Recovering Journalist

Be Prepared

A friend of mine points out that the Anchorage Daily News Web site didn't have anything about Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's choice as John McCain's running mate as late as 11:15 am, Eastern time (7:15 Alaska time). Most of the rest of the media had the story confirmed a half-hour or so before, and it was a strong rumor for an hour or two before that. Want to bet the paper's Web-editor shift didn't start until later in the morning?

The newspaper's site did post a wire story on the Palin choice shortly after 8 a.m., but there's not a lot of excuse for being so far behind on such an important local story. Every newspaper Web site should have a plan in place for moving quickly on breaking local news no matter when it happened–including the ability for site managers to post from home or even from a cell phone, if need be.

PS: Steve Yelvington has a related take.

Beware the Printies

It's bad enough that newspapers are seeing their core business disintegrate and having trouble transitioning into their digital future. But they're also being held back by continuing and chronic problems with old-school managers who are clinging to the print model they grew up on and just won't let go. 

Call these dangerous dinosaurs Printosaurus Rex. Or, for short: Printies. Printies exist throughout the newspaper business, but they're most pernicious in the executive suite, where they continue to hold back intelligent, aggressive digital development. You know the type: They rhapsodize about how nice it is to be able to hold news in their hands as they read it. They tend to wear expensive suits and drive nice cars, paid for in better times. They declaim about never reading blogs. They may have a Facebook profile–but no friends. (But they don't hesitate to hold forth on their "expertise" about Facebook.) They spend money on inane print promotions but don't bother to market their Web sites. 

They print out their e-mail. 

Rather than firmly embracing and investing in the digital future, Printies are doing everything they can to preserve the dead-tree product they're so comfortable with, even at comical expense. They do crazy things like investing in printing plants. They fear the immediacy of the Web, leading to unfortunate memos that mandate paper-first publication (fortunately, cooler heads often prevail on these). They demand prominent "Subscribe to the print edition" links on the top of their Web sites. Truthfully, do these idiotic links really sell papers? Enough to justify that prime placement? I think not. 

Or–and this one's a hallmark of the Printie mentality–they come up with harebrained schemes to propagate the print product through laughable "e-editions" that provide a PDF (or worse) version of the paper for those who...well, I'm not sure who those e-editions are aimed at. Except maybe Printies themselves. These ridiculous products replicate the printed newspaper, online, right down to (hilariously) story jumps. This is of great comfort to the Printies, who believe that the form factor of the newspaper is perfect, even while fruitlessly trying to shoehorn a vertical page design onto a horizontal computer screen. But smart insiders know that very few readers partake of e-editions, and in the end, the only ones making money on them are the vendors who tricked the Printies into falling for the idea, thinking it was a nice way to represent the print edition online. Wrong! 

And that's the crux of the matter: Printies don't understand that the online medium is different, very different, from print. In clinging to their legacy print products at all costs, they invariably starve development of the innovative digital products that have the best chance to save the industry. 

Printies mean well, but they're dinosaurs, and their existence in every newspaper's management team (you know who you are) handicaps the industry's ability to do anything new, different or successful. The product they're protecting has been declining for years, but they're still standing in the way of a solution. Until they're flushed out of the ranks, newspapers will be fighting for their lives with one hand–clutching a PDF version of the print edition, no doubt–tied behind their backs.

What Will Happen When the Presses Go Silent?

The Boston Globe had a story the other day about the travails of the Portland Press Herald last week, and it included a plaintive and intriguing question from a reader of the struggling, up-for-sale Maine paper:

"Can you even be a major city without a daily paper?"

We're going to find out the answer to that before very long, I'm afraid. And it's worth thinking about what such a city will look like.

No, its skyscrapers will not fall, its roads will not collapse, its populace will not move out en masse. In fact, I'll bet that whatever city loses its daily paper–and it will only be the first of many–will continue to be a major city, pretty much unabated. Its media landscape will change, but in ways that may be much less radical than many people think.

