Completely Unnecessary

Minneapolis’ Star Tribune declared bankruptcy last night.

This is just the latest in the series, but demonstrates just how tough it is for papers these days.

The Strib has presumably been getting a boost from the Franken/Coleman debacle, but despite scanning every single challenged ballot, its web traffic is just not filling the ad gap.

Like most newspapers, the Star Tribune has experienced a sharp decline in print advertising. Its earnings before interest, taxes and debt payments were about $26 million in 2008, down from about $59 million in 2007 and $115 million in 2004.

Yikes.

The article also notes the recent purchase of the paper by private equity group,  Avista Capital Partners. Such fiscally-minded groups have generally not been as apt as family-owned companies to take a loss on their newsmaking, whilst balancing the books with other, more lucrative ventures.

In other bankruptcy-plagued news, the Chicago Tribune tried its damnedest this week to cut costs and produce a product someone wants to purchase.

In addition to last week’s re-redesign (which I’ll address in a minute), the Trib is now producing its single-copy paper as a tabloid, leaving its broadsheet to subscribing customers. [announcement and print version]

It’s unclear if readers will adopt/adapt to the latest Tribune change. After all, the Tribune’s truncated broadsheet isn’t some Age-sized behemoth. The change may also acclimate readers to the tabloid format, perhaps making them more likely to pick up the Sun Times, which is 25c less. Finally, given the new format, why would readers not pick up the Red Eye, which provides Tribune content in a tabloid format and is also free?

The Tribune presents these as positive changes, but - the aesthetic and cultural (elitist?!?)  impacts of a tabloid Tribune aside - the printing of two separate editions seems scattered. It makes the paper seem as though they’re scrambling, which, of course, they are.

I was going to say that a brave face, a la the NYT, might be a better approach. Then again, they may merely be trying anything to stay afloat at this point.

I do have some commendation for the Tribune, though. They redesigned their redesign this week (late last week?) and included a helpful pull out about it in the new edition. There was some PR-speak, but the Trib addressed some reader complaints head-on, saying of one aspect, ‘Yeah, we hated it too. It’s gone.’ (Not sure if that’s a direct quote.)

While there are still lots of things I hate about the redesign - such as the horrible Page 3, over-arting in most sections and the ed/op-ed in the back of the Business section - staying in communication with subscribers is the best possible way to keep your base.

Their (mostly) honest assessment of their work makes me more inclined to keep reading the Tribune than anything else they’ve done this year.

And that is what passes for an ‘attaboy’ in this media market.

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[Updated below]

Just a month ago, Detroit’s two dailies, the Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News, announced they would reduce home delivery to just three days a week. Except the mildly profitable Thursday, Friday and Sunday editions, non-delivery days will see truncated content.

This month’s Atlantic examines the plight of the NYT, and sketches out doomsday scenarios for the paper. The upshot? Though unlikely, the NYT’s paper edition could fold as soon as May 2009.

These cutbacks and death of the newspaper nightmares, however, pale in comparison to the actual and sudden death of Seattle’s Post-Intelligencer.

Reporters and newsroom staff were told to gather for an announcement midday on Friday where they were told that the P-I would be put up for sale by parent company, The Hearst Corp.

The chances of a buyer for the troubled paper are extremely low, and no one really sees a print edition remaining on the table if one did emerge.

For all intents and purposes, staff were told that the 146-year old paper will cease production within 60 days.

Many are discussing the move from paper editions to online editions, but it seems unlikely that web-based newspapers will be able to generate the amount of content (and more importantly, the quality of content) delivered by today’s newspapers.

The P-I’s article on its demise notes that a web edition of the paper would not be able to maintain the staff of the print edition. Hirschorn’s Atlantic article estimates that a web-only NYT would be forced to cut staff by 80%.

Outside of media professionals, few are making a fuss:

If you’re hearing few howls and seeing little rending of garments over the impending death of institutional, high-quality journalism, it’s because the public at large has been trained to undervalue journalists and journalism. The Internet has done much to encourage lazy news consumption, while virtually eradicating the meaningful distinctions among newspaper brands. The story from Beijing that pops up in my Google alert could have come from anywhere. As news resources are stretched and shared, it can often appear anywhere as well: a Los Angeles Times piece will show up in TheWashington Post, or vice versa.

That’s from the Hirschorn article, which I highly recommend. Also recommended is Eli Sanders’ evocative and sad posting on the P-I’s demise over at The Stranger.

There are many legitimate complaints about today’s newspapers (and god knows if you read this blog, you’ve heard many of them - and probably some illegitimate ones, too), but I would argue that they retain importance for our culture.

Without waxing overly romantic, newspapers provide us with a tangible, tactile record of our experiences. Holding the front page on November 5, 2008 is something no screen capture can replace. And while I get much of my news from the internet these days, reading the paper with a cup of coffee is a friendly, subtly comforting experience.

