One of Most Storied US Papers Writes Its Own Obituary

These are extraordinary times for American print journalism, and for those of us journalists in this country, it is heartbreaking seen this pillar of democracy disappear.

One of the oldest, most prestigious newspapers in the country, the Rocky Mountain News, printed its last edition today under the headline "Goodbye Colorado," the state it heeds from.

The paper's final front page.

The staff of the newspaper posted this moving video about the terrible ordeal of seen their beloved publication falling victim to the worst crisis the industry has ever seen in the US.

Here is its final editorial:

It is with great sadness that we say goodbye to you today. Our time chronicling the life of Denver and Colorado, the nation and the world, is over. Thousands of men and women have worked at this newspaper since William Byers produced its first edition on the banks of Cherry Creek on April 23, 1859. We speak, we believe, for all of them, when we say that it has been an honor to serve you. To have reached this day, the final edition of the Rocky Mountain News, just 55 days shy of its 150th birthday is painful. We will scatter. And all that will be left are the stories we have told, captured on microfilm or in digital archives, devices unimaginable in those first days. But what was present in the paper then and has remained to this day is a belief in this community and the people who make it what it has become and what it will be. We part in sorrow because we know so much lies ahead that will be worth telling, and we will not be there to do so. We have celebrated life in Colorado, praising its ways, but we have warned, too, against steps we thought were mistaken. We have always been a part of this special place, striving to reflect it accurately and with compassion. We hope Coloradans will remember this newspaper fondly from generation to generation, a reminder of Denver’s history – the ambitions, foibles and virtues of its settlers and those who followed. We are confident that you will build on their dreams and find new ways to tell your story. Farewell – and thank you for so many memorable years together.

Rockie Mountain News. 1859 - 2009

US Largest Newspaper Editors Group Cancels Annual Meeting

And this is the first time since world War II.

The American Association of Newspapers Editors (ASNE) decided to cancel its 2009 convention in Chicago, concluding that "the challenges editors face at their newspapers demand their full attention.

The shocking announcement coincided with the publication today of the last issue of one of the country's most storied newspapers, the Rocky Mountain News.

Faced with the prospects of drastic reduction in attendance, ASNE made the canceling decision even though it "had put in place a robust agenda that promised to address critical issues faced by editors."

The last time ASNE canceled an annual meeting was in 1945, at the end of World War II.

Here's from ASNE's press release:

ASNE had planned votes at the Chicago convention on bylaws changes that would drop “paper” from its name and expand its membership to include editors of online-only news Web sites and leading journalism educators. That, and the annual election of new board members, will now occur electronically.

“We intend to press on with our transformation of ASNE to ensure its relevance in the digital age,” Hall said. “As we broaden our membership, we will aggressively advocate for innovation in journalism, access to public information, First Amendment rights, diversity and ethical standards.”

ASNE, founded in 1922, is the principal organization of American newspaper editors. It is active in a number of areas, including open government, freedom of the press, journalism credibility and ethics, newsroom management, diversity and readership.

The Bad News Won't Stop

And we can only keep reporting them. The US newspaper industry keeps circling the drain, the bad news lining up like in an old Big Depression photo.

The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado's oldest newspaper founded in 1859, will publish its last edition tomorrow, Feb. 27.

Its parent company, E.W. Scripps Co., reported it was unable to find a buyer for a paper that lost $16 million last year, the victim of the current recession, tumbling ad revenue and lost readers to the Internet.

The Associated Press:

Four owners of 33 U.S. daily newspapers have sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the past 2 1/2 months. A number of other newspapers are up for sale.

This past weekend, there were separate bankruptcy filings by New Haven (Connecticut) Register publisher Journal Register Co. and by the owners of The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News.

They followed a December filing by Tribune Co., whose media stable includes the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, and January's filing by the owners of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Other publishers could seek bankruptcy protection in the coming months, too, as advertising prospects for 2009 remain bleak.

Hearst Corp. announced earlier this week it will close or sell the San Francisco Chronicle if it can't reduce expenses dramatically within the next few weeks. Last month, Hearst laid out plans to close the Seattle Post-Intelligencer if a buyer isn't found before April. And Gannett Co. is looking for a buyer for the Tucson Citizen in Arizona.

There is more. The Los Angeles Times, the nation's fourth largest newspaper, will eliminate 300 jobs and one of its sections.

It's non-stop. We are witnessing one of the pillars of the American democracy crumbling before our very eyes. We just hope this is not an end but a transformation.

More on the US Newspaper Crisis

This time around, the author of this article, Nat Ives, from Advertising Age, claims that the problems are not intrinsic to the newspapers, but to the owners who bought them at a prohibitive cost.

In fact, Ives says that the vast majority of newspapers in the US are doing just fine, thank you very much, especially those serving smaller cities.

