WTF Chicago Tribune?! Zell cutting into bone now

I have to say, I can't agree with you deskdude... Trib's expanded boxes are weak. REAL WEAK. No walks, strikeouts for hitters, no number of pitches for pitchers, the pitching form is smaller than many papers run. And their roundup just echoes the box scores -- a roundup should complement the box score, not repeat the same info like Ryan Howard had three RBI. (Trib actually would write RBIs... Like it was 1966). And they pick photos with 5 people in it to fit in a 16 pica hole. It's worse than the Fla. papers used to build, I know that.

 

and the very first reader comment:

 

Why is writing it as RBIs a sign of a 1966 mentality?

 

Now that it's been mentioned, I remember using RBI for years:
"Bench had five RBI and the Reds..."
But then somebody told me: "We're now using RBIs."
Figured next was FL instead of Fla., and MA instead of Mass.
At least we've maintained discipline and standards with regards to style there, and that hasn't happened.
Now, that we've lost focus, back to the topic: Zell cutting through the bone.

 

And it's probably going to get even worse.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/business/media/15papers.html?ref=media

Newspaper Ad Revenue Could Fall as Much as 30%
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: April 14, 2009

NEWSPAPER advertising, already in its worst slump since the Depression, suffered by far the sharpest drop in generations during the first quarter of 2009, down 30 percent for some papers, industry executives and analysts say.

Publishers will start to report first-quarter results this week, but people who follow the industry and have had a glimpse of the 2009 numbers say it is clear that once again, even the most pessimistic predictions were not dark enough. They are expecting declines sharp enough to wipe out profit margins at many papers that, despite two years of battering, had stayed comfortably in the black, and to push already-weak publishers closer to bankruptcy, perhaps even closure. “I think over all we’re going to see a decline somewhere in the mid-20s” compared to the first quarter of last year, said Edward Atorino, a media analyst at the Benchmark Company, a research firm. “There have been a lot of signals that things have gotten much worse in the last couple of months — the furloughs, the pay cuts, the layoffs.”

John Morton, an independent newspaper analyst, agreed with that assessment, adding “from what I’m hearing, I suspect 30 percent won’t be too unusual for the bigger papers.”

One of the few publishers to make a public statement is the Gannett Company, owner of the largest and most profitable newspaper chain in the country. At a conference with analysts last month, Gracia Martore, the company’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, indicated that so far, 2009 newspaper ad revenue was down roughly 30 percent, and more than that at its flagship paper, USA Today.

•

In filing for bankruptcy recently, Sun-Times Media Group, publisher of The Chicago Sun-Times and several smaller papers, disclosed in court papers that it had drawn up its original 2009 budget based on an expected 18 percent slide in ad revenue for the entire year, but had revised that to 30 percent.

More recently, some publishing executives, insisting on anonymity because they are prohibited from discussing figures that have not been made public yet, say they know of some other large newspapers that had a first-quarter drop in the 30 percent range. Declines above 20 percent, they said, were commonplace.

“This is far worse than anything any of us has seen,” said an executive at a major newspaper company. “We can keep cutting, but we need this to start to bottom out.”

Small papers generally fared better than large ones, though they also saw a sharp loss of revenue, experts say. In markets like Michigan and Florida, even some smaller papers have fared as poorly as the big papers, Mr. Morton said.

Offering at least a glimmer of hope, several executives and analysts said there were signs that the year-over-year decline in March was not as steep as those for January and February, even though the traditional pre-Easter advertising bump fell in March last year. (This year, it fell in April.) That and other factors, they said, could signal that losses for the rest of 2009 would not be as steep as the first quarter’s.

Lauren Rich Fine, research director at ContentNext Media, said that in all media, “as the economy grew much worse in the fall, companies really started to pull back hard on advertising” to save money. In particular, automakers, among the biggest advertisers, cut back as it became clear that their own futures were in jeopardy.

Ms. Fine said it was hard to predict when companies would readjust their ad spending limits, which depended in part on when the recession bottomed out.

•

Broadcast advertising has dropped, too, but not to the same degree. Gannett said the decline for its television stations was about half as steep as for its newspapers. In a report released Monday, ZenithOptimedia predicted that ad spending this year in all United States media would fall 8.7 percent.

The worsening crisis has prompted many newspapers, including The New York Times and the Hearst newspapers, to begin developing plans for new revenue sources like charging readers online — an idea that most of the industry had rejected until recently — but it is unclear whether they will put those plans into action, or when.

Newspapers count on advertising for the bulk of their revenue, and for a decade they have been losing ads to the Internet, where advertising is much cheaper and there is far more competition for it. But until 2006, papers held their own.

Then in 2007, ad revenue for newspapers and their Web sites dropped 7.9 percent, according to figures compiled by the Newspaper Association of America. That was the first significant decline in a nonrecession year on record, and came as a surprise to most analysts and executives.

In 2008, the downturn in the overall economy magnified the long-term trend in the newspapers, and ad revenue fell 16.6 percent — again, far more than publishers and analysts predicted. The real estate bubble burst, financial firms tottered and fell, recession took hold and unemployment spiked. Some of the biggest categories of advertising, like real estate and help wanted, all but evaporated.

Nearly every large paper has made significant budget cuts in the last year, including laying off staff and reducing the number and size of pages they print. Recently, a number of publishers, including Gannett and The New York Times Company, have asked employees to take a pay cut — sometimes in the form of mandatory furloughs — and have raised the prices they charge readers.

In December, Tribune Company, publisher of The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune and other major papers, filed for bankruptcy. Since then, Sun-Times Media, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, and Philadelphia Newspapers, owner of that city’s Inquirer and Daily News, have also filed for bankruptcy.

A handful of papers have folded or stopped publishing, becoming much smaller online operations. And companies have threatened to close other papers without major labor concessions, including The San Francisco Chronicle, owned by Hearst, and The Boston Globe, owned by the Times Company.

 

I accept that challenge.

 

What I'm saying is that a lot of information is crammed into one open page.
Sure, baseball pages would look better if the stuff were spread over more than one page.

 

Why would anyone expect this business to improve as the products continues to be dumbed down via job cuts, layoffs and decreased quality of content. Then we charge more for less.

It's like expecting to get rich after spending all your money. There's no logic in that line of thinking. I cannot think of another industry following the same horrible business model.

 

This is what happens when a business or an industry dies. They aren't trying to turn it around, they just trying to survive another day, knowing that it will end eventually.

 

From Los Angeles Business:

Sam Zell, the real-estate mogul that led a leveraged buyout of the Tribune Co. in 2007, called the deal "a mistake" in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Wednesday.

"The definition if you bought something and it’s now worth a great deal less, you made a mistake. And I'm more than willing to say that I made a mistake. I was too optimistic in terms of the newspaper’s ability to preserve its position," Zell, the chairman and chief executive officer of Tribune, said in the interview.

 

NOW he admits he made a mistake. Jesus Fucking Christ. What a tool.

 

So was his mistake simply buying a declining asset or did it also include hiring Abrams and Michaels and attacking the quality of the product he purchased to the point where he contributed to its slashed value? Newspapers were headed down before Zell, but if he's capable of one mistake (buying a business headed into the crapper), he must be capable of others (putting in charge people who have no business being there, thinking he could remake journalism in Chicago, L.A. and other Tribune locales, and so on).

So how about saying, "I have made a shitload of mistakes with Tribune Co. and have demonstrated that I should have stayed away from newspapers/media ventures like Oprah needs to stay away from Twinkies."