So, we're all learning lessons about this here Internet thingee.

The folks who run The Salt Lake Tribune, the Denver-based Media News Group, recently issued a memo to employees - which immediately was posted on Jim Romenesko's journalism-industry blog, for all to read - about where newspapers are going in the online world.

If you can read through the official-sounding linguistic opacity, the upshot seems to be that the company wants to find ways to get Internet users to pay for stuff on the web site. Take this passage:

We are not trying to invent new premium products, but instead tell our existing print readers that what they are buying has real value, and to our online audience (who don’t buy the print edition), that if you want access to all online content, you are going to have to register, and/or pay. If a non-subscriber wants the newspaper content in its entirety online, they will be directed to some sort of registration or pay vehicle (and if they are a print subscriber, they will have full access at no charge).

Encouraging Internet users to pay for content - after they have grown accustomed to getting what they want for free - may feel like stuffing toothpaste back in the tube. So I wish my corporate overlords luck in their endeavors.

But if the news industry is learning hard lessons about the Internet, so are politicians.

Take the example of Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who apparently thought messages he sent out on the social-blogging site Twitter were only being read by one person - not by anybody in the world.

This is how Shurtleff, as the Tribune's Robert Gehrke reported today, accidentally announced to the world that he will be running for the U.S. Senate seat now held by fellow Republican Robert Bennett. (This news isn't much of a surprise, as Shurtleff has been hinting about a primary challenge to Bennett for awhile now.)

Shurtleff quickly deleted the "tweets," but not before public-radio station KCPW-FM got a screen capture of them.

Oopsie. Gotta be careful on the web - but as the guy who oversees the state's prosecution of Internet crimes, Shurtleff should know that.

Labels: internet, journalism, Mark Shurtleff

If you buy The Salt Lake Tribune out of a vending box or at a convenience store, you've already noticed that the price has gone up.

As of May 1, the newsstand price (an anachronism, because who has newsstands anymore?) of The Tribune went up from 50 cents to 75 cents.

The Tribune isn't the only newspaper to make such a change recently. The Boston Herald kicked up its single-copy sale price from a quarter to a buck, while its rival The Boston Globe raised its price within the city from 75 cents to a dollar. The Chicago Sun-Times went from 50 cents to 75 cents at the end of March. And the Financial Times reported Friday that the venerable New York Times will likely raise its newsstand price - from $1.50 to $2 for the daily paper, and from $5 to $6 on Sundays - sometime this week.

Of course, if you're reading this blog, then you probably read The Tribune for free online - so you couldn't care less about the newsstand price.

Labels: journalism

Forgive the tooting of my own horn, but the Culture Vulture blog just won a major award - a first place for blog reporting from the Best of the West journalism contest, which covers newspapers big and small in 13 Western states.

Here's what the judge in the contest - Amanda St. Amand, continuous news editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch - said about the Vulture:

All five of Means' entries were top-of-the-line good - funny, informative, well-written, timely and made excellent use of the tools available online. For example, "American Idol" tryouts come around to a half-dozen or so big cities every year. After a while, how can you write the same story, or cover the same hopefuls? Easy, if you blog at the Culture Vulture. The "American Idol" entry was a great way to click through quickly, stop on the ones that interested you or skip the ones that didn't.

The same could be said for his blog entry on the Outdoor Retailers. Capturing "snapshots of the strangeness" was smart - it didn't make fun of the outdoor lovers but it did point out some of the more offbeat stuff you can find.

The other three entries - the political party involving the McCain drinking game, the sock monkey and "Dan Savage stands me up" - also were strong. Not a weak link among the five, and I have bookmarked this blog as one I plan to watch.

For a look at the competition, here are the blogs that came in second and third: The OC Weekly's "Navel Gazing" blog, and Larry Altman's crime blog in The Daily Breeze in Torrance, Calif. Congratulations to both of them.

Labels: internet, journalism

I have to feel for the kids at The Daily Universe, the student paper at Brigham Young University.

