I can’t say I’m surprised that Denver-based MediaNews Group (well, technically its holding company, Affiliated Media Inc.) has said that it will file for bankruptcy protection. The Wall Street Journal has a report on the latest newspaper-industry dour development, pointing out that the Hearst Corp. has $400 million in equity and debt tied to MediaNews, “and the investment will be wiped out by the bankruptcy filing, according to people familiar with the matter.”

MediaNews is likely to survive, but not without some unfortunate consequences for its newspapers. From the WSJ article:

“(MediaNews Group CEO Dean) Singleton also said cleaning up the company’s debt load allows him to help lead newspaper-industry consolidation, which some people in the industry say would help publishers stay afloat by creating stronger, more efficiently run groups of papers. Others are less sanguine about the benefits of consolidation.

“People in the industry have pointed to MediaNews’ paper in St. Paul and the Star Tribune in Minneapolis as potential candidates for a combination, as well as to adjacent papers in Southern California published by MediaNews, Tribune Co. and Freedom Communications Inc.”

In other words, yet another newspaper-company bankruptcy means that more muscle will be cut from newsrooms (the fat’s already gone) and communities will be more poorly served in the consolidation that’s necessary for industry survival.

We’ve seen plenty of awful things happen to newsrooms, and now we’re seeing things like copy editors being considered for elimination to save money. (E.g., Star Tribune.)

The newsroom cuts keep coming, and as newspaper companies emerge from bankruptcy owned largely by the banks that held their debt, a return to strong staffing levels and higher quality is unlikely anytime soon. (And why would advertisers return to that?)

So, it looks to me like now is a great time to be in journalism!

I’ve said that a few times recently when speaking to groups of college journalism students, and while I’ve gotten some nods of agreement, I’ve seen more heads shaking and puzzled expressions. But here’s what I mean:

Newspapers across the land are declining in quality, and lacking in coverage of their communities. A retired university journalism department head just today wrote this to me in a private e-mail about his local paper, owned by one of the largest newspaper companies in the U.S.:

“Today’s [newspaper name redacted] is a bulletin board of one-paragraph meeting and event announcements, with canned features from other [corporate parent redacted] papers, local columns by city and county functionaries, booster pieces by c-of-c officials, religious claptrap by evangelists, columns on how and why to clean up your garage, pet care, etc. People who want to announce weddings and funerals are charged by the column inch, and the practice of depth reporting is a distant memory.”

I don’t see a way out of this for local and regional newspapers owned by large media companies. Do you? So newspapers will likely continue to decline, while simultaneously, new digital news entities (for- and non-profit) will continue to increase in quality. After all, the newcomers don’t have massive debt to worry about or expensive presses to maintain; digital publishing is cheap in comparison.

And, of course, many of the new news entities emerging are run by the talented journalists laid off by the once-great newspaper companies. So new news providers’ quality will continue to improve.

The problem for all the new-comers to the (reinvented) news game is the lack of a clear business model to support quality journalism in sufficient quantity. But I’m more confident that they can figure that out than I am in the newspaper industry figuring out the digital business model while also handling the collapse of their legacy business.

“New” news media rises as the old falls. MediaNews Group’s troubles are only the latest to open up more opportunities for the new news eco-system to develop.

It’s an exciting time to be a journalist, if you can stomach the chaotic environment. It’s a lousy time to own an established news media business if you’re still in love with its outdated business model.

Throughout much of my nearly 15-year gig as a freelance columnist for Editor & Publisher Online, I’ve cringed at its website. Now that E&P is shutting down (though with some hope of a last-minute save) and my “Stop The Presses!” column has ended its run, I’m free to stop the self-censorship.

Actually, I don’t really need to say that much, since (now former) E&P editor Greg Mitchell acknowledged the obvious in an interview published yesterday:

“At E&P, overly frugal ownership forced the publication to scrape by with an antiquated Web site — even though E&P advocated since the mid-1990s that newspapers and magazines embrace the Internet, or else suffer the consequences.

“‘For four years we were pushing our owners to update our site, and we couldn’t do it,’ Mitchell said. ‘As a result, we have this dinosaur of a Web site. It hasn’t been updated in five years; we can’t do video, you can’t leave comments.’”

