NEW YORK — The Sun-Times Media Group, owner of the Chicago Sun-Times and dozens of suburban newspapers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Tuesday, making it the fifth newspaper publisher to seek protection from creditors in recent months.
The step, brought on by a precipitous decline in advertising revenue, means both of Chicago's major daily newspapers are operating under bankruptcy protection. Tribune Co., the parent company of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, filed for Chapter 11 in December.
The Sun-Times Media Group, which filed in a Delaware court, said it will continue to operate its print and online properties. The company listed $479 million in assets and $801 million in debt. The largest unsecured creditors are newsprint vendors. Three are owed more than $1 million each.
The company has retained Rothschild Inc. to help with a possible sale of assets.
"We firmly believe that filing for Chapter 11 protection and exploring the potential sale of assets or new investment in the company offers us the best opportunity to protect our respected media properties for the long-term," Jeremy Halbreich, the company's interim chief executive, said in a statement.
The Sun-Times, the company's flagship newspaper, had a paid weekday circulation of about 313,000 as of September, ranking it 17th in the U.S.
The dire financial condition of Chicago's newspapers mirrors the situation in Philadelphia, where the publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News filed for bankruptcy protection in February.
Other cities with two daily newspapers have seen the industry's crisis whittle away competition this year. The Rocky Mountain News closed, leaving The Denver Post, while the Seattle Post-Intelligencer went online only, leaving The Seattle Times without a mainstream daily print rival.
Now we have another example that should be required viewing for everyone who considers themselves a journalist. John Stewart had Jim Cramer on his show last night and gave a clinic on what a hard-hitting interview should look like:
Kudos, by the way, to Mr. Cramer for coming on the Daily Show and facing the music. He's obviously a smart man; let's hope he's sincere in offering to try and do a better job as a financial journalist.
It's sad that a show appearing on Comedy Central outshines mainstream media when it comes to practicing real journalism.
Wow! Nothing like being hoist by your own petard. Let's hope Cramer got the point. Funny(not really) that the boys on Morning Joe didn't see fit to show part of that this morning.
When it was announced that Katie Couric had won the Walter Cronkite award for her 2008 interview with Sarah Palin, I couldn't help thinking that the Barbara Walters and company on "The View" also should get some recognition; their visit with John McCain was an example of what forceful, fair-minded journalism should be. They basically schooled a lot of the "get me high level access" national journalists who spend too much time swallowing spin "on background" and lobbing softball questions on how the job is supposed to be done during a political campaign.
Now we have another example that should be required viewing for everyone who considers themselves a journalist. John Stewart had Jim Cramer on his show last night and gave a clinic on what a hard-hitting interview should look like:
Kudos, by the way, to Mr. Cramer for coming on the Daily Show and facing the music. He's obviously a smart man; let's hope he's sincere in offering to try and do a better job as a financial journalist.
It's sad that a show appearing on Comedy Central outshines mainstream media when it comes to practicing real journalism.
Thanks for pointing to this, I missed the show last night
When it was announced that Katie Couric had won the Walter Cronkite award for her 2008 interview with Sarah Palin, I couldn't help thinking that the Barbara Walters and company on "The View" also should get some recognition; their visit with John McCain was an example of what forceful, fair-minded journalism should be. They basically schooled a lot of the "get me high level access" national journalists who spend too much time swallowing spin "on background" and lobbing softball questions on how the job is supposed to be done during a political campaign.
Now we have another example that should be required viewing for everyone who considers themselves a journalist. John Stewart had Jim Cramer on his show last night and gave a clinic on what a hard-hitting interview should look like:
Kudos, by the way, to Mr. Cramer for coming on the Daily Show and facing the music. He's obviously a smart man; let's hope he's sincere in offering to try and do a better job as a financial journalist.
It's sad that a show appearing on Comedy Central outshines mainstream media when it comes to practicing real journalism.
Yow. What were those 2006 clips from? Didn't look like a broadcast.