As The Salt Lake Tribune reported, Monday's edition of The Daily Universe featured what editorial manager Rich Evans called "the worst possible mistake" - a photo of leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, with a caption that referred to the group as "the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates."

(Glossary for the non-religious: An apostate is someone who speaks against the doctrines of a church - and, in LDS circles, is about the nastiest thing you can call a good upstanding Mormon.)

The Universe staff tried to retrieve the 18,500 copies printed, and reprinted a corrected version. They also issued an apology to church leaders, and explained that the error was due to the paper's spell-checking software substituting "apostate" for a misspelled version of "apostle. (Lesson to young journalists: Spell-check doesn't fix everything.)

Lest the Tribune be accused of, as scripture says, noting the mote in its neighbor's eye while ignoring the log in its own, I'll note that such blundering happens at every paper. A week ago, a Tribune story about a speech by LDS Church President Thomas Monson carried a headline that called him Gordon Monson - who happens to be one of the Trib's sports columnists.

I will leave it to theologians to debate which is worse: To be called an apostate or to be called a sportswriter.

Labels: Brigham Young University, journalism, LDS, sports

Things are tough all over in the newspaper business - even in the comic strips.

Last fall, in Garry Trudeau's "Doonesbury," Washington Post investigative reporter Rick Redfern was forced to take a buyout offer. On Saturday, ace reporter Brenda Starr will get the word from publisher B. Babbitt Bottomline that she has to take an unpaid furlough.

"As far-fetched as some of the plots in Brenda are, I do like to keep it topical," Mary Schmich, who writes the "Brenda Starr" strip, told the Chicago Tribune (where Schmich is also a columnist, who most famously penned the "sunscreen" advice that was turned into a hit single by Baz Luhrmann and was frequently misattributed to Kurt Vonnegut).

Schmich said Starr's life "is a fantasy with nuggets of reality tossed in. But even fantasies need some grounding in reality, and right now, economic crisis is the reality that colors everything else at pretty much every newspaper."

Labels: journalism

Attention, mainstream media (and, yes, I'm calling out myself here, too): A lot of younger Americans are tuning you out in favor of - gasp! - comedians.

A national phone survey by Rasmussen Reports finds that 30 percent of Americans age 18-29 and 32 percent of Americans age 30-39 believe satirical news programs - like "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" or "The Colbert Report" - are replacing traditional news outlets.

The survey found 42 percent of the thirty-somethings and 35 percent of the 18-29 group disagreed with that opinion.

True, "The Daily Show" and Colbert's program are intelligent and funny takes on the news - and, more importantly, takes on the people who bring us the news. And it's true that those shows sometimes make news, like when Stewart smacked down CNBC's Jim Cramer over that network's sucking-up-to-CEOs coverage before the financial bubble burst.

But what people conveniently forget is that shows like "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" - like most of the bloggers and other aggregators of information that dominate the Internet - all rely on the "mainstream media" for their source material.

Without the shoe-leather reporting that appears in newspapers and TV newscasts every day, the satirists would have nothing to satirize and the bloggers wouldn't be able to link to anything.

The worry in journalism - and you see it now with the online-only seattlepi.com - is that the online packaging of news is more important than the generation of the information that's being packaged.

Labels: journalism, television

The last edition of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer rolled off the presses early this morning, taking with it 146 years of publishing history and leaving behind a whole lot of doubts among us ink-stained wretches trying to figure out the future of journalism.

While folks in Seattle try to sort out the damage (and this collection of blog posts from The Stranger, Seattle's super-cool alt-weekly, is a good place to start), others are wondering what the P-I's transformation into a lean online-only publication - with only 20 newsroom employees and 20 sales reps, from a staff that used to number 181 - will mean for that city and for newspapers elsewhere.

