Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Today in Sam Zell

By Kevin Roderick, LA Observed

I'd much rather not be posting all the time about a Chicago billionaire, but Sam Zell is L.A.'s biggest news media mogul right now. Yesterday at a taping for Dave Bryan's L.A. Roundtable on Channel 35, former mayor Richard Riordan said that whoever is owner of the Los Angeles Times is the most important person in town. (Riordan also speculated that Zell would get out within six months. The show, which also includes Bill Boyarsky, Henry Weinstein and me, airs in July.) Anyway, Zell's memo o' the day to his Tribune "partners" says they are now looking at ways to "maximize the value" of the Times property on 1st and Spring in Downtown. What do you know, a real-estate play:

From: Talk to Sam
Sent: Wed Jun 25 10:07:04 2008
Subject: Maximizing the Value of Tribune Tower and Times Mirror Square

Partners,

When we started this adventure together, I made a point of saying we would challenge traditional thinking, that there would be no sacred cows, and that we would do everything possible to maximize the value of our assets.

With those objectives in mind, we are in the process of asking a number of real estate firms to give us their best thinking on how we can generate more value from Tribune Tower in Chicago, and the Times Mirror Square complex in Los Angeles.

We’ll be considering numerous options to maximize the value of these properties. While a near-term transaction is possible, we’ll be focusing on opportunities that allow for some level of ongoing occupancy in both buildings for the mid-term (defined as five years), for farther out (15 years), and beyond.

Most importantly, we are not rushing this process, and I can assure you we will not accept anything but full market value for these assets. As we made clear on our first quarter earnings call, Tribune has sufficient liquidity to satisfy our principal amortization requirements through 2008, due to the proceeds we will realize from the Newsday transaction, and from our plans to create an asset-backed commercial paper program.

Our request for proposals, which is being issued today, is likely to generate media attention and debate about what we should or should not do with the properties. Both Tribune Tower and Times Mirror Square are iconic structures, deeply intertwined with the history of this company. But, they are also both under-utilized, and as employee-owners, it’s in our best interests to maximize the value of all our assets.

We will keep you posted as we solidify our plans, so don’t get distracted by speculation. Let’s keep our eye on the ball.

Sam

Also, TellZell posts recent Zell utterances showing more contempt for his "partners."

Sunday, June 15, 2008

My Most Productive Column Ever

Measuring value by word count: What a brilliant idea!

By Michael Kinsley, The Washington Post

My first day on the copy desk at the Royal Oak Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, Mich., the chief copy editor said something that has inspired me ever since. "Remember," he said, "every word that you cut saves the publisher money." But like so much else, this principle seems to have been turned upside down by the Internet.

Last week an article appeared on the Web site of Editor & Publisher, which is a magazine for journalists that also has a Web site, as you would expect.


This article
, by Jennifer Saba, a writer whose work I am not familiar with, although that is not intended in any way as an insult, reported that one Randy Michaels, who is described as chief operating officer of the Tribune Co., a media corporation based in Chicago that owns the Chicago Tribune (the company's flagship newspaper, and indeed the one the company is named after) as well as the Los Angeles Times, some TV stations, and the Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball team, among other properties, had told the business community in its so-called "conference call" (a Wall Street ritual in which financial analysts and others are given an oral report on how a company is doing, so they can repeat this information to their customers) that the Tribune Co. intends to address the ongoing distress of the newspaper industry brought on by the Internet -- distress that already has led to massive layoffs and buyouts and a major crisis of confidence if not identity at even the most prestigious and established and, one would have thought, profitable newspapers -- by starting to measure the productivity of the journalists who are employed at the various tentacles of that institution.


And not only that: Productivity will be measured by column-inches of words. In other words, the company will assume that the more words you write, the more productive you are. Or, to put it another way, if you use many, many, many words to make whatever point you may be trying to make or fact you are attempting to report, you will be considered more productive than another writer who takes pains to be concise -- that is, to use fewer words rather than more words.


This Michaels has apparently been sneaking around with his tape measure (or perhaps he uses an old-fashioned pica rule of the sort once favored by newspaper people during the era of the linotype machine) and has made the piquant discovery that while the average journalist at the Los Angeles Times produces 51 pages of words each year, his or her counterpart at the Hartford Courant, which is also owned by the very same Tribune Co., produces 300 pages of words each year. This is six times as many words.


Or, to put it another way (and why not?), the Los Angeles Times journalist produces only one-sixth as many words as the one working in the newsroom of the Hartford Courant. Michaels is completely unabashed, in fact he seems downright proud, of this idea of measuring productivity in column-inches. He said to Editor & Publisher, "This is a new thing. Nobody ever said, 'How many column inches did someone produce?' "


For many, many years, the Los Angeles Times was known for its verbosity, or tendency to use more words than other newspapers to say roughly the same thing. More recently, this habit of writing many, many words when far fewer could make the point as well or nearly so (which is the essence of verbosity) was discouraged at the Los Angeles Times. It is no longer like the old days, when stories used to jump from one page to another, and then to yet another, and then another still, snaking endlessly around ads -- this was back when newspapers had ads -- and rarely reached a conclusion except for an announcement that Part XIII would appear the next day.


But apparently this new discipline was a terrible, terrible mistake. Or, to put it a different way, it was a bad idea. At any rate, it is yesterday's idea. Today's idea is that a writer should produce as many words as possible, because that means you need fewer writers to produce the same number of words.

But wait. There's more. It has not escaped the attention of the Tribune Co. that there is a second way to reduce the need for reporters and writers -- and paper and ink as well -- which is to publish fewer words. According to Michaels, there should be an equal number of pages devoted to advertising and pages devoted to reporting and opinion.


