Sloppy Post-Star's death by a thousand (self-inflicted) cuts

I know quality control at the Post-Star has become pretty close to non-existent but this is inexcusable even by their standards.

They ran a front page graphic earlier this week which claimed that teachers at Warrensburg missed an average of 10.6 days per year per teacher. This was far higher than any other local school, so obviously it gave the district a black eye.

Then the paper ran a correction - buried in middle of the paper in a tiny segment - stating that OOPS they had used an incorrect data point and that Warrensburg teachers had actually missed only 3.27 days per year per teacher. This was well within the norm of local schools. 

So what did they do yesterday? The print edition* re-ran the old graphic with THE DATA THAT THEY THEMSELVES HAD STATED WAS WRONG.  

(*-this has been corrected in the online edition)

Incidentally, this discredited table was paired with a deceptive editorial using a troubling national statistic and implying that it was a problem locally, even though local numbers are 1/2 to 2/3 lower.

This is what you get in product whose price has doubled in recent years. 

Mainstream journalists like to tell themselves that newspapers' implosion is due to the increased desire for commentary and contempt for objective journalism. And to a large extent, that's true. But there's also a large number of people who see sloppiness like this and no longer see the use in spending their money on an entity with a credibility suffering a death by a thousand self-inflicted cuts.

Glens Falls daily continues its death spiral

Here’s a headline you won’t read in the paper: Post-Star jacks up newsstand price by 50%.

 

Yes, the Glens Falls daily is now charging $1.50 for its daily product. I assume the Sunday paper, with its extra fluff and higher price, will face a similar price rise.

 

I was told by people I know that the paper yanked up their home delivery rates pretty significantly earlier in the year. The people cancelled their subscription after about 40 years of uninterrupted service.

 

Why doesn’t the Post-Star follow the advice it dispenses from its high horse to municipalities, counties and school districts. Just tighten your belt, mark hard choices and cut the fat, rather than jacking up what you charge. They make it sound so easy. Lead by example.

 

Your paid readership is shrinking so you jack up rates by 50%. The technical term for this is a death spiral.

I spent the last week in northern New York. Reading the Massena-Potsdam Courrier-Observer, I was struck by the fact that it contained virtually no wire service copy, aside from one or two sports items. It was almost entirely local content.

This unique content that can't be found for free in 100 other places is exactly what a newspaper in the 2015 media landscape should focus on if it wants people to pay money for its product.

 

But there’s no reason to think we can expect such forward thinking – really no more than common sense and a little bit of openness to change - with the Post-Star’s current senior management.

After all, I wrote almost the same essay five years ago.

 

 

Why should you pay money for newspapers?

Glancing at a copy of The Post-Star in Stewart’s today, I got a good insight as to why the industry is struggling. 

Grand pooh-bahs like Ken Tingley, so eager to pat themselves on the back, intone that newspapers are still valuable because of one thing: editorial judgment. You can get news for free in countless places. But what distinguishes the newspaper from the “Internet” is editorial judgment. That vaunted editorial judgment of the paper allegedly ensures that’s what's published in a newspaper is not only accurate and verifiable but also relevant to its audience. Editorial judgment is why they charge you a dollar.

The editorial judgment of the local Post-Star deemed worthy of front page coverage four stories today. One was about whether 4/20 should be a legal holiday in Colorado. One was the Vatican welcoming an Easter crowd. And one was about the Zimbabwe regime seizing land.

This is what the paper’s leadership thought would be relevant enough to entice upstate New Yorkers to view their product as good value for money.

The only local story was about a historic clock in Saratoga Springs.

Suffice it to say, I did not view this as worth a dollar of my hard earned money.

County Counting: Accuracy (if not openness) Counts at PostStar.com

by contributor Mark Wilson

Part of a series on the troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises.


Glens Falls Post-Star Editor Ken Tingley is having difficulty with arithmetic again. On PostStar.com last week, his Front Page blog post titled "Showing you is different than telling you" referred to "all 58 counties in the state" (NY). The post appeared Thursday afternoon. A reader comment pointing out the error Friday morning was never posted, and yet by noontime the error disappeared without a trace, replaced by the correct number (click image to enlarge).

As has been mentioned before in this series, the Post-Star and Mr. Tingley have an on-again-off-again relationship with professional journalism standards, particularly where online content is concerned. The About Us page at PostStar.com still promotes the newspaper as a "twenty-nine-thousand circulation, daily newspaper" even though the newspaper’s daily circulation dropped well below that level in 2010 (yet the same page has updated the awards the paper and its employees have received at least through 2011).

Of course this is not the first time Mr. Tingley has made mistakes on his blogs. He most famously twice used the term "proof readers" in a post (and comments) scolding commenters and letter writers for lax grammar. This, though, is the first instance we know of where a factual mistake was corrected after the fact without acknowledgement.

The level of professional journalism to which Mr. Tingley aspires has a low tolerance for ethical corner cutting. In its section devoted to accountability, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Ethics Code states: Admit mistakes and correct them promptly.*

Treatment of online errors is not a new issue to the profession. The American Society of News Editors addressed the subject in 2001.