Let's think about an imaginary major American city–let's call it Whoville–and its media ecosystem. Today, Whoville has a major daily paper (the Whoville Bugle), four network TV stations with news departments, an AP bureau, an alt-weekly, a weekly business tabloid, a couple of weekly (or daily) ethnic papers, college papers, perhaps an all-news radio station (and at least a couple stations that still do some local news), a ring of suburban papers–mostly weekly, maybe a couple daily–and perhaps a handful of in-city neighborhood weeklies.

Sounds like a lot, doesn't it? And that's just the traditional media. Whoville and it's 'burbs also are bristling with new media. There are enough local online news and bloggers that Examiner.com and Outside.In each can devote a dedicated channel to aggregating Web content about the city.  Craigslist, Yelp, Citysearch and others have beachheads in the market, offering classifieds and reviews that are especially appealing to younger readers. Local outposts of MerchantCircle, Kudzu and other online business directories and Yellow Pages wannabes target local businesses.  Local restaurant bloggers, sports bloggers and other specialists write about things they're interested in.

Whoville's suburbs have blogs, as well, and perhaps a startup hyperlocal site or two. Just about every neighborhood has some sort of listserv or Yahoo group on which neighbors exchange information. And there are any number of specialty newsletters, Web sites, mailing lists and publications that serve specific audiences, ranging from PTAs to moms to local hobbyist groups. Oh, and of course, there's WhovilleBugle.com, the daily paper's Web site, not to mention Web sites for the local TV and radio stations and the community papers.

All of these media outlets are competing for readers in Whoville and its suburbs; most of them are competing for advertisers, too. In other words, there's a lot more to the Whoville media ecosystem than just the Bugle. And I'm sure I left a few things out (every market has a slightly different collection of local media, of course).

It is precisely this growth in competition that has helped to make the Bugle's financial position so tenuous. Surrounded by competitors that are picking off different audiences and advertisers and offering services for free that used to be revenue streams for the paper, the Bugle has been eaten to death by fleas (some of them very large fleas!). Once king of the jungle, it's now just another player–albeit probably the dominant player–in the Whoville media.

Now let's take the Bugle out of that mix.

The Bugle's owner, frustrated by mounting losses and departing advertisers and readers, decides to close up shop. It shuts the paper, idles the presses, and lays off the staff. (There are somewhat less dire versions of this situation, in which the print product disappears but the Web site remains, or the print product is drastically reduced to perhaps publishing a couple times a week, but for the sake of argument, let's go with the full doomsday scenario.)

What happens? The entire Whoville media ecosystem, described above, steps up to pick off the Bugle's advertisers and readers. Some of the media outlets that were dependent on the Bugle's coverage to inspire their content (e.g. TV news and bloggers) will learn to look to other sources. But there's already a lot of diverse media in Whoville serving local news and information needs, and they'll fill a lot of the gap left by the death of the paper.

Inevitably, a group of ex-Bugle staffers, backed by local money, will start the Whoville Daily Trumpet, a fraction the size of the Bugle but much more focused on the city itself. The new paper will leave suburban coverage to the community papers and be smart enough to not even mess with national and international news that's available in a zillion places. With more focus, a much leaner business plan, hungry ad sales reps and hired printing and distribution, the Daily Trumpet can be competitive in ways the bloated, overextended Bugle could not be. 

Many other ex-staffers will join the other existing media, beefing up their staffs and smarts. Still others will start blogs or small print or online media outlets to cover specific topics. Not all of these will make it, but many of them will, covering things the Bugle used to cover and serving various parts of the old Bugle audience.

Indeed, a year or two after the Bugle's demise left a seemingly enormous hole in the city's media landscape, that hole will essentially be gone. It will be filled by thriving, competitive media that already exist and a few new outlets that spring up in the wake of the newspaper's closing.  The Whoville media ecosystem will prove to be self-repairing, much more quickly than a lot of people would expect. The residents of Whoville and its suburbs will get their news and information from these old and new replacements, and advertisers will use those substitutes for the Bugle to reach those customers. 

The Whoville Bugle will be a nostalgic memory of local life–much like the Whoville Herald, the afternoon paper that closed without much of a fuss a generation ago, or the Whoville Daily News, which quietly bit the dust a generation before that. The Bugle will be toasted at annual reunions of the staff and remembered in dusty collections at the library and historical society, but it will soon be seen as yesteryears' news.