"What you find out is that you can take 500 editorial pages a week out of [a] newspaper and have a 50-50 ad-content ratio." Five hundred pages a week would be about 25,000 pages a year, according to reliable newspaper industry sources.


If the average Los Angeles Times journalist produces 51 pages a year, as Michaels has calculated, this means that a 50-50 ratio will allow him to lay off 500 Los Angeles Times journalists, which is more than half of the current staff.


Then, if he can persuade the remaining Los Angeles Times journalists to raise their productivity from 50 pages to 300 pages a year, he can dismiss five-sixths of the rest. That would leave something like 50 journalists to put out the Los Angeles Times every day. For now. As long as advertising pages continue to decline -- and there is every reason to hope that they will continue to -- editorial pages can be reduced as well, and more and more journalists can be let go in order to maintain the crucial 50-50 ratio of advertising to content.


This Michaels is clearly a bright man. It won't be long before he figures out that you can have an equal number of advertising and editorial pages if you have none of either and simply stop publishing the paper. That way you won't have to employ any journalists at all.


So, that's 1,003 words. Can I go to lunch now?

Michael Kinsley is a columnist for Time and washingtonpost.com.

Sam Zell's Bad Medicine

His prescription for saving Tribune's papers is a ticket to oblivion.

By Rem Rieder (rrieder@ajr.umd.edu) is AJR's editor and senior vice president.

It must have looked so easy from the outside:

These stodgy old publicly held corporations running newspapers just don't know what they are doing. Clearly some sharp, nimble, entrepreneurial private operators could turn these ailing behemoths right around.

Back when he put together a group of local investors to purchase the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, Brian Tierney said there would be no more of the knee-jerk cost-cutting that characterized the final years of Knight Ridder ownership. Instead, Tierney & Co. would invest in the product. What a concept.

It wasn't long before an advertising turndown reared its ugly head, and the brash new owners were slashing and burning. (When AJR business columnist John Morton and I pointed out the irony (see Full Court Press and The Newspaper Business February/March 2007), former CQ President Neil Skene wrote somewhat incredulously that we seemed to be waxing nostalgic for the days of Tony Ridder!)

When Sam Zell was taking over Tribune Co., he talked dismissively about the management skills of the old Tribune leadership. But it wasn't long before he was downsizing his new properties.

Now Zell is talking about implementing a 50-50 split between news and advertising, which would mean 500 fewer pages in Tribune papers each week. And Chief Operating Officer Randy Michaels says it's time to "right-size" the operation, which means fewer and fewer staffers for papers like the Los Angeles Times, whose roster has already been trimmed repeatedly.

But not to worry. Lots of those ink-stained wretches aren't bringing much to the party anyway. Reporters at Tribune's smaller papers are much more productive than those at the overstuffed Times. "We can eliminate a fair amount of people, while eliminating not much copy," Michaels told the company's creditors, according to the Chicago Tribune.

Beautiful.

Nothing could showcase more vividly how little Zell and his peeps know about the newspaper business. It's not the same as an assembly line. "Productivity" isn't measured by byline counts (what a pernicious idea) and column inches. The contribution of staffers is measured by the quality of their work. Accountability reporting, so crucial to newspapers' raison d'etre, is labor intensive. It takes a lot of time--a lot more than knocking out four quick hitters a day.

There's no doubt that these are troubling times for the mainstream media. The impact of the Internet is huge, and permanent. Media companies have to shed the shackles of the past, to think boldly and creatively, to adapt to the new and fast-evolving world.

But if all you're bringing to the table is mindless ax-wielding, why bother? There's no way drastically weakening your product in a bitterly competitive media landscape is a recipe for success.

In-depth, hard-hitting enterprise efforts are one of the key offerings that differentiate good newspapers and their Web sites from their numerous competitors. They are an important component of the brand.

I just finished Denis Johnson's brilliant Vietnam novel, "Tree of Smoke," so maybe that's why the devastating comment from the tragic war in Southeast Asia comes to mind:

Sam Zell wants to destroy the village in order to save it.

Thursday, June 12, 2008

The Tribune Co.'s Sam Zell Satirized in Daryl Cagle Cartoon



NEW YORK Daryl Cagle took a swipe at Sam Zell in a new editorial cartoon.


In the drawing, Cagle shows the Tribune Co. Chairman/CEO in front of dozens of typing monkeys. Zell says: "Each of them puts out three-hundred pages of text per year, they're really cheap, and someday they'll write 'Hamlet.'"

Cagle, of course, was satirizing the recent Tribune Co. announcement that reporters' productivity might be quantified in some way. The cartoon can be seen here.

In addition to doing cartoons, Cagle runs the massive Cagle.MSNBC.com cartoon site and the Cagle Cartoons syndicate. Cagle is not the first cartoonist to slam Zell. David Horsey of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Tribune Media Services this winter criticized the Tribune Co. executive for his cost-cutting and blunt language, as reported in a Feb. 27 E&P story.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

AFTRA Board OKs New Contract

The group decides not to delay ratification of the the deal, despite SAG's request.

From the Associated Press

Leaders of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists approved a new contract with Hollywood studios that grants actors more money for Internet work -- an issue that sparked a crippling writers' strike earlier this year.


AFTRA's board approved the three-year deal late Friday and it will go to the union's 70,000 members for ratification later this month, the union announced Saturday. The existing contract was set to end June 30.


The agreement makes sense for all performers, AFTRA National President Roberta Reardon said in the statement. AFTRA members now have the opportunity to vote yes for higher pay, improved working conditions, and continued right of consent for use of excerpts in New Media.


The deal covers only a handful of prime-time TV shows, including HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm, the CBS drama Rules of Engagement, and ABC's Cashmere Mafia.


