Writing About Lives

NPR’s Morning Edition

August 1, 2008 · Self-published author Brunonia Barry literally dreamed her first novel, The Lace Reader, into existence: “I had a dream that I saw a future event in a piece of lace,” Barry says, “and it came true the next day.”

If Barry had been able to see the future of The Lace Reader — a self-published work that she ultimately sold to a major publishing house — she probably wouldn’t have believed it.

Barry’s husband, Gary Ward, encouraged her to self-publish; she says if it had not been for him, the book might still be sitting in a drawer. Barry and Ward have their own software publishing business, which served as a base for the venture.

“We thought, ‘We can do this, we’re already publishers,” Barry remembers. “It’s kind of a laugh now, because you run into so many things you never anticipated.”

Ward adds:

“We were emboldened by our ignorance. We knew just enough to get going, but not enough to stop us.”

How’d They Do It?

Barry and Ward began by thinking local. The Lace Reader is set in Salem, Mass., and the picturesque seaside town plays a major role in the story. They went to independent bookstores and asked for the names of local book clubs that might be interested in reading a first-time author.

“The first two book clubs got just straight pages of the book … in a box,” Ward says. “We didn’t have any real printed books yet.”

Hilary Emerson Lay, manager of the Spirit of ‘76 bookstore in Marblehead, Mass., calls Barry and Ward’s marketing efforts “revolutionary.” She says Barry was genuinely interested in hearing how readers reacted to the book, and believes that the author’s involvement with local book clubs helped generate a genuine interest in The Lace Reader.

“I’ve never known an author to come and give me an early draft of the book and say, ‘I really want to know what you think,’” Lay says.

Eventually, Barry and Ward printed 2,000 copies of the book. Local bookstores talked it up, and word spread between book clubs around the country. Booksellers also helped Barry make important contacts in the publishing world that led to The Lace Reader receiving a starred review in Publishers Weekly.

The larger world of publishing and film began to take notice.

‘This Book Was Different’

Self-publishing is still risky business — Rebecca Oliver, a literary agent with Endeavor talent agency, says people in the publishing world often assume that self-published books aren’t up to the industry’s standards.

“When I started reading The Lace Reader,” Oliver says, “it was so clear that this book … was different.”

Oliver became Barry’s agent and put the book out for auction in fall 2007. Before the bidding even got off the ground, Oliver turned down a seven-figure offer.

“The first bid came in, and Gary and I said, ‘Yes we’ll take it,’” Barry remembers. “And [Oliver] said, ‘I don’t think so.’”

Oliver doesn’t turn down large offers lightly, but she was convinced the book could bring in a higher bid.

“People who were reading this book were falling in love with it,” Oliver says. “I thought: We’ve just got to see this through to the end.”

In the end, three major publishing houses were bidding on the book, and Barry was able to choose the one she liked best. She signed with William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, for a deal that is reportedly worth more than $2 million.

“I remember walking around our living room … putting my hand on my forehead, stumbling around saying, ‘What just happened to us?’” Ward recalls.

In addition to the original deal, the rights to the book have also been sold in more than 20 countries, and there is interest in adapting the story into a film. Barry says the whole experience is a fantasy come true. But Ward cautions that his wife’s experience with self-publishing isn’t typical; some of the old prejudices are fading he says, but it’s still a tough road.

“The process is a little more democratic today,” Oliver says. “But it’s awfully, awfully competitive, and I wouldn’t want anyone to spend their life savings or anything like that, saying, ‘I’m going to get The Lace Reader type deal.’”

Barry and Ward say that luck played a big role in their success, and — just like a delicate piece of lace — the whole thing could have unraveled if even one thread had been out of place.

To hear it online go to: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92934202

Black and White, Red All Over: Is 2008 the Worst Year in Modern Newspaper History?

by John Koblin | July 21, 2008 - The New York Observer

On Wednesday morning at 11 a.m., Arthur Sulzberger and Janet Robinson will be managing a conference call that, from the looks of it, won’t be much fun.

They’ll be reporting The New York Times Company’s second-quarter earnings. Last time they did one of quarterly earnings calls, The Times reported big losses; there was a plan to cut 100 newsroom jobs, some through straight-up layoffs rather than superannuation and retirement deals.

And in the past few weeks, it’s only gotten worse: the company’s stock has fallen to a decade low, and tumbled more than 15 percent in just this month.

The Times is hardly alone. It trickles in day by day: more news of lost jobs and tumbling stocks for major newspapers and their parent companies. But as bad as newspapers have been doing—it’s been conventional wisdom for a few years now—the industry is actually doing much worse than most ever anticipated, and that’s become painfully clear over the past two months.

At the beginning of the year, things didn’t look so bad.

There was bad news, but it seemed consistent with what we’ve been getting warnings about for years now: In February, The New York Times announced it would cut 100 jobs from its newsroom, including laying people off for the first time ever.