When it was announced that Katie Couric had won the Walter Cronkite award for her 2008 interview with Sarah Palin, I couldn't help thinking that the Barbara Walters and company on "The View" also should get some recognition; their visit with John McCain was an example of what forceful, fair-minded journalism should be. They basically schooled a lot of the "get me high level access" national journalists who spend too much time swallowing spin "on background" and lobbing softball questions on how the job is supposed to be done during a political campaign.
Now we have another example that should be required viewing for everyone who considers themselves a journalist. John Stewart had Jim Cramer on his show last night and gave a clinic on what a hard-hitting interview should look like:
Kudos, by the way, to Mr. Cramer for coming on the Daily Show and facing the music. He's obviously a smart man; let's hope he's sincere in offering to try and do a better job as a financial journalist.
It's sad that a show appearing on Comedy Central outshines mainstream media when it comes to practicing real journalism.
The history of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer stretches back more than two decades before Washington became a state, but after 146 years of publishing, the paper is expected to print its last issue next week, perhaps surviving only in a much smaller online version.
And it is not alone. The Rocky Mountain News shut down two weeks ago, and The Tucson Citizen is expected to fold next week.
At least Denver, Seattle and Tucson still have daily papers. But now, some economists and newspaper executives say it is only a matter of time — and probably not much time at that — before some major American city is left with no prominent local newspaper at all.
“In 2009 and 2010, all the two-newspaper markets will become one-newspaper markets, and you will start to see one-newspaper markets become no-newspaper markets,” said Mike Simonton, a senior director at Fitch Ratings, who analyzes the industry.
Many critics and competitors of newspapers — including online start-ups that have been hailed as the future of journalism — say that no one should welcome their demise.
“It would be a terrible thing for any city for the dominant paper to go under, because that’s who does the bulk of the serious reporting,” said Joel Kramer, former editor and publisher of The Star Tribune and now the editor and chief executive of MinnPost .com, an online news organization in Minneapolis.
“Places like us would spring up,” he said, “but they wouldn’t be nearly as big. We can tweak the papers and compete with them, but we can’t replace them.”
No one knows which will be the first big city without a large paper, but there are candidates all across the country. The Hearst Corporation, which owns The Post-Intelligencer, has also threatened to close The San Francisco Chronicle, which lost more than $1 million a week last year, unless it can wring significant savings from the operation.
In a tentative deal reached Tuesday night, the California Media Workers Guild agreed to less vacation time, longer workweeks and more flexibility for The Chronicle to make layoffs without regard to seniority. Union officials say they have been told to expect the elimination of at least 150 guild jobs, almost one-third of the total, and management is still trying to negotiate concessions from the Teamsters union.
Advance Publications said last fall that it might shut down The Star-Ledger, the dominant paper in New Jersey, but a set of cutbacks and union concessions kept the paper alive in much-downsized form.
The top papers in many markets, like The Star Tribune in Minneapolis, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New Haven Register, belong to companies that have gone into bankruptcy in the last three months.
The owners insist they have no intention of closing publications, but the management making those assurances may not be in charge when the companies emerge from reorganization.
Other publishers, like the Seattle Times Company and MediaNews Group, owner of The Denver Post, The San Jose Mercury News and The Detroit News, are seen as being at risk of bankruptcy. Many newspapers — from The Miami Herald to The Chicago Sun-Times — have been put up for sale, with no buyers on the horizon.
Ad revenue, the industry’s lifeblood, has dropped about 25 percent in the last two years (by comparison, automotive revenue for Detroit’s Big Three fell about 15 percent during the same period, although it has accelerated recently), and that slide, accelerated by the recession, shows no sign of leveling off in 2009.
Web sites like Craigslist have been to classified ads what the internal combustion engine was to horse-drawn buggies. The stock prices of most newspaper publishers have dropped more than 90 percent from their peaks.
And magnifying the problem, for many chains, is a heavy burden of debt that they took on, mostly in a spree of buying other newspapers from 2005 to 2007, just before the bottom dropped out of the business.