In 2008 the Columbia Missourian devoted an entire blog to the topic, complete with historical context and a common sense comprehensive policy statement. It also addresses how severely the credibility of news organizations is damaged by lack of candor and transparency.

Three years ago, a commentary at the Columbia Journalism Review referred to an article at MediaBugs.org that advanced another set of common sense standards for correcting factual errors in online content, many of which had already been widely adopted throughout the industry.

None of the best practices advanced by journalism’s ethical watchdogs condone the sort of surreptitious content scrubbing that happened last week at PostStar.com.

For a newspaper that sells itself as a model of professional integrity and has built a reputation for shining light on less than transparent operations in public offices, the honorable and consistent recourse would be for Mr. Tingley and the Post-Star to adopt a firm set of online correction standards and post them prominently at PostStar.com. And then, of course, adhere to them.

Failing that, here are a few handy poses Mr. Tingley might strike while defending or explaining future lapses, should the question of New York State counties arise again:
The Global/Universal Posture: Its so hard to count them when they keep moving around—the constant rotating on the earth’s axis, and revolving around the sun. . .and don’t get us started on the ever-accelerating expansion of the universe!
The Hyperlocal Posture: Our news coverage is so close-to-home that we don’t give a hoot how many counties lie outside our circulation radius!
The Nativist Posture: We refuse to acknowledge the existence of Oswego, Otsego, Otisco and Otasco Counties until they give themselves English names!
The Where’s Waldo Posture: Dude, for a moment there we thought we were living in California.
The Taught-to-the-Test Posture: 58 out of 62 is 93.5%. We still get an "A."

Of course, when all else fails, there’s always the truth: Hey, I’m human. I made a mistake. I thought I knew a fact and I didn’t and I didn’t bother to have another editor read it before I sent it out over my name and under the Post-Star brand.

(Mark Wilson is an editorial cartoonist and illustrator living in Saranac Lake, NY. Since 1999 his work has appeared in news media across upstate New York, including, from 2000-2003, the Post-Star.)

*Note to readers: Links to charts and graphs from earlier postings in this series were broken in December 2012. They have been restored.

Print newspapers are dying... just follow the (ad) money

At North Country Public Radio's In Box blog, Brian Mann posted an interesting graphic which highlighted the flow of advertising dollars away from the traditional print media toward online sources. It provoked an interesting discussion, but it shows the decreasing relevance of newspapers. And that's unfortunate.

The problem with the newspapers is that the main product is fundamentally the same as it’s been for a long time even as the broader media landscape has transformed radically.

Sure, newspapers added bells and whistles like websites, video, Twitter and blogs. Journalists themselves are absolutely doing things a lot differently. But the core product, the print newspaper, is fundamentally unchanged. And that's why the industry is dying.

The typical local newspaper contains some local news. Lots of canned wire service news stories, often shortened into meaninglessness. Tons of syndicated features. Press releases. You’ll notice that all of the stuff, save the first, is identical to what you can get elsewhere for free.

Newspapers have adapted to the changing reality via the (often free) bells and whistles but they haven’t adapted the core product that they’re all asking people to pay money for.

They need to recognize that people are getting their national news elsewhere. They’re getting their infotainment elsewhere. They’re getting their sports scores and standings elsewhere. They're getting their movie listings and recipes elsewhere. The print newspaper can’t compete with other media in these areas. They need to focus like a laser beam on what makes them truly unique: LOCAL news and other local content.

Sure, they will say “Blah blah blah we do x local stories each day” devoid of context. One weekday print issue of the Post-Star, I counted every single story and tagged it as created by a staff member or not. About 40% of the stories were created by one of their journalists. I’m not picking on the Post-Star (they’re just the one I read every day). Most smaller newspapers are like this. Many have a much lower percentage of local content.

Newspapers are losing money because they aren’t offering enough original, unique content to  make people think, “I *can’t* not read the paper today because I will miss stories I can’t get anywhere else.” Most local papers don’t have nearly enough of those stories. They need to re-direct their resources. 

Slash syndicated features to the bare minimum (people freak out about puzzles and cartoons so keep those and the better op-ed columnists but get rid of the syndicated fluff stories). Get rid of all other wire service content. Take all that money and re-direct into more and more local content.

Sclerotic 'experts' may say it’s crazy. But when your industry is in a death spiral, not be willing to risk big changes is what’s crazy.

The insidiousness of lazy, casual bias

In a rapidly changing landscape, there is one article of faith among the pooh-bahs of the press: the main reason that traditional media are better than the new media is trustworthiness. Blogs, Twitter and other Internet outlets merely echo rumor and speculation, often because of an ideological agenda. Newspapers, magazines and broadcasters are superior because they always verify claims before publishing them. Or at least that's the contention.

The actions of the Glens Falls Post-Star give lie to this claim and also highlights the daily's rapidly declining standards. 

The Post-Star has long been a divisive part of the community with its editorials reflexively hostile to teachers unions. These editorials wrongly demonize teachers for wanted to be treated like high-qualified professionals when the real culprit for high school taxes is a completely insane structure of education funding in the state. However, a recent editorial highlights just how lazy and casual this bias is.

