AP Wire | 09/23/2005 | Mercury News cutting 60 jobs — This comes on the heels of my latest PC Magazine Online Column on this exact situation. The problem for these people is that no newspapers are hiring and they are mostly writers specializing in writing for newspapers. It will be interesting to see if the J-schools start to fall apart too.
SAN JOSE, Calif. – The San Jose Mercury News is cutting 60 positions, including 52 newsroom jobs, through buyouts and possible layoffs, the newspaper announced Friday.
Beginning Monday, employees covered by the San Jose Newspaper Guild will be offered buyout packages. They have until Nov. 10 to decide whether to apply for the offer, said Mercury News Executive Editor Susan Goldberg. Employees were notified in a staff meeting Friday afternoon.
“The problem for these people is that no newspapers are hiring and they are mostly writers specializing in writing for newspapers. It will be interesting to see if the J-schools start to fall apart too.”
Many of them, however, shouldn’t have too much trouble moving over to TV. I know at the station I’m at right now, we have people from the local newspaper on the air all of the time offering “expert” analysis of everything from business to entertainment to high school sports.
Also as for the J-Schools… I know that Marquette’s Journalism program is focusing on “convergence” (basically, what I just described above)
-A
Portals are where it’s at; why assault a forest when you could read the news online?
Better link for the article
Here’s some of what I learned from the publisher of the online edition of a daily newspaper. In this particular case, we were discussing a well-established local paper, privately-owned. The online edition has been around for several years. It is a prize-winner and very professional.
The online edition gets more traffic than any of their competition has sales — of their print editions.
He expects revenue from the online edition to surpass the print edition sometime in the next 5-8 years.
You can easily figure out the problematical discussions between the print and online management. The next few years should be pretty interesting. Maybe a little messy, too.
BTW — after reading the half of your PC Mag piece that their site allowed to be read — an interesting take on when the DVD vs. movie release is scheduled comes from Mark Cuban. He thinks both + TV release, as well, should be simultaneous!
http://www.blogmaverick.com/entry/1234000577058233/
The NY Times just changed their registration. You now cannot read their editorials for free, they now want you to pay $7.95 per month.
EXTRA! EXTRA!
The New York Times situation is really funny. As more news and information is flowing more freely than ever before, they start throwing up digital walls and asking for more fees from the users. All of which is fine, because I don’t live in New York or depend on them for information. What makes this comical is the fact that they are paying consultants to fix things and have supposedly eliminated the wall between the online and print news people. It looks like the consultants just moved the wall a little bit and put it between the readers and the writers. It seems kind of dumb.
Newspapers are going to continue downsizing, after many of the big publishers went out of their way to buy up the little community newspapers. This has been how Richard M. Scaife, Publisher and his right wing media empire has grown. Now you have all these little community papers facing extinction because they are not competitive. It’s like what happened with mom and pop gasoline service stations, who were eliminated and now the oil company wants more for gasoline. The news business is going self service and the chowder heads at the top are now looking to collect new fees for our right to read about what is happening in our community. Left or right politics, it’s all the same elitist thinking, so I couldn’t care less if they all stop the presses and call it quits. Maybe the little community presses in the spirit of Mr. Franklin will come back in force. New York could have five papers, one for each area of the Big Apple. It would be better than getting screwed by a bunch of self serving elitists trying to squeeze and extract every last dime out of the readers like a big oil company.
Times, Post, Village Voice, Daily News, Observer, and Sun.
sadly newspapers are dead. I know I will miss them. The newspaper biz biggest problem is simply the cost of paper. Paper costs are just to high.
I just read your column, John… a couple of points.
I think your economic argument is weeks. Isn’t going to the movie theater still much cheaper?
When you factor in all the hardware… DVD player, good, big TV, nice sound system, etc. . That’s a couple thousand bucks, right?
It still must be cheaper to go to the moves three or four times a month which is the most I’ve ever done and I consider myself a movie buff.
As for newspapers, you make better points.
But since most of the “alternative” media (Limbaugh, bloggers, etc) heavily rely on the mainstream media for their facts, where will that leave us when they fold?
I delivered a free weekly local paper when I was still below the legal working age. That was about the same time the steel industry was folding. Here we are years later and the free news is still moving ahead. The paper was a small publication, supported with ad revenues and I got $2.00 a week, plus a few tips. The paid big city daily papers, fired all the newsboys and hired middle aged unemployed guys to deliver the newspapers and our little free press folded years ago. Then the big city papers began buying up these little independent presses and got bigger. Now it appears that the bigger newspapers are in trouble. I can remember how much competition there was and how we had morning papers, weekly papers and evening papers. Now we have these huge news media companies that look a lot like the steel industry did in the 1980’s. Some people don’t believe in competition until they are put under by competition. The big newspapers have big problems. They are like most of the big cities, full of decay and crime. More presses in the control of smaller publishers seems like a fairly honest solution. Don’t hire unemployed middle aged guys to distribute your paper. The kids can do it better, because they don’t need a car, insurance or something to do. They just want to make a few bucks a week for baseball cards or something fun. Build your presses close to the circulation base and not in the population drain of the city. The presses will keep rolling in one form or another. Believe it or not, everybody doesn’t have a computer. We have people around here that don’t even have electric service and there wasn’t a hurricane.
It’s my understanding that many graduates from journalism school end up in the PR industry. It pays better. I don’t know if it’s a growth industry, but it’s probably more stable than mainstream journalism.
I love to keep up on current events, and I get the vast majority of my information from the internet.