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Media General, the corporation that owns The Potomac News (my former employer), is cutting almost 11 percent of its work force:
The 750 job cuts are paired with other operating cost reductions, as the company faces a slumping U.S. economy and a deepening recession in Florida, where it has numerous operations, Marshall N. Morton, the company’s president and chief executive said in a news release.
“Media General continues to implement its announced performance improvement initiatives across all parts of the company,” Morton said. “Our efforts to reduce operating costs have necessarily included personnel.”
The publisher of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Tampa Tribune and Winston-Salem Journal said it expects annual savings of $40 million from the job cuts, which will be fully realized next year. Media General will post severance charges of between $4 million and $4.5 million in the second quarter.
Staff reductions, which will decrease the total number of employees to 6,150, are spread across publishing, broadcast and corporate operations. The company did, however, increase positions in its interactive media division as it focuses on the Internet.
The newspaper industry’s woes aren’t confined to Media General, by any means: More than 100 Washington Post journalists are taking a buy-out.
Sad times.
 I think this is the first time that it’s been available on an LP, but better late than never for the record-lovers, I guess: Exile in Guyville on vinyl . Amazon seems to be unclear at this point about whether this comes with the DVD or not, and they neglect to mention the additional tracks being added.
You can, of course, also get it on CD. Both are set to be released on June 24.
The “hyper-local” and multimedia approach to newspapering has made it into today’s edition of Marketplace:
Scott Anthony is president of the consulting company Innosight. (By the way, Innosight has done a lot of work with the newspaper business. But wasn’t directly involved in any of the changes you’ll hear about in this piece.) He says the industry’s finally coming around to the idea that printing a newspaper online is not the solution. Instead, it needs to find a new model.
Take the Journal News. A paper that covers the suburban counties north of New York City. The kind of hometown paper most people read. It’s owned by Gannett, the chain that owns USA Today.
There, as at other Gannett papers, the big move has been toward local news. Not just local in the sense of focusing on, say, the city of White Plains. But what the company calls hyperlocal.
Henry Freeman’s the editor there.
Henry Freeman: We’ve gotten pretty aggressive here at community conversation.
That means creating ways, such as online forums and discussion boards, for readers to participate in the coverage. And then actually paying attention to what readers are saying. Which, Freeman says, has changed the paper’s coverage:
Freeman: It’s made us realize stories we thought were over and done with that there’s still an interest in them. It’s made us sometimes realize something that we still think is a big story really has died down out there and there’s not a lot new in it.
What readers are talking about plays a big role in the standup “huddles” that have replaced the old-style morning meeting. Which instead of being just a couple of editors now includes anybody in the newsroom who’s interested in chiming in.
But chat rooms and discussion boards are just one part of the paper’s other brave new strategy. Diana Costello is the paper’s education reporter:
Diana Costello: It’s no longer just about putting an article in the newspaper. It’s now also updating a blog. Assigning videos. Writing TV scripts, producing your own videos for the blog and really just looking at the story from as many different angles as you possibly can to make it as rich for the viewer or the reader.
The paper also produces a couple of glossy magazines and a TV show. The multi-platform approach, as the paper calls it, also makes it easier to go hyperlocal. The Journal News has, for example, extensive coverage of the local Little League, and will cover every one of the 90-odd graduations in the area this spring.
All of this has changed the old product, the daily paper. Breaking stories — like a freak wind storm that passed through the area late one afternoon, taking down power lines and trees — end up being covered on the Web. What appears in the print edition tends to be more analysis and less news story.
Sounds good to me. We don’t have the resources to cover the out-of-town graduations that are standard for Hesperia schools, but this model sounds exactly like what Peter and I are trying to do with the Hesperia Star.
 I’m not naturally comfortable watching an MTV reality show — I have to draw the line somewhere — but I have to say, The Paper is improbably entertaining. (iTunes has the first episode available as a free download, which is how I became aware of the show.) It’s all the ridiculous drama of a newsroom combined with all of the ridiculous drama of high school.
Heck, it even makes me sympathetic for an editor-in-chief. Inconceivable!
Very much a guilty pleasure.
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