Its October 1 "Boos and Bravos" section, which states the paper's formal editorial opinion, deplored the 16-month contract impasse between the teachers union and the school board in Warrensburg. Pretty vanilla stuff. In the past, the paper has also called for more transparency in budget negotiations. No objection there.

But the paper goes on to declare that because of the wording of state education law, it can only surmise that this is a stall tactic by the teachers union...

Wait, what?

I thought they were a newspaper. Why do they have to "surmise"?

If they wanted, they could do some actual journalism to try to reveal whether the impasse really was because of a "stall tactic" or whether there was some other reason. 

What would a responsible news outlet would do? Do in a little digging, find out the truth and then let that reality guide their editorial opinion 

Instead, the paper does exactly what the pooh-bahs so often convict the new media of doing: publishing reckless, inflammatory speculation to suit an ideological agenda.

The previous week, the paper did publish a news article on the impasse. But the article did not quote district or union officials as to their positions. 

The paper may or may not have reported on such details in the past, but if it had, then it could have cited those details rather than just "surmising." 

It just assumes that this particular impasse is the teachers fault -- a position that conveniently correlates with its past editorials against teachers unions -- for no concrete reason. This sort of lazy, casual bias is the most insidious kind.

The gutting of The Post-Star's staff and the economic straits of its parent company have been widely chronicled in this blog.

Maybe The Post-Star doesn't have the resources to do decent journalism of the sort that getting to the bottom of this story might require. But if they can't inform the public about what's going on in Warrensburg, then it should remain silent until it's willing and able do its job. Reckless speculation with no stated basis in fact is beneath what a purportedly responsible news organization should be engaging in.

Post-Star paywall gets bigger

The Post-Star seems intent on making its reach as small as possible, somehow calculating this will help their bottom line. Despite plummeting quality, such as managing to misspell the name of its own hometown in a baseball box score yesterday, and a rapidly shrinking workforce, the Glens Falls daily has seen fit to nearly triple its newsstand price in the last few years.

On May 1 of this year, the paper announced that it would be imposing a paywall on its website. Users would be limited to 15 free article views per 30 days.

Apparently without warning (I can not verify this due to the restrictions), the paper at some point recently has reduced this to 10 free articles.

Will local newspapers adapt or die?

New Orleans has become the latest (and biggest?) major city in the United States to cease having a daily newspaper. The Times-Picayune, celebrated for its work and investigative journalism during and after Hurricane Katrina, will now publish in print only three days a week.

Will other dailies, especially smaller local and regional ones, evolve or will they keep patting themselves on the back and telling what’s left of their readership “You’ll miss us when we’re gone”? So far, they've preferred the latter.

Most seem to think 'evolving' constitutes posting videos on their websites. When I visit a newspaper website, it doesn't even occur to me to watch a video -- that's not what I go there for -- unless someone I know has told me they're in it. I don't know of anyone who does otherwise. 

This is really part of the smoke-and-mirrors (or razzle-dazzle lasers) approach most papers are taking to avoid truly transformative action that might actually save their business. Videos. Semi-paywalls. Giving blogs to people who already have columns. None of this matters.

Truly revolutionary change in the newspaper industries would be for local newspapers to focus on *local* news. Drop the wire service for everything (except for the cartoons and puzzles which I guess people freak out about if messed with). Take the money you save and use it to invest in more local reporters and better local journalism.

The national and international news they publish is half-a**ed crap written which is usually hacked for space reasons to the point of being... well... pointless. No one *pays* for The Post-Star or Saratogian for national or international news, when they can get the same stuff for *free*, and much better quality, from hundreds of different websites or, for that matter, on television. 

Local papers ought to focus exclusively on local content. Why? Because that's the one thing that's truly unique. It's the one thing they offer that people, particularly in smaller areas, can't get anywhere else. If it's truly unique, they're more likely to be willing to pay for it. If a newspaper is 30% unique customer and 70% stuff you can get for free else where, it diminishes the value of the entire product. If the newspaper is 90% or 100% unique content, then it has a much greater value to the potential customer.

Most newspaper people will read this and adopt the ostrich approach. They will call me naive and say "I don't understand" blah blah blah. Well, there is one thing I do understand. Circulation numbers for most papers are down, some way down. Some papers, even major ones, are going out of business or ceasing to be dailies. That's not me talking. That's the market talking. The band-aid-on-a-flesh-wound strategy isn't working. This isn't the time for the timid newspaper man. They'd better act. And they'd better act boldly and decisively before the newspaper ostriches go the way of the dodo.

Update: Also, it's not exactly the smartest business strategy to tut-tut commenters to your newspaper website for their poor spelling and then misspell (or not bother to notice the copy-pasted misspelling of) the name of your paper's own city, as did "Glen Falls" Post-Star editor Ken Tingley.


Also see: my earlier essay The Decline and Fall of the Newsprint Empire.

Buy A Falling Star

by contributor Mark Wilson

Part of a series on the troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations has released paid newspaper readership figures for the six month period ending March 31. The report brings more hard news for the Glens Falls Post-Star. With average daily circulation standing at 24,578, the paper showed a loss of 1,455 paying readers since last October. Compared to a year ago, the average daily circulation is off 1,029 or roughly 4 percent. This places the Post-Star in the middle of the pack of nearby newspapers—the Albany Times Union showed a slight gain in paid readership over last year, while the Saratogian and Troy Record reported heavier losses of 5.7% and 7.5% respectively. Of the four regional papers, only the Post-Star showed deteriorating numbers in the second half of the past twelve month period.