AFTRA's voting members earlier gave 93-percent approval to a separate contract deal for the majority of TV shows it represents, including Oprah and Entertainment Tonight.


The AFTRA agreement largely followed a script laid out in contracts approved by directors in January and by writers after their 100-day strike ended in February.


The deal established higher fees for downloaded content and residual payments for ad-supported streams and clips. It also sets a 90-day deadline after ratification for developing a system for actors to consent to the online use of clips containing their images or voices.


The agreement also called for increase base pay, health and retirement benefits and overtime pay.


The 120,000-member Screen Actors Guild, which is the larger and more combative of Hollywood's two actor unions, is still negotiating with the studios. SAG had pushed for more concessions by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers and still has the power to shut down film production.


The two unions had agreed to the same starting proposals but took different tacks with the studios -- the first time they had negotiated separately for the first time in 27 years. Some 44,000 actors are members of both unions.


In March, AFTRA accused SAG of trying to entice actors in the soap drama The Bold and The Beautiful to abandon the federation and said it was in the best interests of our members to deal with the studios on its own.


AFTRA began its own negotiations on May 7 after SAG temporarily suspended its studio talks. AFTRA's board gave tentative approval to the contract on May 28 -- and hours later, SAG returned to the bargaining table.


In its statement Saturday, AFTRA said its board rejected a SAG request to delay ratification of the new contract until SAG concluded its own negotiations. AFTRA's board also warned that it might pursue legal remedies if SAG tried to "undermine or interfere with our ratification process."


A call to a SAG spokeswoman seeking comment was not immediately returned Saturday.

SAG president Alan Rosenberg has insisted that his union would push for a better deal. In a message to members May 27, he said the guild would still fight to increase payments for DVD appearances in the form of pension and health care contributions.


Rosenberg said the guild would also push to give actors a say regarding product endorsements in scripted scenes and argue for jurisdiction to cover projects created for the Internet, even those with low budgets.


Both AFTRA and SAG had said they wanted to avoid a repeat of the 110-day writers strike that ended in February. That walkout shut down production on dozens of TV shows and cost the Los Angeles area economy an estimated $2.5 billion.


Pressure for a speedy resolution came from A-list actors such as Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, who took out ads in trade publications in March calling for talks to start months ahead of the June 30 contract expiration date.


The possibility of a strike sent some film producers rushing to finish shooting or delaying projects for fear they would be shut down before filming was complete.

SAG reached separate deals that cleared the way for more than 300 independent productions to raise financing and start work. The agreements called for those companies to abide retroactively by the long-term contract eventually reached with the major studios.


SAG represents actors in movies, TV and other media. The TV and radio federation represents, among others, actors, singers, announcers and journalists.

Hollywood studios, AFTRA reach deal


The agreement, modeled on a deal with directors, puts pressure on SAG to come to terms. Preservation of performers' control over use of film clips is a key point.

By Richard Verrier and Claudia Eller, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers


The new contract struck between the Hollywood studios and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists achieved across-the-board gains for actors, especially for journeyman performers who have seen their incomes squeezed in recent years.


But it is not clear if those gains will be sufficient to mollify leaders of the larger Screen Actors Guild, which resumed negotiations with the studios on Wednesday.


AFTRA's tentative accord, addressing bread-and-butter economic issues, includes a 13% hike in minimum pay for guest stars and other major role performers. It also doubles the pay actors receive from movies and TV shows sold online and establishes payments for programs that are streamed online.


If its members ratify the agreement, AFTRA would become the second Hollywood union to accept a deal based on the contract negotiated by the directors guild in January. That would probably make it harder for SAG -- which represents the overwhelming majority of performers in prime-time TV and all of those in studio feature films -- to argue that its members deserve significantly better terms.


This is a challenging time in the entertainment industry, and this was a tough negotiation, said AFTRA President Roberta Reardon. Our ability to achieve these crucial breakthroughs for performers was a direct result of [our] pragmatic approach to collective bargaining.


Reardon's comments appeared intended to underline the differences between the smaller union -- whose members also include musicians, radio announcers and daytime television actors -- and SAG, which has taken a more aggressive posture in negotiations with the studios.


The two labor groups, after squabbling over turf issues, recently ended a 27-year partnership under which they negotiated with the studios jointly. AFTRA was able to wrap up its negotiations in just three weeks, modeling its agreement on a pact that settled the writers strike earlier this year. The writers' deal was based on the contract the Directors Guild of America negotiated.


SAG officials declined to comment on the AFTRA agreement, saying they hadn't seen details yet. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios at the bargaining table, said the parties found a way to fairly and sensibly tailor our industry's new media framework to meet the needs of actors.


Although AFTRA's accord falls short of satisfying some of SAG's key demands, it could still help the larger union craft a deal that would avoid a strike this summer.


In preparation for a possible walkout, the studios have effectively stopped green lighting films that can't wrap production by June 30, when SAG's contract expires.


Notably, AFTRA said it preserved actors' right of consent over the use of non-promotional video clips, a power they have had since 1960. The studios argued in earlier negotiations with SAG that the consent rule would impede their ability to build an online market for their library of programming because it is cumbersome to administer.


But AFTRA and the studios think they have hit a workable solution. They agreed to devise a system under which, for example, the studios would be able to obtain consent to use clips of an actor's work covering an entire TV series rather than negotiate for each individual clip.


Others provisions of AFTRA's new contract will not go down so well with SAG. AFTRA did not achieve an increase in the decades-old -- and, the union contends, outdated -- formula that governs residual payments from the sale of home video such as DVDs.


On the other hand, the union did make strides in setting up rules covering shows created for the Web. Although still in its infancy, online entertainment is expected to grow rapidly and actors fear that the studios will hire nonunion labor to fill many roles.