Let's get back to the original question. Will Whoville still be a major city? Sure. It will still have its various corporate headquarters, beautiful architecture and parks, international airport, pro sports teams, a thriving music scene, opera, theater, good restaurants, great neighborhoods and all of the other things that make up a major city. It just won't have its old-fashioned daily newspaper. And sorry, but the Bugle really won't be missed.

The AP–Of All Places–As News Industry Think-Tank

The Associated Press has taken a beating in some quarters lately over perceptions–largely misguided, I believe–that it's somehow competing online with its newspaper members. Not only does this reflect a misunderstanding of what the AP does, but a lot of critics seem to forget that AP is owned by those newspapers. It's a rare example of newspaper ownership of a savvy online player, and a lot better than the alternative (think: Reuters. Or Google).

One of the reasons AP is taking some heat, frankly, is because it's been especially aggressive and innovative in embracing online media. Once incredibly stodgy, AP's leadership now seems to be on the cutting edge in how it thinks about the new world of journalism. Go figure.

The latest example of that is a fascinating research report released recently by the news cooperative. "A New Model For News" slipped out of the AP a few weeks ago and has gotten very little coverage in the industry media. But it reads like a roadmap for what news organizations–and especially newspapers–should be doing to regain their competitiveness, especially with young readers.

The report is based on detailed interviews and observations of young (20ish) readers in the U.S., Britain and India. Not surprisingly, it finds out that kids don't read newspapers. No news there. But it does show that they've got real interest in news, and are going to all sorts of sources besides print to find out what's going on in the world.

You should read it, but I'll briefly summarize: TV, Web sites and mobile alerts are popular with these young news consumers. So is news exchanged via social interactions (online and offline) with friends and co-workers. (Missing from the report: Any mention of Twitter, but that may have to do with the timing of the basic user research, which is now a year old.) Interestingly, the young folks interviewed generally don't think they're getting enough depth in their news. The detailed profiles of the various young readers and their news habits are quite interesting–and depressing if you're still betting on print.

Yeah, yeah, you're saying, we know all that: Kids use non-traditional news sources. But what are traditional news sources, i.e. newspapers, doing about it? Not a hell of a lot. Most papers haven't done anything particularly interesting with video (traditional TV, not just Web video), mobile alerts, and even now-"standard" technologies such as e-mail newsletters and RSS. The industry's track record on these vital new media is pretty sad.

Not to worry: The AP report provides a veritable cookbook of "new models" for news production and distribution, including:

• Tying news delivery more closely to e-mail. Clearly, these readers want news pushed to them. They want to be alerted when something is going on that they care about (gee, maybe they're news junkies more than anyone thought!), and they want to be able to do it simultaneous with checking their e-mail or text messages. That means more e-mail products, mobile products and distribution via things like instant-messaging and RSS. 
• Deliver to the technologies these readers live with. Seems obvious, but again, most newspapers and their Web sites are still publishing most of their news the old-fashioned way. These readers are looking at TV, their phones and PDAs, and other, fresher technologies (a surprising number don't even have computers at home, or dismiss the computer as more of a time-waster). That's where news needs to be delivered, with the same quality and aggressiveness of traditional outlets. (AP is walking the walk on this: its AP Mobile News app is one of the snazzier of the new iPhone apps.)
• Don't underestimate television. It's still a significant form of news delivery for these consumers. That suggests that newspapers need to find ways to move their brands onto TV (what is this, 1955?). Online video is one thing–and it's important–but regular TV is still a very viable medium for these young readers, and newspapers don't reach them there.
• Give them depth. This one's a bit of a surprise, but clearly these young readers are frustrated by the thinness of the news they're getting. I think the secret here is to give them the option to go deeper if they like–but not to force depth on them. Products need to offer both brief and long versions that readers can choose.
• News consumption is increasingly multitasked. Translation: These news consumers want information they can access while they're doing something else, rather than having to focus intently on, say, a newspaper or Web site. They're getting news while driving or while doing other things. That means news organizations need to find ways to wedge news products into those activities rather than demanding 100 percent attention (young readers will give that if they're more interested in depth).
• A bit of news fatigue is setting in. With news coming from many directions, these consumers feel overloaded by information. This argues for well-crafted, focused news reports that maximize the amount of information delivered and provides it in high quality. Sounds like a business newspapers should know well–but it needs to happen in different media than paper.
• News is social currency. It's "cool" for these kids to know something their friends don't, and then to be the source of that news, or for them to be conversant with their friends and colleagues about what's going on in the world. That's an old-fashioned value that appears to still hold with these new audiences.

