HA ha...
Newsroom layoffs stifle US journalism-lobbying group
Wed Dec 7, 2005 05:43 PM ET
By Dan Wilchins
NEW YORK, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Political lobbying group MoveOn, best known for efforts to unseat U.S. President George W. Bush in the 2004 election, protested job cuts in American newsrooms on Wednesday, saying it would stifle good journalism.
At a media conference in New York, the group delivered a petition with 45,000 signatures to executives of newspaper publisher Tribune Co.(TRB.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , objecting to the company's layoffs of more than 800 newspaper workers, which will likely include reporters.
Tribune Co.'s papers include the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.
"We're concerned about the ability of newspapers to report news. Good watchdog journalism costs money, but it's what communities rely on newspapers for," Noah Winer, media action director at MoveOn, told Reuters.
U.S. newspaper circulation has been in decline since 1984, according to the Newspaper Association of America, hurt by competition with the Internet and cable TV news and rising distrust of a media dogged by reporting scandals in recent years.
Tribune Co. is just one of a raft of companies to announce newsroom layoffs. In September, The New York Times said it was laying off about 80 reporters, while Knight Ridder's two Philadelphia newspapers, the Inquirer and Daily News, said they would cut 16 percent of their newsroom staff through buyouts or layoffs.
Newspaper employment has broadly been declining since 1990. Since 2001, the number of newspaper reporter jobs has fallen 4 percent to 54,134, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
Josh Douglass, a lifelong reader of Tribune Co.'s Newsday, said layoffs at the Long Island, New York-based newspaper could prevent political scandals from coming to light.
"If there are no reporters there to get friendly with people and find out what might be going on behind closed doors, that's a real problem," Douglass said.
Most major U.S. newspapers are owned by publicly traded companies that produce profits for shareholders. Newspaper publishers' shares have fallen this year and increasing use of the Internet as a source of information raises uncertainty about newspapers' future earnings, said John Morton, president of Morton Research Inc. in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Tribune Co. reported a 19 percent rise in operating profits for the first nine months of the year, but that has not been enough to boost its share price.
Weak share prices pressured Knight Ridder, the second largest newspaper publisher in the United States, to say last month it was considering selling itself.
I wonder if they'll ever figure out it's not the cost of ink that's losing them money? It's a lack of readers and advertisers.
"Tribune, which publishes the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and Newsday in New York said instead it plans to focus on organic growth..."
The brightest comment yet on how newspapers can turn around their bleak future...start growing pot.
They shouldn't be called newspapers anymore because they do not report the news.
The print media is finished. Online news rules! And that is a good thing! ;)
It's beyond me why newspaper owners who are losing fortunes don't understand what they are doing wrong. "It's the Content Stupid!"
The extreme leftist bias in most editorial rooms is so complete it blinds the owners to the obvious.
As large circulation dailies continue to lose readers media buyers might someday realize that they are advertising their sales and services in a medium no longer read by the buying public.
It's no wonder that so many newspapers are putting out false circulation numbers. They must convince advertisers that many people are reading their ads.
I would propose to media buyers an experiment: Stop all advertising in news dailies for one month and see if sales go down. I'll bet that it either will not be affected at all or it will go up as more ad dollars are freed up for radio, TV and direct advertising.