Louis Freedberg and friends of the California Media Collaborative blog on the California media.
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For anyone wondering whether newspapers can sustain themselves by going to an online operation only, some answers have begun to emerge in recent days.
The big question is how many staffers -- and reporters -- can be supported from online revenue only.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which ceased publication on Tuesday after 146 years,will live on, sort of, with it online version seattlepi.com.
Today was its first day as an online-only operation -- a historic first, in many ways -- the first time a major metropolitan daily has gone completely digital.
It may be the first of many such transformations in daily newspapers around the country.
But the online operation, which has attracted 1.8 million unique visitors each month, will only have a staff a fraction the size of its former newsroom -- 20 "newsgatherers and web producers," along with 20 newly hired advertising staff.
That's not a very encouraging outcome. Clearly seattlepi.com will not be able to produce anything near the quantity of news its reporters did in its now defunct print edition.
What are the implications for California? What was more encouraging -- and intriguing -- was Los Angeles Times' editor Russ Stanton estimation that the revenue from latimes.com could sustain a staff of 150.
However, a few days later Stanton backtracked a little in a conversation at a symposium at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, when he said that his earlier estimate did not include the costs of "newsgathering, which he said was "a whole other double-digit, large million dollar figure."
Even if latimes.com could sustain say a staff of 100, if you factor in the news production costs, that is still a decent sized newsroom (although one tenth the size of the Times' newsroom a half dozen years ago).
What seems clear is that the Los Angeles Times online edition -- with some 8 million unique visitors each month -- is generating enough revenue to support something that would look like a newsroom.
That's not the case in Seattle, and is unlikely to be the case in most other places around the country.
The San Francisco Chronicle's online edition, sfgate.com, attracts about 4 million unique visitors. Based on Stanton's calculations of revenue for latimes.com, it suggests that sfgate.com could sustain a newsroom of about 50 -- also about one tenth the size of Chronicle's newsroom at its peak.
What is also not clear is what will happen to newspapers websites once they have been stripped of their print editions. Will the seattlepi.com be able to keep its readership, and keep growing, now that its brand has been stripped of its most distinctive product -- a daily newspaper delivered to doorsteps and sold in newstand around the city and region?
Interestingly, seattlepi.com already faces some immediate competition -- from crosscut.com, an independent online outlet that looks better than its older competitor. Curiously, the pi online version doesn't have any ads, while crosscut is packed with them.
I'll give it a month or so -- and then report back on how the online newspaper wars in Seattle are shaping up.
LOUIS FREEDBERG
Newspapers can't say they weren't warned -- or aware -- of the coming Internet age that could radically affect their futures. Take a look at this news report from KRON TV in 1981.
The report described an experiment -- allowing the readers of the Chronicle and Examiner (and six other newspapers around the country) to download the contents of the newspapers (without ads, comics or photos) onto their home computers.
Those involved with the experiment only dimly anticipated the revolution that computer age would wreak in the television world.
"This is an experiment," said David Cole, a bushy-haired Examiner reporter is quoted in the report. "We're trying to find out what this means for us as
editors and reporters, and home users."
Providing poignant insight into the newspaper industry failure to adequately "monetize" their online content, Cole said, "We are not into this to make money. We're probably not going to make money, but we're probably not going to lose money either."
At the time, the experiment was viewed as a big success. About 500 out of the 3,000 or so Bay Area residents who owned computers signed up for the new service. And the TV reporter, Steve Miller, presciently placed the experiment in a larger context.
At the same time, it's easy to see why newspapers didn't see the emerging, and still primitive technology as a threat.
"This is only the first step of newspapers by computer," he said. "Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our
newspapers and magazines, but that is a few years off."
Nearly thirty years later that day has now arrived. The early San Francisco experiment has mushroomed into a technological revolution that has made newspapers unimaginably more accessible to readers -- but also threatens their very existence.
But at the time, it took two hours to download the Examiner -- at a cost of $5 per hour for the modem charge.
That prompted the news anchor to close the report by dismissing the online threat.
"And with an hourly charge of $5, it (the electronic newspaper) won’t be much of competition for the street edition. So for now this fellow" -- pointing to a shot of a street vendor selling a copy of the Examiner -- "is not afraid he’ll be out of a job."
Today, the Examiner is a shadow of its former self, and the reporters the Chronicle, its successor paper are threatened with more layoffs, and the closure of the newspaper itself.
LOUIS FREEDBERG
As newspapers get downsized, photographers who are forced out or leave get far less attention than they deserve.
That is certainly the case in Sacramento -- where, Steve Maviglio shockingly reports in his Majority Report blog, there is now only one full time photographer covering the State Capitol -- Associated Press photographer Rich Pedrocelli.
Pedrocelli became the lone full time photographer after the departure of Sacramento Bee photog Brian Baer, whose talents were fully evident during the most recent budget stalemate, as a result of the recent layoffs/buyouts at the Bee.
At least now lawmakers who fall asleep at their desks will be less at risk of having those -- and other -- embarassing images showing up in their hometown newspapers.
Does anyone need reminding that California is the 8th largest economy in the world? And the State Capitol is where decisions about its future are being made?
LOUIS FREEDBERG
The El Buen Sabor taqueria on the corner of Valencia and 18th Street in San Francisco was the last place I expected to find one of the more hopeful signs in local journalism.
Who -- or what -- is responsible for the sad state of a growing number of daily newspapers?
There are of course the numerous and well known structural forces, like the disappearance of classifieds, Internet offerings, a less literate society, the insatiable investor demand for more profits and so on? investors, etc. etc.?
Or, just maybe, could management also be to blame?
In what may be a first for a newspaper editor, The Chronicle's best known executive editor has taken publicly taken some responsibility for the near demise of the paper whose newsroom he led for much of the past decade.