Again, you should read the entire report and think about how your company's products should be refocused to better serve this audience–which, of course, is the audience of the future. You've got to build products that that audience wants, not just creating (print) products for an audience that is aging rapidly (you know how that story ends). Clearly, from the AP report, even news Web sites aren't enough–and may remind them too much of their print forebears. There's a real need for a fresh approach to news, from reporting to delivery.

Moreover, one of the most interesting and profound statements in the report is from an AP editor who says, "We're reporting what is happening, not what has happened."

That's a critical change in tense, and very smart thinking. Everyone in the newspaper and new media business should be pondering it. Yes, it's a rougher first draft of history than many journalists are used to, or even comfortable with. But in an era of technology-driven news immediacy, it's exactly the right philosophy to have, especially to reach the younger news consumers who are subjects of the AP research report. 

All of AP's member newspapers should be closely examining "A New Model for News" and looking for ways to build products that exploit its findings. After all, they paid for the research. They might as well take advantage of it.

Update: On a related note, the Newspaper Association of America just released a good primer about what newspapers should be doing with mobile publishing. It all seems so obvious–but there really aren't a lot of good newspaper mobile efforts out there, much less any that really try to make money on it. It's a big opportunity.

Conventional Wisdom–Not

Forbes is reporting that there will be 15,000 journalists at each of the two upcoming political conventions.

Unbelievable.

At a time when news budgets are being slashed because of declining revenue, how can a news organization possibly justify sending a raft of people to the conventions? (I suspect the numbers for the Olympics are about the same–and just as ridiculous.)

The Los Angeles Times is sending 15 people to the conventions, Forbes says. And that doesn't count journalists from other Tribune Co. papers that will be helping out. With what? Apparently, the Zellot cost-cutters missed this line item. Too bad. USA Today plans to send 34 reporters to each convention; Dow Jones is sending 23 to each. The New York Times and Washington Post aren't disclosing their numbers, but you can believe they're similarly inflated. The good news is that many organizations say they're cutting back from previous convention coverage–but it's still too much.

Sorry, but in most cases, there's really no (legitimate) excuse for a single news organization to send a large number of journalists to the convention. What stories are they going to get that the AP can't supply? Hijinks of the local delegates? Inside info about what the candidates hope to do for the economy back home? Local color on Denver and St. Paul? It's really hard to understand the need for this kind of bulk coverage. 

Unless, of course, you understand that the conventions serve as gala social events for journalists, as well. It isn't just political reporters that go to big events like these–it's editors, managing editors and publishers who get to go along for the expense-account ride (in expensive style, no doubt). That puffs up those numbers of attendees. It's a way of showing the flag, of hanging out with old friends, of doing some (much-needed these days) job networking. 

But that doesn't make it right. In fact, at a time when coverage is being cut back and newspapers and broadcasters really need to be devoting more resources to local coverage and other journalism that readers truly care about, this sort of boondoggle is just plain wrong.

Adding Up The Newspaper Cutbacks

How severe have the recent cutbacks in newspaper staffing and operations been? Pretty severe. Over the past few days, I've built a database of the cuts over the past year at the nation's 100 largest newspapers (measured by circulation), and here's what I found:

