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Editor & Publisher
Hopi Tutuveni (Ariz.)
Kirkus Reviews
Tri-County News (Junction City, Ore.)
West Lane News (Veneta, Ore.)

Last week, the 320-page McSweeney’s Panorama hit the streets, bookstores and hipstery apartments in San Francisco to much fanfare among newsy folk and literary types. The one-time-only product sold out its initial run immediately, which seems to augur well for the newspaper industry — until you do the math:

The Panorama‘s 23,000 issues cost just under $200,000 to print, including $80,000 for editorial expenses. (Yes, printing costs are exorbitant.) Subtract about $40,000 to pay the 218 contributors a below-market price for their work, lop off another $15,000 for illustrations, and you’re left with maybe $25,000 to feed, clothe and house seven full-time staffers for nine months.

Eggers pinky-sweared his project would demonstrate that “if you rework the newspaper model a bit, it can not only survive, but actually thrive.” But if this is the 360-degree view of print journalism afforded by the Panorama, the skies sure look cloudy.

It’s been a rough year for the economy and an even rougher year for Philadelphia papers. The most recent unemployment rates hover around 10 percent, and Philadelphia Newspapers, the group that owns the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News, filed for bankruptcy in February, leading to a string of legal battles that most recently resulted in a trip to the U.S. Court of Appeals. But in one of the most unlikely places during one of the most unlikely times, something strange happened. On Tuesday, people were reading a new newspaper on the streets of this nearly newspaper-less city.

The 16-page One Step Away, produced entirely by homeless residents, launched yesterday and sells for $1, with 25 cents going towards covering printing costs. The rest goes directly to the vendors, who are from two Philadelphia homeless shelters.

Though the launch seems to buck almost every trend, it also sheds light on an interesting sector of the newspaper industry: one that is doing well. Homeless papers nationwide (it’s unclear, but officials quoted in the AP article about the launch estimate there are “more than two dozen street newspapers in cities across North America), are thriving. Street Sense, a homeless paper in Washington, D.C., reported record circulation of over 30,000 issues per month this year and an 18-percent increase in donations. And in Nashville, the Contributor printed a record 7,000 issues in November. Two years ago, the Contributor was selling 1,000 copies per month (also for $1).

This upward swing in readership could be a result of the tepid financial climate and its effect on homelessness — according to the 2008 Annual Homeless Assessment Report released last July, there were about 700,000 people living on the streets at any point during the year. But maybe it shouldn’t take losing a home to realize that newspapers can still make a community.

Last March, the Providence Journal laid off 74 staff members to meet cost-cutting demands from its Dallas-based parent company, A.H Belo Corp. This was the fourth round of workforce cutbacks in six months to hit Rhode Island’s largest newspaper — 22 staff members took voluntary buyouts the previous September, 31 employees were laid off in October and 20 part-timers and supervisors were laid off in December.

At the time, Howard Sutton, president, chairman, publisher and CEO of the Journal Co. told his paper, “It’s always difficult to reduce your staffing levels through [layoffs], but it’s necessary to ensure the future of the franchise. We remain committed to our mission of being the premier news and information provider for the state of Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts.”

On Monday night, LedeObserver went to the Journal newsroom and found a lifeless collection of empty desks, dark computer screens and a lone Web producer.

This, the producer said, is what happens when 12 percent of a newspaper’s staff is given the pink slip, the main server is outsourced to another state and the printing press loses one third of its own employees to cutbacks:

The paper goes to bed between 10:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. because the few advertisers who still invest in the paper want it distributed by a certain time the next morning to maximize the advertisements’ effects. Any news occurring after 11 p.m. goes online-only and many of the late sports games never make it into the print edition of the paper (during this year’s baseball playoffs, this angered the Red Sox fans who wanted to read about their team in the Journal — though with a reported 18.8-percent drop in circulation for the newspaper in the last six-month period, how many fans this actually angered is unclear). And when the back end of the Web site acts up, which the producer said it does frequently, he must call the Dallas company that operates the server before he is redirected to an office in Colorado whose staff members usually don’t know how to help. There is no security officer at the front desk. And no elevator operator.

But the Web producer said it isn’t all bad news. The Journal recently hired someone who writes new code for the Web site and three new copy editors because the six it had before wasn’t enough to meet the 11 p.m. filing deadline. And even if it’s always two-thirds empty and palpably Eeyorish, the newsroom can still get hectic, he said.

Even so, it wasn’t hard to hear the death rattle, especially when the only other noise was the sound of the sports reporters playing catch.

Editor & Publisher, a trade journal that has covered the print journalism industry since 1884, will become yet another publication to fold when parent company Nielsen shuts it down at the end of the year, according to an article on the E&P Web site. Nielsen also announced plans to close Kirkus Reviews, a publication that covers the book publishing industry, which, incidentally, is also an industry under duress.

But Nielsen is still looking to make some sort of profit, even if it doesn’t plan to look for buyers for E&P or Kirkus. In the same announcement, Nielsen revealed plans to sell eight other titles to e5 Global Media, including Billboard and the Hollywood Reporter, which cover the music and entertainment industries, respectively.