Thank you, Greg!

For me, not a month has gone by over the last, oh, 5 years or more that, following publication of my monthly column, I didn’t get reader e-mails complaining about not being able to leave a public comment responding to what I’d written. I often resorted to using this, my personal blog, as the place for E&P readers to leave feedback or have a public discussion.

The worst were my (many) columns advocating that news websites be more interactive and participatory. Readers couldn’t resist the opportunity to point out the irony, though of course they had to do it either in a “letter to the editor” sent to EditorandPublisher.com, or to my personal e-mail address (or sometimes with a phone call).

That said, that’s a hit only on E&P’s penny-pinching overlords, not the E&P staff. My column tenure lasted through several editors before Mitchell, and each faced the same problem. Whenever I repeated my request that comments be added to my column, I got the same frustrated response: We want to do it but we can’t get corporate to allow it!

For me, the ultimate irony — and there’s a lesson here, I think — is that when I switched this blog to the popular Wordpress open-source content management system (CMS) years ago, my personal website was in many ways more sophisticated and flexible than E&P’s! If I wanted a new feature, I just found a free Wordpress plug-in and added new functionality in a few minutes. E&P’s poor editors had to beg corporate IT for any new features to be added, which either took weeks or months, or never happened (like adding user comments).

Open-source platforms like Wordpress, Drupal, and others are now remarkably advanced. You have to wonder why companies like E&P owner Nielsen (and VNU before that) would cripple themselves using a proprietary CMS.

OK, I’ve got that off my chest. I’ll end with high praise for the editorial work of E&P’s staff over the years. E&P was around for 125 years, and deservedly so. I’m proud to have been associated with the E&P brand, and leave with great respect for everyone in the now-shuttered New York City office.

You can still find them on the new (temporary?) blog, E&P In Exile.

Oh, and feel free to leave a comment below.

After writing a column for Editor & Publisher Online for so long (it was my “Stop The Presses!” column that served as the website’s main original content at the very beginning), it feels weird to have the final one published.

But it’s online, “Goodbye, for Now: Looking Foward.” (My editors rejected my apparently too-controversial suggested headline: “Stop a Lot of the Presses! (Farewell, E&P).”

There’s no place for online discussion of the column on the E&P site, so I hope anyone with an opinion on it will use the Comments area below this blog item to react to what I’ve written.

I chose to go out with a two-part list.

• One is 20/20 hindsight fantasy: what the last 15 years should have looked like if only the newspaper industry’s leaders (and employees and outside analysists and pundits) had reacted to (and more effectively lobbied industry leaders on how to respond to) disruptive change properly.

• The other is prediction: based on the reality of what did happen over that time and the decisions made, what can the newspaper industry expect next and what will the news eco-system look like.

I’ll continue writing on the future of news — and yes, expressing my opinions — on this blog. You’ll also start to see me writing on a blog associated with my newest project, set to launch in January 2010: the Digital Media Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado at Boulder. More on that very soon.

To any and everyone who spent any time reading “Stop The Presses!” over the years, thank you for spending some of your valuable time pondering my words. To everyone I’ve interviewed, thank you for sharing your ideas and opinions — and educating me on what’s to become of media in the digital era. And to my editors at E&P (present and past), thanks for allowing me this venue, and for your support over the years. Good luck!

Writing a column (“Stop The Presses!“) for Editor & Publisher Online, where I’ve covered the intersection (perhaps I should call it a collision) of the Internet and newspapers since 1995, is the longest-running professional gig I’ve ever had. The only things in my life that have lasted longer are my marriage (21 years) and being a parent (17 years).

So it’s with sadness that I learned this morning that the Nielsen Co. is shutting down E&P after being unable to sell it along with its other publications. E&P’s roots go back to 1884 and it long was considered “the bible of the newspaper industry.” I can’t say that I’m surprised; indeed, the only surprise was that the magazine and website lasted this long, as did my monthly column. (Many other E&P columns by non-staff members were cut earlier on for budgetary reasons.)

