PNNA classified ad program update

To date, 18 member newspapers have agreed to participate in the PNNA Classified Advertising Program. This is about half of the newspapers we need in the program before we begin to sell ads. We need this critical mass of members in the program to amass the numbers of readers that will be attractive to advertisers. Additionally, there is the issue of fairness because the programs and services funded through ad sales will, in general, benefit all PNNA members. For those who have not yet returned the participation agreement, please review the packet of information sent to you. PNNA needs your support of this important fundraiser so that PNNA can achieve its central purpose as stated in its mission statement: To be vital to the long-term success of our members by helping newspapers achieve excellence. The names of those newspapers who have enrolled are listed on the PNNA website. The list will be updated as each additional newspaper commits. For questions about the PNNA Classified Ad Network, contact Executive Director Jack Bates (1-888-344-7662), who will be happy to discuss details of the program and what would be required of your newspaper to participate. If all member newspapers agree to participate, PNNA will have the funds necessary to become a dynamic resource for its members and to add tremendous value to membership.

National Academies Communication Awards 
is accepting nominations

On Feb. 1 the National Academies began accepting nominations for the 2007 National Academies Communication Awards, which recognize excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering and medicine to the public during 2006. Three $20,000 prizes will be awarded to a book author, print or online journalist and a producer or reporter in television or radio. Nominations must be completed online no later than April 5. Visit www.keckfutures.org/awards for rules and nomination information. The awards are one component of the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative. Information about the Futures Initiative can be found at www.keckfutures.org.

Celebrate Sunshine Week March 11-17

Celebrate open government with Sunshine Week 2007 to be held March 11-17. You can contribute work to the online national Toolkit, which is available to everyone participating in Sunshine Week. If you've produced a story, opinion column, cartoon, graphic, Web product, podcast or anything else looking at the importance of access to official information, it could be considered for inclusion. Please send your submissions to Debra Gersh Hernandez, Sunshine Week coordinator. Everything in the Toolkit is available to use for Sunshine Week coverage. Each year, interesting work is posted in an electronic gallery on the Sunshine Week website, and some is selected for inclusion in the “Bright Ideas” book.

Newspaper Industry Compensation Survey

The Newspaper Industry Compensation Survey (NICS) is the largest and most complete and authoritative survey of salaries for newspaper positions. The survey covers more than 90 job titles specific to the newspaper industry. It is the “industry standard” and guides the compensation planning process for most newspaper groups. The purpose of the survey is to provide high-quality planning data for pay levels and pay practices in the United States and Canada. The survey provides comprehensive pay data that enable papers to: Receive reliable and effective pay benchmarks, the quality and scope of which cannot be found elsewhere; Compare compensation levels by circulation size, by revenue level, by geographic region and with the newspaper industry as a whole; Assist the newspaper industry in managing an important fact of business; Explain compensation decisions. The survey cost is based on circulation size and discounts are available for PNNA members (Less than 30,000 circ. - $85; 30,000-100,000 circ. - $175; More than 100,000 - $375.) Late fees apply after March 15. Final deadline is May 15. For information on fees and to download the form click here.

NEWS:

Josh Wolf is longest jailed journalist in U.S. history

Josh Wolf, named Northern California’s 2006 journalist of the year by The Society of Professional Journalists, broke the record for the longest amount of time a reporter has spent in jail protecting his sources currently having spent 190 days in jail. Journalist and professional organizations are denouncing his continued imprisonment. The 24-year-old independent journalist sold his footage of a 2005 San Francisco demonstration to the nightly news. The broadcast attracted the attention of local and federal law enforcement agents who later served Wolf a federal subpoena requiring his unpublished video footage and testimony. When he refused to comply he was charged with contempt of court and incarcerated.

Olson subpoena dropped

The Society of Professional Journalists reports that the U.S. Army has dropped its subpoena of independent journalist Sarah Olson, who was ordered in December to testify against Lt. Ehren Watada, a military officer who publicly refused deployment to Iraq. Watada faces two fewer years in prison if he’s convicted now that the Army has dropped two of five charges against the Stryker officer. The two dropped charges of conduct unbecoming an officer stem from statements Watada made in interviews with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and independent Web journalist Olson of truthout.org.