The Tribune Company, for instance, owner of The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and other papers, filed for bankruptcy in December, largely because of its debt load. The reality is that even though the economic climate is hard for newspapers, without their debt payments the publishers in bankruptcy would still make money, as do most newspapers around the country.
But profits are shrinking fast; taken together, major chains had an operating profit margin of about 10 percent in 2008, down from more than 20 percent as recently as 2004, according to research by John Morton, an independent analyst.
The recent closures and threatened closures point to an ominous new trend. For The Chronicle, The Rocky, The Star-Ledger, The Citizen and others, debt was never the problem and they belonged to solvent companies, but still they have been losing money.
Analysts say that many other major papers have also slid into red ink recently, including The Washington Post and The Boston Globe (which is owned by The New York Times Company).
The steady trickle of downsizing that sapped American papers for almost a decade has become a flood in the last few years. The Los Angeles Times still has one of the largest news staffs in the country, about 600 people, but it was twice as big in the late 1990s. The Washington Post had a newsroom of more than 900 six years ago, and has fewer than 700 now. The Gannett Company, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, eliminated more than 8,300 jobs in 2007 and 2008, or 22 percent of the total.
On Wednesday, The Miami Herald, once the celebrated flagship of the Knight Ridder chain, said it would trim an additional 19 percent of its already diminished staff.
Nearly every large paper in the country prints fewer pages and fewer articles, and many have eliminated entire sections. Bureaus in foreign capitals and even Washington have closed, and papers have jettisoned film criticism, book reviews and coverage of local news outside their home markets.
Many papers are sharing coverage with former competitors in an effort to save money. (The New York Times has also suffered from declining revenue, but has been able to avoid serious newsroom cuts so far.)
For more than two centuries, newspapers have been the indispensable source of public information and a check on the abuses of government and other powerful interests. And they still reach a vast and growing audience. Daily print circulation has dropped from a peak of 62 million two decades ago to around 49 million, and online readership has risen faster, to almost 75 million Americans and 3.7 billion page views in January, according to Nielsen Online.
But no one yet has unlocked the puzzle of supporting a large newsroom purely on digital revenue, a fact that may presage an era of news organizations that are smaller, weaker and less able to fulfill their traditional function as the nation’s watchdog.
“I can’t imagine what civil society would be like,” said Buzz Woolley, a wealthy San Diego businessman who has been a vocal critic of the paper there, The Union-Tribune, and the primary backer of an Internet news site, VoiceofSanDiego.org. “I don’t want to imagine it. A huge amount of information would just never get out.”
Not everyone agrees. The death of a newspaper should result in an explosion of much smaller news sources online, producing at least as much coverage as the paper did, says Jeff Jarvis, director of interactive journalism at the City University of New York’s graduate journalism school. Those sources might be less polished, Mr. Jarvis said, but they would be competitive, ending the monopolies many newspapers have long enjoyed.
A number of money-losing papers should “have the guts to shut down print and go online,” he said. “It will have to be a much smaller product, but that’s where we’re headed anyway.”
Industry executives who once scoffed at the idea of an Internet-only product now concede that they are probably headed in that direction, but the consensus is that newspapers going all digital would become drastically smaller news sources for the foreseeable future.
Until then, papers have turned to measures that would have been unthinkable just a year or two ago, including many that are weighing whether to begin charging readers for online access, as The Wall Street Journal does.
Starting March 30, the major Detroit papers, The Free Press and The News, will deliver to subscribers only three days a week, to save money on printing and trucking. The Christian Science Monitor will print its last daily edition on March 27, becoming primarily an online operation, with a printed weekly paper.
“It’s not so much that everyone has a great plan,” said John Yemma, editor of The Monitor. Rather, he said, “everybody is so desperate, they’re looking at every possibility.”
There is a sea change underway in the American news business. I can get used to getting my daily news electronically. I will not get used to the fall-off in content and quality that was once the hallmark of professional journalists. See the post before this for a succinct analysis of what is wrong with this change.