With the latest report, the Post-Star has officially broken below the 25,000 average daily circulation level, a threshold which many organizations recognize when bestowing annual newspaper awards. With the general collapse of newspaper circulation over the past decade, the number of newspapers occupying the under 25,000 category has swelled, far surpassing occupants at higher levels.

While the Post-Star’s circulation losses are middling in comparison with neighboring papers, its performance against the rest of the newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises were considerably worse. Over the past six months, the Post-Star suffered the third highest percentage circulation losses of all fifty papers owned in whole or part by Lee. Perhaps of greater concern, against the firmament of Lee papers, the Post-Star has dropped farther than any other over the past five-and-a-half-years, dropping from the twelfth largest Lee property in October 2006, to twentieth (the ranking figures in the accompanying table take into account the various Lee properties that either merged or were sold over the years).

The Post-Star’s harrowing circulation drop might well explain why the newspaper moved so suddenly at the end of April to subscribed access for its online content: while plenty of people may be reading the Post-Star, fewer and fewer are buying it.

Today, MOFYC... tomorrow, the world!

North Country Public Radio’s Brian Mann notes that the political cartoonist Mark Wilson, whose series on the troubles at The Post-Star is a regular feature of this blog, is now having his cartoons featured at Long Island’s most prominent daily paper Newsday.

Bravo Marquil!

Hitting the Paywall: The Post-Star and other Lee properties resort to fee-for-online content

Part of a series on troubles at The Post-Star and its parent company Lee Enterprises

by contributor Mark Wilson

The Post-Star of Glens Falls announced in Monday’s editions that as of midnight May 1, they will charge a subscription for access to most online content. Officials at Lee Enterprises, Inc.—the Post-Star’s Davenport Iowa-based corporate parent—announced in late March that most of the company’s 48 daily newspapers would erect a paywall before the end of the year. The announcement comes at a precarious time for the Post-Star, Lee Enterprises and newspapers in general. Over the past decade, the industry has been staggered by numerous body-blows, many delivered by online and mobile technologies; some, sadly, self-inflicted. National, local retail and classified advertising, once roughly three quarters of Lee’s operating revenue dropped by over 40% between the second quarter of 2006 and the most recent second quarterly report released in early April. While part of that loss can be blamed on the national recession (income which may eventually return) most of the missing ad revenue has been steadily raided by national online advertising engines like Google, Groupon, Monster and Craigs List. That revenue is gone for good. As reported in earlier installments, much of Lee Enterprises’ financial woes stem from its wildly over-leveraged and over-priced purchase of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (and the rest of the Pulitzer chain of newspapers), overseen by CEO Mary Junck and CFO Carl Schmidt in 2005. The resulting debt landed the company in bankruptcy court at the beginning of this year. The court-ordered reorganization seems only likely to prolong a grim reckoning for another few years.

At the annual meeting of Lee shareholders in March, corporate directors rewarded Junck and Schmidt with $500,000 and $250,000 bonuses, respectively, for piloting the company through a “successful” bankruptcy. While this amounts to an insignificant fraction of Lee’s annual costs, at a time when Lee headquarters was ordering damaging layoffs at papers across the country, the bonuses attracted unwelcome attention.

At the local level, the fiscal mess in Iowa has translated into increased layoffs (diluting valuable local content) and increased prices passed along to the consumer. Either one of the increases would be a tough sell to a readership in the grips of a national recession. Combined, they constitute an assault on even the most dedicated or dependent audience.

In April 2010 the Post-Star doubled the newsstand price of its print editions, little more than a year after laying off 15.5% (25) of its listed staff (business and editorial). Post-Star circulation losses of 4.62% the year of the layoffs ballooned to 10.58% after the price hike—the fourth worst circulation losses in Lee’s entire portfolio. Needless to say, loss of paying readers only compounded advertising revenue losses.

Of course, two years ago much of the paying Post-Star readership could easily retreat to the free content available at PostStar.com (visits to which have been growing steadily for years). The hope underlying yesterday’s erection of the paywall is that the paper will manage to reconvert enough of these online free-readers into paying news consumers, thereby reversing circulation revenue losses (which—in context—are still only 6.6% of advertising losses).

The success of this plan or its failure—a potentially accelerated migration of readers—hinges on the outcome of two major uncertainties: The first is what role increased free-print and online competition in the Post-Star’s circulation region—NCPR, Adirondack Almanack and Denton Publications to the north, Saratoga Today, WAMC, the Times Union and YNN (Time Warner Cable) to the south, and the Chronicle within the city—will have in providing Post-Star readers with satisfactory alternatives. The second is how the Post-Star’s most recent layoffs—including the closure of its Saratoga Bureau and the attenuation of its northern coverage—might undermine readers’ loyalties in those vulnerable regions.

Statistically, the answer to these questions will begin to emerge in six months when the Audit Bureau of Circulations reports semi-annual circulation and online activity numbers.

