We’ve seen this story before. Newspaper announces cuts. Pundits and experts speak out about how to fix things. Then, more cuts, then, a sell off. It doesn’t need to be that way.

SFGate.com: Chronicle to cut 25% of jobs in newsroom:

To cut costs and try to adapt to a changing media marketplace, The Chronicle will trim 25 percent of its newsroom staff by the end of the summer.

IP Democracy: Why Can’t Newspapers Get With the Program?:

If somehow the newspaper industry just understood that even now the Internet is still the wild west, they’d take the journalists they’re jettisoning and instead use them to create new web-based businesses.

Dan Gillmor: San Francisco Paper Whacks Jobs:

When Hearst bought the Chronicle years ago, it pledged to keep all the employees from the old Chronicle. Then it brought the SF Examiner employees along, and had what can only be called a bloated staff.

But the paper did improve – wow, did it improve.

The city always deserved a vastly better paper than it had. It still deserves a better paper, but the positive change has been incredible since the Hearst buyout.

Yet that didn’t translate to subscribers – circulation kept dropping, in part due to deliberate corporate decisions, and advertising didn’t recover after the burst of the tech bubble and the increasing inroads from classified-ad competitors that work better for buyers and sellers. The newspaper was said to be losing $1 million a week a year ago, an amazing number. I’ve heard that the losses were slowing, but obviously not enough to matter. (For the record, we get the Chronicle – and several other papers – delivered to our door each morning when we’re home.)

The Chronicle’s website has been among the most progressive anywhere, and it reflects the dilemma many publishers face. The site is free, with no registration requirements. There are ads, but not enough revenue to make up for the whacks to the print advertising that are hard to stop. The archives are also free and open – which I have to believe is on balance a revenue booster over the paywalled archives at most other local papers.

Reflections of a Newsosaur: Staff cuts won’t cure Chron woes:

The Chronicle’s year-to-date deficit of $165,563 per day is roughly equivalent to the annual pay and benefits of two journeyman reporters. If the paper continued losing money at the same rate every day for the rest of the year, it could fire every journalist in the joint and still not break even.

With continuing uncontrolled losses of this magnitude, the Chronicle, if it were a standalone company, would be going out of business.

The only reason the Chronicle is still around is the continuing forbearance of the Hearst Corp., a family-owned, $7 billion-a-year media conglomerate whose other newspaper, magazine and broadcasting interests are sufficiently profitable to effectively subsidize the struggling newspaper.

Not directly related, but worth a read or re-read:

Recovering Journalist: Betting on the Future:

Or this, from a Microsoft exec: “This is about the opportunity,” said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division. “We believe that there are tens of billions of dollars in economic value that can be generated in this industry, and we are committed to getting a bigger share of it.”

Bingo. We’re in the very early stages of Web advertising, and there’s nothing but growth ahead. That’s what Microsoft, Google and others know, and are betting on–while newspaper execs complain that the online business can’t seem to catch up to the losses on the print side.

Oh, and why didn’t a big newspaper company, or perhaps a consortium of them, step forward and buy DoubleClick or aQuantive? Good question. It would have been a very smart acquisition, a real bet on the future. The technology companies seem to have that vision. The newspaper companies apparently don’t.

A few years ago, I was privy to a conversation among board members of a newspaper-centric media outfit about the possibility of buying a major Web company (I have to fudge a few details here to protect confidences). One short-sighted board member protested, “It would cost us hundreds of millions of dollars.” But a smarter exec said, “Yeah, but if we don’t do it, in a year it will cost us a couple billion dollars.” He couldn’t convince the others, and it turns out he guessed low: The Web company was sold a year later for several billion dollars–to another technology company. Once again, the newspaper industry failed to pull the trigger on the future. Some things never change.

Publishing 2.0: The New Vertically Integrated Media And Advertising:

It’s clear now that the media and advertising industries, which thanks to Google and Web 2.0 now include the software industry, will be dominated by a new breed of company – the vertically integrated media and advertising company. Google’s AdWords created a new model by combining a media company – Google’s search results and its network of AdSense affiliate websites – with an advertising agency, i.e. advertisers buy ads directly from Google through its AdWords platform. Google also revolutionized the media and advertising business by introducing a data-driven dynamic marketplace into what had once been a market based largely on human relationships.

Doc Searls: How to Save Newspapers:

Informing is not the same as “delivering information”. Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you.

What we call “authority” is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us.