Joel Connelly, a P-I columnist and one of the lucky few who still has a job there, calls the new online P-I "an adventure in journalism, not just for P-I writers but for an audience that seeks information, has opinions and is willing to speak its mind." And David Domke, a journalism professor at the University of Washington (my alma mater), told NPR that if this online experiment has a chance anywhere, it's a wired city like Seattle (which, after all, is home to Microsoft and Amazon.com - not to mention the source of all tech junkies' power: Starbucks).

Some former P-I staffers, speaking to the Columbia Journalism Review, aren't sold on the new web-only paper. Art critic Regina Hackett decries the P-I's parent company, the Hearst Corp., for a history of nickel-and-diming the paper: "A skeleton looks plump compared to poorly-paid online crew. ... The future according to the Hearst Corporation seems to be, journalism without journalists." Reporter Debera Harrell remarked that "a huge truth is that online journalism is being deployed to break unions."

Reporters everywhere watch when a paper, like the P-I or Denver's Rocky Mountain News, shuts down and they wonder: What if it happens here? When our readers start asking the same question, the urgency of finding a solution will grow exponentially.

(Illustration: David Horsey/The Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Labels: journalism

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has been publishing for 146 years, will print its final edition on Tuesday.

In a time when newspaper layoffs and closures are regular new, this one hurts. As a student at the University of Washington, I was a voracious P-I reader. The P-I was always the smaller and scrappier paper, compared to the larger and stodgier Seattle Times.

Or, as the P-I's about-to-be-former art critic, Regina Hackett, wrote on the blog of Seattle's alt-weekly, The Stranger:

"The P-I offered a reasonably sensible collection of stories written without the we-precious-few tone of the Times, which rubs itself against the legs of the comfortably middle-class like a cat looking for a handout. The P-I connects with its city without undo flattery."

Besides, I always loved the P-I's landmark neon globe - the sort of thing you'd see atop The Daily Planet in a "Superman" movie.

The paper's owners, the Hearst Corp., plan to maintain an online news entity, seattlepi.com - but with a bare-bones staff compared to the paper's newsroom. (The AP reports the digital-only P-I will employ about 40 people - half in the newsroom, half selling ads - compared to the 181 employees of the print edition.)

Anyone who thinks we can live without newspapers is invited to tell that to the 140 soon-to-be-unemployed professionals in Seattle. Good luck getting all your teeth back.

UPDATE: The AP is reporting that the Tucson Citizen, which has been printing for 138 years, will put out its final edition on Saturday.

(Photo: Joshua Trujillo/Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Labels: journalism

So I pick my Sunday paper off the porch (the image isn't as unpleasant as seeing Tony Soprano in his boxers and bathrobe), and the headline greets me: "Are newspapers sinking?"

Yes, every industry is suffering in this awful economy - but the news industry's troubles seem destined to be fully chronicled, since we're all writing about ourselves. We read Jim Romenesko's blog for updates on which papers are firing people or giving up the ghost entirely - right now we're waiting to see when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will announce its demise.

(That said, the Tribune's Paul Beebe presented a thoughtful and surprisingly non-paranoid analysis of the national newspaper situation - and another about how Salt Lake City's papers are dealing with it. My colleague Vince Horiuchi also weighed in with a story about what Utah's TV stations are doing to counter declining audience numbers.)

Digging further into Sunday's Tribune to find happier news, I find The Mix section - where my colleague Ben Fulton has a story about how cash-strapped arts organizations are getting as creative in their fund-raising as they are in their art.

Things are tough all over, and I happen to be at an intersection where two of my passions, newspapers and art, are both suffering at the same time. The good news is that through adversity comes innovation, and both newspapers and artists are learning they have to get innovative in a hurry - or else.

Labels: economy, journalism

The other day I joked that we reporters read Jim Romenesko's blog - a clearinghouse of news-industry stories - the same way elderly people read the obituaries: To see if people they know are gone.

The joke was gallows humor, a whistling-past-the-graveyard comment about the perilous state of the news industry, where layoffs and buyouts have given way to wholesale shutdowns of newspapers.