Anecdotally, the answer may be more immediate. The Post-Star’s report yesterday of the paywall’s imminent introduction drew a high volume of comments from online readers. By six o’clock yesterday 82 readers had registered 94 reactions. A casual count of those comments showed roughly three of every four commenters objecting (a majority forcefully) to the move with one of every eight either resigned to or tepidly in favor of the move.

Post-Star to go behind paywall

In news predicted on this blog last month, The Post-Star announced that starting tomorrow, it was putting most of its online contentbehind a metered paywall, similar to the system used by The New York Times. According to the daily, readers will be to access for free 15 articles a month. Further articles will require an online subscription, whose cost varies depending on length and whether the user is also a print subscriber.

The gutting of The Post-Star's content continues

Mark Wilson has a post over at Adirondack Almanack on the further gutting of the news department at the Glens Falls daily.

Post-Star likely to go behind paywall this year

A reader pointed me to this press release by Lee Enterprises. In it, the Post-Star's parent company announced a paywall would be imposed on more Lee newspaper websites in the next three months and in most Lee markets by the end of the year. The New York Times recently announced that net surfers would only be able to access 10 free articles per month, down from 20; it is not clear if Post-Star readers will be able to access any free articles. The Iowa-based corporation certainly hopes this process goes more smoothly than the disastrous and quickly abandoned PostStar.net scheme of the early 2000s.

Down by the Levy: the Sinking of Lee

(a continuing series by contributor Mark Wilson on the troubles at Lee Enterprises, Inc. and the Post-Star)

On April 22nd of this year, the Mississippi River, nearing historic levels, jumped its banks and rose to within a city block of Lee Enterprises’ Davenport, Iowa headquarters.

Inside, financial and executive officers for Lee—the corporate owner of the Glens Falls Post-Star—were planning a junk bond issue large enough to pay off nearly a billion dollars in debt that was coming due within a year’s time. The subsequent failure of the junk bond issue ten days later set off a slide in the company’s stock price, as well as its fortunes, that came to a head last week when Lee sought Chapter 11 protection in a Delaware bankruptcy court. Court papers tabulated by Bloomberg News revealed that Lee and its subsidiary companies had—in the vernacular of real estate bank foreclosures—been under water all along.

Total assets: $1.2 billion
Total debts: $1.3 billion
Net worth: minus $100,000,000

In the initial stage of the bankruptcy case, Lee was granted permission to borrow $40 million more to pay bills, meet payroll and keep its presses rolling. The rest of the bankruptcy proceeding will determine whether or not Lee can extend the due dates on its outstanding debts from 2012 to 2015 and 2017, in exchange for double-digit interest rates. Most of Lee’s creditors have already signed on to the refinancing plan, and it is widely seen that the bankruptcy court will play along. The hope underlying the new debt timeline is that within three years the economy will recover enough to rescue the paper with real estate, automobile and jobs advertising revenue, and that by 2017 news publishers will have figured out how to better monetize their internet traffic and stem the collapse of their print audience.

While the courts sort out the longterm picture for Lee, it might be well to consider a more immediate threat in the company’s path. Back in July, the New York Stock Exchange issued a compliance warning to Lee when the price of its stock slipped below one dollar. The warning stated that if the share price did not regain the dollar mark within a six month “cure period,” the exchange would remove Lee from its trading list.

A useful primer on the significance of a stock delisting can be found online at Investopedia.com. The NYSE Listed Company Manual, Section 802.01 C addresses the delisting timeline for companies whose stock price drops below one dollar.

In short, Lee’s one remaining hope to avoid delisting would be if its stock were to close over one dollar per share on January 6th 2012, having sustained an average closing price of one dollar or more over the previous 30-trading-day period.

Fifteen of those thirty trading days have already elapsed with Lee’s daily closing share price averaging only 65 cents. So starting Monday, Lee’s share price must close at or above $1.35, and keep that price (on average) for three straight weeks. This at a time of year when many portfolio managers are tidying up client accounts by killing off their biggest turkeys. To put it bluntly, Lee’s thirty-three-and-a-half year association with the New York Stock Exchange is over.

Apart from the general stigma of joining the ranks of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Bros. and MF Global, perhaps the most troubling consequence of delisting is that it may well trigger the automatic sell-off of stock holdings by many of Lee’s institutional investors (many pension funds restrict their investments to listed stocks). This in turn could set off a chain reaction run of individual stockholders, driving the share price—and any chances of eventually paying off its debts—to historic, even unsalvageable depths.

New hires, a significant departure and a welcome return at The Post-Star

13th in a series by contributor Mark Wilson

(©2011 Mark Wilson)

The human resources department at the Post-Star is busy. News today that Editorial Page Editor Mark Mahoney is leaving the newspaper to take a job with the New York State Bar Association is only the latest in a list of recent personnel changes.

Post-Star Managing Editor Ken Tingley announced in a blog post last week that the newspaper recently filled three editorial positions that have been vacant since last summer. The three new writers are Mary Albl and Michael Bonner in sports and Jamie Munks in news, covering Washington County.

