I ran into a Star Tribune friend this morning, who mentioned something interesting about the paper’s staffing. Local media-watchers are aware of the recent major cutbacks in copy editors at the paper; David Brauer has covered it ably for MinnPost. The strategy is to do everything possible to protect the jobs of reporters and other [...]

Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To see the original, go to http://bit.ly/687e6g.
I ran across an intriguing bit of media research recently. A consulting firm surveyed more than 500 newspaper publishers from papers of all sizes and asked them to predict revenue trends for 2010.
These executives collectively declared their long [...]

Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To view the original, go to http://tinyurl.com/lf2q3o.
I like talking to news people. They’re smart, funny and irreverent. I spent 20 years in newsrooms, and I’m not sure there’s a workplace anywhere that’s such a mixture of earnest inquiry, frenzied energy, high-minded idealism and juvenile [...]

Newspapers are dead. Or so some harbingers predict. Most likely they’re right too, at least in the traditional forms we think of them in. Sure, there will be the “big ones” who might not ever fall by the wayside – The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The National Enquirer – but that might be it. All [...]

For my money, this gorgeous bit of reporting on the demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as we’ve known it captures what’s happening in the newspaper industry better than anything I’ve read so far.  Inspired work, Dan Barry. Sadly, there’s not just a hole in New Zealand …
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Now this is a fascinating look at the birth of old-media doom: a 1981 report by a San Francisco TV station about people getting newspapers over their home computer!
It runs about 2 minutes. At 50 seconds in, you’ll see that among the first 8 newspapers available over CompuServe was the “Star and Tribune.” So, far [...]

Editor’s note: This is John Reinan’s weekly marketing column for MinnPost.com. To see the original, go to http://tinyurl.com/6d7kys.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year or two trying to figure out new media. But lately, I’ve been devoting more thought to the old media.
Why? The same reason people gawk at a bad accident. [...]

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: the crumbling of the newspaper industry isn’t because people have stopped reading the newspaper. Rather, it’s because advertisers are finding more options on the Web, and the online revenue that newspapers do get isn’t nearly enough to replace the lost revenue from lucrative print ads, especially classified. [...]

The McClatchy Co., former owner of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, always prided itself on not using layoffs as a financial management tool.
No more.
McClatchy is cutting 10% of its employees companywide, or about 1,400 people in all, which the company says will save it about $70 million a year. Not all of its 30 daily newspapers are [...]

But broadband Internet did.

photo credit: Marcin Wichary
Alan Mutter, who’s one of the smartest industry analysts around, has more at his blog, Reflections of a Newsosaur. According to Mutter, the tipping point was when about 25% of U.S. households got broadband Internet service. Actually, Mutter says that circulation began to crater when broadband penetration hit [...]