In his message announcing the decision to close E&P and Kirkus, Greg Farrar, the president of Nielsen Business Media, wrote:

This move will allow us to strengthen investment in our core businesses – those parts of our portfolio that have the greatest potential for growth – and ensure our long-term success.

Ouch. But perhaps completely shuttering these meta-publications is a preemptively good move for Nielsen, at least financially — anyone who reads E&P already knows there isn’t much “potential for growth” for newspapers. And there won’t be much to report anyway when the industry being covered no longer exists.

Two weeks ago, Rupert Murdoch made waves when he announced plans to pull his News Corporation content from Google and give Microsoft sole rights to articles from his online publications. According to a Nov. 24 article in the Financial Times, Murdoch seemed to be the instigator:

“Rupert Murdoch’s effort to change the economics of the internet by stopping Google linking to stories in his newspapers looks, at first glance, like an act of self-destruction. That is how News Corp’s negotiations on a deal to favour Microsoft’s search engine Bing instead is viewed by many rivals and technology experts.”

This wasn’t just another one of Murdoch’s schemes: Microsoft was offering News Corp. monetary incentive to remove articles from the Google search engine and put them up exclusively on Bing, according to a New York Times article. When the Times ran their story on Nov. 24, only anonymous sources would confirm the shady rumor. But today, Microsoft’s senior vice president in charge of online audiences, Yusuf Mehdi, released this statement:

“What I would say is, our focus is on improving the user experience and driving our differentiation of user intent and decision-making. It’s not to necessarily pay people to de-index our competition. That’s not our focus. So, I wouldn’t think of it that way. It’s more about how do we build a better experience for people. If there’s a way to share in the economics of search in that, then we’re game to do that.”

The Journal ran a more official story addressing the rumors on Wednesday, with a comment from Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s senior vice president for online services that there was “no real intent” to pay publishers to de-index from Google.

But you can only see the Journal article in a cached Google version — the real one is already behind a pay wall.

There isn’t much doubt that online journalism trumps print these days in reporting breaking news, but Talking Points Memo proved Wednesday afternoon that the web is even more adept at breaking news about news. According to an article filed at 3:15 p.m. Wednesday afternoon on the TPM site (tweeted speedily by Romenesko) , the vice president for human resources at the Washington Times sent out an e-mail at 2:45 p.m. (a mere 30 minutes before TPM’s story) calling for an “all staff meeting (all employees) that will be held in the Ballroom today at 3:30 p.m.”

TPM didn’t know much more — the last line of the brief read, “As always, we’ll tell you more when we know it.” — but that could have been because the meeting hadn’t even happened yet.

At 3:50 p.m., TPM filed another article — this time with news. According to the story, the Times’ publisher Jonathan Slevin announced the paper would be reducing its 370-member staff by as much as 40 percent (this, though, is hearsay — TPM wrote this figure was “according to a source who attended an afternoon staff meeting.” But that’s what you get when news breaks this fast). These layoffs could occur within the next 60 days (according to “two newsroom sources”).

In a statement, the Times also revealed plans to distribute its local edition free of charge in selected areas and “expand the recently-launched theconservatives.com.”

Distributing free copies of its print edition might not solve the monetary conundrum at the Times, but when online sites can publish stories about meetings before they happen, maybe the Times has the right idea in strengthening its web coverage.

And given that in the past month, the top editor at the paper resigned, three executives were fired and the former editorial page editor accused the paper of religious discrimination, maybe the Times will be able to report when it folds before anyone actually makes the decision.

The gloomy industry outlook might suggest abject newspaper abandonment, but a report issued by Scarborough Research found 74 percent of adults in the U.S. are still reading news. Just maybe not in print form.

Though the Integrated Newspaper Audience survey, which ran from February 2008 through last March, asked respondents only if they read the newspaper in some form (online or offline), the results still provide more optimistic numbers than a report released by the Audit Bureau of Circulations last month, which found circulation had decreased 10 percent during the six-month period starting in April. But if circulation is rapidly decreasing (it declined 7 percent in the previous six-month period) despite these seemingly hopeful Scarborough figures, maybe the report is really just another indication that people would rather read their news for free.

Though the past year wreaked havoc on the newspaper industry, 28 years ago was a different story. Gannett might have reported a 28.4-percent decline in ad revenue for its third-quarter this year, but on December 16, 1981, another kind of article appeared as a special to the New York Times, buried within the front section on page 21:

The print is small, but the article has this graph:

“Leonard R. Harris, a spokesman for The Times, welcomed the new addition to the ranks of national publications, and added that the willingness of Gannett to undertake the venture was ‘evidence of the increasing strength’ of newspaper circulation and advertising.”

And next to the article is a small blurb from the United Press International announcing the launch of the Washington Times, the paper that just saw its editor resign and three of its top executives fired.

Looks like maybe the way to save newspapers is a time machine.