• More than 6,300 employees at the 100 largest newspapers have lost jobs through buyouts or layoffs in the past year.
• More than half of those cutbacks have come since the beginning of June.
• Nearly two-thirds of the top 100 papers have cut staff in the past year, including all but four of the top 34 (the two New York City tabloids, the Indianapolis Star and the Cleveland Plain Dealer are the exceptions–and Plain Dealer management has threatened imminent cuts).
• Even papers that haven't made recent cuts have sliced staff in the past couple of years–in all, three-quarters of the Top 100 have eliminated jobs in the past two years or so. 
• Twenty-eight of the Top 100 have cut more than 100 jobs in the past year. Seven have cut more than 200 jobs–and those numbers go up significantly if you go back more than a year. 
• The largest cuts have come at the biggest papers, not surprisingly, and at chains. (The worst: 350 jobs lost at the Los Angeles Times since February.) Perhaps the safest place to work is at an independently owned paper in a mid-sized market. So far.
• Virtually all cuts are on the print side–few papers, if any, have cut online staffing, fortunately. 
• Until recently, voluntary buyouts were the usual method of cutting employment–but lately, many cuts have been through outright layoffs.
• Job cuts aren't the only thing going on–papers also are freezing hiring and shrinking through reduction of editions and sections, striking partnerships with other papers, closing bureaus and outsourcing some production (even copy-editing!) overseas.
• More than a handful of papers–and their owners–clearly are in fairly dire financial peril, losing money or having trouble making debt payments. And several papers have been put up for sale.

A lot of this we've known through anecdotal evidence, usually from postings on Romenesko, as the drumbeat of cutbacks has mounted in recent months. But putting it all together in one database shows the totality of the newspaper industry's shrinkage. Seeing all the cuts and other moves in one place is revealing–and more than a bit depressing.

If you'd like to see the gory details, a PDF of the spreadsheet I created can be downloaded here. I'd also recommend a look at Erica Smith's superb PaperCuts site, which plots all of the U.S. newspaper employment cuts since 2007 on a map. I conducted my own research to assemble my database, and our results are slightly different, as is the presentation. A tip of the hat also goes to sites such as Gannett Blog and McClatchy Watch, which are tracking the cutbacks at individual chains and were very helpful. (If I've missed anything–or gotten a number or detail wrong–please let me know so I can update the spreadsheet.)

As dramatic as the numbers are, I'm not sure I got all of the cuts–some have happened very quietly, unreported even by the papers themselves. Some reports have been fuzzy–unspecified numbers–or incomplete, listing only newsroom cuts but not business-side staff reductions, for instance. A lot of smaller cuts are never announced. And more cutbacks are in the offing: The full impacts of major chain-wide downsizings recently announced by A.H. Belo and Media General, for instance, still are unclear, and the results of a few recently announced buyout programs have not yet been announced.

The data shows some interesting patterns. Advance, which recently announced significant cuts (and a threatened sale) at its Newark Star-Ledger, has left other papers in the chain untouched, for example. Ditto Gannett, Hearst and MediaNews, which have made cuts at some papers but not others. This would seem to indicate that chains are targeting papers that have specific problems, and sparing others that may be more profitable. At least for now.

More cuts, no doubt, are still to come. Gannett Blog believes a fresh round is coming at that company any day now, and there are rumblings and rumors of cuts at other companies. Many papers that have not made cuts yet this year probably are going to have to do so soon as revenue continues to deteriorate. And with the structural changes rocking the industry and the ongoing effects of the worsening economy, it seems likely that papers will continue to have to cut costs to maintain their financial equilibrium. As Alan Mutter and others have documented, newspaper revenue still is falling much more quickly than costs are being reduced. That's almost a guarantee of more cuts to come. 

As I've said before, in a year we may look back at this summer's wave of cutbacks as, sadly, a sort of golden era. It's going to get worse. But it's already been very bad.

Horse-Trading on the Gold Coast

Just when you thought the market for buying and selling newspapers was all but dried up, news comes that Hearst has scooped up a bunch of dailies and weeklies on Connecticut's affluent Gold Coast.

But there's something odd about this deal. The seller is Hearst's frequent partner MediaNews Group. And just a few months ago Hearst announced that it was partnering with MediaNews to buy and run some of the papers.

A hint about what's going on may come in a statement from Joseph Lodovic, president of cash-strapped MediaNews, who said, "This transaction allows MediaNews to manage its balance sheet during a challenging economic environment and transfer ownership ... to a company we admire." 