Microsoft, Hearst unite to deliver newspapers online, starting with Seattle P-I

Microsoft Corp. and Hearst Corp. unveiled a software service Thursday that allows newspaper readers to download stories and read them even when not connected to the Internet. The News Reader, which is now available to readers of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, enables readers to automatically transfer a sampling of stories from the newspaper’s website onto their computers by clicking on a desktop icon. Another company, NewsStand Inc., offers digital media content from a number of newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. With the Seattle paper’s News Reader service, readers who remain online can get updated content every hour. Only select stories will be made available through the service, which is free. To get access to all the newspaper’s stories, readers must go to the publication’s website, subscribe to the paper’s electronic edition or buy a copy of the newspaper. The News Reader software will work only with computers using Microsoft Windows XP or Vista operating systems.

Newsprint makers Abitibi Consolidated, 
Bowater to merge

Two leaders of the North American newsprint industry, Abitibi Consolidated and Bowater, announced earlier this month that they would merge through a stock-based transaction. The resulting company, AbitibiBowater, will retain Abitibi’s Montreal headquarters, but the current shareholders of Bowater, which is based in Greenville, S.C. will own 52 percent of its stock. The combined operation, which will evenly divide board positions between the companies, has an estimated value of $8 billion. In announcing the merger, the chief executive and president of Abitibi, John W. Weaver, and the chief executive and president of Bowater, David J. Paterson, emphasized that the merger should realize savings of $250 million a year. Weaver will become the executive chairman of AbitibiBowater; Patterson will retain the titles of chief executive and president.

Seattle Weekly's founding editor to start 
Web newspaper

The Seattle Times reports that The Seattle Weekly’s founding editor plans to launch an online Northwest “newspaper” next month. David Brewster said the site, Crosscut, is tentatively scheduled to make its public debut March 12. Brewster said he has lined up hundreds of thousands of dollars in startup financing from more than a dozen “civic-minded” Seattle-area investors. He has enlisted two other Seattle Weekly veterans to work on the venture. Former Weekly Managing Editor Chuck Taylor will be Crosscut’s editor. Knute “Skip” Berger, the Weekly’s former editor-in-chief, will write for the publication. Brewster, who will be publisher, said Crosscut’s content will be a mix of original journalism, blogs, material derived from the mainstream media and other sources, and forums and other interactive features. The site, at crosscut.com, will cover Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and parts of British Columbia. Brewster said one of his models for Crosscut is New West, a two-year-old network of Rocky Mountain news sites that stretches from Missoula, Mont., to Albuquerque, N.M. Crosscut marks a return to journalism for Brewster, who sold his interest in the Weekly in 1997, then wrote a twice-monthly column for The Seattle Times until 2000.

Washington state student free press bill passes,
awaits approval by House of Reps. Rules Committee

The Washington state student press freedom bill, introduced in January, was passed earlier this month in a judiciary committee executive session by a 7-4 party-line vote without a proposed amendment to exclude high school students. Rep. Jay Rodne (R-North Bend) proposed the amendment, which would only apply the bill to college students. He said there are legal distinctions between high school and college student newspapers that should be addressed, referencing the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier. The legislation, if passed into law, would be the first to protect both high school and college journalists under the same statute. Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas and Massachusetts all have laws that protect free high school student expression, and California recently enacted a bill that affords additional protection to college journalists. The bill will now be reviewed by the Washington state House of Representatives Rules Committee.

