s news). But the price for shedding this will be steep — especially in a country where informed citizens are supposed to keep the government honest, but those informed citizens almost never attend a government meeting and look at government documents even less. The cost of losing that will be far higher than the billions in stock value that evaporated in the month of July 2008.

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Tags: newspaperstock, profit margin, private ownership, watchdog, investigative journalism