As well, in the past week, two other names have been added to PostStar.com’s contact page. They are Danielle Johnson, who will write obituaries, and former Post-Star Assistant Features Editor Rhonda Triller.

Triller returns to the paper's staff after a four-year stint at the Albany Times-Union. In 2007 Triller accepted a copy editing post at the Albany paper. In May 2009 she started a TimesUnion.com blog focused on her newborn triplets. She signed off from the blog (and the Times-Union) this past Monday. Triller’s new role at the Post-Star will be as copy editor.

[The hiring of quality control is long overdue at the Post-Star. In a recent post on his blog, The Front Page, Editor Ken Tingley thoroughly trashed the English language in defense of an editorial which some readers saw as critical of South Glens Falls High School. Unless his ten paragraph post was a deliberate attempt to lend the offended educators some consolation in the knowledge of their comparative literacy, uploading the scolding copy without first vetting it with a proofreader was ill-advised. Welcome back, Rhonda!]

For those keeping score, the recent hires brings to 60 Post-Star employees listed on the paper’s web site. This is four more than last month's low of 56, but one fewer than the names listed on August 2nd. The organization must hire eight more staffers to return to its June 2nd staffing level.

A comparison of the executive and editorial positions listed at PostStar.com to its nearest-sized sister publication in the Lee Enterprises barn shows a sizable staffing gap: The Lacrosse (Wisconsin) Tribune contact page lists 24 employees in these positions while the Post-Star has over forty percent more at 34.

Moneyball: Lee Enterprises and the Post-Star by the numbers

Eleventh in a series by contributor Mark Wilson
(©2011 Mark Wilson)

With the end of September comes the end of another semi-annual survey of the number of newspaper readers conducted by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The results of the latest audit will not be released until the first week in November.

While the ABC’s last audit showed the Glens Falls Post-Star in the middle of a haggard pack of regional newspapers when ranked by percentage of lost circulation, it might be useful to assess the recent performance of The Post-Star in context of the 53 daily newspapers owned by its parent company, Lee Enterprises, Inc. of Davenport, Iowa. After all, for as much as the Post-Star wants readers to see it as a paragon of small-town local journalism, it is ultimately just another property in a corporate portfolio—a corporation under the shadow of overwhelming debt, impending stock exchange delisting and possible bankruptcy.

Lee Enterprises operates 53 newspapers and their satellite publications in 23 states, with heavy concentration in the country’s northern midwest region. As of a year ago, the audited daily circulation of Lee’s properties ranged from 207,145 (St. Louis Post-Dispatch) to 3,821 (Baraboo [Wisconsin] News Republic). With its circulation of 26,798, the Post-Star reached the 14th largest audience in the Lee stable. A year ago the paper accounted for 1.94% of Lee’s entire weekday paid circulation.

Over the five-year span bracketed by the 2006 and 2010 annual reports, while every Lee paper but one posted losses in circulation (combined, Lee papers lost 256,338 paying readers or 15.66%), the Post-Star lost readers (6,473—or 19.46%) at a pace well above the average. In percentage of circulation losses, the Post-Star ranked fifteenth worst of the 56 Lee papers that were extant in 2006.

Perhaps of greater concern to Lee management, the Post-Star appears to be shedding its print audience at an increasing rate compared to the rest of the field. Between 2008 and 2010 the Post Star ranked tenth worst in Lee circulation losses; between 2009 and 2010—a year after winning the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing—the Post-Star moved to fourth place among Lee’s biggest losers.

While no two newspapers are alike, and the regional forces influencing circulation figures vary from year to year, finding yourself routinely on the list of under-performers (and sinking) in a corporate portfolio is not good. Particularly when the corporation is under tremendous pressure from creditors to increase its liquidity.

All the grim statistics might yet point up an opportunity—both for the Post-Star and its sister newspaper the (even worse-performing) Auburn [NY] Citizen. Should the time come when Lee is forced to divest its geographical or financial outliers, perhaps a local (or at least regional) interest will step forward to buy the undervalued properties. Should that happen the Post-Star will be able to stake a valid claim (for the first time in four decades) of being a genuinely local newspaper.

Failing Circulation Forces Newspaper Awards to Break the Rules

Tenth in a series by regular contributor Mark Wilson

(©2011 Mark Wilson)

Cascading newspaper circulation numbers are causing problems in more than advertising revenues, newspaper staffs, and corporate media stock prices. They now appear to have compromised the integrity of newspaper awards.

The New York State Associated Press Association (NYSAPA) announced its annual awards earlier this month for writers, editors, photographers and graphic artists working at daily publications across the state. A total of 240 awards (82 first, 80 second and 78 third prizes) in 27 categories went to numerous employees of 34 newspapers.

According to the official rules, entrants for the writing categories are divided into four separate circulation classes: Under 25,000; 25,000 to 50,000; 50,000 to 125,000; and over 125,000. At present, the Audit Bureau of Circulations lists only six newspapers in New York State with circulation between 25,000 and 50,000. While there is no indication of how many newspapers submitted entries to the competition, of these six papers, only three -- The Poughkeepsie Journal, The Observer-Dispatch of Utica, and The Post-Star of Glens Falls -- won any writing awards. Inexplicably, a fourth newspaper, The Watertown Daily Times, also won awards (three) in this class. The Audit Bureau of Circulations lists the daily circulation of the Watertown paper as 20,475—4,525 readers shy of the minimum standard for the judging class.