The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about. Yeah, it’s about other things. But it needs to be respected as an accessory to our humanity. And terms like “social media”, forgive me, don’t do that. (At least not for me.)

norgs.pbwiki.com: The Norgs Unconference Statement Of Principles:

7. The Internet ‘disintermediates.’ Business models based on scarcity of media and high barriers to production and distribution, are not only threatened, but are terminal. It’s change or die time for broadcast TV, traditional record companies, and yes, newspaper companies.

Not all “old media” has turned against “new media”. The situation isn’t as bad as this discussion on Techmeme may present. Far from it.

Here is, what I am sure, is just a small example: On March 25, 2006 a group of about 40 technologists, bloggers, newspaper and media execs and business leaders got together to discuss the future of journalism and held an unconference in Philadelphia.

The history of the unconference and on going conversation can be found here, but an important artifact of that day has been missing online until now.

A statement of findings by those that came to the unconference and conversed.

There’s a lot here to chew on, as it walks the line between recognizing reality and finding a way to meet the needs of the future.

Some will find the following too general to be useful, others will think it nothing more than marketecture-PR-speak, others will be surprised that newspaper folks and bloggers, in a heated, intimate, discussion, came to conclusions as robust as these are.

I tend to think it it was great start, and I am working to gather the sign offs of those who attended the conference on what will be an evolving document.

The Norgs Unconference Statement Of Principles:

1. The ‘product’ of a newspaper isn’t the newspaper. In the sense that the ‘product’ of a musical act has never been the CD, or the Cassette, or the Album – mediums come and go – the music lives on.
2. Newspapers are aggregates of information *and* relationships.
3. Newspapers have been traditionally bounded by time and space. Inches on paper, space on news stands, the daily news cycle. The Web changes our relationship with time and space. The ‘audience’ isn’t confined by physical boundaries now, neither should the ‘newsroom’.
4. Healthy democracies must have informed citizens. The reach and production of acts of journalism plays a major role.
5. Lets be honest, most of the pieces in a newspaper aren’t acts of journalism, but these additional bits are almost as important.
6. Newspapers – for a time – defined the ‘fourth estate’, having near monopoly over attention driving influence. They were influence intermediaries.
7. The Internet ‘disintermediates’. Business models based on scarcity of media and high barriers to production and distribution, are not only threatened, but are terminal. It’s change or die time for broadcast TV, traditional record companies, and yes, newspaper companies.
8. The Internet and Web are a platform for collaborative communications and social/participatory media. Blogging, Citizen Journalism, message forums, email lists, Usenet, YouTube, Google, Digg, Slashdot, Flickr, Wikipedia, are just some examples of the many.
9. The most successful Web services have recognized and utilized its participatory architecture. It’s a read/write Web. eBay, Amazon.com, Slashdot, Yahoo!, Google,MySpace, have all leveraged this and based their businesses upon it.
10. As technical barriers have fallen, and broadband availability widened, different forms of participation have proliferated – text, software, images, music, and now movies.
11. ‘Users’ of the Web are not passive consumers. They are ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’. They know more then you do.
12. Acts of journalism can be produced by anyone and the Web blurs distinctions between the professional and the amateur.
13. Producing certain successful (but not all) acts of journalism requires knowledge, skill, infrastructure (legal and financial), marketing and influence.
14. The existence of ever increasing flows of media does not portend the same for acts of journalism.
15. There is no news media versus blogging conflict. Blogging does not remove the pressures that existed on journalistic endeavors – corporations, politicians, forces of power – anyone who wants to manipulate a message – will try to do so.
16. Journalists must become familiar with the medium they are communicating over. Editors have an important new role that will be embraced by someone, if not them.
17. Participating on the Web means more then simply publishing files to a Web server. It means providing a means for those outside the organization, for the community, to participate in what you’ve published (link to, comment on, extend). It means going out of the confines of your Web presence and participating elsewhere.
18. Authenticity, transparency, voice, and ultimately trust not only matter – they are central.
19. Publishing systems and CMSes must be far more nimble. Stories are no longer static pieces that once published, are of no additional use. Collaboration must be enabled not only across a newsroom, but across the world, especially taking into account a newspaper’s existing community.
20. Stories on the Web gain in value long after original publication. It’s the economics of the Long Tail. Reference archives – link to individual items prominently!
21. Collections of stories, and our interactions with them, define communities.
22. While birds of a virtual feather may flock together, this presents opportunities for those willing to provide new aggregates of news, opinion, and information.