There are two daily newspapers in my community. One has filed for Chapter 11 and the other has reduced content so much, especially Monday - Wednesday, that it's barely worth reading. This reduction in available local news will not be compensated for by local TV which gives us the latest in emergency services activity and human interest stories and certainly not by the blogosphere which is like reading a newspaper consisting entirely of op-ed pieces.
(Reuters) - Hearst Corp, one of the largest U.S. publishers, has offered some of its Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I) staff work in an online-only version of the paper, amidst speculation that the newspaper's print edition may be shutting down, according to media reports.
Two reporters said they received "provisional offers" and were told that they will be given formal offers if the website gets the go-ahead from Hearst's senior management, P-I reported on its website late on Thursday.
Hector Castro, a general assignment reporter, told P-I that he turned down the offer.
According to Castro, Hearst executive Ken Riddick said the publisher plans to start the site the day after the paper quits publishing. The Wall Street Journal and New York Times also reported that the Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper is advancing plans to turn into an online-only publication.
It is unclear how many employees would remain if the paper becomes a standalone website, the Journal said.
No one at Hearst was immediately available for comment.
Hearst said on January 9 that it would try to sell P-I and might shut down the newspaper or pursue other options, including publishing the newspaper only on the Internet, if it could not find a buyer in 60 days.
No buyer has emerged and an announcement is expected next week, the New York Times said.
A number of high-profile U.S. newspaper chains have filed for bankruptcy or taken steps to preserve their bottom lines by cutting costs.
Last week, media conglomerate EW Scripps Co closed the Rocky Mountain News after failing to lure qualified buyers.
News is expensive to gather, and you get what you pay for
By Stephen Hume, Special to the SunMarch 3, 2009
Denver's venerable Rocky Mountain News ceased 150 years of publication last Friday. The San Francisco Chronicle, a newspaper older than Canada, joined the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on death row.
Meanwhile, blogosphere chatter responds with gleefully patronizing pronouncements on how the "old media" are toast, about to join the pterodactyl. The "new media" leads the way to a promised land of free information and citizen journalism.
Permit a few observations from the tar pits. First, the old media are the new media. The Vancouver Sun's website, for example, generated 10 million page views in February — more than 357,000 a day. Our blogs attract more than 500,000 page views per month and have become — let me quote from the boss's last memo — "a vital tool to gather and distribute content." And all these numbers trend upward.
Second, it's not about the medium, it's about the content.
Think milk. In my day, I've bought milk in bottles delivered to my doorstep every morning, at the supermarket in plastic bags that fit into reusable jugs, at my local gas station in waxed cardboard cartons, at the all-night convenience store in plastic blimps, in cans and in tetra packs. The medium of delivery may change but milk is milk and I don't expect to get it free because the package changes. The price I pay for milk enables farmer and cow to produce it.
Journalism is the content cow. News organizations are the farmer. Both represent input costs recouped by charging for the output.
The delusion that input costs can be de-linked from output is the Achilles heel of so-called "new media" organizations like Google.
Aggregating and repackaging content that somebody else has paid to produce, distributing it at no charge but using the traffic it generates to sell advertising is a nice deal for them, but parasitism is not sustainable over the long run. Every time a newspaper like the Rocky Mountain News goes down, it means one less cow in the dairy herd, and overall content diminishes.
Third, cream rises regardless of the shape of the container. What you get from trained journalists, as opposed to amateur bloggers, is assurance of quality and public accountability.
Yes, journalists are imperfect. News media have flaws. Cowardice is not generally one of them. If you don't like what I have to say or you think I've got it wrong, you know who I am and where to find me. As long as the blogosphere embraces a culture of anonymous comment it amplifies evasion of accountability — the corrosive opposite of what journalism seeks.
Fourth, news is expensive to gather, and ultimately you get what you pay for. If you believe individual citizens have the resources to generate the quantity and quality of news to which citizens of a functioning democracy are now accustomed, you are living in dreamland.
Besides that, do you want to leave the news to wealthy dilettantes or those with vested interests — spin doctors, marketers and propagandists?