When asked to explain the discrepancy, contest organizer and AP New York Bureau Chief Howard Goldberg initially explained that because of shifts in newspaper audiences from print to online editions, the NYSAPA decided to use 2009 circulation figures for this year’s competition. Asked then why the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle won ten writing awards this year in the 50,000—125,000 class when its 2009 daily circulation was 130,506, Mr. Goldberg retreated. He clarified that for this year’s contest classes NYSAPA “mostly stuck with the print circulation numbers we had used for last year’s contest.”

This explanation raised a few questions:

*Did NYSAPA modify the circulation numbers for all participating papers?
If so, did they use the same formula for each paper?

*Why did the official rules fail to mention the change?

*How were the participating newspapers notified of the change in rules?

*And who authorized the change?

Mr. Goldberg declined the opportunity to answer these questions. Mr. Goldberg also did not share the number of submissions for each category within each class of the writing competition. Along with the four newspapers that divided 45 prizes for writing in the 25,000 to 50,000 circulation class, the over-125,000 circulation class distributed 39 writing prizes among four newspapers, and six papers with circulation between 50,000 and 125,000 shared 45 prizes. In the most competitive class, 18 newspapers with circulation under 25,000 shared 44 writing prizes in 15 categories.

The Associated Press determined its New York State awards prestigious enough to send out a wire story nationwide. Likewise, eight of the 14 newspapers whose employees were honored for writing in the three least competitive classes devoted newsprint to coverage of their own successes. None bothered to report the narrowness of the classes in which they competed.

At The Post-Star in Glens Falls, Editor Ken Tingley, who sits on NYSAPA’s Board of Directors, announced his paper’s new honors in a blog post that cited 33 awards. A story soon followed (attributed to “staff”) in his paper’s business pages under the headline, “Post-Star wins total of 33 state Associated Press awards.” As a matter of fact, the newspaper actually won 34 awards—none for fact-checking. In a sign of these hard economic times for the news publishing sector, four of the nine Post-Star staffers awarded first prize in the NYSAPA contest have left the paper since their honored work appeared in print.

As for NYSAPA’s apparent breaking of its own rules in an effort to beef up award classes and lend the contest some semblance of legitimacy, Howard Goldberg claims that contest reform will be on the agenda at the organization’s September board meeting. Perhaps his board might consider scrapping the self-indulgent exercise altogether. It has passed the point of resembling Prize Day at Low-Self-Esteem Summer Camp far more than a valid gauge of professional merit in a benighted industry.

Post-Star: Help Wanted (guest essay)

9th in a series on the troubles at The Post-Star and its parent Lee Enterprises

by Mark Wilson

Astronomy informs us that at the end of a star’s useful life, when it has burned through all its fuel, it expands into a loose assemblage of cosmic dust centered on a collapsing carbon and oxygen core. The outer shell eventually dissipates, leaving the ultra dense, sparkless core to mark a once-bright spot in the heavens. This post-star phase of stellar evolution is known as a “white dwarf” or “degenerate dwarf.”

In Glens Falls, the Post-Star is in transition. Dire financial crises at Lee Enterprise Inc—the Iowa corporation that owns the newspaper, along with about fifty other dailies across the country—have forced another round of staff cutbacks in all departments. Since Memorial Day, the Post-Star has lost nine of the 68 staffers (13.2%) listed on the “Contact Info” page at poststar.com. The loss of editorial staff includes Drew Kerr from the Saratoga Bureau, feature writer Jordan Reardon, veteran photographer and photo-illustrator TJ Hooker, and sportswriter Alex Matthews. In the past week the paper has also lost its online editor Jonathan Davenport (particularly painful as the news organization attempts the difficult transition to an internet-based model) and Washington County correspondent Lydia Wheeler, whose name has yet to be removed from the web page.

Characteristically, Post-Star Editor Ken Tingley wrote a vague blog post attempting to spin this bad news into something positive: a portent of a strengthening business climate in the newspaper publishing industry. His implication that the missing writers left for better jobs in the industry seems not to be true in all cases. When asked, Tingley declined to identify the recently-departed editorial staff; the transparency-crusading editor who publishes the names (and salaries) of public-sector employees as a service to the taxpayers who underwrite them proves himself unwilling to even confirm the employment status of his own byline journalists as a service to the subscribers, readers and advertisers who support them.

This summer’s staff cutbacks at the Post-Star mark the second major round of shrinkage for the newspaper (and the parent corporation) since the recession took hold in 2008. In December of that year an article in the Post-Star announced the firing of four of its full-time employees. The story stated that the cuts amounted to two per cent of the paper’s workforce, reducing the staff from 161 full- and part-time employees to 157. The following March, an article announcing the layoffs of eleven more employees cited a decrease in the paper’s payroll from 147 to 136 full- and part-time staff. Using their own numbers, in the three and a half months between those two news items ten more staffers disappeared, unreported. In total, the attrition in Post-Star staff between December 2008 and March 2009 amounted to 25 employees, or 15.5% of the original 161. By comparison, the Post-Star’s parent company reported a 12.2% decrease in total employees in the fiscal year ending September 2009.

