With Cost-Cutting Constantly Discussed at Media Company Meetings, Just What Are They Up To These Days?

Take Gannett, publisher of USA Today and 85 daily US newspapers. It has just completed a two-year project to knock an inch off the width off its newspapers, down from 13 inches to 12 inches and while the spin may be that makes the newspaper easier to handle the reality means big savings in newsprint costs. Other major newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have shrunk page widths this year for the same reason – to save millions of dollars in newsprint costs.

But Gannett management apparently are saying to themselves that if they could save as much as they have by cutting one inch then why not go where no US newspaper has gone before and cut another inch off the width, down to 11 inches, the same width as US letter size.

According to Editor & Publisher one Gannett newspaper in California, the Visalia Times-Delta, has already made the change and others are in the pipeline.

Fort technical reasons we won’t get into here, the drop from 12 inches to 11 inches is apparently far more difficult than the drop from 13 inches to 12, but Gannett newspapers across the group apparently are looking at the feasibility of making the change. For design purposes things would be a little odd since the newspapers’ length remains at 22 inches, meaning a direct 2:1 ratio in length to width.

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The Way Wall Street Sees It: "Even The Most Diligent" Cost-Cutting By Newspaper s Cannot Make Up Revenues Losses – Goldman Sachs After Reviewing Gannett’s Dismal May Numbers
As newspaper groups continue to report how their Internet revenue increases are just swell but, well, let’s not talk about print, Goldman Sachs weighs in with the view that no matter how good that Internet revenue, no matter how big the print cost-cutting, those print losses continue to outstrip all the bandages.

Is This The Unacceptable Face of Newspaper Capitalism -- Dow Jones Continues Implementing Costs Savings, Recently Dropping 97 Jobs, And Yet It Hands Out Huge Bonuses To Its Senior Managers?
Dow Jones is on a continuing binge to save costs wherever it can. It narrowed the width of its newsprint to save some $18 million annually, it fired 97 employees in reorganizing its enterprise media group, and it’s studying how it can further outsource jobs. So with that environment is it really right to issue a couple of million dollars worth of bonuses to top executives? It must have done wonders for staff morale.

With China Expected To Deliver 75,000 Tons of Newsprint to the US in 2007, and With Economies Having Already Cut US Newsprint Usage By 6.6% This Year, The Laws Of Supply And Demand Are Finally Favoring Publishers
The relationship between newspapers and their newsprint suppliers has never been a love affair. No matter what publishers did in the past to cut back on their newsprint usage to save costs the producers would go and close down a newsprint paper mill or two to reduce supply and the laws of supply and demand put publishers right back where they were. But this year is different.

NBC’s Cost Cutting, Including 700 Jobs, Shows The Problems That Newspapers Are Experiencing Are Also At Play At Broadcasting Giants Who Are Also Desperately Trying To Get More Digitally Involved
US television network NBC saw its advertising revenues drop by $800 million two years ago and that money has not come running back, so the network has decided that relying on being just a traditional media analog player is no longer its future – digital is the name of the game and it has embarked on a massive reorganization including huge cost cuts to free up investment funds.

Ad Revenues at VG, Norway’s Largest Newspaper, Are About Equal Between Newspaper And Its Web Site, But Costs Are A Different Story -- So What, It’s All One Multi-Platform Brand, Isn’t It?
VG, Norway’s largest newspaper has tried just about everything to keep its print circulation and advertising revenues stable, but that’s a tough act given that the country’s broadband penetration level is one of the world’s highest, about 70% of the population accesses the Internet, and that 60% of its readers have said flat out they prefer to read news on the Internet rather than in the newspaper.

And then there is the idea floating around the campus of California State at Long Beach that one way to save money on the money-losing Daily 49er newspaper is to drop print entirely and just rely on the Internet.

The proposal was made by the dean of the College of Liberal Arts that has to pick up the newspaper’s losses out of its budget. The chairman of the journalism department told the dean he thought that was a bad idea and the next thing you know the journalism department is looking for a new chairman.

The newspaper’s staff is none too happy with the dean’s proposal and the newspaper’s general manager, Beverly Munson said in a 49er article the move to online only is premature. "Half a percent of our ad revenue comes from online [advertisements]," Munson said. "If the 49er were to go online only, it would have about $500 ad revenue annually. We're not ready for this. We're not ready to go online only."

No doubt that debate will continue on the campus but how many newspapers out there are asking themselves that same question. Is it time to take the “paper” out of newspaper?

Portfolio Magazine interviewed Barry Diller, chairman of online conglomerate IAC and travel services company Expedia.com and he also sits next to Warren Buffett on the board of the Washington Post Company.

And his view of “paper” is not very comfortable. He says newspapers are having a particularly tough time right now. “I don’t think there are easy solutions. It’s hard when you use the word ‘newspaper’. If you mean news-gathering, or just news, take the paper off, then I’m very hopeful. But the current print system is going to continue to decline. To what extent? I can’t really predict, but it’s going to continue to decline.

“The problem for print is print. I mean, it’s paper. It’s current distribution, and it’s going to be supplanted by other paths. So I’m optimistic about the paths but you certainly can’t be optimistic if you’re running a newspaper,” he said.

And he continued, “I think that the print business, the ink business, is deeply challenged. But I also think that’s just the distribution mode. I think that the work that is done produces value, and it will produce value in the internet and other forms. I mean, I now get the Washington Post printed on my own little printer on my boat every morning via the Internet.”

And what about people who want that printed paper in their hands? “That’s for an aging population, and we can’t predict what form people will want the news to be in. But people are going to want edited, informed products of journalistic process. So if you can organize that on the kind of scale that great papers have done, and do, there’s a future for you, too.”

Incidentally, you don’t have to be a Barry Diller on a boat printing out the Washington Post each morning – you can have someone else do the printing for you. ftm in Switzerland recently received an offer in the mail from YourMail newspaper service as part of the Newspaper-Print-on-Demand Service that you can get the Post or any one of 300 newspapers from 50 countries in 30 languages that are printed out from the Internet immediately after going to press and delivered by courier at “top speed”. One year’s subscription for 3.50 Swiss francs a copy ($3, £1.50).

But perhaps the UK’s public broadcaster, the BBC, has the easiest idea. Combine all of its newsrooms – TV, radio and online – and then cut the overall budget by 5% for each of the next five years.

And then there is multi-tasking. The popular BBC-TV Newsnight program currently uses five staff to produce each story –a reporter, producer, camera person, editor and graphics designer. That’s going to be reduced by one or two staffers, with the remaining ones expected to be able to complete the jobs the others did.

With Cost-Cutting Constantly Discussed at Media Company Meetings, Just What Are They Up To These Days?

From Gannett, America’s largest newspaper group, to the BBC, the UK’s public broadcaster, media groups are continually on the lookout for new ways to save money and sometimes it means going back to past savings ideas and doing it all over again.