MNI cuts may not be deep enough

The savings McClatchy hopes to achieve by trimming 10% of its work force will not save enough money to offset even a quarter of the likely drop in the company’s advertising revenues this year, suggesting that more cuts may lie ahead.Barring an upturn in the newspaper business in the second half of this year that no one foresees, MNI’s ad sales for 2008 are likely to be $295 million lower than

Jocks plan shock for Trib Co. readers

Thanks to a terrific new blog published anonymously by someone who identifies herself or himself as an employee of the Los Angeles Times, we have the first reported sighting of the radical new format planned for the Tribune Co. newspapers. And it’s scary.Not because it represents an abrupt change, though it does. And not because it is unconventional, though it is. But because the combination of

A high-water mark in crisis coverage

The staffers of the Cedar Rapids Gazette brilliantly rose to the occasion this week when record flooding inundated not only much of the city but also the very building where they work.Resisting pleas from city officials to evacuate their downtown office, the staff produced an amazing body of multimedia work while cobbling together a generator grid that powered everything from laptops to bilge

ROP ads poised for a comeback?

In a potential bit of good news for newspapers, run-of-paper advertising may be making a comeback after a sustained period of decline.Large national retailers like Macy’s and Best Buy, which had shifted much of their budgets to free-standing color inserts over the years, are taking a fresh look at in-paper advertising as a way of eliminating the growing cost of producing the ad inserts they pay

Murdoch has a plan. Zell doesn’t.

While Rupert Murdoch has gotten busy building the Wall Street Journal into an even more powerful global brand, Sam Zell seems to have no plan at all for Tribune Co., unless you count flogging the hands until morale improves.The two companies have gone down distinctly divergent paths in the six months since Mr. Murdoch bought Dow Jones and Mr. Zell almost simultaneously acquired Tribune. Dow Jones

$4.7B ad drop feared for newspapers

Print newspaper sales this year appear to be on track to drop by some $4.7 billion to less than $37.5 billion, a level not seen since the mid-1990s.The prediction comes from Paul Ginocchio of Deutsche Bank at a time of growing dismay among media executives who, for the most part, have watched sales weaken every month this year.“We keep throwing more and more rope into the well, but we never seem

Get me an ethnographer, sweetheart

Forget rewrite, sweetheart. Get me an anthropologist.The crisis of confidence in the media business has gotten so bad that the Associated Press revealed today that it sent a team of ethnographers around the world to see if young folks consume news differently on their laptops and iPhones than their parents did in print and on TV. And, by golly, they do.After months of research in such exotic