Wednesday May 30, 2012 News Updates
Times-Pic plan step beyond Advance's earlier strategies
The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune and three Alabama dailies also published by Advance Publications will move to three-day-a-week publication this fall as the publisher expands the digital-centric strategy it launched earlier this year in Michigan.
In addition to the 158,000-subscriber Times-Picayune, the move affects the Press-Register in Mobile, Huntsville Times and Birmingham News.
All four papers will be printed on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays and placed under the management of new entities while a separate firm, Advance Central Services, will oversee printing, distribution and other operations.
The reduction in print days will also be accompanied by an undisclosed number of job cuts across the four properties.
The initiative is similar to what Advance did in Michigan, where it launched a new entity, MLive, to oversee the newsgathering operations of the Kalamazoo Gazette, Jackson Citizen-Patriot, Grand Rapids Press and Muskegon Chronicle. The papers also cut back home delivery to three days a week, but they continue to be printed each day for newsstand and retail distribution.
That won't be the case for The Times-Picayune or the three Alabama dailies, whose printing schedules will be closer to AnnArbor.com, the twice-weekly print supplement to annarbor.com that Advance launched in 2009 after folding The Ann Arbor News.
"We did not make these changes out of desperation - we have a very strong operation in New Orleans - but we face tremendous challenges in terms of both revenue and the 24-hour news cycle," Steven Newhouse, chairman of Advance.net, the corporate digital arm of Advance Publications, told The New York Times about the initiative. "We needed to make a plan for the long-term and not sit still for a spiral of losses and cutbacks."
Still unknown is the fate of The Times-Picayune printing plant, an aging facility near downtown that houses the paper's Goss Headliner presses. The plant was due for an upgrade, with The Times-Picayune switching out its film-based prepress for CTP.
MLive, meantime, said it made progress since shifting to the new strategy, although MLive President Dan Gaydou told The Grand Rapids Press that, "Some processes still need to be straightened out."
The interview with the paper followed the May release of the Audit Bureau of Circulations' spring Fas-Fax and Audience-Fax circulation reports, which found that online traffic at the four MLive papers increased even as daily print circ declined anywhere from 2.7 percent to 11.8 percent. Sunday circ declines ranged from 2.1 percent to 5.4 percent, with The Press dropping the furthest.
Gaydou said the papers were going to lose circ regardless of the change in distribution. But the drops, he told The Press, were not "to the degree people might have thought."
NAA blisters proposed USPS, Valassis pact
The Newspaper Association of America asked the U.S. Postal Regulatory Commission to reject a proposed agreement between the U.S. Postal Service and Valassis that would give the direct-mail company a discounted rate under which it could send its packages of ad circulars.
"Since the days of Ben Franklin - the first U.S. postmaster general as well as a newspaper publisher - there have been strong ties between the U.S. Postal Service and America's newspapers," said Caroline H. Little, NAA president and CEO, in a statement. "But newspaper publishers are shocked by the specifics of this special deal for the country's largest direct-mail company. The proposal to provide steep discounts to a major newspaper competitor is a dagger aimed at the financial health of newspapers."
The proposed negotiated agreement calls for Valassis to receive discounts ranging from 22 percent to 36 percent on "new" advertising mail pieces beyond what it sends now.
Specifically, NAA argued that if the USPRC approves the negotiated agreement, it would:
•Cause unreasonable harm to the marketplace by granting Valassis unprecedented rebates and other terms that would enable and subsidize a direct attack on local newspaper advertising throughout the nation.
•Result in a net financial loss to the Postal Service by driving substantial volumes of newspaper mailings out of the mail system to lower-cost delivery services.
•Be tailored so narrowly as effectively to be unavailable to any mailer other than Valassis.
•Confer an unreasonable rate discrimination in favor of Valassis - granting this one national mailer rebates as high as 36 percent, and a rate advantage up to 72 percent lower compared with rates paid by other mailers in the system, such as local newspaper companies.
The PRC is expected to issue its ruling in the next few weeks.
Report: 14% of N.A. mill capacity at risk of closure
More than 14 percent of newsprint manufacturing capacity in North America could be shuttered by 2017, according to a report issued by a forest product industry analyst.
RISI, in its Global Newsprint Risk of Closure Study, said that there is a "high risk" of closure for more than 2 million tons of the 7 million total tons of North American newsprint manufacturing capacity over the next five years.
"Declines in newspaper circulation in developed economies over the last decade, due largely to media tablets and mobile devices, will continue over the next several years," said John Maine, RISI's vice president of graphic paper.
RISI said that North American and European mills most reliant on recycled newsprint as a fiber source are at the greatest risk of closure.
Canadian pub Postmedia cutting editions
Canadian newspaper publisher Postmedia Network Inc. said it would eliminate Sunday newspapers of the Calgary Herald, Ottawa Citizen and Edmonton Journal and temporarily suspend Monday editions of the National Post for the summer.
The financially pressured publisher is also eliminating jobs at the Montreal Gazette and making other changes, according to multiple reports.
Postmedia owns 11 major daily newspapers and several community newspapers. The company was formed two years ago from CanWest's former newspaper unit.
Analysts: Globe May be For Sale Soon
The blow-by-blow details of the ouster of top New York Times honcho Janet Robinson for defending The Boston Globe - reported in a behind-the-scenes expose in this week's New York magazine - raise the odds that the local broadsheet may soon be put up for sale, media analysts said.
"It does make it sound more likely. I did have a sense from covering the company for a number of years that Janet Robinson had a warm spot for the Globe," said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst for The Poynter Institute.
