Newspaper shares slid $23B in 6 months

The value of 11 newspaper companies traded on the public market since 2005 dove a combined $23.7 billion in the first half of this year, falling almost as much in six months as they had in the three prior years put together.Wall Street’s intensifying repudiation of the industry means that the companies in the group have lost a cumulative $49.7 billion in market capitalization in 3½ years,

S.J. Merc staff gutted by 62.5%

The lightning-round layoffs due to cut the newsroom of the San Jose Mercury News by another nine employees by tomorrow night means the staff will have been pared by fully 62.5% from its peak strength in 2000.The newspaper was perhaps the primary beneficiary of the Internet Bubble, when aggressive competition for dot-comers pumped its want-ad revenues to stratospheric – and, as it proved –

Little ado over Orlando's redo

Fewer than 0.05% of the readers of the Orlando Sentinel are fussed about the bold redesign of their newspaper, according to statistics provided by management three days after the debut of the new look.The response could mean any of the following::: 99.95% of the readers like the colorful overhaul, which would be great news for the newspaper.:: 99.95% of the readers didn’t notice, which not only

How close to default is your paper?

The newspaper industry shuddered last week when Bloomberg News warned that several publishers are in danger of default. And some are. But there are many degrees of defaultness and not all publishers are in equal danger of going down the drain.So, I have created not only the word “defaultness” but also a simple tool called the “Default-O-Matic” to help you see at a glance the degree of financial

Reader Jason writes: Is it better to leave a computer on all the time or shut it off when you done? If I leave it on, what settings (like hibernate) should I use?

Years ago the conventional wisdom was that leaving your computer on all the time would allow it to last longer before a crash. The culprit: Your hard drive. Frequent starts and stops would cause your hard drive mechanism to wear out much faster than if the drive never spun down. An old saying (possibly apocryphal) was that stopping and restarting a hard drive was the same as eight hours of regular running time.

I talked to the good folks at Seagate to find out if things had changed. According to the company, starting and stopping is not a huge problem with drives any more, and they can be safely shut off and on in order to save power. According to Seagate, you can expect a drive to last for three to five years of running time before dying, though obviously many drives last longer.

What's the big factor that causes drives to die early? Heat, says Seagate. Ensuring your computer stays cool through the proper use of fans is far and away the best thing you can do to keep your drive healthy. I'd imagine that shutting it down when not in use will only help. Naturally, shutting down your computer will also conserve electricity, so unless there's a compelling reason to leave it on (as with a server), you should probably shut down at night.

So, how should you shut down properly? It's completely up to you, really. If you do a full "Shut Down" (or "Turn Off Computer") your computer will be completely off, using no power at all. "Hibernate" and "Standby" are lower-power states that allow you to resume quickly into the Windows desktop. Standby simply powers down hardware components like the hard drive, monitor, and peripherals, but continues to provide power to RAM, so everything you were doing stays active. Hibernate is closer to a shut down: It saves an exact image of your Windows desktop, then powers the PC down. When you awaken from hibernation, everything is back where you last had it. Personally I'm not a big fan of hibernate, because if I'm going to shut Windows down completely I like to reload everything fresh into RAM, which helps system stability. I tend to use both standby (for shorter times away from my PC) and shut down (for more than a few hours of downtime) instead.

The case for a JOA in Miami

As odd a couple as they might be, Gary Pruitt and Sam Zell may want to buddy up to figure out how to reduce expenses to make the most of the sagging revenues at their struggling newspapers in south Florida.If they can modify their loan covenants, appease federal antitrust-regulators and navigate the myriad other details associated with an undertaking of this sort, the heavily leveraged owners of

Shared presses will squeeze deadlines

Plans to print two McClatchy titles in the plants of neighboring newspapers almost certainly will force earlier deadlines in the newsrooms of all four papers, which could compromise the quality of their coverage.In a development likely to become increasingly commonplace among publishers eager to reduce operating costs, MNI and privately held Pioneer Newspapers announced plans to shift the

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