The problems of the news industry hit home Thursday afternoon, when the E.W. Scripps chain announced that Denver's Rocky Mountain News - a paper that has been reporting Colorado's news for almost 150 years - was ceasing publication with Friday's edition. (Reading the live-blog of the newsroom announcement is a heartbreaking exercise.)

The closure makes Denver a one-newspaper town: The Denver Post (owned by MediaNews Group, which also owns The Salt Lake Tribune) carries on.

"Contrary to a lot of what has been written, the Rocky is not struggling financially any more than The Post," the Rocky's editor, John Temple, wrote in today's edition. "But its owner, the E.W. Scripps Co., sees losses in Denver worsening and little prospect that the business can be turned around, even in a one-newspaper town. That's why they decided to leave Denver, after running newspapers here for more than 100 years."

MediaNews Group's CEO, William Dean Singleton, called the Rocky's closure "a sad day" - but acknowledged that the move "it will help [the Post] substantially from a financial standpoint."

And what's happening in Denver could happen elsewhere soon. The company that operates Philadelphia's two daily newspapers recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Hearst chain has announced that both The San Francisco Chronicle and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer could close if buyers don't come forward soon. And Gannett announced that the Tucson Citizen may cease publication in March, after 138 years, if no buyer steps up.

Labels: journalism

Word is trickling out that Holly Mullen has been let go as editor of the City Weekly, Salt Lake City's alt-weekly paper.

The news came in that most modern of ways - through Mullen's status on Facebook.

Mullen started the City Weekly gig in January 2007, after leaving her gig as the Tribune's metro columnist. She's also known for her family ties: Her ex is the Tribune's Salt Lake Crawler blogger Glen Warchol, and she's now married to former Salt Lake City Mayor Ted Wilson (which makes Jenny Wilson, Salt Lake County councilwoman, her stepdaughter).

More details as they arrive...

Labels: City Weekly, journalism

Things are getting a mite testy over at the Deseret News.

Nine reporters and an intern at Salt Lake's other newspaper mounted a "byline strike" - in other words, removed their names from the stories they filed - in Tuesday's paper, in protest over the demotion of two editors and a change in policy that is turning the D-News into a Mormon-centric publication.

The reporters will not be punished for their insolence, the D-News' managing editor Rick Hall told the Tribune's Paul Beebe. "If they want to express themselves that way, they certainly can," Hall said.

Hall and the D-News' editor, Joe Cannon, reassigned two editors - deputy managing editor Chuck Gates (who will now be a "special writer," whatever that means) and business editor Julianne Basinger, who will join the copy desk - who criticized Cannon's drive to turn the LDS Church-owned paper into a niche publication aimed at Mormons.

(Obligatory disclaimer: The Deseret News and The Salt Lake Tribune share advertising, printing and circulation operations.)

For people outside the news business, a "byline strike" may seem like a toothless protest - and, admittedly, it is. Within journalism circles, it's a major diss. In the end, the only thing a journalist has to claim credibility is his or her good name. Withholding that good name is the ultimate vote of no-confidence in your superiors.

Labels: Deseret News, journalism, LDS

We at the Tribune are justly proud of Pat Bagley, our fiercely observant editorial cartoonist. Now somebody else recognizes Bagley's talent, too.

The Herb Block Foundation, named for the legendary Washington Post cartoonist, has announced that Bagley will receive the 2009 Herblock Prize - given to "distinguished examples of original editorial cartooning that exemplify the courageous standard set by Herblock."

The jury - "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau, the Village Voice's Jules Pfeiffer, and the Boulder Daily Camera's John Sherffius (last year's winner) - were unanimous in their choice.

Bagley will pick up his prize - a sterling silver trophy and a $15,000 cash award - on April 2 at the Library of Congress.

Labels: journalism

A Utah businessman's plan to run a full-page ad Sunday in Salt Lake City's two major newspapers - The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News - criticizing the LDS Church's stance on California's Prop. 8 was stopped when the papers pulled the ad, according to the blog Gay Rights Watch.