Perhaps a better measure of the net loss of Post-Star talent (that accounts for staff increases as well as decreases) is a comparison of the staff “Contact Info” pages from poststar.com at various dates. The page from September 14, 2008 lists 84 employees. (Notably vacant on this list is the position of Publisher, which would not be filled by Rick Emanuel until October 20, about a month prior to the layoffs.) The same web page today lists 60 employees. Accounting for the previously mentioned departure of Lydia Wheeler, in less than three years the newspaper has suffered a net loss of nearly 30% of the staff it distinguishes with a listing on its own website.

While Editor Tingley, may try to put some positive spin on this grim statistic, the fact remains that the Post-Star continues to shine ever and evermore dimly.

Lee Enterprises, Inc’s 3rd Quarter Report: Black & White & Red All Over (guest essay)

8th in a series on troubles at The Post-Star and its parent Lee Enterprises

by Mark Wilson

The Iowa corporation that owns the Glens Falls Post-Star, Lee Enterprises, Inc., released its third quarter financial statement late Friday afternoon. As any reporter will tell you, the vacant lot between the close of stock markets Friday and Monday’s opening bell is where you go to bury bad news.

While many of the headlines from Lee’s SEC filing were made public soon after the fiscal quarter ended on June 26th, the aggregate bad news and the details of the measures the company is undertaking to stay afloat make for compelling and distressing reading.

The Big Picture
Lee Enterprises lost $155.5 million over the last three months. That compares to last year when they gained $10 million for the same quarter, and 2009—at the bottom of the recession—when they lost only $24.5 million. Even if Lee repeats last year’s fourth quarter gains (unlikely in what looks like a secondary recession) it will outpace its 2008-09 recession year losses by nearly $10 million or 7.85%.

Revenue Loss
While representatives for Lee Enterprise (including management at the Post-Star) continue to accentuate the increase in online ad revenue (up 22% over last year), those sales amount to only 12% of total advertising income. Combined print and digital advertising lost 5.6% over last year with real estate ads leading the decline (down 20%). Revenue from circulation was off .4%, a figure that reflects the unfortunate tug-of-war between the increased newsstand and subscription prices at some of Lee’s papers and the drop-off in readership.

Layoffs and Benefit Cuts
With revenues plunging and material costs on the rise, Lee has resorted to the one revenue stream under its control: laying off staff and cutting back on employee and retiree benefits. Lee saved $4 million over the last three months through layoff, buyout or “coerced attrition.” Full time equivalent employment at Lee (a term that balances out full and part time labor) decreased 4.8% from last year. (these savings were offset by increased $1.6 million “workforce adjustment costs” (outsourcing, contract labor, etc.).

Lee also saved $4 million by eliminating post-retirement medical coverage for its employees and freezing some pension benefits. Ominously, the report looks ahead to decreasing these operating costs another 4-5% in the coming quarter.

Corporate Debt
Lee Enterprises continues to struggle beneath a $1 billion debt burden which comes due in eight months. This picture may soon brighten,however, if only for the short term.

Reporters Mike Spector and Matt Wirz for the Wall Street Journal broke the story last Wednesdaybthat Lee has approached its principal lenders with a new plan for reorganizing its debt. The new plan divides the current debt obligation into three parts: $675 million in first lien senior debt; $175 million in second lien debt; and $175 new bond debt. The senior debt holds an interest rate of 7.5% over a term of four years (compared to the 4.25% they are paying now). The second lien debt holds an interest rate of 15% over five years (compared to 10% now paid on the debt remaining from the purchase of Pulitzer newspapers) and offers lenders a 13% stake in the company. Lee’s lenders Goldman Sachs and Monarch Alternative Capital have tentatively agreed to hold the publisher’s second tier debt in exchange for the over 1/8th ownership stake.

If the new arrangement holds to the previous terms (apart from interest rate and maturity dates) a very rough calculation of Lee’s new debt looks something like this:

•$675,000,000 over 4 years at 7.5% interest (in quarterly installments) comes to $197 million/year
•$175,000,000 over 5 years at 15% interest (in quarterly installments) comes to $50 million/year

When combined, Lee will have to come up with about $147 million/year to satisfy its creditors (before even considering the new bond debt service). This payout would be 2.25 times larger than the $109 million debt service it managed to come up with this past year. For an advertiser/subscriber/investor–dependent company going into the second wave of a national recession, this will be a very tall order to fill.

In the increasingly likely event that Lee ultimately fails to meet the new debt obligations and declares bankruptcy, the new arrangement with its banks sets up a dynamic similar to the Journal Register Company, which emerged from its 2009 bankruptcy last month as the privately-held property of the hedge fund Alden Global, the newspaper’s principal lender.

Anyone who was disappointed three years ago in their newspaper’s failure to hold financial institutions accountable for the nation’s real estate and stock market collapses will not see this infiltration into the publishing sector by many of the same banks as a move in the right direction.

Late in the week, following news of the debt refinancing plan and in anticipation of the quarterly report, Lee’s stock dropped to a 2-year low of 68¢ per share.