The new AFTRA contract extends the union's jurisdiction to programming created for the Internet in cases in which a show costs more than $15,000 a minute to produce, or when producers hire a covered actor who meets certain criteria, such as having two credits.


The issue has been among the sticking points in talks that broke off this month between SAG and the studios.


AFTRA has 70,000 members, of which 44,000 also belong to the 122,000-member SAG. The smaller union's jurisdiction does not include feature films and covers only a handful of prime-time TV shows, such as CBS Rules of Engagement and HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm.


richard.verrier@latimes.com

claudia.eller@latimes.com

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Words, Words, Words

A brilliant new scheme for measuring the productivity of journalists.

My first day on the copy desk at the Royal Oak Daily Tribune in Royal Oak, Mich., the chief copy editor said something that has inspired me ever since. "Remember," he said, "every word that you cut saves the publisher money." But like so much else, this principle seems to have been turned upside down by the Internet.


Last week an article appeared on the Web site of Editor & Publisher, which is a magazine for journalists that also has a Web site, as you would expect. This article, by Jennifer Saba, a writer whose work I am not familiar with, although that is not intended in any way as an insult, reported that one Randy Michaels, who is described as chief operating officer of the Tribune Co., a media corporation based in Chicago that owns the Chicago Tribune (the company's flagship newspaper, and indeed the one the company is named after) as well as the Los Angeles Times, some TV stations, and the Chicago Cubs Major League Baseball team, among other properties, had told the business community in its so-called "conference call" (a Wall Street ritual in which financial analysts and others are given an oral report on how a company is doing, so they can repeat this information to their customers) that the Tribune Co. intends to address the ongoing distress of the newspaper industry brought on by the Internet—distress that already has led to massive layoffs and buyouts and a major crisis of confidence if not identity at even the most prestigious and established and, one would have thought, profitable newspapers—by starting to measure the productivity of the journalists who are employed at the various tentacles of that institution.


And not only that: Productivity will be measured by column-inches of words. In other words, the company will assume that the more words you write, the more productive you are. Or, to put it another way, if you use many, many, many words to make whatever point you may be trying to make or fact you are attempting to report, you will be considered more productive than another writer who takes pains to be concise—that is, to use fewer words rather than more words.


This Michaels has apparently been sneaking around with his tape measure (or perhaps he uses an old-fashioned pica rule of the sort once favored by newspaper people during the era of the linotype machine) and has made the piquant discovery that while the average journalist at the Los Angeles Times produces 51 pages of words each year, his or her counterpart at the Hartford Courant, which is also owned by the very same Tribune Co., produces 300 pages of words each year.


This is six times as many words. Or, to put it another way (and why not?), the Los Angeles Times journalist produces only one-sixth as many words as the one working in the newsroom of the Hartford Courant. Michaels is completely unabashed, in fact he seems downright proud, of this idea of measuring productivity in column-inches. He said to Editor & Publisher, "This is a new thing. Nobody ever said, 'How many column inches did someone produce?' "


For many, many years, the Los Angeles Times was known for its verbosity, or tendency to use more words than other newspapers to say roughly the same thing. More recently, this habit of writing many, many words when far fewer could make the point as well or nearly so (which is the essence of verbosity) was discouraged at the Los Angeles Times.


It is no longer like the old days, when stories used to jump from one page to another, and then to yet another, and then another still, snaking endlessly around ads—this was back when newspapers had ads—and rarely reached a conclusion except for an announcement that Part XIII would appear the next day. But apparently this new discipline was a terrible, terrible mistake. Or, to put it a different way, it was a bad idea. At any rate, it is yesterday's idea. Today's idea is that a writer should produce as many words as possible, because that means you need fewer writers to produce the same number of words.


But wait. There's more. It has not escaped the attention of the Tribune Co. that there is a second way to reduce the need for reporters and writers—and paper and ink as well—which is to publish fewer words. According to Michaels, there should be an equal number of pages devoted to advertising and pages devoted to reporting and opinion. "What you find out is that you can take 500 editorial pages a week out of [a] newspaper and have a 50-50 ad-content ratio." Five hundred pages a week would be about 25,000 pages a year, according to reliable newspaper industry sources.


If the average Los Angeles Times journalist produces 51 pages a year, as Michaels has calculated, this means that a 50-50 ratio will allow him to lay off 500 Los Angeles Times journalists, which is more than half of the current staff. Then, if he can persuade the remaining Los Angeles Times journalists to raise their productivity from 50 pages to 300 pages a year, he can dismiss five-sixths of the rest. That would leave something like 50 journalists to put out the Los Angeles Times every day. For now. As long as advertising pages continue to decline—and there is every reason to hope that they will continue to—editorial pages can be reduced as well, and more and more journalists can be let go in order to maintain the crucial 50-50 ratio of advertising to content.


This Michaels is clearly a bright man. It won't be long before he figures out that you can have an equal number of advertising and editorial pages if you have none of either and simply stop publishing the paper. That way you won't have to employ any journalists at all.


So, that's 1,003 words. Can I go to lunch now?

Friday, June 6, 2008

Tribune's Zell To Journalists: I'm Firing A Bunch Of You, Making The Rest Work Harder

, Silicon Valley Insider

Sam Zell's message to the employer-owners at the faltering Tribune company: There's going to be fewer of you, and the ones that stick around will have to get a lot more productive, pronto.

Sam laid out his new plan, which really isn't that new to the dwindling newspaper industry, during a conference call yesterday for investors: Print fewer pages at the likes of the L.A. Times and the Chicago Tribune -- because they're selling fewer ads -- and employ fewer journalists to fill the pages you have left -- because it turns out you can squeeze a lot more work out of them.