If you’re expecting details from me, I don’t have many, since I am not nor ever have I been an E&P or Nielsen employee; my column has always been a freelance or contract arrangement, one of many things that I do around the digital-news space. So based here in Boulder, Colorado, I’ve seldom known the “inside dope” about what was happening in the New York office, and didn’t know in advance that this was coming. (Indeed, just yesterday I’d been faxed my contract to sign for next year, so my editors at E&P didn’t know, either. That’s one item to delete from my to-do list for today.)

I can tell you that things are up in the air in terms of what happens to the “Editor & Publisher” brand, but that its staff will be out of their offices by the end of the year. (“Happy Holidays, E&P gang! -Love, Nielsen Co.”)

I kept writing my E&P column for so long, I guess, because I came out of the newspaper business (from 1978 to 1993 I worked mostly at newspapers in Colorado and California) and maintained an affinity for newspapers and the brand of journalism they produce. In late 1993 when the Internet came onto the scene (that’s when the first web browser was introduced to the world), I viewed it as transformational — and expected that it could transform the newspaper industry; and with my prior experience and enthusiasm for the new online world I surmised that I might be able to help, by closing watching new online trends that could affect newspapers and identifying new technologies and trends that could be leveraged by newspapers.

Ah, if I’d only known then. … If only I’d realized that the newspaper culture was too mired in the muck of its own long history, and that its leaders would, for the most part, resist-resist-resist the rapid changes required by the evolving digital culture to do what needed to be done to survive. I might have taken the new route rather than trying to repave the old one with new materials, transforming a sleepy two-lane into a sleek new super-highway.

That’s not meant as a criticism of the digital-media folks that have toiled in the newspaper industry this last decade and a half, with the same mission as I had. Those fine and smart people on the inside, and people like me on the outside offering advice and ideas for surviving the digital revolution, generally saw the direction things should go. Alas, so often it was the top leaders who held back the digital pioneers and their crazy ideas for fear of hurting the cash cow that was the printed newspaper.

Indeed, that attitude still holds true at the top of many companies, it seems. A profound moment of disappointment — when I think my mind finally lost the last tiny shread of hope for the newspaper industry — was this summer, when during a reinveinting-news conference I had a few minutes for a private conversation with the CEO of one of the largest U.S. newspaper companies. He told me that his firm’s intention of putting up pay-walls at most of its newspaper websites was meant primarily as a strategy to drive more print revenues. He said he didn’t expect to earn much from the web side with the pay-wall strategy.

That same company (I’ll be polite and refrain from naming it) early this year had me do a small consulting job, to do some research on social-media directors at other news companies and determine if it was worth it for the company to create such a position at the corporate level. I came back with estimates of how other news companies had fared with a person in that position, including estimates of increased website traffic and additional revenues from increased social-media activity and initiatives. I also made the case that ignoring social media would be a huge mistake, because it is a huge part of the future of news.

You guessed it. I later heard from the interactive-division VP who hired me that it was decided (above his level) that the social-media position would not be created, because management couldn’t see enough of a ROI in the short term, and of course money was tight for creating new positions. I just shook my head in disbelief. But, again, I wasn’t surprised.

Writing my E&P column for so long, I’ve received plenty of accolades for identifying breaking trends and alerting newspaper digital managers of technologies that they should deploy and business models they should investigate. I’ve also gotten plenty of criticisms from journalists and publishers who I describe as “old school,” who thought that my ideas would hurt the industry by hurting print revenues.

I’ve also been asked, a lot lately, why I continue to “preach to people who obviously won’t listen to what you have to say?” That’s crossed my mind for quite a while, and in that respect it’s a bit of a relief to stop writing a column that’s targeted to newspaper leaders to offer them ideas for evolving into digital creatures. This “opportunity” of losing my column aimed at a newspaper-industry audience will allow me to write more broadly about the future of news and journalism, and the new news eco-system that is evolving to fill in the gaps left by dwindling old news media.

As many others have said, journalism isn’t in danger of extinction, but newspaper print editions are. That the industry could lose its dominant and oldest trade journal is another signal itself of many more newspapers’ demise or slide into irrelevancy.