Study: Newsroom spending raises profits

U.S. newspapers that spend more money on their newsrooms will make more money, according to a study released recently, which questioned the wisdom of the media industry’s trend of cutting jobs to save costs. The authors of the University of Missouri-Columbia study, which was based on 10 years of financial data, said news quality affects profit more than spending on circulation, advertising and other parts of the business. “If you invest in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes,” Esther Thorson, an advertising professor and associate dean for graduate studies at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, said in a statement. “If you lower the amount of money spent in the newsroom, then pretty soon the news product becomes so bad that you begin to lose money,” she said. The researchers developed a mathematical model that showed how newspapers could rearrange their spending on distribution and circulation, advertising and newsrooms to achieve a higher profit, Thorson said in an interview. “Until recently, people have been doing it because the results looked good to investors on Wall Street, but it’s ... ignoring the long-term aspects,” said marketing professor and study co-author Murali Mantrala. The study, “Uphill or Downhill? Locating Your Firm on a Profit Function,” will be published in the April issue of the Journal of Marketing.

Media Audit says websites are increasing 
local newspaper penetration

According to a special release from The Media Audit, newspapers are increasing their market penetration beyond 60, 70 and even 80 percent with the help of their websites. Ten daily newspapers have achieved a net reach of more than 80 percent. The New Orleans Times-Picayune leads the nation with a net reach in the metropolitan area it serves of 87.3 percent. Visit the Media Audit here for more on this summary.

Study: Print beats broadcast to online video advertising

Broadcasting & Cable reports that local online video advertising is shaping into a battle between traditional print and television news providers, according to a new report from Borrell Associates. Worth about $161 million in 2006, the local online video advertising marketplace is expected to grow to $371 million, or 5 percent of local online advertising, this year and to balloon past $5 billion in the next five years. In 2006 the market for locally targeted online video ads quietly solidified into a legitimate market with the three largest markets (Chicago, New York and Los Angeles) worth more than $5 million each. The growing advertising category has benefited publishers and broadcasters moving online, but initially has been embraced much more quickly by print. In 2006, newspapers sold approximately $81 million in local online video commercials in comparison to $32 million sold by TV broadcasters. Broadcasters are expected to bounce back this year; 80 percent of broadcasters surveyed by Borrell expect to sell streaming video ads this year, up from 72 percent who did last year. The online video advertising market is expected to increasingly revolve around the strength of websites’ video content, an area that many larger newspapers have been working hard to cultivate.

Imported newsprint from China is shortsighted, 
report says

MarketWatch reports that U.S. newspapers are starting to import their newsprint from China. Short-term investors in newspaper companies may be pleased, but the environmental and sustainability standards to which Chinese suppliers adhere are far below that of the usual suppliers of U.S. newsprint: Canadian mills. In its online edition, Ethical Corporation, based in London, reports that The Tribune Co. began testing the paper from China at the Orlando Sentinel in November and said it expected to be using it at its largest newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, by January. Gannett and the New York Times are also looking to China for newsprint, Ethical Corp. said. There has been a moratorium on domestic logging in China for almost the past 10 years, which means most of the country’s timber and wood products come from Myanmar, Indonesia and Russia, all of which have been accused of illegal logging. Canadian newsprint suppliers use pulp from legal logging in certified forests. Third World nations and those countries deep in debt often ignore forestry standards to meet demands of pulp suppliers. China’s own moratorium came about because of its forest massacres, and it claims to have replanted 1 billion new trees since 1982. Read the full article here.

Survey: Rethink NIE programs

Editor & Publisher reports that teachers are using more online sources to discuss news-related issues in the classroom, with less use of newspapers – particularly local daily publications – according to a new survey from the Carnegie Knight Task Force at Harvard University. The findings, which are drawn from surveys of newspaper executives and classroom teachers, could have implications for the many Newspapers In Education programs sponsored by newspapers nationwide. “In America’s schools, local newspapers are losing out to the Internet,” said Alex S. Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center and a member of the Task Force. “We need to start rethinking how the NIE program can be most effective and how to bolster local media in the classroom.” Tom Patterson, a Harvard faculty member and research coordinator for the survey, said newspapers need to expand their NIE programs beyond the print product and provide classrooms with tools for using the online versions of their papers. The study notes that “teachers, as they have moved to the Internet, have switched from using hundreds of local news outlets to making use of a small number of national ones. Internet-based news in the classroom is dominated by the websites of a few top news organizations including CNN, PBS and The New York Times. In fact, the classroom use of non-U.S. websites, such as BBC’s, even exceeds the use of local TV or newspaper sites.” To read more about these results and suggestions click here.