That same month, the L.A. Times publisher David Hiller sent out an announcement as well: He said up to 150 jobs would be lost across the L.A. Times media group (which includes Spanish paper Hoy and other community papers).

When Russ Stanton was named the paper’s editor a day after that memo was sent out, he said he was “hopping mad over this seemingly endless ‘Groundhog Day’ nightmare. We in the newsroom need to figure out how to break this self-defeating cycle before it does indeed result in our defeat.”

Sam Zell, the brand new owner of the paper’s parent company, the Tribune Company, said: “Unfortunately, I can’t turn this ship from its course of the past 10 years within just a few months.” He added, “But, make no mistake. This is not my ultimate strategy for our company.”

The February cuts at The Times and the other Tribune papers looked like a one-time deal. Despite the undeniable blow to all these newsrooms, it seemed Mr. Zell was just clearing out some fat, and if there were future cuts, maybe they’d happen next year.

And indeed, things were beginning to look up. In June, Russ Stanton told MediaBistro that morale was starting to reappear at the paper and that people were “focused solely on doing great work and good stories and terrific journalism.”

And then Sam Zell threw all that out the window the next day. “What has become clear as we have gotten intimately familiar with the business is that the model for newspapers no longer works,” he said in a memo.

Ad revenue, as bad as its been in recent years, fell to levels that no one had anticipated either at Tribune papers or in the industry overall. Last year, ad revenue dropped 8 percent from 2006; this year there has been a double-digit decline from even that poor performance.

“It’s going a lot worse than anybody predicted, and if we have double-digit ad declines for two years, some newspapers will be in real financial jeopardy,” Edward Atorino, an analyst at the Benchmark Company, told The New York Times in June.

After gutting those 150 jobs earlier in the year, the L.A. Times fired 150 more people from its newsroom this past week. And the body count is getting larger all around the Tribune. This year, The Baltimore Sun is cutting about 100 jobs; the Chicago Tribune announced recently it would cut 80; the Sun-Sentinel about 50; the Hartford Courant would cut 57; and the Orlando Senintel about 50.

Last week, newsroom employees at the Sun picketed their building, carrying slogans calling for Mr. Zell’s ouster. But, of course, these problems are not just slamming Mr. Zell.

There was that business last week with Times stock dropping 15 percent in one week, to a decade low.

Over the past week or so, the paper’s stock has consistently been hovering in the $12 range, whereas it was batting around $14 just a few weeks ago.

The company’s stock began to fall after Craig Huber, an analyst for Lehman Brothers, wrote earlier this month in a letter to clients about his surprise that ad revenue is projecting a 9.1 percent decline this year, more than the 7.2 percent previously projected.

Ad sales next year probably will fall 7.5 percent, compared with his earlier estimate of 6 percent, he said.

Last year’s purchase of Dow Jones Inc. by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. was seen as a sign that something interesting could still happen with newspapers. Mr. Murdoch and
The Wall Street Journal’s managing editor Robert Thomson have been promising to invest money in the paper.

But they also cut 50 jobs last week, and closed most of the paper’s editorial operations in South Brunswick, an emotionally fraught decision since that was the paper’s home base after the Sept. 11 attacks closed their downtown newsroom for months.

It’s obviously easy to look at ad revenues and a tanking economy and point toward that and blame this year on that. But there are other theories.

“Because we are in the newspaper industry, we spend a lot of time writing about the demise of newspapers,” Katharine Weymouth, the new publisher of The Washington Post, told The Observer last week. “Nobody—I mean, we never see Katie Couric doing a 20-minute segment on the evening news talking about the audience that the nightly news is losing. I mean, they just don’t do those stories, right? We write a little obsessively about our own industry, I think. But when you look at the real story with what’s happening with newspapers, is there a seismic shift going on? Absolutely. Are ad revenues plummeting? Absolutely. But there is still a very good story.”

But even she conceded: “This is not me being Pollyannaish,” she said. “It’s real.”

Good luck, Arthur and Janet.

A crime victim’s road back

By Kevin Scott Hall

Sunday, June 29th 2008
New York Daily News

I was recently thrust into the news by one of those freak things in life that you can’t predict, let alone plan for.

I arrived home from a fulfilling New York evening of watching my students perform for an enthusiastic crowd to discover that I had several messages on my home answering machine and cell phone. (Contrary to popular belief, there are some of us who do turn off their cell phones when celebratory things in life are happening.)

News organizations from all over the city were calling to get my comment on the arrest of Elie Granger, the bicycle-riding terror who had just stabbed a Queens woman, Eduarda Oliva.

Why me? Well, I happened to be the last one Granger had attacked before he was arrested the last time. On Oct. 7, 1994, he stabbed me in the chest and in the arm. I lost a lot of blood; miraculously, the knife missed my heart and lung - by less than a quarter of an inch on each side.

Surely, the media assumed, I had something of note to say.