Newspapers have dug themselves some serious holes, many of which are destined to become graves in the current financial environment. The P-I is the first in what I fear will be a long line of papers to fold this year.

Best of luck to the staff and families of the P-I.

Update: The NYT’s communications dept takes issue with Hirschorn’s assessment.

Update II: Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan pushes back against the NYT’s letter, including some analysis of the NYT’s financial situation. Gawker also notes that the NYT’s online component would have to increase traffic sevenfold to survive without its print component. It already has the fifth highest traffic in the interwebs, so that kind of a jump seems unlikely, if nigh impossible.

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God knows why my blogging has fallen off as of late. I suppose it’s because I have nothing I need to actively avoid; everything I don’t want to do these days is merely a question of benign neglect.

Anyway, silly things have been happening.

Tribune declared bankruptcy. It might have helped not to to take the company private and to, you know, put out a product that doesn’t blow chunks (and here I’m talking about the flagship, Chicago Tribune).

Speaking of things that make people sick, Burger King is running a pretty deplorable ad campaign. Entitled ‘Whopper Virgins’, the campaign has rounded up people from north of Chiang Mai, Thailand to taste test Whoppers versus Big Macs.

Personally, I think it’s the music that does it for me. The simple exoticism of it all is what makes it the most offensive. “Let’s give the barbarians Western things and see what they do with them!”

Less offensive if they were American Whopper virgins? I suppose, but the whole thing is just a bad idea (not to mention that the idea of finding an American who has missed out on this culinary treasure seems unlikely).

The MN recount has ended, though there is still the issue of the contested ballots and the possible addition of a number of the initially rejected ballots. The search for 133 ballots from U of M’s Dinkytown has apparently been abandoned, which is a bad thing for Franken. Franken’s people have him ahead, but we’ll see.

But maybe it’s not such a good thing if Franken wins. Nate Silver has some ideas about a Senate 58 versus 59 that I think are pretty compelling.

And, yeah, everyone’s all like, ‘That’s about enough Robert Mugabe!” But… we won’t do anything about it until far, far too late.

So let’s hope that Cubs sale goes well. So far, it’s a blast…

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Iceland - which is standing on the brink of economic collapse - might have to ask the International Monetary Fund for assistance.

How is this described by the NYT?

Such a move, which would make this small island nation the first sovereign state to fall victim to the credit squeeze that began last year, would require it to accept harsh measures to restore fiscal and monetary stability.

Wait, I thought the IMF was a great organisation that helped brown countries that can’t manage their own money. I thought the IMF got them back on the correct road to financial stability so they couldn’t stuff it up with their corruption and other sundry brown-ness.

I had no idea that the IMF imposed draconian, neo-liberal, globalised ’solutions’ onto the countries helped.

Wow. It seems totally different when described in a European context. That’s so weird.

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My category ‘us impending doom’ will have to be changed to ‘world impending doom’ (or perhaps just ‘impending doom’ for simplicity), as the fallout from the US crisis goes global.

Despite the horror (like my savings losing about 30% of their value from just three months ago), it’s interesting to watch what is clearly a historical moment play out.

We know the narrative of The Great Depression in the US. Coolidge, Hoover. Black Thursday’s stock market crash. Breadlines. Tent cities.

What happened incrementally over a period of years gets lost to history in this narrative.

While we don’t yet know if the crisis will result in another Great Depression (the Greatest Depression?), the day-to-day workings of the crisis should give us a moment to reflect on the historical moment.

While the people of 1929 weren’t as instantaneously alerted to the movements of the markets and their currencies, some factors would have been similar. The sinking feeling as one reads the newspaper over the latest market drop. The discussions with friends - about topics you’ve never discussed before, like if you should move your money, look for a new job. The feeling of perhaps general helplessness in affecting change, whilst watching a series of individual movements create a larger, systemic change.

We didn’t go from the Crash to tent cities in one easy movement. It took day after day after day of things sometimes getting better, but more often moving towards an unknowable bottom.

Did some people save themselves with a risky, but wise transaction? Did some families plan to move their money from banks just a day too late?

Will the history books remember the day that Iceland’s economy threatened to collapse? Or could it become lost in what might be a series of national tragedies?

This all sounds rather dramatic (and, hopefully, unwarrantably pessimistic), but what I’m interested in the the opposite of that: the day to day, banal decisions that make up what becomes history.

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Palin’s widely anticipated stuff up on Supreme Court cases aired tonight.

The governor believes Roe v Wade should be left to the states because she’s ‘a Federalist’, but also believes there’s an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution.

I’ll leave that contradiction aside because I don’t care about Palin’s stance on abortion (and her verbal roulette in that clip probably doesn’t explain it that well anyway).

The anticipation had to do with Couric’s follow up. Palin notably couldn’t think of any other Supreme Court cases with which she disagreed - other than nameless ones that should be left to the states.