No details on how many cuts Tribune has in mind, but Zell and COO Randy Michaels did explain that they've already been measuring productivity, paper by paper, and have a pretty good idea of where they can trim fat. No news to the folks at the LA Times, but they'll want to keep their resumes handy.

Mr. Michaels said that, after measuring journalists’ output, “when you get into the individuals, you find out that you can eliminate a fair number of people while eliminating not very much content.” He added that he understood that some reporting jobs naturally produce less output than others.

He said that The Los Angeles Times produced 51 pages of news for each journalist there, while the figure for two other Tribune papers, The Baltimore Sun and The Hartford Courant, is more than 300 pages.

What will the remaining journalists do to fill those pages? Pack them full of “maps, graphics, lists, ranking and stats,” Zell says. “We’re in the business of satisfying customers, and we will respond to what they say they want.

As unpleasant as this may sound for our ink-stained colleagues, it can't come as a surprise: Even the most ostrich-like newspaper folks know what's happening to their businesss, and the broader media business. And if they think getting measured by page production is unpleasant, we've got bad news for them: It gets much worse online, when you can tell if anyone's actually reading the stuff you're writing.

Tribune Co. Plans Sharp Cutbacks at Papers

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
THE NEW YORK TIMES

Tribune Company newspapers like The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune will quickly cut costs — by printing fewer papers and employing fewer journalists — top company executives said on Thursday.

Samuel Zell, the chairman and chief executive of Tribune, and Randy Michaels, the company’s chief operating officer, revealed the cuts during a conference call with Wall Street analysts.

They also said the struggling company has looked at the column inches of news produced by each reporter, and by each paper’s news staff. Finding wide variation, they said, they have concluded that it could do without a large number of news employees and not lose much content.

Mr. Michaels said of the changes, “This is going to happen quickly.”

Mr. Zell said, “I promise you he’s underestimating the level of aggressiveness with which we are attacking this whole challenge.”

They said the company would aim for a 50-50 split between ads and news across all the news pages (excluding classified ads and advertising supplements). Mr. Michaels said this would mean eliminating 500 pages of news a week across all of the company’s 12 papers.

“If we take, for instance, The Los Angeles Times to a 50-50 ratio, we will be eliminating about 82 pages a week,” Mr. Michaels said, leaving the smallest papers of the week at 56 news pages.

Since being taken over in an $8.2 billion deal that took the company private in December, Tribune has downsized newspapers that had already been trimmed under the previous regime. During the call and in a note from Mr. Zell to Tribune employees, the executives signaled that bigger cuts are coming.

Mr. Michaels said that, after measuring journalists’ output, “when you get into the individuals, you find out that you can eliminate a fair number of people while eliminating not very much content.” He added that he understood that some reporting jobs naturally produce less output than others.

He said that The Los Angeles Times produced 51 pages of news for each journalist there, while the figure for two other Tribune papers, The Baltimore Sun and The Hartford Courant, is more than 300 pages. It was not clear whether that meant the ax would fall harder in Los Angeles, or whether the cuts would include Newsday, which Tribune has agreed to sell to Cablevision for $650 million.

The new approach would save on newsroom and newsprint costs, which together typically account for 25 percent to 30 percent of a newspaper’s operating costs.

James O’Shea, who was fired recently as editor of The Los Angeles Times for refusing to cut his newsroom staff, said Mr. Michaels’s statements showed a misunderstanding of how newspapers work.

“The problem is the papers aren’t producing ad revenue, and diminishing the journalism isn’t going to solve that,” he said. He said it was wrong to think that a paper could cut staff without reducing output and quality.

In his note to employees, Mr. Zell wrote that Tribune papers would be redesigned, beginning with The Orlando Sentinel, on June 22. Surveys show readers want “maps, graphics, lists, ranking and stats,” he wrote. “We’re in the business of satisfying customers, and we will respond to what they say they want.”

In an era of fast-falling newspaper ad revenue, Tribune has acknowledged that it barely has the cash flow to service its $12.8 billion in debt, most of which resulted from last year’s transaction, and that it must sell assets to meet coming balloon payments. The company plans to sell the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field.

“We’ve finalized the books for the disposition of the team and Wrigley Field,” and sent them to Major League Baseball for approval, Mr. Zell said in the conference call. “We expect that they will go out to private buyers sometime in the next week. Preliminary bids will be due give or take 30 days thereafter.”

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

More ideas from Tribune's innovation chief

Lee Abrams latest:

* Two way street. Shouldn't the TV station also be prominently featured
in the Newspaper? I see NO reason why we should "assume" that people
know they are both Tribune properties.

It would be SO easy to tie it all together into a local Super brand. And that "News/Information" Super brand could be an incredible powerhouse far beyond the individual brands. The individual TV & Paper brands are intact...it's just USING each other for a much needed, competitively potent solution...with a buzzy revenue angle.

*Cross promotion. If Newspaper and TV were REALLY tied at the hip in the public's eye...imagine the cross promotion opportunity.

They'd drive readers and viewers to each other in unprecedented ways. I'm sure there are creative ways to maximize revenue through this level of interaction.

*"Oh we do that already"...I don't think anyone does this to the degree
it's noticeable to the average Joe in a big way.

*The Web: Maybe ONE supersite. More opportunities to create the superbrand. And---No doubt we will lead the revolution online...but I wonder why the TV (and other platforms) isn't tied together.

Again, I know there's discussion on this, and in South Florida, some action, but when I walk through a newsroom...and watch our TV stations, I can't help thinking we are not REALLY, REALLY going after this enormous opportunity to aggressively work together to create news/information superbrands...leverage the newspaper resources and create something very powerful. Of course every market doesn't have a TV or Newspaper partner, but the point really gets back to THINKING about maximizing the resources.