Without a doubt: I wanted to speak about the unfairness of Granger getting a nine-year sentence for three attempted murders, before being paroled in 2004. I wanted to speak of my outrage about an absentee district attorney who never informed me of Granger’s release - and allowed him to live in the same city as his widely publicized victim.

Most of all, though, I wanted to speak about how New York is a great city, and that the energy and resources available here can help you to move on and create a fulfilling life, even after being shaken to the core by violent crime.

In so doing, you can actually begin to forget about the awful thing someone did to you many years before.

I had the opportunity to say all these things, most notably in an interview with a local TV station. But it soon became clear that the media was not interested in that story. My five minutes on camera were edited down to the bloody 15-second sound bite.

That’s not the real story. And that’s not the story that Eduarda Oliva, who struggles to recover after being terrorized, needs to hear right now.

The real story - my story - is of a young man who arrived in New York fresh out of college, like so many others, to pursue his life on the city’s great stages. The real story is of fifth floor walkups, cockroaches, scrambling to pay the rent and trying hard to find community among the chaos.

The real story is of an unexpected horror that threatened to derail whatever meager progress he was making. Followed by anger, heartbreak, questioning … and finally, waking up and emerging from the grief.

A waking up to new possibilities. To a profound sense of thanks for being alive.

This young man started to sing again, and even did a comedy routine about the dumb things people say when you’ve been viciously attacked. He began to teach others. He worked at an agency helping others find work. Many of his clients still keep in touch.

He found a multicultural, spiritual church that represents the best New York has to offer. He went back to school and got his Master’s degree and started teaching at City College. He wrote.

There have been no recording contracts and no publishing deals - no triumphs that make the headlines - but he lives every day surrounded by wonderful friends and the knowledge that his message of hope, which he tries to instill in his everyday actions, will make some small difference to those who need to hear it.

This slow road back is precisely what thousands of other victims of crime travel upon in this city. There were some 50,000 victims of violent crime in New York City last year - and the vast majority of them are, without fanfare, reclaiming their lives. As are their families.

This is the story that Eduarda Oliva and her daughter need to hear. This is just one of the 8 million stories in our wonderful New York.

Hall is a teacher and freelance writer.

GRADY, Ark. - Whenever the train comes through this town, all the windows, tables and kitchen tops shake as the reverberations are felt by the people living closest to the train track. That’s my family. All of them live within
a few hundred feet of it, some even closer. The noise is so deafening all conversations, television watching and sleeping, are interrupted by the rat-a-tat-tat of the locomotives.

Each time I come down here I walk away with some insight or appreciation for our family’s geographic roots, what it means to be from a town of 500 and more importantly what it means to have escaped. More than anything this last trip I am committed to writing a book proposal that will help me excavate the landscape and rich themes of American religion,
dislocated sexuality, mental illness and addiction so carefully placed in my family.

It never fails that when I leave Grady, when I’ve wave goodbye to my cousins and kiss my grandmother on the cheek, tears always seem to gather in my eyes. Life on the other side of the train track is freedom. This last time my grandmother, Muh Deah, had a more poignant reaction.

“Goodbye Muh Deah,” I yelled as I walked toward the screen door.

“Don’t say goodbye to me,” she snapped back, her body slumped over in a chair facing the TV. She’s unable to hide the pout on her face.

“Alright then, farewell.”

She waved her hand without even looking up from the TV.

I never realized how trapped she must feel when we drive off.

by Matthew Thornton — Publishers Weekly, 5/19/2008

Publishers continue to snap up memoirs, undermining the perception that the genre is embattled in this post-Frey, post-Seltzer era. Gotham executive editor Lauren Marino preempted North American rights to a memoir straight from the pages of the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column: Julie Klausner’s tentatively titled I Don’t Care About Your Band: Lessons I’ve Learned from Romantic Disappointments. Scott Mendel made the substantial sale. Derived from the author’s April 27 column about her short-lived romance with a musician, the book will chronicle Klausner’s years of searching for a relationship prospect as good as her own father, a career as successful as Bette Midler’s and a world to live in as sane as the one in her own imagination. Tentative pub date is spring 2010.

Penguin Group imprints prevailed in two recent auctions conducted by agents at Artists and Artisans. First, Riverhead exec editor Jake Morrissey won world rights from Adam Chromy to David Ellis Dickerson’s House of Cards, in which the crossword puzzle designer and frequent contributor to This American Life explains how writing greeting cards at Hallmark led the former evangelical Christian to lose his religion and virginity, while discovering just how many ways there are to say “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

And Berkley exec editor Denise Silvestro won world rights from Jamie Brenner to Erica Rivera’s Insatiable, in which the single mother recounts how she confronted her addiction to an eating disorder comprising starvation, bingeing and compulsive exercise. Rivera writes for the Minnesota Star Tribune. This and the Dickerson are scheduled for summer 2009.