World conference seeks to improve NIE programs

An international panel of Newspapers In Education experts will share
the latest ideas for using newspapers in the classroom at the 7th World Young Reader Conference, to be held March 25-28 in Washington, D.C. NIE is just one of the subjects to be addressed at the conference, which will examine the full range of strategies that newspapers are using to attract the young to newspapers, both in print and online. Full conference details can be found at http://www.wan-press.org/washington. The panel, which will address both how to get started using NIE and how to improve existing programs, includes Jim Abbott, vice president of the Newspaper Association of America Foundation; Lynne Cahill, NIE expert at the West Australian Newspaper in Perth, Australia; and Gerard van der Weijden, a Dutch NIE expert and creator of the international Reading Passport. “NIE programs call for schools to use newspaper content – stories, commentary, art, maps and photos – as a teaching aid in the classrooms. Thanks to recent research, we know that investing in quality NIE programs will improve student performance, encourage better citizenship and nurture the newspaper reading habit,” said Aralynn McMane, Director of Young Readership Development for the World Association of Newspapers, which is organizing the event along with the NAA Foundation.

Fire the wire and hire locally, says media consultant

Mark A. Phillips, formerly editor-in-chief for Boston Metro and assistant city editor for The Repository in Canton, Ohio, wrote in Editor & Publisher this week that papers should stop firing people and fire their newswire. Phillips, who now operates LP NewMedia LLC, a media consulting company, makes the suggestion because “by the time your valued local newspaper reader gets a copy of your paper, the news could be a day old.” He also asks, “Don’t you want to give them something they truly cannot get anywhere else?” To read more on why he wants you to “Fire the Wire” click here.

Publishers trim national ad premiums

Media Life Magazine reports that media buyers who place their national clients in local newspapers pay higher rates than local advertisers. Under these premiums, a national advertiser can be charged 30 percent or more over what local advertisers must pay for the exact same ad space. There was a time when national advertisers had no choice but the local daily if they wanted to reach into their markets. Now there are increasingly other choices, led by the Internet, and some say the premium is costing publishers business. In a recent survey on buying newspapers, Media Life asked what most annoyed buyers about the process. One respondent answered: “The scam of multiple rate cards and the general cocky attitude of the reps (‘We’re the only daily newspaper in town!’). Circ goes down and rates go up. Advertisers are losing value in newspapers every day, but newspapers act like it is still 1970.” To read more about these changes click here.

PEOPLE:

Brandt named ad director for Western Communications

The Bulletin in Bend, Ore. reports that Jay Brandt has been named director of advertising sales for Western Communications Inc., parent company of The Bulletin and The Observer in La Grande, Ore. Brandt, The Bulletin’s display advertising manager for more than six years, succeeds Debbie Pantenburg. Brandt will oversee all advertising sales at The Bulletin and The Observer as well as several other newspapers in Oregon and California owned by Western.

IN MEMORIAM:

Earl Clark, 95

Earl W. Clark, a former managing editor of the daily newspaper in Port Angeles, Wash., has died at age 95. Clark died at his Port Angeles home of age-related causes, the Peninsula Daily News reported. Clark started working for the Port Angeles Evening News – the predecessor to the Daily News – In 1948, following stints at papers in his home state of Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. He stayed at the Evening News for six years before moving on to other journalism jobs around the state. He purchased the weekly Edmonds Tribune-Review in 1954, was twice president of the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association, and became editorial and documentary writer for KIRO-TV in Seattle. He returned to Port Angeles in 1969 to pursue freelance writing and to teach journalism at Peninsula College. Most recently, he was a moderator for the Round Table on Politics discussions at the Port Angeles Senior and Community Center. Clark is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter.

CALL TO READERS : Send stories to the editor Kristen Lowrey.

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