In a perfect world:

*We reinvent newspapers so they are TOTALLY 2008 and growing

*We create local news/information superbrands that maximize the
unprecedented news gathering power of the paper. Individual brands, tied together BLATANTLY,

*Together, it's untouchable.

...A lot of discussion these days about size of papers, newsprint cost,
etc....Probably not a bad thing. I'm thinking it's probably better to do
fewer things...better. Gets back to the "speed of now". Combined with
better navigation, I believe MORE people will engage with MORE content
if things are easier to find (MUCH easier)...and there's a higher
concentration of 'hit' stories.

Alongside of HIT stories are "trademarks". Those things you are known
for. I think we too often may take these things for granted...AND need
to create new generations of trademarks. Trademarks being content that
you OWN.

Take crime. WGNO-TV in New Orleans is making some nice moves in "owning" crime reporting. While the competition simply reports on crime, WGNO is going further. Here's some dialogue with GM Larry Delia:

*Based on our call, you might be able to "OWN CRIME" meaning that Crime coverage isn't just an element of your news, but when people think crime and justice, the clearly and unquestionably think WGNO. I always see how TV stations are in an arms race on weather graphics, yet with crime (every survey I see shows how important it is), it's still "Eastside Man killed in shooting" generic coverage. It's one of those things where it seems NO one is stepping out and CLAIMING crime coverage as a station trademark.

*I think the Wheel is good. But you might want to balance the game show aspect of it with the establishment of THE WGNO CRIME BUREAU which I think Ed mentioned. The combination of the snappy Wheel and the gritty Bureau could be the 1-2 punch that sets you up to own Crime. Picture:

A concrete kind of room. If you could smell the TV, you'd smell cigar
smoke and the dank atmosphere of a big city detective bureau.

It's about CRIME FIGHTING not high tech glitz or fashion. 180 degrees from the slick set.

During the newscast you "switch" to the Crime Bureau. There you have an ex-N.O. cop type whose "seen it all"---rough at the edges. Gravy stains on his shirt. It's all about crime not "look". In this room, the ex Cop crime expert reports on the crimes...SHOWS weapons (Here's the home burglar's weapon of choice...)...tells stories (Back in 82 I busted some guy....). Has "insights" as in 'ok folks, its Thursday tomorrow--historically, carjackings will be up 40%---Lock your car door'. He has maps and charts and other old school non-slick visual aids.

The idea is to create something incredibly real and credible. Deliberately NOT too polished. Makes the typical local crime reporting on the competitors look silly. If typical sick TV crime reporting is the clean cut old Dragnet--this is Law & Order.

If you find the right guy, he could become a folk hero.

Then...on the Web! The balance of:

*Wheel
*The Crime bureau
*A crime busters info paradise with pages and pages of crime stats, trends etc...

The magic of this is that it's an important area and NO-ONE is stepping
out an claiming it. ...the point is instead of "assuming" you are known for crime coverage---go a little crazy with it--and definitely OWN it to where its coverage isn't just an element of your content...but it's a TRADEMARK.

...then use that 2x4 to get the word out....and ALWAYS over deliver the
goods.

Here's another comment I've received relative to classifieds:

I just got back from a trip to the U.K. last week.

I was struck by the "classified" section in the Manchester newspaper.
It was VERY colorful, lots of font sizes, ad sizes. (As you said in the think piece, "flea market like")

It looked like they let the advertisers get as creative as possible. On the one hand, it was ugly like a flea market... BUT... It was interesting. I found myself looking through the ads just to see what was there. (Unfortunately, I forgot it on the airplane home.)

Our "classified" sections are conservative, consistent and generally boring... The fact that they are so consistent, makes them hard to read and hard to scan.

While I'm on the subject... I think we should introduce "personals"
back to the classified. Maybe even make them free. They make a great "loss leader".

I find that I read the personals in the "Chicago Reader" and "Milwaukee Shepard Express", not because I'm looking for someone, but because they're so "far out" that they're fun and interesting.

Of course, while I'm there, you've drawn me in to the rest of the ads and I might see something interesting that I would buy. Maybe you would even try spreading the personal ads throughout the rest of the classifieds to get people looking.

If we want some interesting newspaper ideas, I'd also encourage you to
get copies of as many European newspapers as you can. There are a lot
more newspapers in Europe in most cities than in the U.S., which has
increased competition and innovation (relative to 1-2 per U.S. city).

I spend a lot of time in Europe and have seen quite a few interesting and
innovative ideas in their papers. ...We have the talent....we have the vision...NOW---we just gotta AGGRESSIVELY and WITH GREAT PASSION---AFDI.

Monday, June 2, 2008

Congress Is Trying to Crack Down on Workers Misclassified as Independent Contractors

From Edward Silverstein, Labor Issues Blog
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Congress is trying to crack down on employers who misclassify workers as independent contractors, as a way to avoid paying more in salary, benefits and taxes. It’s a good idea in theory but human resources professionals warn that there is already confusion about the definition of independent contractor. Additional laws may make it even more confusing.


Recently, Congressional Democrats have proposed the Employee Misclassification Prevention Act of 2008 (H.R. 6111) , which would increase penalties on employers who misclassify workers as independent contractors and would step up law enforcement efforts to catch employers who break the law.


Full-time employees misclassified as independent contractors lose rights, such as workers’ compensation coverage, minimum wage and overtime protections, family and medical leave, and the right to organize and collectively bargain, according to the bill’s proponents.