Lindsay Orman at Three Rivers Press won an auction for an untitled memoir by Izzy Rose via Yfat Reiss Gendell at Foundry, who sold North American rights. Rose, an Emmy-winning television producer and creator of the blog Stepmother’s Milk, will chronicle her journey from happy single life in San Francisco to an even happier one as a married Texan learning how to be a stepmother to her husband’s two boys from a previous marriage. Tentative pub date is May 2009.

Mobilenet Promises to Be the Next Big Medium
But Don’t Get Sidetracked Into Third-Screen Thinking

By Al Ries
Advertising Age

Published: May 06, 2008
We are on the verge of witnessing the birth of a new mass-communications medium. It’s the second new mass medium to appear in the last two decades.

The internet arrived in the 1990s, joining the other four mass media: 1) The book 2) The periodical 3) Radio 4) TV. Each new mass medium has created enormous upheavals in society.

* The book ignited the knowledge explosion.
* The periodical furthered the growth of democracy.
* Radio created a celebrity-oriented society.
* TV homogenized the culture.

The internet, the latest and newest mass medium, continues to make waves. “We are not witnessing the beginning of the end of old media,” Advertising Age’s Bob Garfield wrote recently. “We are witnessing the middle of the end of old media.”

“Both print and broadcast — burdened with unwieldy, archaic and crushingly expensive means of distribution — are experiencing the disintegration of the audience critical mass they require to operate profitably,” Mr. Garfield continued. “Moreover, they are losing that audience to the infinitely fragmented digital media, which have near-zero distribution costs and are overwhelmingly free to the user.”

Fasten your seat belts. On the horizon, there’s another profound shift in media, consumer behavior and technology coming. In the near future we are likely to welcome the arrival of a sixth mass-communications medium.

And what is this earth-shaking new medium? It’s the Mobilenet.

The what? Surely you are joking, Al. The Mobilenet is just a subset of the internet. Just another way of going online. Just another way of surfing the net without using a computer. That’s why mobile devices are commonly called the “third screen.”

Third-screen thinking is going to cause you and your company to miss the boat. Which big brands were created by moving content from one medium to another? Very, very few.

* Moving The Wall Street Journal online didn’t save Dow Jones from the clutches of Rupert Murdoch for just $5 billion.
* Moving ESPN onto cellphones didn’t take it to the big leagues.
* So far, moving TV shows to the internet hasn’t created as much value as one internet site, YouTube.com. Less than 20 months after its launch, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion.

Google can afford to splurge. In the first quarter of this year, Google had net income of $1.3 billion. In the same quarter, The New York Times Co. lost $350,000. Moving the Times to the internet didn’t solve the company’s financial problems. Last year, NYTimes.com had estimated revenue of $27.6 million, pretty small potatoes for a site that was launched more than 11 years ago.

In spite of its dubious record, the content movement continues to gain momentum. The telecoms plus the TV industry are making massive efforts to move TV to cellphones, in spite of surveys that show, according to Yankee Group analyst Linda Barrabee, only 5% of U.S. consumers are willing to pay for mobile TV.

The software industry is also spending a fortune developing programs to permit these inter-medium transfers. Two weeks ago, Microsoft unveiled “Live Mesh,” a software program to link all internet-enabled devices. “Not just PCs and phones,” reported Ray Ozzie, the company’s chief software architect, “but TVs, game consoles, digital picture frames, DVRs, media players, cameras and camcorders, home servers … our car’s entertainment and navigation systems and more.”

That’s the wrong approach. A new medium calls for new brands, not for extensions of existing brands. The internet didn’t reward traditional brands like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, ABC, NBC, CBS, Barnes & Noble and Hallmark. It rewarded new brands created especially for the net. Dot-com brands like Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Expedia, Netflix, MySpace, Facebook and AOL.

The Mobilenet will also reward new brands created especially for the medium. Like Loopt, a service that lets people with GPS-equipped phones share their real-time locations with friends.

A slimmed-down, warmed-over dot-com brand isn’t going to make it on the Mobilenet.

Laying the foundation
The Mobilenet, of course, isn’t going to become an overnight success. (The internet didn’t either.) A number of developments need to come first.

On the sending side, the missing ingredients are the dot-mobis that will make the receiving device a universal, carry-everywhere product much like the cellphone.

On the receiving side, the missing ingredient is a gadget that integrates telecom service with three technologies in an attractive and convenient package: 1) GPS, global-positioning-system receiver; 2) scanner; and 3) voice-recognition software.

Oddly enough, the most heavily hyped new product of the 21st century (Apple’s iPhone) doesn’t include any of those three technologies. Too bad. With all of Apple’s brilliant design and technology skills, the company could have pioneered and dominated the Mobilenet for decades to come.

Instead, Apple perfected the smartphone, a convergence device destined to remain a niche product. The first smartphone (the Nokia 9000) was introduced 12 years ago. Yet today the smartphone accounts for only 10% of the global cellphone market.

