Law 11 – For Journalists’ Jobs, It’s Back to the Future

Funding the journalism business isn’t like funding Sears and Kodak or other fading institutions. It’s not even about saving a perhaps-vital American industry, like the auto industry.It’s about keeping a lifeline of funding open so that our best reporters can do their jobs.

“Everyone wants us to fast-forward to the end of the movie,” Webster notes. He has a sensible point. Given how each Patch rumor — two sites consolidated here, freelance budgets cut back there — is treated as forensic evidence, Webster is in relatively hardy form. He admits that Patch, with its fast expansion, took too much of a one-size-fits-all approach to site deployment, and was too “cookie cutter.” Some of the changes in budgeting — for instance, devoting some site budgets more to marketing awareness and less to paying stringers — derive from overall understandings of the market; others attempt to learn that needs in West Des Moines are different than in West Orange.

All we can say with certainty: we’re witnessing the death and life of California news. Who will own the biggest news media? Who will manage the biggest news media? How much of a life in print will be left for newspapers as they go digital? And, of course, how many journalists will be paid to get the news to the state’s 37 million residents and to the rest of the country? Already, well over 1,000 daily newspaper journalists have lost their jobs over the past five-plus years. How many new combinations — among news entities formerly known as newspapers, broadcast, and digital news startups — will emerge and grow to scale? Those combinations are already beginning to tax legacy imaginations, and as of this week, we’ve got a new intriguing model to add to the mix.

Today’s news that the Times Company is finally selling its New York Times Regional Newspaper Group holdings of 14 newspapers absolutely fits with the last week’s news of CEO Janet Robinson’s abrupt departure. Expect the new CEO, most likely from the outside to be focused on three A’s: audience, advertising and analytics. Arrange those three in a virtuous circle, and you have an efficient spinning of the new digital economy. That’s clearly what Time Inc has in mind as it hired Laura Lang from the ad world. The new CEO must also drive a faster kind of decision-making at the Times Company,

2012 budgeting, still in full swing at many newspaper companies, is too much like a medical examiner’s exercise. What I hear: Dailies are budgeting down from mid-single digits to as high as low double-digits in print advertising for 2012, compared to 2011. That would compare to how much they’ve already lost this year, compared to last year. Those are brutal numbers.