More than 10 million workers in the U.S. are classified as independent contractors. Several studies in individual states report that these workers are misclassified, deliberately or otherwise, as independent contractors when they are really regular employees, according to Democratic Congressional Representatives. For example, a Massachusetts study found that 11.4 percent of the state’s construction workers had been misclassified as independent contractors between 2001 and 2003. And an Illinois study found that misclassification had increased by 55 percent between 2001 and 2005.


By improperly categorizing employees as independent contractors, employers are able to avoid payroll taxes. A Coopers & Lybrand study estimated that the federal government lost $34.7 billion in unpaid taxes between 1996 and 2004 as a result of the misclassification of workers, according to a Congressional document.


To help remedy the situation, the Employee Misclassification Prevention Act of 2008 would:


  • Impose penalties on employers who misclassify employees as independent contractors.
  • Require employers to keep records on and notify workers of their employment or independent contractor classification and their right to challenge that classification.
  • Require state unemployment insurance agencies to conduct audits to identify employers who are misclassifying employees.
  • Track and monitor states’ effectiveness in identifying employers who misclassify employees.
  • Allow the U.S. Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service to share information on cases where employers misclassify workers.
  • Mandate that the Department of Labor perform targeted audits focusing on employers in industries that frequently misclassify employees.

Human resources consultant Christine Walters, speaking on behalf of the Society for Human Resource Management , testified before Congress last year that there can be confusion over independent contractor status. Conflicting definitions are found in federal or state laws, as well as in court decisions, she said.


“Additional law in this area is likely to only add to the existing confusion,” she said. “Instead, solutions need to focus on the education and the enforcement aspects of the problem.”


Walters said that guidance from relevant agencies on the classification of employees would greatly assist employers in complying with the law. Enforcement of existing law should not only be increased, it should be coordinated among the relevant federal agencies, she said. The focus therefore should be on improved enforcement, clarification and information sharing, Walters added.


It’s important to note that the use of independent contractors is a common practice in some industries, particularly in health care, she added. Independent contractors also include workers who want or need income while they are between jobs or workers returning to the workforce after being a full-time parent.


No doubt there are misclassifications of the workers now in the independent contractor status. But many employers and employees rightfully use that category to meet their individual needs -- as the law intended. Whatever solution the government comes up with, it should help employees not hurt them. And employers need an easy to understand law that the government finds easy to enforce.

Time to Go

After a long career at the often turbulent Los Angeles Times, a veteran editor watches Sam Zell in action and decides to take a buyout.

By Joel Sappell, American Journalism Review


For more than two decades, I'd lugged my frayed cardboard boxes from one desk to another inside the Los Angeles Times, never bothering to peek inside. But now here I am, alone in my office, burrowing into them as though I'm on an archaeological dig of my career.


In one box is a clip of my first bylined story at the paper, as an intern in 1976, so yellowed it looks like parchment. In another is an announcement that a partner and I had won a George Polk Award for exposing illegal spying by the LAPD. Yet another is crammed with old printouts and keepsakes from a five-years-in-the-making series on Scientology, including a gift from some wise-guy colleagues commemorating the project's second anniversary: a cassette of Schubert's unfinished symphony.


And so it goes, well into the evening, a crush of memories spreading across 26 years. By the time I'm done, I'm in tears. What's wrong with me? How can I leave this place of so many remarkable moments and enduring friendships, where I've grown from upstart reporter to AARP-eligible editor?


But then, in a call to my wife, I'm reminded that the past is not the future. I'd come to believe that the Los Angeles Times, while still stacked with talent, is in decline, and that it's time to go.


On the morning of March 28, I walk into the Times' human resources office and submit my paperwork for a buyout that will pay me a year's salary while I try to figure out what awaits me in the world beyond Spring Street. As I turn to leave, another lifer appears – legal affairs writer Henry Weinstein, who's been at the Times for 30 years. Among reporters, he's revered, widely considered to be the soul and conscience of the paper.


Face to face, we're quiet. Our tight hug says it all. What a sad day.


Sometimes it's best, I think, to read Romenesko at night. His Poynter Institute media blog (poynter.org/medianews) has practically become a daily dirge for the newspaper industry. Why start the morning in mourning?


On any given day, Jim Romenesko will link to one story after another about papers, big and small, staggered by eroding circulation and plunging revenue. Inevitably, there'll be a slew of items about a new round of buyouts in some corner of the country as panicked executives try to reduce costs before initiating so-called involuntary separations.


Buyouts in the newspaper industry, of course, are not new. But in recent months, with the Internet taking an increasingly voracious bite out of profits, they've accelerated in scope and frequency. In the process, more and more veteran journalists are being forced to rethink their careers in a business – a calling – they thought they'd never abandon.


In February, the buyout drumbeat on Romenesko got a loud cymbal crash. Pulitzer Prize winner Linda Greenhouse was heading for the exit after 30 years of covering the U.S. Supreme Court for the New York Times. Although countless others had taken buyouts before her, Greenhouse's star power made her an unwitting symbol of sorts. If she's leaving, then the industry must be going south faster than any of us could have imagined only a handful of years ago.


Greenhouse says she "didn't even open the envelopes" for the two previous buyouts her paper offered during the past five years. But after 40 years of daily journalism at the Times, she says, it was time for a second act. "I could be kidding myself," says the 61-year-old reporter, "but I think I'm ready."


Greenhouse, who's been named Yale Law School's Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence, says she's shocked by the attention her departure has attracted. "I don't think I'm a symbol of anything," she says. But she acknowledges that her timing could be read by skittish journalists as a comment on the state of their industry.


No matter what the reasons, such high-level defections are forcing a generational shift that, while better positioning newsrooms for an Internet future with younger reporters, is coming with a cost, says Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. "It's not about the number of FTEs who are leaving," he says. "It's about what they know, about institutional memory."