Even as they take blow after blow from recession and digital media, newspapers themselves still earn decent profits. They do even better outside big cities, which tend to get all the attention.

"Not a lot of papers are operating at a loss," said John Morton, the veteran industry analyst. "There are roughly 1,400 daily newspapers. We only hear about the top markets. That leaves at least 1,300 papers out there."

Publicly owned newspapers averaged an operating profit of 10.8% in the first three quarters of last year, Mr. Morton said. That's not the margin enjoyed by newspapers when they were monopolies, but it's not nothing either.

This is a good read.

Heading toward a US Press Freedom Recession?

During the worst US recession since the Great Depression, the least the country needs is a press freedom recession.

We are not there yet, but a streak of bad news is raising fears that this most crucial right could be under siege. To a recent influential court decision, we need to add this new outrageous example of wanton disregard for a most sacred American tradition.

The city of Deltona, in the state of Florida, passed a proposal to use taxpayer money to pay for legal fees incurred by public officials who sue for criminal defamation charges.

And the city is up in arms about the ludicrous notion that taxpayers are supposed to pick up the tab resulting from its public officials misdeeds or that they won't be able to keep them accountable.

The Orlando Sentinel:

"These are my tax dollars," said Nancy Schleicher, chairman of Deltona Citizens Action Committee, a government watchdog group. "I pay my personal property taxes for things that are going to improve my city. To pay for litigation, that's a personal thing."

The motion, which passed by a vote of 4-3 late Monday, was proposed by Mayor Dennis Mulder, who said that an organized group of residents has ventured from the usual political mudslinging and is spreading outright lies that must be stopped. Mulder threatened to resign if his motion wasn't approved.

One Web site has accused Mulder of being a habitual marijuana user, criminally corrupt and a "weird rodent immune to reason." Vice Mayor Michael Carmolingo and commissioners Janet Deyette and Paul Treusch, who often vote with the mayor, have also been subjected to political jabs.

Mulder, who denies all of the allegations, said Friday that it wasn't intended to suppress public disapproval of government officials.

"It has nothing to do with criticism or political satire," he said. "You start accusing people of criminal acts and that gets out into the community. It does a lot of damage to the sanctity of the office and the community.

All this may sound a little too comical. But there is nothing funny about the fact that in the land that practically invented both the notion of press freedom and the concept of keeping public officials accountable through a free and independent press this kind of huge step backwards is taking place.

Press freedom is under siege in most parts of the world. The least we could afford right now is an attacked from the rear.

The US Newspaper Malaise Keeps Taking Casualties

The worst US newspaper crisis in memory has added a new victim to its relentless advance.

Philadelphia Media Holdings LLC, the parent company of the Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the most prestigious newspapers in the US, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection "in an effort to restructure its debt load," the company announced.

The Associated Press via The Huffington Post:

"This restructuring is focused solely on our debt, not our operations," chief executive officer Brian P. Tierney said in a statement. "Our operations are sound and profitable."

The filing Sunday indicated the company has between $100 million and $500 million in assets and liabilities in the same range. The company said it will continue the normal operations of its newspapers, magazines and online businesses without interruption during the debt-restructuring process.

"In the last two years, we experienced the rare trifecta of a dramatic decline in revenue, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and a debt structure out of line with current economic realities," Tierney said.

The announcement joins a long, painful streak of bad news for the US newspaper industry, including difficulties by The New York Times, The Journal Register Co., The Tribune Co. and The Star Tribune of Minneapolis.

Perhaps all these companies should take a good look at Time magazine's "How to Save your Newspaper" article by Walter Isaacson, former Time editor and current president and CEO of the Aspen Institute.

Here's a short piece of advice:

There is, however, a striking and somewhat odd fact about this crisis. Newspapers have more readers than ever. Their content, as well as that of newsmagazines and other producers of traditional journalism, is more popular than ever — even (in fact, especially) among young people.

The problem is that fewer of these consumers are paying. Instead, news organizations are merrily giving away their news. According to a Pew Research Center study, a tipping point occurred last year: more people in the U.S. got their news online for free than paid for it by buying newspapers and magazines. Who can blame them? Even an old print junkie like me has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it.

China Hides Its Dissidents

Any hopes that the visit to by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would improve that country's human rights were promptly dashed by the Beijing regime.

Secretary Clinton talking to China's President
Hu Jintao yesterday in Beijing. (EPA photo)

In preparation for Clinton's trip, which has been strongly criticized because of her unwillingness to deal with human rights issues, the Chinese police put several dissidents in house arrest and kept a close watch over many others, according to China Human Rights Defenders.

The Associated Press:

Several of those under watch had been signatories to "Charter 08," an unusually open call for civil rights and political reforms that has garnered considerable attention since its release last December.

They include constitutional scholar Zhang Zuhua, who was told by police stationed outside his home since Friday that he would not be able to leave or meet visitors for several days, said the group, a network of human rights activists that collects information on abuses.

