Tucson Citizen closes

The Tucson Citizen likely published its last issue on May 16. It is the third Joint Operating Agreement to go down to just one paper this year, following Denver and Seattle.

There is a legal challenge by the state's attorney general and Gannett says the Citizen will become an online home for opinion and commentary.

More on the Citizen and JOAs: http://bit.ly/19CsUJ

What Not to Say to People Who Lost Their Jobs

DiversityInc.com describes four things to NOT say to people who have lost their job.

We might say these things to be supportive, but they might not be received that way.

They are:

1. "Why didn't you …" or "You should have …"

2. "You have lots of experience. You'll be fine."

3. "It's happening to everyone. It's not the end of the world."

4. "Hey, at least you can collect unemployment."

Want to know what's wrong with saying those things? Go to the article on DiversityInc.com.

National Buy a Newspaper Day

Chris Freiberg, a police and military reporter at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in Alaska, has declared National Buy a Newspaper Day on Facebook.

He wrote in an e-mail Thursday, "I've been sitting here for the past few days reading about all the doom and gloom in the industry. I felt the need to do something about it, and declaring a 'buy a newspaper day' to try and organize journalists and readers alike seemed to be the best thing that I, as one lowly newspaper reporter, could do."

He set up his Facebook group just before midnight (Alaska time) on Monday.

His e-mail said, "Being trained in new media, I understand that eventually most of what's found in a daily newspaper will make its way online (along with things like videos, slideshows and blogs). However, as I wrote on the event page, my concern is that as far in debt as the big syndicates are, and given the current economic crisis, many papers might just close down completely before they're able to make the transition."

By midnight Thursday, Eastern Time, Freiberg's Facebook group had attracted 2,400 guests and his friend had launched a Web page, http://www.buyanewspaperday.com/.

Freiberg, a 2007 graduate of Indiana University, wrote in an e-mail, "The main thing is that I want this to be a movement that starts on Facebook, and not just a Facebook movement that people see on here,
say that they'll join, and that's the end of it."

On the Facebook group page, Freiberg wrote, "The fact of the matter is that the biggest chains are deeply in debt. Major cities that have had at least two daily newspapers for more than a century, such as Chicago and Seattle, might soon find themselves with only one source of news. Other papers, such as those in Detroit are no longer providing daily home delivery. If things get really bad, some experts say that some small towns might not have any paper by 2010. ...

"So for one day, Monday, Feb. 2, 2009, please make it a point to pick up your local newspaper (reading it online doesn't count)."

So, National Buy a Newspaper Day will be on Groundhog Day. Let's hope Freiberg's newspaper buyers don't see their shadows and head back underground for six more weeks of winter.

Car Companies Let the Young Speak

With the auto show tuning up in Detroit this week, a recent story from my favorite newspaper, the Detroit Free Press, seems so appropriate.

One of the cars being unveiled this week is the redesigned 2010 Buick LaCrosse. According to J.D. Power and Associated, the averageage of Buick buyers in the United States last year was 63. Yes, you read that correctly.

Tim Higgins, the young guy on the Freep's auto team, reported oin the designers who overhauled the LaCrosse. They are young, too. In their 20s and 30s. The article is striking because GM's solution to an aging clientele is exactly what a lot of newspaper companies should be trying. If you want to expand and extend your market, give people who are in that demographic a bigger vote.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Higgins' article. But I have substituted a couple words -- in bold. See what you think.

"The company turned to a collection of some of the newspaper's youngest lead designers in hopes of injecting a more youthful voice into the newspaper.

...

" 'We wanted people like us to be able to go, "That's a cool newspaper. I've got to look at that," ' said Justin Thompson, 33, a lead exterior designer on the newspaper.

"For the designers, the newspaper was a unique opportunity, since many designers their ages rarely get the opportunity to take leadership roles in such a project, company officials said.

" 'It's an opportunity to make your mark on a brand that's re-emerging from a design point of view,' Thompson said."

For years, I worked to get more youthful ideas into the Free Press. A lot of editors supported that. But not all. At one point, shortly after hiring someone in their 20s, I was trying to bring in a second person, also in their 20s. An editor objected: "Aren't we hiring an awful lot of young people?" Right. Two out of what was then 300? I don't think so. As the 300 raised our average age a year at a time, we would hardly see a dent with 10 young people, let alone two.

The second young person was hired, but that's not even half the issue. Newspapers need to ask them what they think.

I am not in favor of kicking all the Buick drivers out of the executive garage. We need experience, too. But let's get the 60-year-olds and the 30-year-olds to sit down together and work on some solutions.

Higgins' original article is here.

Pew: Online Overtakes Newspapers as Source

In the closing days of 2008, the Pew Charitable Trusts reports that more Americans now get their news from online news sources than from printed products.

Television remains No. 1, except for people under 30, where TV and the internet are tied.

The change is happening rapidly. Pew reports, "Currently, 40% say they get most of their news about national and international issues from the internet, up from just 24% in September 2007. For the first time in a Pew survey, more people say they rely mostly on the internet for news than cite newspapers (35%). Television continues to be cited most frequently as a main source for national and international news, at 70%."

The survey does not get into how much of that online news has been reported and posted by traditional newspaper companies.

Jobs Down, Interest in them Up

If you take a look at the trend line for how often the word Jobs shows up in Google searches over the past several years, you'll see a pattern.