Bruce Palenske's full-page ad (which you can see here in a pdf file) criticized the LDS Church's role in funding the Prop. 8 campaign, and included a form for people wishing to complain to the IRS about the church violating its tax-exempt status.

"We have a signed contract, and the newspapers had already accepted payment for the ad when it was pulled literally 5 minutes before the production deadline," Palenske told Gay Rights Watch. "This is clearly political. ... I can’t help but think that the LDS came in and put the brakes on this."

Labels: journalism, LDS, politics

The drumbeat of bad news in the journalism industry continues. Here are the headlines just from this week:

• The Los Angeles Times laid off 75 newsroom employees.
• The Christian Science Monitor announced it would discontinue its daily print edition, and go all online.
• The Gannett Co. announced plans to lay off 10 percent of its workforce, about 3,000 jobs, across its 80 local newspapers.
• Time Inc. will cut 600 jobs across its magazine empire, and reorganize the company's corporate structure.
• The Newark Star-Ledger announced it would offer buyouts to 151 newsroom employees - 40 percent of the staff.

David Carr, The New York Times' media columnist neatly summed up the feeling in the news industry: "Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it."

(Kim Voynar, on her Film Essent blog, offers up another appraisal of the situation.)

The problem is money - namely, the lack of it coming into print publications from advertisers, who are cutting back on spending and putting their money into cheaper alternatives.

One of those alternatives is the Internet, which is where more and more people are getting their information. Newspapers are trying to make that transition, but figuring out how to make it pay. As Carr writes, "a single newspaper ad might cost many thousands of dollars while an online ad might only bring in $20 for each 1,000 customers who see it."

Some outside the news industry say journalists should stop whining. It's a new world, and if this industry has to either keep up or be relegated to history along with the buggy-whip manufacturers who lost their jobs when people started driving cars.

Newspapers - some methodically, some flailing about like a drowning swimmer - are trying everything they can think of to stay competitive and move with the times: Interactive features, reporters' blogs, video, continuous updates, you name it. The question is whether any of them will work, and what will be left of the news when all the dust settles.

Labels: journalism

We like to think that the United States of America has no equal in terms of freedom - but, according to a new report, that's not the case when it comes to freedom of the press.

The group Reporters Without Borders today released its annual World Press Freedom Index, ranking the state of journalists' liberty in 173 nations - and the United States ranked 36th, tied with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cape Verde, South Africa, Spain and Taiwan.

On the bright side, that's up from 48th place the year before, thanks in part to the release of Sami al-Haj, an al-Jazeera cameraman who had been in Guantanamo since June 2002. But there are a few deficiencies in U.S. press freedom, according to Reporters Without Borders:

• The lack of a federal "shield law," to keep reporters from being compelled to give up confidential sources in court. (The House has passed such a bill, but it's hung up in the Senate over whether bloggers and students should count as journalists.)
• The lack of a resolution in the case of murdered Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey.
• Arrests of reporters covering street protests at the Republican and Democratic national conventions.

Iceland, Luxembourg and Norway tied for No. 1 on the list. The repressive regimes of Eritrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan were at the bottom.

Labels: journalism

Roger Ebert, the esteemed movie critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, has as rational a mind as anyone you might meet in the journalism game - and his recent convalescence from emergency surgery, which has left him unable to speak, has somehow sharpened his writing and his impish wit.

So when he posted a Q&A on Sunday, headlined "Creationism: Your questions answered," I immediately recognized it as a sly satire - and recognized that Ebert was following one of the first rules of satire: You play it 99 percent straight.

In the article, Ebert answered the basic questions of creationism - the alternative "theory" to evolution for how we all got here on this planet - using the arguments, as best he understands them, used by those who espouse creationism.

Apparently, though, not everyone got the joke. In a Tuesday post on his blog, Ebert laments how some in the blogosphere have opined that Ebert is a supporter of creationism, or that he's gone 'round the bend, or that Ebert's web site was hacked. None of the above, Ebert reports, as he explains why he needed to explain his creationism article:

"The purpose of this blog entry is not to discuss politics (a subject banned from the blog). Nor is it to discuss Creationism versus the theory of evolution (that way lurks an endless loop). It is to discuss the gradual decay of our sense of irony and instinct for satire, and our growing credulity."

