Employees at The Nugget in North Bay, Ont., are using social networking and transit ads to enlist readers and advertisers in their battle to preserve the local nature of the daily newspaper. Dave Dale, president of the North Bay Newspaper Guild, says his remaining 70 members are frustrated by layoffs, consolidations and looming contract clawbacks as Quebecor-owned Sun Media squeezes small-town assets to shore up the bottom line in bigger centres.
Even if newspapers migrate every print reader to paying online, they will still face big losses, according to one analyst. Annual income per paywall subscriber on TheTimes.co.uk and WSJ.com is just a quarter that from subscribers to UK quality dailies’ print editions, he concludes, while switching off the presses might save newspapers 25% of their total costs — which is not enough to make up the gap from the smaller online income.
As the fugitive businessman Asil Nadir flew back to Britain from his North Cyprus bolt-hole last week, Sean O’Neill, the crime editor of The Times, scooped Fleet Street by being the only print journalist on the plane. Yet those searching Google for the latest on the breaking story that morning would have found no sign of O’Neill’s exclusive — only follow-up stories by rival news organizations such as The Guardian and ITN
Honduran radio reporter Israel Zelaya Díaz was found dead Tuesday night on the side of a rural road in San Pedro Sula, making him at least the eighth journalist killed in that country this year. If past killings are any guide, his murder will go unsolved — a pattern that suggests a deeper breakdown of law and order, undermining Honduras’ desire to put last year’s political violence behind it.
Newspaper and TV newsroom mergers could become the next big thing as profit-pressed publishers and broadcasters seek to cut costs and strengthen their digital presence. But will hybrid newsrooms live up the promises of producing better journalism? The performance of the longest-running major newsroom merger — the combination 10 years ago of the Tampa Tribune and WFLA — is far from encouraging.