I’ll keep covering the news industry and news digital trends in this blog. But you’ll see less of me cheerleading a newspaper industry that seems bent on self-destruction. If every newspaper would take digital opportunities as seriously as does the New York Times, which has a large technology staff to go along with its still-large editorial staff, then there’d be hope. But it’s the rare few newspapers in larger markets that will survive long term because they will adapt and innovate sufficiently, like the NYT. (Small-town papers have much more of a cushion against extinction.)

Finally, lest I appear to put all the blame on newspaper industry CEOs for their myopic vision, I feel that I let the newspaper industry down, as did E&P. I and they were not strident enough with our criticisms, apparently, or strong enough with our arguments, to convince newspapers’ top leaders that they needed to get on the digital path more quickly and more solidly. I end my E&P column thinking that I could and should have done more. But at the same time, I thoroughly enjoyed the many people I met in the newspaper industry, many of them innovators and visionaries.

I’ll be continuing to guide the news industry with my latest project, which is founding the Digital Media Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I don’t even have a finished website to point you to yet, but we’ll debut soon.

My latest Editor & Publisher Online column has been posted:

Some (Unasked-for) Advice for Smaller, Non-Metro Newspapers

While it’s the metro newspapers, and any paper owned by an over-leveraged parent corporation needing to pay off debt, that are the most challenged by the digital transition, newspapers in small towns away from metro areas also need (different) advice. They have less pressure and a bit longer to come to terms with the Internet and mobile revolution and how they impact their print business and historic business model. But many could do a better job of taking advantage of digital trends.

I focus on two small papers in Idaho and Montana, and I’ve invited the editors to respond here if they’d like. I hope you’ll share your ideas for what small-town newspapers should do, too. (Comment area below.)

Google Fast Flip launched this week as a public Google Labs beta, and I’ve been surprised at some of the skepticism about it. The main complaint is that it takes a step backward by displaying screen captures of popular articles from a selection of media websites and makes them the entry point to finding the best content on media sites. The idea and design seem a bit old-school to some critics.

I like Fast Flip a lot, for several reasons:

1. It’s an “alternative Google News” for those not wanting to be overwhelmed with selecting from thousands of media sources.
2. It’s a more comfortable interface for some people, especially, I would guess, older online users who are still most at ease with print-like design than with lists of headline links to choose from.
3. It’s not a replacement for Google News, but an alternative for those looking for a different way to find and read the best content from a selected group of quality sources.
4. It’s Google’s first time in sharing with publishers some of the money earned on its own pages. The search giant doesn’t share revenue from links to news websites’ content on Google News, so this is a significant change in policy, even if only experimental — a way for Google to directly support media publishers, including those who complain that Google is eating their lunch by profiting from links to their news.

Frankly, I’m feeling a bit vindicated by Google’s introduction of Fast Flip. Last April, I wrote several blog posts suggesting that it would be in Google’s self-interest to turn Google News into a news search service that shared ad revenue with publishers that are included in Google News:
Google could come to the rescue, but won’t?
How can newspapers help Google?
To Eric Schmidt: What happened to ‘Don’t Be Evil’?

I also sent e-mails in April to Krishna Bharat, Google Distinguished Researcher and creator and leader of Google News, suggesting that revenue-sharing with news publishers would be a good thing for both the news industry and Google (and, thus, society in general as citizens remained well informed by a healthier news sector). I never heard back from Bharat, even though I’d met him in person a few weeks earlier at Stanford University during a fellowship interview.

If you read through the comment threads on the blog items above, you’ll agree that this was not among the most popular ideas I’ve ever floated in my writing over the years. I got lots of pushback, much of it to the tune of: Google is just smarter than media publishers; Google owes the news industry nothing because it’s already giving news sites millions and millions of user visits, but the publishers aren’t smart enough to figure out how to make money from that.

You can read the links above if you care about my original (unpopular) argument, but the crux is that by sharing revenues, Google would prevent angry and scared news publishers from locking down their content online, AND it would make it politically possible to turn on the ad spigot for Google News because it would share some of its new revenues with the creators/publishers of the content it links to.

While Google didn’t follow my suggestion for opening up Google News for revenue sharing with news publishers, it has done so with a few dozen selected media companies that are taking part in Fast Flip. It’s a variation of what I suggested last April to a generally vigorous assault on the idea.