In other words: Yes, it was a joke, but we're living in an age where jokes must be underlined in neon for everyone to understand it's a joke. We are too ready to believe what we are told - a condition, Ebert suggests, which has led to some jaw-dropping bits of political umbrage:

"These days, there is no room for ambiguity, and few rewards for critical thinking. Now every word of a politician is pumped dry by his opponent, looking for sinister meanings. Many political ads are an insult to the intelligence. Here I am not discussing politics. I am discussing credulity. If you were to see a TV ad charging that a politician supported "comprehensive sex education" for kindergarten children, would you (1) believe it, or (2) very much doubt it? The authors of the ad spent big money in a bet on the credulity and unquestioning thinking of the viewership. Ask yourself what such an ad believes about us. No politics, please."

Kudos to Roger for cutting through so many levels of nonsense with one well-sharpened knife.

Labels: journalism, Roger Ebert

Layoffs and job cutbacks have been a constant in the newspaper industry in recent years, but you know things are serious when a fictional reporter is getting the ax.

Rick Redfern, for years an investigative reporter for the Washington Post - as least, as seen in Garry Trudeau's comic strip Doonesbury - got the news in today's strip (seen in hundreds of papers, including The Salt Lake Tribune): The budget for investigative reporting is being chopped, and he's being forced to take a buyout.


"The free-fall of newspapers is something I've been thinking a lot about lately," Trudeau told Michael Cavna, a real-life Washington Post reporter, on his "Comic Riffs" blog. "I'm feeling the hot breath of change on my neck too" with space reductions in the comics pages.

The ink-stained wretches can just read this week's Doonesbury and nod knowingly. If we haven't been there, we know somebody who has.

(Illustration: Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau/Universal Press Syndicate)

Labels: journalism

Last week in this space I reported on Andrew Berends, a New York-based documentary filmmaker who had been arrested in Nigeria.

Happy news, from the Sundance Documentary Film Program, which gave Berends a grant to make the film he was shooting at the time of his arrest: Berends and his interpreter, Samuel George, were provisionally released by the Nigerian government on Friday. They "hope to be headed home soon," the Sundance release states.

UPDATE: It's not over yet, according to this site maintained by Berends' supporters (and thanks to the commenter who linked to it). Berends was re-detained Monday and questioned for three hours by Nigeria's State Security Service. Berends' friends are urging anyone to contact their congressperson to apply pressure to the State Department to intercede on Berends' behalf.

Labels: journalism

It's a chilling thought to any journalist: That you could be arrested for doing your job.

That appears to have happened to New York documentary filmmaker Andrew Berends (pictured), who (according to this AP dispatch) was arrested in Nigeria - accused by the military of spying in that nation's troubled oil region.

The anti-censorship group Reporters Without Borders has condemned the arrest of Berends and his interpreter, Samuel George, in the town of Port Harcourt on Sunday. Berends was released after 36 hours and told to return for more questioning; George is still in custody.

Word of Berends' detainment spread quickly across the Web, thanks to e-mails sent around by editor Aaron Soffin (who edited some of Berends' documentaries) and filmmaker James Longley (who directed the Sundance entry "Iraq in Fragments").

And if you think what happened to Berends can't happen in America, I direct you to this news of the violent arrest of Amy Goodman and two of the producers of her "Democracy Now!" radio program in St. Paul at the Republican National Convention.

Goodman was charged with obstruction of a legal process and interference with a peace officer. The producers, Sharif Abdel Kouddous and Nicole Salazar, face felony counts of "suspicion of rioting" - even though they identified themselves as members of the press. The three were covering the anti-RNC protests, and the riot-squad response by St. Paul Police.

Salazar captured footage of her own arrest:




Here's the video of Goodman's arrest:

Labels: journalism, politics