But as Jezebel commenter, lacey in ak, points out, at least one decision should have occurred to the governor. Perhaps Palin might have remembered that she filed an amicus brief in Exxon v Baker and then released a statement complaining about the decision.

That last part happened in June.

In other news, in the Senate today the bailout was strangely attached to the Paul Wellstone Mental Health Bill. Ezra Klein explains:

Tax bills have to originate in the House of Representatives. But the current thinking is that the Senate should pass a bailout bill to increase pressure on the House. So they needed to find some piece of legislation that had already passed the House but had not yet passed the Senate.

The 25 Nay votes are a strange mishmash of Senators from both sides of the aisle. It’s probably not often that Russ Feingold finds himself voting with Brownback, Sessions and Inhofe. (Also means that Feingold voted against the Wellstone bill, which must have killed him.) Dole made a bid to hang onto her Senate seat with her ‘no’ vote - who knows if it’ll work.

And, finally, the corruption trial of Senator Ted Sevens (R-AK) continues apace. Today, friend and renovator, Bill Allen, testified that while Stevens asked for an invoice, it was clear that Allen should never bill the senator for work done to ‘the chalet’.

Apparently Allen and Stevens were such close friends that they:

used to go to “boot camp” in the desert Southwest - where they would walk around, eating little and drinking only wine, “trying to get some pounds off.” [ADN via Mudflats]

I have no idea.

(Sounds pretty awesome though…)

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[Ed note - sorry, this was supposed to publish late last night and failed somehow. The miracle of technology.]

I’m not a big fan of Chicago Tribune columnist, Dennis Byrne. (If you’re googling yourself again, Mr Byrne - welcome back.)

His column today [Sept 30], however, made me chuckle rather than foam. This - in all seriousness - is the opening line:

The American public on Monday stuck it to the “knowledgeable and sophisticated” elites who warned that without the $700 billion federal financial bailout plan all hell would break loose.

Um, the ‘elite’ leading the charge for the bailout was none other than Mr Byrne’s president, George W. Bush.

Bryne complains about the choice that we, American taxpayers, are being forced to make:

We who hesitate are lost. On top of that, the public was asked to pick its poison immediately, without congressional hearings, extensive public debate or any other accouterments of a democratic republic. The public was required to accept the edict. No look before you leap.

Now… of what does this remind me? The insistence that we accept at face value what we are told despite what appears to be a reckless investment of capital into a risky adventure that no one has taken the time to think through… What could it be?

But, credit to Mr Bryne for both calling out Bush as ‘elitist’ and then railing against Speaker Pelosi for:

…let[ting] loose with a nasty partisan attack totally inappropriate for the quality of the debate. You had to see it to believe it: There was rational debate on the House floor, indeed in a spirit of bipartisanship, and then she comes along blaming President George W. Bush for everything.

To be fair, I don’t disagree with some of his points - the bailout plan was rather rushed; hopefully there will be a better plan sometime this week.

But what I adore about Byrne’s column is it appears totally devoid of irony (at least when it’s not coming from the Left).

Now that’s something you have to see to believe.

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Well, John McCain ’suspended’ his campaign and headed back to Washington… to the apparent dismay of everyone involved in trying to fix the US economic clusterfuck.

My favorite quote is actually from Bush (can you believe it?) who referred to the economy as ‘this sucker’.

Paulson got on his knees in front of Pelosi, and everyone more or less acknowledged that it was House Republicans (plus the largely silent McCain) who were stuffing the whole thing up:

Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the Senate banking committee, denounced the session as “a rescue plan for John McCain,” and proclaimed it a waste of precious hours that could have been spent negotiating.

But a top aide to Mr. Boehner said it was Democrats who had done the political posturing. The aide, Kevin Smith, said Republicans revolted, in part, because they were chafing at what they saw as an attempt by Democrats to jam through an agreement on the bailout early Thursday and deny Mr. McCain an opportunity to participate in the agreement.

Oh, please. Shove a Boehner in it, will you? McCain is on none of the economic/financial committees - there was no reason for him to be there.

Senator McCain will have plenty of time to air his views on just about anything he pleases should he show up tomorrow night for the debate.

And I think he will. 75% of Americans think the debate and the campaigns should continue - so methinks he’d have to have a crystal ball and monster cojones to flake out tomorrow.

Speaking of… well whatever - how craptastic were the Palin interviews? Ish. They were still sort of amusing, but in that awkward way.

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Great - my bank (Washington Mutual) has just been seized by the federal government and shoved into the (undoubtedly reluctant) hands of JP Morgan Chase, the only solvent bank in these United States.

Jonathan Golob of The Stranger has more, as well as some good advice.

Whilst WaMu deposits are covered up to $100,000 per person, it’s probably a good idea to print out your most recent statement. I’m taking screen captures - which will be totally usless when I have to fight for my $100,000.

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