It’d be nice to think that my humble blog had something to do with the Fast Flip revenue-sharing model, but that’s likely wishful thinking. (If it did, perhaps some nice Google executive will share some of that big pile of G-cash with me. Ah, but life doesn’t work that way.)

Anyway, I’m happy to see Google executives decide that it might be in their interests to share some ad revenues with media publishers. Fast Flip will be an experiment we’ll all be watching closely. Perhaps it will lead to a news-industry revenue source that starts to chip away at the News Crisis we find ourselves in.

This week I was lucky enough to participate in an Aspen Institute conference, “Of the Press: Models for Preserving American Journalism.” The participants were an all-star bunch, including Madeleine Albright (a journalist before becoming a diplomat) for day 1, Washington Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli, Marissa Mayer of Google, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Federal Trade Commission chairman Jon Leibowitz, NPR CEO Vivian Schiller, and other assorted top dogs from News Corp., MediaNews Group, Associated Press, American Public Media, the Knight Foundation, etc. (Here’s the full list; it opens up a Word doc.)

A significant part of the 3-day event was devoted to business models to sustain journalism (legacy news institutions, upstart digital news entities, community bloggers, and non-profit news initiatives), and especially the idea of getting online users to pay for news, whether through force (pay-wall schemes) or persuasion (donation models).

I’ll write more about the event later, but for now I want to toss out one quick impression: It didn’t turn into the jihad over business strategy that I expected going in.

First, some context. … In recent months, some of the news industry’s leaders have made some statements that seemed to indicate that they were gearing up to put a lock on a lot of their online news content (or even all of it) and make users pay for access, that they’d seriously go after people “stealing” their content, and that even headline-and-excerpt news links might be banned. For example:

Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.: “Quality journalism is not cheap and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalizing its ability to produce good reporting. … We can be platform-neutral but never free.”

Tom Curley, Associated Press: “If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that.”

Dean Singleton, MediaNews Group: “The content is ours and we can do anything with it we choose to do with it. If it’s in our best interest to give it away, we will give it away. If it’s in the best interest to charge, we will charge.”

But after spending a few days in Aspen, I returned to Boulder feeling more optimistic. While overall the news industry remains in a state of confusion, with no clear immediate solutions to the decline in legacy news organizations (especially newspapers), the outcome of the conference discussions were, I dare say, reasonable. I had feared either that the conversation would become hostile between “paid vs. free” camps, or that the group would come to bad decisions, such as a stronger move toward unity on charging for news online. Rather, I’m thinking that recent statements like those above are mostly bluster.

While it’s not clear that all news publishers will follow the quasi-consensus of the elite Aspen Institute crowd, I got a sense that for the most part, really bad moves like putting up high pay-walls on news websites won’t happen.

Here are a few quick takeaways:

• Most news publishers recognize that many revenue streams will be necessary for digital news. They’re not stuck on just advertising, just paid content, or just both; they know they’ll need more, including new models not yet devised. To quote Clay Shirky on saving the news industry: “Nothing will work, but everything may work.”
• Most everyone wants to charge for some premium content, but few think that any news publisher will be able to get money out of more than 10% of their most-loyal users. That sounds too high to me, since newspapers and other old media have cut back so much on staff and they’ll have a hard time creating content and services that online users will pay for. I didn’t sense any kind of death wish, so for the most part we’ll probably see 90%-plus of legacy news sites’ content remain free.
• That desire to find the right “freemium” model leaves room for implementing other options simultaneously, including allowing users to donate and support their favorite sites via networked donation solutions (e.g., Kachingle, whose founder was an Aspen participant), as well as tracking copyright infringement and making revenue-sharing offers to the offenders rather than punishment being the only option.
• The non-profit news sector will grow quickly, as more foundations, philanthropists, and the public become aware of the “news crisis” and support investigative and public-interest journalism as the struggling private sector falls down on that job.