In the last quarter, Apple sold 1,703,000 iPhones, about 6% of the global smartphone market. Not exactly earth-shaking results. In the same quarter, Apple sold 10,644,000 iPods, about 70% of the MP3-player market.

Besides market share, there’s another striking difference between the two products. The iPod, a divergence device, pioneered a new category. The iPhone, a convergence device, was not designed to create a new category, but to improve on an existing category, always a risky strategy for a would-be market leader.

Dawn of a new device
If the Mobilenet is a new mass medium, what would you call the receiving device? The logical name is “MobiPhone,” to reflect the millions of dot-mobi websites sure to come.

Names don’t always describe what a device is really used for. Most people do little “computing” on a computer. (I do my computing on a printing calculator.) A MobiPhone may not necessarily include a cellphone. Many people might like a separate device to make telephone calls.

Obviously some people are thinking along similar lines. To me, the most interesting news item of the month was Nokia’s purchase of Navteq, a firm that collects map data from around the world, for $8.1 billion.

Eight-point-one billion? That’s one and a half Wall Street Journals for a company with revenue of just $853 million last year. That mind-boggling number tells you what the folks in Finland are thinking about. It ties in with the thought that the GPS receiver will be the key function of future telecom devices.

The global positioning system, like every technological change, creates the conditions for a product or a medium to diverge in the same way that environmental changes create the conditions for a species to diverge.

Mobile marketing would snowball
First the internet; now the Mobilenet. That’s how divergence works. Furthermore, the Mobilenet promises to make the dream of mobile marketing a reality.

Up till now, mobile marketing has captured a trivial slice of the advertising market ($708 million last year) even though the cellphone predates the worldwide web.

The potential Mobilenet marketplace dwarfs the internet. Last year more than 1.15 billion mobile phones were sold worldwide, compared to only 271.2 million personal computers. In other words, more than four times as many mobile phones were bought than PCs. And, in my opinion, most consumers will find a GPS-equipped MobiPhone to be a device they can’t live without.

The MobiPhone is not just another device, of course. It’s the receiving end of another medium, one that is unique and different from the internet. And one likely to be larger and more universal than the internet. Companies that want to take advantage of this new medium will quickly register their company and brand names as dot-mobi domain names.

Furthermore, each dot-mobi website should be considered separately from the company or the brand’s dot-com website. Two different media demand two different approaches. (You wouldn’t run a radio advertisement on TV, so why would you run a dot-com program for a dot-mobi audience?)

Long-term, “mobile” is going to become a very important part of the overall marketing environment in America. What kinds of advertising approaches are best suited to the new mobile medium?

Consumers empowered
In my opinion, there are two types of advertising: one that might be described as “passive” advertising, the other as “active.”

Passive advertising is conventional advertising found in newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. It interrupts the reader, listener or viewer in order to present “a message from the sponsor” of the medium.

Active advertising, on the other hand, is initiated by the consumer. Search advertising on the internet is a typical example. But there’s active advertising in conventional media, too. In particular, classified advertising in newspapers and telephone directories. Roughly 40% of all advertising on the internet is “active.” This is what has made Google such a big success.

The Mobilenet is going to be an even bigger medium for active advertising than the internet. That’s why there is a golden opportunity for a Google-like brand specially designed to search dot-mobi websites and coordinate with the user’s exact location.

But that’s only the beginning.

A MobiPhone with a 2D barcode scanner will enable consumers to get a wealth of information by scanning products in supermarkets, drugstores, clothing stores.

MobiPhone users might be able to arrange to be notified when certain things occur; for example, when a celebrity shows up at a restaurant or nightclub.

It’s easy to visualize what a useful device a MobiPhone could be if it is served by appropriate dot-mobi websites.

* What’s the speed limit? (Maybe we can avoid those huge pileups that sometimes occur in heavy fog by automatically lowering speed limits when visibility is impaired.)
* How far is the next exit and what facilities can be found there?
* Without stopping to read them, what do those historic markers actually say?
* Location of the nearest hotel/motel and the price of a room?
* Location of the nearest gas station and the price of gasoline?
* Location of the nearest restaurant by type and price level?
* What’s the Parker number on that bottle of wine? (One of the many facts that might be available by simply scanning a label.)

What consumers can do with the receiving device is not the most significant aspect of the Mobilenet. More significant are the changes in structure the new medium will facilitate.

For example, taxicab dispatch systems are likely to disappear, since a consumer will be able to see the location of the nearest available cab and call one directly. Similar changes are likely in all types of dispatching systems.

Consumers will find many other ways to use a MobiPhone. Every August for the last eight years, my wife and I have driven around the scenic areas of the Southwest. Every afternoon on those trips, we would keep an eagle eye out for a Dairy Queen in order to snare a couple of their chocolate-dipped cones.

Hopefully, next year we’ll check DQ.Mobi instead.