Fifth, journalists can fulfil their role as high-profile watchdogs in a democracy because they have organizations with clout and deep pockets behind them. I am empowered to write from my conscience in part because my employer defends my right to do so. Citizen journalists are vulnerable journalists.
So I rue the fate of the Rocky Mountain News. After 43 years in journalism, my race is just about run. It's not out of self-interest that I voice my concern.
I fear that if the much-reviled "old media" vanishes, it will be the harbinger not of a golden age of free information but of fewer, less reliable and more easily manipulated sources.
The currency of the medieval village was rumour, lies and slander, which is where democracy could return if news-gathering organizations, magazines and book publishers that permit writers to make a living don't quickly find a workable model for generating adequate revenue in the freeloading culture of the blogosphere.
How often do you find Media Matters and the Media Research Center in agreement? I think the MSM should try to get people who actually have subject matter knowledge to appear on these talking head shows, and I doubt it would be that hard for them to get knowledgeable and well spoken economists to appear on these shows. Seriously, how much can Dick Morris and Karl Rove know about actual economic policy?
Covering stuff that happened a long time ago, but it certainly seems hypocritical for him to criticize others for things he has done in the past. I had a lot of respect and admiration for Moyers due to his coverage of the MSM's herd mentality and pathetic unwillingness to do their job in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. This lessens it significantly.
Death by moron Has anonymous commenting destroyed meaningful online dialogue? Oh, hell yes
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist Friday, February 13, 2009
Here is my strange confession: I miss my hate mail.
It's an odd thing to admit, but in a perverse sort of way, I actually miss the wretched river, the rancid flow of puerile, nasty, sickeningly homophobic email I used to receive on a regular basis from the ultra-right and the Christian right and the Mormon right and the Bush-impaired whenever I would post a friendly, pointed column full of tangy liberal attitude. Which is, of course, all of them.
Oh, I miss all the lovely and positive email too, which outpaced the nasty stuff by a huge margin. But the hate mail was (and still is, what dribble I now get) very special indeed, great fodder for live readings, for the reaction of horrified disbelief of anyone who saw it, for the charming reminder of just how ugly and violent and grammatically challenged the human animal can be.
(FYI: the best of the worst of my hate mail — about 50 truly stunning examples — will be published in my upcoming mega-compendium of a book, "The Daring Spectacle." Get on my personal newsletter to find out more).
So, what happened? Where has all the hate gone? One easy explanation: the merciful EoB, the End of Bush. The extraordinary failure of the neocon mindset means that the most troglodytic of the haters have now retreated to the Caves of Ignorance to lick their wounds and fellate each other in assorted airport restrooms. Good news all around.
But that's only a small part of it. Something else is afoot, something more nefarious and curious and, well, downright sad. Fact is, despite the steadily increasing traffic to my column over the years, I now get far less email overall than I used to, either positive or negative.
You already know the reason: Anonymous commenting. Those semi-public forums like the one you see right down there, at the bottom of this very column, those "community" discussion areas borne of the blogosphere and spread to every media site imaginable, from SFGate to the New York Times to YouTube to Knitting World. Indeed, they're one of the most popular, widely used innovations of the Web 2.0 revolution, and they've dramatically transformed public communication and conversation.
For the worse. Oh, for the far, far worse.
I didn't always think so. I was, for years, an enthusiastic advocate of the egalitarian, free-for-all, let's-level-the-playing field aspect of the Web. More voices! More feedback! More participation! Bring it on!
Not anymore. As I've mentioned before, I now tend to agree with "West Wing" creator Aaron Sorkin, who said, "Nothing has done more to make us dumber or meaner than the anonymity of the Internet." Hyperbole? Not by much.
But let's spin backwards for just a moment, to a time before blogs and Facebook and the Web 2.0 socialgasm. There was this wonderful killer app called email. There was a concomitant killer innovation, called HTML links. As every newspaper hastily rushed its content online, suddenly reporters and columnists and hardcore news jockeys alike began seeing their bylines turned into a sweet, baffling little "mailto" link.
And lo, a revolution was born.