More later…

A poignant video goodbye from Rocky Mountain News staff. If you love(d) newspapers, or grew up reading the Rocky as I did, it’ll bring a tear to your eye. The staff did a great job on it. Personally, I’m feeling a combination of sadness and anger. The latter is because this didn’t have to happen. But management and staff culture couldn’t change fast enough. Perhaps some good will come of the largest U.S. newspaper yet going down. Surviving metro newspapers surely can no longer ignore the need for radical change. Well, they can, but they’ll end up with their own farewell edition and video.

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

My latest column for Editor & Publisher Online was posted this morning:

The All-Digital Newsroom of the Not-So-Distant Future

It’s my take on what a newspaper that’s decided to completely ditch its print edition but survive and reinvent itself as a digital-only local news entity will look like. I envision a news operation that still has enough left to be a force in the community and an effective watchdog, and run as a profitable business.

It’s looking like we’ll see that happen soon. Top candidate is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which owner Hearst Corp. has said will either be shut down soon or become a down-scaled online-only news organization. That’s of course if no buyer is found. In this economic landscape? Not likely.

Similar situations are possible in other U.S. cities.

Please discuss. … What do you think a surviving and reinvented digital “newspaper” will look like?

This afternoon at 3:14 p.m., a few minutes after my daughter’s school ended for the day, I received this e-mail alert from the school’s principal:

“Dear Parents:

“An incident occurred today that we wanted to make you aware of. At around 12:45 p.m. the school received notice from BVSD that a threat had been phoned in to the Police Department regarding the King Soopers at Broadway and Table Mesa. BVSD and the Boulder Police Department determined that this was not a serious threat. Nevertheless BVSD asked Summit, Fairview High School and Southern Hills Middle School to go on a heightened alert status as a precaution and we (at Summit) did so for the last couple of hours of the school day. This involved students passing only in the hallway, locking all outside doors and having administrative staff and faculty outside during passing periods and after school to increase our level of supervision. The day ended without incident.

“Please call the school if you have any questions.”

I’m happy to get these kind of alerts from the school, and this one was somewhat timely, though I would have preferred to learn of it earlier since the initial threat was received by the school at 12:45 p.m. (Previous similar instances at my kids’ various schools have seen the e-mail parent alerts come much — often, annoyingly — later.)

The principal’s note made me think that our local newspaper could better serve the community by tapping into information like this and quickly sharing it with the community at large and, in a more in-your-face way, with anyone connected to the schools affected.

When I checked the Boulder Daily Camera website about half an hour after receiving the e-mail, there was nothing about the incident at the King Soopers grocery store or the school lockdowns. I don’t mean to fault the Camera; it sounds like it ended up being not much of a story, and/or they may not have gotten word as quickly as I, as a parent, got it.

But here’s my point: Local newspapers should be plugged in to alternative news and information sources such as alerts coming out of schools. This is how I’d imagine it:

• News editors ask to be put on parent-communication e-mail lists, so reporters will learn about incidents like the above right away.
• When an alert like this comes in, post it as “breaking news” on the newspaper website. Today’s school incident might warrant nothing more than a tiny blurb on the homepage, but a more serious incident like a school shooting in progress will get prominent website play plus e-mail and mobile news alerts to subscribers.
• Ultimately, this sort of information is of most use to those connected to the schools involved: parents and relatives of kids who attend, teachers’ spouses, etc. So here we get into the notion of the “personalized news service,” where registered users of a newspaper website have filled out a profile with information including where their kids go to school. (Explain, of course, that the information is used only to provide personalized news and information.)

This afternoon’s little incident may have been so inconsequential that a news editor wouldn’t deem it worthy of publishing a write-up in the print edition or the website. Even so, it’s significant news to those people in the community associated with the three schools that were locked down. This would be an opportunity to alert just those who care about a small story. (I’d include this in what I call “micro-personal news.”)

Yes, in this case the schools themselves got the word out in a timely enough manner, given the low significance of the threat. A more serious incident — say, a gunman being hunted in the neighborhood near the school — would demand more immediate news alerts, especially to parents. In that case, the newspaper staff most likely will spread the news faster than the school principal will get around to e-mailing parents.

A personalized-news feature that will send me special digital/mobile alerts when they involve an institution that I have an interest is an element I hope we’ll see offered by local newspapers soon.

We are, after all, in the age of instant news.