By Eric Pryne

Seattle Times business reporter

The Seattle Times Co., reeling from continued declines in advertising revenue, announced Monday it will slice its flagship newspaper’s staff by nearly 200 and make other cuts aimed at saving $15 million.

The staff reductions will include up to 131 layoffs, the company said in an e-mail to employees. Sixty unfilled positions will be frozen.

The Times has 1,845 full-time and part-time employees.

Spokeswoman Jill Mackie would not be specific about other cuts, except to say that “there will be some changes that will affect both readers and advertisers.”

One big change: Employees were told The Times will close its suburban news bureaus in Bellevue and Lynnwood, lay off almost all the reporters who work there and stop publishing zoned editions for the Eastside and Snohomish County.

Vice President Alayne Fardella said in an e-mail to employees that up to 45 circulation workers, 30 newsroom employees and 24 advertising staff could be laid off. The exact number will depend on how many employees choose to accept buyouts and leave voluntarily, she said.

Employees have until next Monday to make that decision, Fardella wrote.

Newsroom staff members who attended a meeting with Executive Editor David Boardman said they were told at least 16 employees in that department will be laid off, regardless of how many choose to depart voluntarily.

Monday’s cuts come on top of $21 million The Times slashed from its budget earlier this year, including 17 layoffs, mostly circulation workers.

“We had hoped the expense reductions made at the beginning of the year would prevent the need for further downsizing, but that is not the case,” Publisher Frank Blethen and President Carolyn Kelly said in another e-mail to employees Monday.

Mackie would not rule out further cuts or layoffs. “We have no choice but to bring our expenditures in line with our revenues,” she said.

Industry battered

The Times’ problems are far from unique. Metropolitan newspapers throughout the country are struggling with declining classified-ad revenues and shrinking circulation, problems driven at least in part by competition from the Internet.

Papers that have announced newsroom staff cuts in recent months include The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today and the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Newspapers are still far from dead,” the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a research organization, said in a report this year, “but the language of the obituary is creeping in.”

At The Times, Monday’s layoff announcement had been rumored for days and came as no huge surprise, considering the string of bad news from the privately held company in recent months.

In a Dec. 27 e-mail to employees, Blethen said that combined print-advertising revenue for The Times and smaller Seattle Post-Intelligencer was down 9 percent in 2007 and had dropped more than one-quarter since 2000.

The Times and P-I maintain competing newsrooms, but The Times handles advertising, circulation, production and other business functions for both under a federally sanctioned joint-operating agreement.

So far this year, ad revenues have fallen even more precipitously.

In an e-mail to staff late last month, Kelly said that, through February, combined print-advertising revenues for the Times and P-I were down 10.7 percent from last year.

More ominously, online-ad revenues fell 6.5 percent year-over-year. While online advertising is only a small fraction of The Times’ and other newspapers’ total revenue, it has been growing rapidly in recent years.

Many say it is the industry’s best hope as it searches for a new business model.

Last month, The Times Co. put its Maine papers — three dailies and one weekly — up for sale, saying it needed cash to help keep its flagship paper afloat.

Despite its troubles, Mackie said Monday, The Seattle Times was one of only a handful of larger papers whose circulation grew last year, and its drop in ad revenue was smaller than the industry average.

Closing the suburban newsrooms marks the end of an era for The Times, which opened its first office in Bellevue and began publishing its first separate Eastside section in 1976.

Suburban “zone” reporters and columnists are in a separate union job classification from their downtown counterparts; all, including one with about 20 years at the paper, were told Monday they will be laid off.

“It’s a sad day,” said Eastside columnist Sherry Grindeland, who joined The Times in 1997. “I feel the Eastside is going to not be getting the attention it should get.”

“Emotional whiplash”

Snohomish County reporter Diane Wright said she was experiencing “emotional whiplash. … It’s a little death. There’s no other way to call it.”

Mackie said The Times “fully intend[s] to cover communities affected by changes to our zoned content.”

While it is joined at the hip with The Times economically, the P-I — owned by New York-based Hearst Corp. — has not announced buyouts or layoffs.

No layoffs are planned, P-I Publisher Roger Oglesby said Monday, but added, “I will never rule out the possibility they might happen, and they might happen at any time.”

The P-I has been cutting expenses and not filling most vacant positions, he said, “but it doesn’t look like we’re going to make money this year. … It’s a very tough year.”

Another friend writes a nonfiction book.