We had such high hopes in Los Angeles for the billionaire from Chicago. When Sam Zell took over last year and said it was time to stop cutting, we wanted to believe.


By then, many of us old-timers had weathered years of internal upheaval and public embarrassment, thanks to the likes of Mark H. Willes, once the CEO of then-Times parent company Times Mirror. Willes, a newcomer to the newspaper business, promptly ensnared us in a scandalous revenue-sharing pact with the newly built Staples Center, which was being featured in the Times' Sunday magazine (see "Down and Out in L.A.," January/February 2000).


In the wake of the Staples affair, Tribune Co. acquired Times Mirror, and in strode John Carroll, with his Southern drawl, steely stare and satchel of Pulitzers. We were back on track, or so we thought (see "Let the Good Times Roll," September 2001).


I worked closely with John while running our investigation into groping allegations against Arnold Schwarzenegger (see "The Women," December 2003/ January 2004). Despite suffocating pressure from the action hero's operatives, John never blinked.


One night at about 11, as we were racing on a follow-up, I handed him my cell phone. Schwarzenegger's press deputy wanted us to hold the story for a day so he could get a more detailed response from the candidate. Coolly, John said he'd hold the presses for 15 minutes, no more, and suggested that the aide get cracking on that comment. John looked at us and smiled. With him, we knew we were in good hands.


During John's five years as editor, we won 13 Pulitzers, a feat dismissed by some Tribune brass as signifying nothing other than that a cabal of other journalists liked us. At least that's what Tribune's president of publishing suggested to me in a dinner conversation.


In 2005, tired of fending off Tribune's demands for cuts he believed would undermine the Times' quality and mission, John left the paper. To be sure, it was a difficult day for us, but the hurt was eased because following him as editor was the talented and charismatic managing editor, Dean Baquet.


Soon he'd be gone, too, along with Publisher Jeff Johnson, a friend of the newsroom. The two had publicly refused to swing Tribune's ax. To many staffers, including me, Dean's departure signaled an end to the resurgence of an institution that only a half-dozen years earlier was adrift at the top.


In Dean's place, our corporate parent installed Chicago Tribune Managing Editor Jim O'Shea, an accomplished journalist whose first address to a largely resentful newsroom was greeted mostly with silence. Jim, a good man, seemed uncomfortably over matched by the personalities and the politics of the operation. He was widely viewed by the staff – with which he rarely mingled – as a caretaker, an impression fueled by the fact that he was living in Manhattan Beach while his wife was still living on the shores of Lake Michigan.


Still, despite the management instability, we continued to produce memorable journalism in print and online, a tribute to the resilience of the reporters and editors, who saw hope when Tribune put itself on the block. As the thinking went, almost anyone would be better than the Tribune Co. suits.


I suspect many of you know some of this history and may even have experienced something similar in your own shop. If so, then perhaps you coped like me – burying the resentments, focusing on stories yet to be told, grateful for the paycheck and not pining for "the good old days" that sometimes weren't all that good and certainly aren't returning.


In all, since joining the L.A. Times in 1981, I'd seen seven editors and eight publishers pass through the place as I progressed through a series of management jobs after my years as an investigative reporter: city editor, metro projects editor, senior entertainment editor, assistant managing editor for interactive and, finally, senior projects editor. Not once did I consider bolting when buyouts were floated. I told myself, with a body of evidence, that the L.A. Times was simply too good for any one owner, publisher or editor to diminish, even given the hard economic choices that would have to be made.


We had no doubt our newest publisher, David Hiller, would make cuts others had resisted, the ranks of which now included Jim, who soon fled like his predecessors. But we hoped that Hiller, like his Tribune-appointed predecessors, would "go native" and be guided by the aspirations, if not the line items, that were part of the organization's genetics.


Our optimism grew when Zell, soon after his highly leveraged takeover of Tribune, promised investment, not retrenchment. But that didn't happen. Although a gifted real estate man, he'd underestimated the severity of the newspaper crisis and ordered reductions.


He also quickly began to reveal himself as thin-skinned and crass, upbraiding Tribune journalists who challenged his vision. In a meeting with staffers in Florida, he punctuated his response to a female photographer's question about the public service nature of journalism with a self-satisfied "fuck you." When word of the incident spread through our newsroom, jaws dropped and hearts sank.


Then came Zell's visit to Washington, where he gruffly informed reporters and editors that their operation was bloated, a drain on the company. Almost instantaneously, e-mails began flying into the home office with a blow-by-blow of Zell's performance, correctly described in the blog L.A. Observed (laobserved.com) as a "psychic bloodbath."


Zell has insisted that his over-the-top words are meant to shake years of complacency from the organization. Maybe so, but I'd heard enough. Soon, I was sitting in my first buyout briefing in a room crowded with big names and many who'd worked behind the scenes with little public notice or acclaim.


I had a sick feeling. Leaving was almost inconceivable. I wasn't Linda Greenhouse. I had no safety net. At 55, could I find a new job? How would I support my family? What about medical benefits and college for the kids? Most important, would I ever be as happy again in my work?


I tried to figure out ways to stay, free of the politics and uncertainties of management. I told our new editor, Russ Stanton, I wanted to write again, to communicate directly with readers. But Russ said he needed me in the editing ranks because of gaps that potentially could open in the months ahead with more buyouts or layoffs – not an encouraging prospect.


As I agonized over a decision, I admitted to myself for the first time that no matter what the job, I couldn't see myself working at the L.A. Times even two years down the road. My fear of leaving was finally overtaken by a stronger belief that, like others before me, I could find both work and a workplace of which I could be proud again.


So in a leap of faith – and self- respect – I took the money and said goodbye to an institution that gave me a career of no regrets.

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