"Admire" is an understatement. The chummy Hearst-MediaNews relationship is fascinating, with the two companies co-managing some papers and Hearst investing money in MediaNews to enable it to buy others. Is it possible the Connecticut deal is a way for MediaNews to square its accounts with Hearst using newsprint rather than banknotes? And what does a transaction like this portend for Hearst's San Francisco Chronicle, which is losing more than $1 million a week and surrounded in the Bay Area by MediaNews papers? A lot of people have speculated that Hearst's San Francisco endgame might be to turn the Chronicle over to MediaNews–if antitrust regulators would permit such a thing. Will there be more trades between the two partners?

In the meantime, we have this interesting Connecticut deal, which must be making heads spin among the employees at a couple of the papers. Let's review: In March 2007, Tribune struck a deal to sell the Stamford Advocate and Greenwich Time to Gannett, but that deal fell through because of union issues. Last November, it was announced that Hearst was buying the two papers for $62.4 million–but with MediaNews managing them. Now, as part of the latest deal, Hearst has "assumed management" of the two papers, plus MediaNews' Danbury News-Times. In addition, Hearst gets ownership of several suburban weeklies and MediaNews' Connecticut Post (based in Bridgeport), the third-largest paper in the state.

No terms for all of this horse-trading were disclosed. But MediaNews bought the Connecticut Post in 2000 from Thomson for a whopping $205 million. Wanna bet the pricetag was a lot lower this time around?

It's the Election, Stupid

It's a Presidential election year, about as big a news story as there can be. But too many news organizations still are not doing a particularly good or innovative job of providing online campaign coverage that goes beyond standard print and broadcast coverage.

In fact, it's taken a startup site to redefine campaign coverage in this Presidential cycle. The remarkable FiveThirtyEight.com is providing daily updates of polling activity and adding sophisticated statistical analysis tools to attempt to track and project what's happening among the ever-changing electorate. 

While most mainstream media sites still are fixated on essentially meaningless national voter polls, FiveThirtyEight.com is breaking down state-by-state results to attempt to chart what's going to happen in the all-important Electoral College (the site's name refers to the number of Electoral College votes up for grabs). Poll data is weighted based on the pollster's past record of accuracy. And the site applies tools like regression analysis and similarity scores to attempt to bring clarity to the mass of numbers it collects.

Who's behind FiveThirtyEight.com? A guy named Nate Silver, whose day job is being one of the principals behind legendary baseball statistics site Baseball Prospectus. (Silver invented the legendary baseball player stat-projection tool, PECOTA.) 

Silver is bringing the kinds of advanced statistical analysis beloved of baseball stats geeks to the Presidential political arena, and the results are revelatory. He's even run 10,000 simulations of the election to try to project the outcome, and constantly changes his probability estimates of various outcomes based on the latest polling data. At the moment Silver thinks there's 17.44 percent chance of an Obama landslide, a 3.98 percent chance that McCain could lost Ohio yet win the election, and a 0.82 percent chance of an electoral college tie.

This is heady stuff, especially when most major news organizations' idea of sophisticated political coverage is pretty much limited to reporter blogs. How 2004. Last time around, ABC News' The Note defined campaign coverage, and naturally, this year every major news site has its own version–The Fix, The Trail, The Caucus, Top of the Ticket, etc. Some are very good. But they're still pretty conventional, especially compared to what Silver is doing. Also conventional: Politico, the much-ballyhooed politics Web site/newspaper startup from two former Washington Post reporters that's quickly become a player on the national political news scene. Politico is solid, but it's still basically a newspaper on a screen (disclosure: I did some pre-launch consulting for Politico).

FiveThirtyEight.com is not the only one exploring new ways of looking at the election, but other good examples are few and far between. A handful of others worth checking out:

• PolitiFact.com, by the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly, whose Truth-o-Meter is a clever way to look at the back and forth between candidates. PolitiFact is very witty and engaging about holding the candidates accountable for their statements, matched only by The Daily Show's masterful use of videos that catch contradictory statements. WashingtonPost.com has tried something sort of similar with its FactChecker blog, but FactChecker is inexplicably taking the summer off. Don't they know there's an election coming up? 
• Patchwork Nation, by the Christian Science Monitor, an interesting way to try to move election coverage away from the Washington vortex. Based on 11 blogs from around the country, each attempting to represent a different voter interest group (Evangelical Epicenters, Immigration Nation, Tractor Country, and so on) Patchwork Nation offers a different perspective, for sure. But I wish it had gone farther, and opened itself up to blogs and contributions from readers all over the nation, not just those 11 blogs. That would really bring the patchwork map that dominates the site to life. Still, it's a good effort to get beyond the usual political coverage.
• Poligraph, by HealthCentral.com (another former client) does an interesting job of tracking the candidates' positions on health care issues, with an easy to understand interactive graphic tool. You can even compare your own stance on various health issues with the candidates'. Extra credit: HealthCentral has made it easy for other sites to add Poligraph to their political coverage as an embeddable widget. One only wishes there were similar tools for other major issues.
• YouDecide, by San Francisco public TV station KQED, offers a smart interactive tool that both assesses your stands on various issues and challenges your position through a series of questions. It's an interesting approach, and it's also available for embedding in other sites (hint: embeddable widgets like this are a great way to spread a brand name).

Other than that, the list of interesting political coverage efforts is pretty thin. There are various versions of electoral maps and campaign finance databases, and WashingtonPost.com–which should be the ESPN.com of politics but never seems to rise to that level–does have a candidate-travel tracking tool, an issues-tracker (powered by DayLife) that seems out of date (it still lists Mike Gravel as a candidate), and a few rudimentary Facebook widgets (again, spreading the brand).

But FiveThirtyEight right now is way ahead in the election coverage innovation polls. But there could be a dark horse: Google did an incredible map-based site to cover last year's Australian election. If the company has something similar coming for the U.S. Presidential race (with less than three months to go, it had better get cracking), all those campaign blogs are going to look even more like also-rans.

The New York Times, Big in La Crosse. Or Maybe Not

A New York Times distributor in La Crosse, Wisc., managed to convince the paper that it had several thousand subscribers there (pop. about 51,000–pretty good market penetration!). Federal wire fraud charges are now pending against the guy, who is accused of defrauding the company of nearly $325,000 over a couple of years.

But you have to wonder–how did it take so long for The Times to become suspicious when its La Crosse subscriber base jumped from 65 daily and 103 Sunday to 2,781 daily and 2,818 on Sunday? Shouldn't somebody's eyebrows have been raised immediately when nearly 3 percent of The Times' circulation was coming from a small town in Wisconsin? And don't miss the comments on the La Crosse Tribune story, which includes notes from people who fruitlessly tried to tell The Times that something was wrong. Sheesh!

Hang On, Folks. Things Are Getting Worse

The past couple of months have seen a drumbeat of announcements of newspaper layoffs, cutbacks and other bad news. Just today, A.H. Belo announced that it's cutting 14 percent of its workforce. Last week, it was the lenders who put up the money to buy the Minneapolis Star-Tribune running for the exits. And it's raining lousy second-quarter earnings reports.

It all seems pretty bad. But hold on to your press hats: Things are going to get worse in the newspaper industry, perhaps much worse. Three sharp new analyses of the second-quarter newspaper results–by fellow recovering journalists Alan Mutter, Ken Doctor and Wall Street analyst Mike Simonton–suggest that declines in ad revenue were generally accelerating in June, and worst of all, that the existing cuts and layoffs at newspapers are not keeping up with the decline of the business.

"Unless sales improve or the industry is willing to accept lower profitability in the future, the companies evidently would have no choice but to consider even further spending cuts," Mutter warns. Echoes Simonton, "We haven't yet reached the bottom for revenue declines." And Doctor asks, "So you think current cuts are tough?"

They're probably not nearly tough enough, unfortunately. We'll see more layoffs and cutbacks for the rest of the year, and then a fresh round of deep cuts around the first of the year, as companies assess their 2008 results and the new, even-more-shrunken budgets take hold. And don't go looking for an economic miracle to turn things around, because odds are that the structural changes rocking the industry are so profound that there won't be a significant advertising rebound even if the economy improves.

In other words, it's not only going to get worse before it gets better–it may not even get better. The next few months could bring a bloodletting in the industry that will make what's currently happening look like a picnic.

But here's the big, really painful prediction: Before long, we're going to lose a big newspaper (several, actually). And it's going to happen sooner than anybody thinks.