Free Republic

The staff of Newsweek will shrink dramatically, after 111 staffers on its news and business sides accepted a buyout last week. Among those leaving are some of the magazine's best-known, most-admired and longest-service critics, including David Gates, David Ansen and Cathleen McGuigan. Harold Shain, a former president of the magazine who moved over to sister publication Budget Travel at the beginning of this year, is also departing. 146 staffers were offered the chance to leave the magazine, with as much as two years of their current salary as a departing bonus, depending on their age and length of service. The...

NEW YORK (AP) Gannett Co.'s stock fell Monday as a Bear Stearns analyst downgraded the nation's largest newspaper publisher, citing ongoing advertising revenue softness.Analyst Alexia Quadrani said the McLean, Va.-based company's 14.5 percent decline in December newspaper advertising revenue was a significant slide from the average 4.6 percent dropoff in October and November advertising results. The analyst was also disappointed with USA Today's fourth-quarter ad revenue slide of 12.7 percent and noted that the paper never experienced the ad sales increase in the second half of the year that was predicted. In addition, Quadrani was concerned that the increase in...

[With apologies in advance to Martin Nisenholtz, who I believe is genuinely fighting the good fight, and who will no doubt end up with a great job at some fine Internet company.]The hiring of Bill Kristol was the last straw.I can't take it anymore.I hereby inaugurate my New York Times Deathwatch, which will continue until the last Sulzberger has left the building.Recent dispatches that are fit to print: Leading the way [in terrible end-of-year news from the newspaper industry] was The New York Times Company, where total [quarterly] revenues fell 1.7% to $865.8 million, due mostly to a 4.1% drop...

... Primetime ratings for ABC, which aired low-rated repeats of "Grey's Anatomy" and "Desperate Housewives," fell 26 percent among adults aged 18 to 49, a key category for advertisers. CBS, with reruns of "Two and a Half Men," "NCIS" and "CSI," dropped 30 percent in that same category, according to figures from Nielsen. A survey from ad-buying firm Carat found that just 16 percent of primetime viewers said they would continue to watch their favorite TV shows in repeats during the next three to six months. The other 84 percent said they either "would not" or "may not" watch shows...

LOS ANGELES, Jan 30 (Reuters) - The 12-week-old Hollywood writers strike is taking a heavy toll on prime-time viewership with television production largely stopped and the major networks airing more repeats, game shows and reality shows. The five top broadcast networks were down a collective 17 percent for the week ended Jan. 27 in ratings among viewers aged 18 to 49, the audience most prized by advertisers compared with the same week last year, according to Nielsen Media Research. That is a sharp drop from earlier this season, before networks' supply of original sitcom and drama episodes ran dry and...

MTV's Kurt Loder on the delusions of celebrity culture, the coming collapse of mainstream media outlets, and the rising tide of free expression that can't be stopped ... Reason: Major record companies complain they’re losing market share and revenue. Major daily newspapers say the same thing. Broadcast networks still command a huge audience, but it’s much smaller than before. The big outlets don’t seem to have the monopoly on audience they once did. Is the decentralization of audience, of culture, a good thing?Kurt Loder: We’re better off with new technology. Music is proliferating in a way it never has before....

The New York Times and others are reporting that Alabama-based hedge fund gave notice Friday that it would try to elect directors to The New York Times Company board, the company said. Evidently the hedge fund, Harbinger Capital Partners, a part of Harbert Management Corporation, controls less than 5 percent of Times Company stock, as there have been no S.E.C. filings indicating this level of investment.  Haubert is led by Phillip Falcone. Falcone had a stellar year, raking in more than $1.3 Billion betting short on the mortgage meltdown, according to Bloomberg Hedge Fund Research, making him the seconbd highest-paid hedge fund manager...

The Orange County Register is moving most of its business news into the main section of the newspaper at the end of January as part of a series of initiatives announced by the company this month. The changes, which will begin Jan. 30, are being made in response to the challenges facing newspapers in this digital age – declining circulation, a loss of advertising, high newsprint costs and an increasing demand for instantaneous access to news. "Shifting our business coverage into News is driven by a need to be more efficient in the type of news we publish in our...

The Chicago Tribune has announced that it is ending help wanted ads on weekdays. In its place will be a section on Tuesdays with basic information and Web IDs that will point people toward online listings in the Tribune’s CareerBuilder section. (The Web ID concept has been used at other newspapers with reportedly mixed results.) What is noteworthy about the announcement is not that a newspaper is dismantling something else within the paper and either sending readers to its Web site or giving up on it altogether. Newspapers have been making such moves aggressively in recent years to cut costs...

The way things are going in the newspaper business, it may not be too long before the big papers will be just about the only ones left. Two longtime newspapers have closed since the end of 2006, and many others have undertaken layoffs and other cost-saving measures. In recent years, hundreds of afternoon dailies have vanished, or become morning papers. Here in Southern California, the papers owned by Dean Singleton have virtually all laid off numerous employees. At the Orange County Register, the story has been told about the unfortunate newsman summoned in on his day off to a meeting,...