Interest seems to taper off in the last three months of the year, hitting its lowest point around the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas -- and then climbing sharply as people being working on those New Year's resolutions to get into new jobs.

It's no wonder people suspend their job searches around the holidays. They're busy, employers are busy and budget years are ending. But, with the new year, hope for new budgets and a renewed sense of urgency, we start looking again.

That all makes sense.

That's not happening this year.

The trend has not fallen off for 2008, as it did in past years. But that doesn't necessarily mean people are looking for new jobs, either.

Two of the top stories for hits in this last quarter of the year have been an Associated Press story about employers cutting jobs harder than they have in the past five years and another AP story that the Pittsburg Post-Gazette headlined "Vanishing jobs, stressed consumers feed downturn."

If there is a lesson in any of this, it is that people are concerned about the job market -- and that they will probably have a lot of competition when we hit the first of the new year.

Get that application ready.

Black and White, not Green all Over

As if newspapers don't have enough to worry about ...

On the Huffington Post, Henry Blodget wrote that young people, bored by what newspapers are doing, may one day get all worked up about it, and not in a good way.

Blodgett postulates that, "As 'green business' practices take hold, a new generation of consumers will come to view the newspaper industry as a horrifically wasteful polluter that eats forests, gobbles fuel and electricity, and farts untold amounts of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere -- all to deliver information that might have been interesting yesterday."

I've been thinking about that for the past couple weeks and think his prediction has merit. While the level of  disdain is unpredictable, the conclusion seems to be unavoidable, even as much as publishers would like to eliminate the costs of paper and fuel.

Any paper product, or physical product, can be in for the same criticism, but the short shelf life of the newspaper, its low cost and easy availability seem to make it a likely target.

Shortly after Blodget's prediction appeared, I was in Washington, DoC., getting around the city on the Metro. I boarded at the Cleveland Park stop, man pushed a copy of the free Washington Express tabloid into my hands and I carried it with me for about four stops to the Metro Center stop.

There, I got off the train and fell in with a few of commuters who trooped past a trash receptacle. Several shoved still-new copies of the Express into it. I snapped a picture. Their copies had been "in circulation" for 15 minutes. That kind of throwaway news consumption could one day lead to subway stop activism.

Newspapers can get busy as soon as tomorrow to engage this issue on the field of public opinion.

* I frequently see "Please recycle" printed on items that I am not sure can be recycled. Maybe it's just a slogan to them. Newspapers can be recycled, should be recycled and are an important segment of the recycling game. When newspaper consumption is reduced, recyclers are hurt. Their business can be jeopardized by a lack of materials or a mix that is increasingly harder to break down. Newspapers can start telling that story.

* For years no, newspaper have also helped out recyclers by buying a lot of their product. Newspapers would be doing themselves a favor by stating, on the front page, how much of the paper's content is recycled. Again, let's tell how important the newspapers are to keeoing recycling operations humming.

* I have a harder time with arguments about fuel usage. And publishers would just as soon get out from under those costs/ Are their stories to tell about how newspaper drivers plan their routes to conserve fuel or whether the newspaper is an efficient way to deliver? If there is, let's read it.

* Finally, and quite aside from how newspapers are printed and delivered, newspapers can use their editorial pages to champion green causes and their news pages to describe environmental issues and efforts.

Maternal Profiling

ABC News has posted a piece about maternal profiling -- the practice by some employers of asking whether female job candidates have children. Several have said that as soon as that information was out in the open, their employment prospects plummeted.

Twenty-two states and Puerto Rico forbid questions about parenthood, but other states allow it, sometimes with the proviso that it be asked of male and female candidates alike. While it is legal in some states to ask about marital or family status, it is not legal to discriminate on the basis of those factors.

The ABC News article interviewed women who felt they lost job opportunities when their status came to light, but it said that proving that can be difficult.

Coverage by ABC News is no doubt welcome by Kiki Peppard, who has been lobbying for stronger anti-profiling laws and who has been critical of the mainstream media for not taking up the issue.

Flat is the New Up

I have heard people say not even half jokingly, that flat is the new up in newspaper circulation figures.

No decline means you're doing pretty good. And circulation growth, well, dream on.

When the American Society of Newspaper Editors reported its newsroom census figures a little more than a week ago, they showed that newspaper editorial staffs had declined by 2,400 positions in 2007, but that online positions in newsrooms had stayed the same, around 1,700. The census is intended to track how well the nation's newsrooms reflect the diversity of the population, and there was not much to cheer about there, either, as the country keeps getting more diverse but newsrooms don't.

The survey does not disclose how many people saved their jobs by moving onto their newspapers' online staffs. Certainly the census should encourage people to apply for new-media openings.

SPJ's Wall of Shame

I spoke at an SPJ regional recently at the University of South Carolina, and the students gave me a little poster about liars, plagiarists and other cheats who have dishonored journalism. At the bottom it admonishes me, "Don't be the next."

Well, that's nice.

You know many of the names on the poster, so I won't repeat them.

The thing I found interesting was the frequency with which people made the list:

2005, 8
2004, 2
2003, 2
2002, 1
1999, 1
1998, 2
1995, 1
1981, 1

It's one of those puzzles: Are we getting more corrupt, or are we just getting better at finding it? Or, maybe the list, journalism-style, keyed on what was newest.

The poster reminded me that the Web makes it easier than ever for people to plagiarize -- and easier than ever for it to be detected.