For the first time in more than a century, a fundamental shift occurred in the sacred — but formerly quite cold and detached — writer/reader relationship. Suddenly, readers could respond instantly to a newspaper piece, to the journalist in question, and authors could instantly know the effect and accuracy of their words. No more hand-written, snail-mailed Letters to the Editor that might (but probably won't) get published two or three weeks later. The feedback loop was made instant, and enormously compelling. It was lauded as a new era, one that would change the newspaper biz forever.
Or maybe not. Because now, that once-revolutionary connection, all those vibrant reader interactions I once cherished, have changed again. Or more accurately, have devolved dramatically.
That sacred relationship is no longer the slightest bit sacred. If you've ever spent much time in the comment boards of this or any major media site (or, of course, any popular blog), you already know: Anonymity tends to bring out the absolute worst in people, the meanest and nastiest and least considerate. Something about not having to reveal who you really are caters to the basest, most unkind instincts of the human animal. Go figure.
Thoughtful discourse? Humorous insight? Sometimes. But mostly it's a tactless spectator sport. It's about being seen, about out-snarking the previous poster, about trying to top one another in the quest for... I'm not sure what. A tiny shot of notoriety? The feeling of being "published" on a major media site? Or is it the thrill that can only come from hurling a verbal Molotov at the Great Satan of "corporate media," and then running away like a snorting 8-year-old? All of the above?
Do not misunderstand: It is far from all bad, and many intelligent, eloquent, hilarious people still add their voices to comment boards across the Interwebs, including ours. Hell, I still get terrific pleasure from reading some of the comments on a few of my favorite blogs, along with rich information, morbid humor, even new column ideas and unusual angles I never thought of. What's more, some of the larger media sites still have enough resources (read: overworked, as-of-yet-not-laid-off staffers) to moderate their forums and keep the verbal chyme to a minimum.
But the coherent voices are, by and large, increasingly drowned out by the nasty, the puerile, the inane, to the point where, unless you're in the mood to have your positive mood ruined and your belief in the inherent goodness of humanity stomped like a rainbow flag in the Mormon church, there's almost no point in trying to sift through it anymore. The relentless nastiness is, quite literally, sickening.
Solutions? That's easy.
One is to block it all out. Install and employ something like the fabulously named StupidFilter (which I wrote about last year), an elaborate algorithm that scans through and removes all insidiously childish, dumb, or otherwise moronic language from a given chat forum. Hey, it could work. The StupidFilter Project is, apparently, still quite real, though I've no idea if it will ever catch on. We can only hope.
There is, of course, another solution, and it's far simpler and more elegant and it would fix the entire problem in an instant.
It is this: Reveal yourself. Anyone who wishes to post a public comment must also post his/her real name, an actual email address, maybe even a nice little headshot. You want to participate and add to the conversation, criticize and parry and thrust? Great. Let's see who you are, honest and true. Fire it up. Debate. Engage. Let's create a real community.
No more hiding. No more anonymous cowardice. No more hit-and-run verbal spitwads and avoiding responsibility for what you say. Hey, writers and journalists have been doing it for years, posting our names and email addresses and even photos for the entire world to see. If Web 2.0 means we're now all in this public sphere together, shouldn't I know exactly who you are, too? Shouldn't everyone?
Will it happen? Not a chance. Truth is, anonymous forums still drive a ton of desperately needed traffic to every media joint that offers them, including this one. Until the novelty of anon posting dies out — which I'm fairly convinced it will, relatively soon — commerce wins. In a land where click-throughs are king, quantity still trumps quality, every time. Don't you just hate that? I look forward to your emails.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate.com. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. To get on Mark's personal (i.e.; non-Chronicle) mailing list (appearances, books, readings, blogs, yoga and more), please click here and remove two more.
Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive page. He's also on Face
A brief story reminding us of one of the many areas in which the Obama administration cannot possibly do a worse job than the Bush 43 administration did: respecting the principle of transparency and openness in government by dealing fairly and responsibly with the media.
". . . for the past eight years this White House has mainly given the Fourth Estate and the First Amendment the finger."