Invisible Chains: Shawn Hornbeck and the Kidnapping Case that Shook the Nation by Kristina Sauerwein

From Publisher’s Weekly

Kristina Sauerwein, a former reporter for the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch and the L.A. Times, delves into a
puzzling kidnapping case with penetrating true crime
reporting. She describes 11-year-old Shawn Hornbeck’s
disappearance from his rural Missouri hometown, while
riding his bike in 2002. He was abducted by Michael
Devlin, an innocuous-seeming pizza-shop manager who
repeatedly sexually abused and tortured Shawn for four
years. In a strange twist, Devlin also assumed a
fatherly role and Hornbeck became his “son”; even
given freedom to go out alone, Hornbeck never tried to
escape. Shawn was joined by another kidnapped boy, Ben
Ownby, four days before the police nabbed Devlin in
January 2007. The unusual psychological aspects of
Hornbeck’s captivity and his failure to attempt to
escape are explained, according to Sauerwein, by the
Stockholm syndrome, which leads a captive to bond with
his captor. An impeccable, on-target true crime
narration, this book of loss, perversity and
redemption illuminates not only the desperate pangs of
a predator’s sexual hunger but the steadfast love of
two families for their missing children. (May)

Read it and weep: the perilous fall of the Press-Telegram;
The story of the Long Beach newspaper carries with it a warning about the future of community journalism.

Dennis McDougal
Los Angeles Times

Thirty years ago, Stan Leppard, a rewrite man on the city desk with phlegm in his larynx and a terminal addiction to unfiltered cigarettes, gave me the best professional advice I ever received. He delivered it shortly before I was about to file a not-very-credible story about a homeless man who lived on the streets of downtown Long Beach and planned to adopt a son.

“Hard to believe, but it does read terrific,” Stan said to me, smiling slyly. “Of course, you should never over-verify a good story.”

That Leppard offered the ironic advice with a straight face gave me pause — and, perhaps, saved my fledgling career as a reporter at the Long Beach Press-Telegram. I did not file the homeless-man-adopts-son story. Instead, I re-reported it and found my original to be full of holes and one-sided. But there was a story, one about a mentally challenged ward of the state who had neither the right nor the resources to adopt a dog, let alone a child. As it turned out, the “over-verified” version prompted a reexamination of an unofficial county policy of simply ignoring unqualified applicants in hopes that they would simply get the message and go away.

From the old P-T, I went on to work at the Los Angeles Times, followed by stints at CNN and TV Guide and the publication of several biographies. But the journalism postgraduate school I attended for four years on the second floor of the Press-Telegram building in downtown Long Beach was the best education I ever got, and it still resonates with me every time I sit down at the computer.

The Press-Telegram was one of several “farm teams” — the Santa Monica Outlook and Pasadena Star-News were two others — on the fringes of the expanding Los Angeles Times empire in the 1970s and 1980s. The P-T’s newsroom was straight out of Ben Hecht’s “Front Page”: a raucous, rowdy, nicotine-stained bullpen of hungry cubs and grizzled veterans all working to get the news out every day. Among others, the P-T produced such future Times veterans as the late media critic David Shaw, former Sacramento reporter Mark Gladstone and columnist Jill Stewart, now L.A. Weekly news editor.

I was still a reporter at the morning paper in the early 1980s when its afternoon counterpart, the Long Beach Independent, printed its final edition. Bottles came out of drawers as everyone from the managing editor to copy boys offered a toast to the passing of an institution. And now, more than a quarter of a century later, it appears that I may yet live to offer a similar toast to the P-T.

In most parts of the U.S., Long Beach would be recognized as a major city. Indeed, its population exceeds that of Miami, Minneapolis or New Orleans, each of which still has a daily newspaper. While identified with the aging Queen Mary, its harbor is one of the busiest in the world, and its airport has been home to both Douglas Aircraft and Boeing. Long Beach’s neighborhoods run the gamut, from the WASPish affluence of Naples and Virginia Country Club to an inner city that produced Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. The highest concentration of Cambodians outside of Phnom Penh lives in Long Beach, as does a large Latino population. It is as cosmopolitan as any city in the nation, and news worth reporting happens there every day.

But as we know all too well in 2008, newspapers are a business — and businesses fail.

Two years ago, the Press-Telegram quit its home of more than half a century for new digs in a high-rise overlooking the Long Beach harbor. The six-story P-T building at 6th Street and Pine Avenue is apparently destined to become condos. More than a decade earlier, the presses in the building’s basement were stilled after MediaNews Group, the P-T’s new owner, began printing the paper on the other side of L.A. County to cut costs. Simultaneously, the company began cutting jobs and wages, a downsizing that has continued ever since it bought the paper from Knight Ridder Inc.

Last month, the Denver-based chain announced its latest cost-cutting maneuver: It was combining the P-T with a neighboring daily, the South Bay Daily Breeze. The P-T (circulation: 88,000) will keep its news operation in Long Beach, and the Breeze (circulation: 65,000) will run everything else out of its Torrance headquarters. Between them, the two newspapers will lose 19 jobs, including the P-T’s editor and publisher.

The drumbeat from corporate headquarters remains the same: Ad revenue is down, costs are up and the rise of the Internet as a news source makes MediaNews middle management as nervous as cats in the proverbial room full of rocking chairs. Never mind that MediaNews’ net income rose 34% in the fourth quarter of 2007, or that the combined circulation of its 57 dailies tops 2.6 million.