In a sign of the emerging power of TV outside the home, NBC Universal will hold what media buyers are likening to an “upfront” presentation for its digital out-of-home assets Jan. 16. The media company is hoping to get more advertisers to consider NBC for placing ads on TV screens in supermarkets, near gas-station pumps and in taxi cabs and arenas, among other places. Set to be held in Studio 8H, the NBC presentation will address about 200 advertisers and media buyers. It’s telling that NBC has chosen this year to roll out its first out-of-home upfront. As the Writers...

As a way of profiling three artists who made three solid hip-hop albums this year--Turf Talk, Prodigy, and Project Pat--the New York Times' Kelefa Sanneh has written another entry in the "hip-hop: possibly dead, definitely changing" trend piece parade. The reasons, in case you've been otherwise occupied: sales are in the crapper, hip-hop sales are really in the crapper, one-hit ringtones rule, albums by former backpack outliers are (shockingly, right?) selling better than albums by the one-hit ringtoners, and the genre's mainstream is taking the reality of the new model harder than most thanks to its longstanding "if you're not...

The newspaper industry is now worth 42% less than it was three years ago and 26% less than twelve months ago, says former newspaper man and Reflections of a Newsosaur analyst Alan D. Mutter. Wacko street analysts and newspaper executives chalk this up to "cyclical weakness." Mutter knows better. $23B zapped in news stock value The market value of the American newspaper publishers entering 2008 as independent, publicly traded companies has fallen by $23 billion, or 42%, since the end 2004, the year before the wheels started coming off the industry. Nearly half the slide in the market capitalization of...

Broadcast networks, newspapers, music labels struggle while Internet rises Leave it to a group of Hollywood screenwriters to script a perfect scene showing the struggles that old media faces in the digital era. When the Writers Guild of America went on strike in November, it drummed up sympathy by posting countless videos of rallies and marches on YouTube—and received no compensation for the content.From broadcast to print to music, New York's old media companies stumbled in the face of the chaos brought about by new media in 2007. The future of some of the city's most venerable companies and...

The Virginia Gazette commercial printing operation will close at the end of January, resulting in the loss of up to 10 jobs at the Williamsburg newspaper. The Virginia Gazette and Daily Press are both owned by Tribune Company ... The Daily Press and Gazette have had a number of small-scale layoffs over the last few years as the newspaper industry struggles with declining circulation and free Internet content.

RUSH: "NBC officially announced today that its two late-night stars, Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien, will return to the air on Jan. 2 even if the [writers] strike ... is not resolved by then. The two hosts would be forced to perform without writers, and might have to face opposition from the Writers Guild, which has thus far urged the late-night hosts to support the strike by staying off the air." But they want to get back.  Why do they want to come back?  I know they love their jobs. They love their jobs. They like the money and so...

There are two schools of thought on the declining newspaper business: The right one, which thinks the dead-tree-distribution business is dying as readers move online and alternative news and advertising options proliferate, and The crazy head-in-sand one which thinks the awful performance of leading newspaper companies over the past few years is just the result of the housing bust.CSFB's newspaper analyst John Klim appears to be a card-carrying member of the nutbag school. He argues that newspapers' recent troubles are mostly cyclical (2/3) and that newspapers are in a great position to benefit from the transition to digital media. All...

When Philip Smith took to his blog to describe his (negative) experience of working with an eBay listing company, he did not expect that he would end up representing himself in a federal defamation and trademark dilution lawsuit or that he would have difficulty selling his condo after a lawyer for the plaintiffs clouded his title to the property. Now, after winning the case in spectacular fashion, Smith has emerged as an unlikely hero for bloggers everywhere who hope to be regarded as journalists. No US court has yet weighed in with authority on the debate about whether bloggers count...

Warner Music doesn't formally offer guidance to Wall Street. But read between the lines from its just-concluded Q4 earnings call and it's pretty clear that WMG is going to have a lousy 2008: • Physical music sales are going to continue to plummet, and retailers are indeed going to cut back on the shelf space they devote to music, which will compound the decline. WMG's Edgar Bronfman Jr. is more optimistic than some: He predicts that recorded music sales will only drop in the "mid-teens". • Digital sales growth, which Warner has been counting on to counter the drop in...

New Jersey's Ocean County Observer to Covert to a Weekly FormatTOMS RIVER, N.J. (AP) -- The Ocean County Observer, a newspaper that traces its roots back more than 150 years, is being converted to a weekly due to declining circulation, the paper's publisher said.Starting Jan. 10, the daily newspaper will be replaced by the weekly Toms River Observer-Reporter. The new weekly publication will focus on local schools and sports, small businesses and the Toms River-area population. The broadsheet format newspaper will be mailed to 40,000 homes.Thomas M. Donovan, president and publisher of the Observer and the Asbury Park Press, both...