Zeng Jinyan, the wife of imprisoned activist Hu Jia, was also barred from leaving home, the group said in a statement e-mailed to journalists.

Rights groups have been dismayed by a statement from Clinton ahead of her arrival in Beijing that issues such as climate change, the world financial crisis and security threats like North Korea would likely take precedence in her discussions ahead of traditional U.S. concerns about human rights.

Amnesty International said Clinton had damaged future U.S. initiatives to protect human rights in China, while Human Rights Watch said she had overlooked the connection between strengthened legal protections and press freedoms and progress on the issues she cited.

"Secretary Clinton's remarks point to a diplomatic strategy that has worked well for the Chinese government — segregating human rights issues into a dead-end 'dialogue of the deaf,'" Human Rights Watch's Asia advocacy director Sophie Richardson said in an e-mailed statement.

Disturbing Court Decision in the US

For a good part of the 20th Century, the US set the international standards of press freedom due in large part to ground-breaking decisions by the country's courts.

And one of the fundamental principles those courts upheld time after time was the concept of "actual malice," meaning reckless disregard for the truth. In other words, a party seeking legal redress for a statement deemed as false had to prove that there was "actual malice" on the part of the defendant in order to get compensation.

But now we hear that an US appellate court, the US Court of Appeals in Boston, interpreting a 100-year-old law, has ruled that true statements can be libelous if published maliciously.

Here's from the website of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press:

“It is the most dangerous libel decision in decades. The decision puts a crack in the bedrock that threatens to undermine free speech,” Robert Ambrogi, executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association, wrote on his blog.

It must be said that the parties involved in the case have nothing to do with the media, that it has to do with a disgruntled employee suing the employer that had just fired him.

The case involved a lawsuit brought by a former Staples employee against his employer. Alan Noonan sued Staples for libel after the company’s executive vice president sent an e-mail to 1,500 employees alerting them that Noonan had been fired for violating the company’s travel and expense policy.

Noonan acknowledged that everything written in the e-mail was true, but still claimed he had been libelled because it was sent with malicious intent.

In finding that a reasonable jury might find that the Staples e-mail was sent maliciously, the court pointed to a century-old Massachusetts statute that allows true statements to be considered libelous “if the plaintiff can show that the defendant acted with ‘actual malice’ in publishing the statement.” According to Ambrogi's blog, the Massachusetts statute was held unconstitutional by a 1998 state court decision.

The court held that the statute's use of the term ''actual malice" did not have the same meaning as the U.S. Supreme Court's definition of the term in the landmark First Amendment case New York Times v. Sullivan. Instead of interpreting actual malice to mean that the plaintiff acted with reckless disregard for the truth, as New York Times held, the Court of Appeals ruled that it means ill will or malevolent intent, a much lower standard for the plaintiff to prove.

“Though the Massachusetts statute at issue in this case also uses the term ‘actual malice,’ we are persuaded that we should not read that term as having the specialized meaning later developed by the Supreme Court,” Judge Juan Torruella wrote in the opinion.

It must also be noted that the decision did not rule that the case was libelous but that it must be presented to a jury. In any instance, it is extraordinary in the United States for such a relevant court, just one step short of the Supreme Court, to rule against exemplary jurisprudence that turned the US media into the model to be imitated by the rest of the democratic world.

The New York Times' Problems Pile up

The current economic crisis is making the nosedive of the US newspaper industry even more pronounced.

The US newspaper industry seems to be going
up  in smoke in the current crisis. (EPA photo)

Now we hear The New York Times parent company is suspending the distribution of its quarterly dividend, the financial force that has been sustaining the Ochs-Sulzberger family, the owner of the most influential  paper in the US and probably the world.

The company's stock hit $3.51 on Thursday, making it less than the price of the newspaper at newsstands.

Here's from the Huffington Post:

The company had previously slashed its dividend from $0.23 per share to $0.06 per share in November 2008.

"Today's decision provides the Company with additional financial flexibility given the current economic environment and the uncertain business outlook," chairman Arthur Sulzberger said in a statement. "We have taken decisive steps to reduce capital spending, lower operating costs and re-evaluate our assets. Last month we announced a private financing transaction for $250 million in senior unsecured notes and warrants. We also recently announced that we are exploring the possible sale of our ownership interest in New England Sports Ventures, LLC. We expect the suspension of the dividend, coupled with our other actions, will help us decrease debt and improve the liquidity of the Company, a difficult but prudent measure in this operating environment."

In December, The New York Times Company announced that it was borrowing $255 million against the value of the building to keep its operations going.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words

So let this Reuters photo of unused shipping containers piling up in a Hong Kong residential neighborhood speak for itself about the devastating consequences the current economic crisis is taking on countries around the world.

 
(Reuters photo)