Company founder, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive William Dean Singleton has left no doubt about what’s important to him in what remains of U.S. daily journalism — profit margins. In relentlessly cutting “news” from newspapers to maintain profits, he and many of his peers have helped transform an industry. Journalists like Leppard are bought out or laid off, limiting — or even eliminating — the newsroom opportunities for mentoring that transforms youthful ambition into thoughtful journalism. The fact that the mistakes of reporters make it into print more frequently these days, and that newspapers increasingly shy away from investigative stories, can be traced to the slash-and-shrink policies of chief executives who vanquish veterans and intimidate greenhorns, all the while adding more “failing” newspapers to their portfolios.

The L.A. Times, the Washington Post and the New York Times are also cutting their newsroom staffs through buyouts, but the cutbacks in coverage seem less evident than in smaller papers like the P-T. But as in Major League Baseball, it’s the triple-A teams of journalism — the Press-Telegrams — that indicate where the future lies. Nobody buys a newspaper that is unable to report the news.

The city of Long Beach has already recognized this, complaining to Media- News that the P-T isn’t doing its job of reporting the news, and threatening to pull its legal advertising from the downsized daily. The irony — which would never get past Leppard — is that withholding such advertising could kill the paper, and while The Times might gain some disaffected or former P-T readers, it would be losing a farm team.

As readers, we watch suburban dailies like the P-T

By Jon Friedman, MarketWatch
Last update: 12:01 a.m. EDT March 24, 2008
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NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — One of the mysteries of television is why PBS’ Tavis Smiley continues to fly below the radar. He has an easy charm and a keen curiosity, and deserves to be better known.

Smiley follows Charlie Rose’s respected talk show, which has a much bigger reputation. But Smiley shouldn’t be regarded as second-string to Rose.

In fact, you could say that Smiley has emerged on TV as a populist version of Rose. While Rose tends to attract ambassadors and Nobel Prize winners by the bushel, Smiley probes less formal — though no less compelling — subjects. And he does so every bit as thoughtfully as his more famous PBS colleague.

Smiley does many things that I appreciate in a TV interviewer. He allows his guests to speak their minds and doesn’t cut them off mid-sentence so he can intrude by presenting his opinions. You can almost see the relief on their faces when they can veer off on a tangent and not worry about getting yanked back by Smiley.

These qualities were on display in a typical show recently when Smiley interviewed separately author and founder of the Skeptics Society Michael Shermer and actress Amy Ryan. You couldn’t hope to see two more different guests on the same talk show.

To call Shermer’s opinions unorthodox is an understatement, especially when he launches into a discussion about his “Google theory of peace,” as he did on Smiley’s show. When Smiley heard Shermer talking, he looked quizzical but didn’t patronize his guest.

Smiley revealed a lot of his philosophy when he told Shermer at one point: “I’m not convinced as yet …of your point. I’ll let you explain it.”

Another interviewer might have seized the moment to make fun of his guest. Smiley didn’t want to pick a fight. He wanted to understand the logic.

The human touch

Smiley shifted gears gracefully when he started chatting with Ryan, who distinguished herself in the recent movie “Gone Baby Gone.” And “chatting” is the appropriate term. Smiley has a playful side which he reveals when he speaks with entertainment figures.

“Gone Baby Gone,” a movie about two Boston area police detectives investigating a little girl’s kidnapping, has lifted Ryan’s profile significantly (she was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Supporting Actress category off that performance). Smiley seemed to pick up on her happy amazement at hitting the big time after a career of working toward that goal.

It was clear that Ryan was practically pinching herself. Smiley could have acted like a world-weary host facing yet another flavor-of-the-month actor. But he genuinely seemed to get a charge out of listening to Ryan enjoy her success.

“How does it feel … has it sunken in yet?” he asked her.

The approach works because it gets people to tell you what they’re really thinking, not the safe answer that their publicists hope to hear. My favorite moment occurred when Ryan talked about acting with Ed Harris, who is known for playing menacing characters in movies. “You don’t feel intimidated?” Smiley asked her impishly.

“Oh, absolutely!” Ryan declared, not worried that she might come across as a wimp. It’s fun for the audience when a celebrity can laugh at himself or herself.

Last week, Smiley interviewed political theorist and author Benjamin Barber on his idea that companies “turn adults into grasping youngsters.” It might sound like mumbo-jumbo to some viewers, but again, Smiley didn’t condescend to Barber’s unusual opinions.

He wasn’t embarrassed to gush over Michael McDonald, the former Doobie Brothers vocalist. It was fun to watch McDonald patiently answer Smiley’s questions, which approximated the kinds of subjects that any fan watching at home might bring up. “The screaming and yelling (at concerts) must get crazy!” Tavis suggested with a smile.
As Smiley is fond of saying to close his show, keep the faith.