By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions

Tag: Salem News

At newspapers, the slashing continues

Budget-slashing at newspapers continues, both locally and nationally.

At the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, 36 positions are being cut and zoned local editions are being eliminated, according to the Daily Worcesteria, which adds: “This is the journalistic equivalent of bunkering in at the last, strongest point and abandoning the outposts.”

Ironically, the Daily Worcesteria is part of Worcester Magazine, which is shedding positions following an ownership change, reports the, uh, Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

The T&G, as you probably know, is owned by the New York Times Co., whose New England Newspaper Group (the T&G, the Boston Globe and Boston.com) suffered a 24.5 percent loss in advertising revenue in July as compared to the same month in 2007.

Things are at least as grim on the North Shore and in the Merrimack Valley, as CNHI, the corporate owner of the Eagle-Tribune papers, announced this week that it is eliminating 52 jobs, writes Boston Herald media reporter Jessica Heslam. The chain comprises the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, the Daily News of Newburyport, the Salem News and the Gloucester Daily Times.

And it’s no better elsewhere. Alan Mutter, who writes the Newsosaur blog, tells us today that newspaper revenues are down $3 billion over the first six months of 2008, bringing revenues to their lowest level in a dozen years.

Even online revenues are slipping, Mutter says, which shows that what’s happening now has as much to do with the economic recession as it does with the stampede from print to the Web.

News as community

Good news for North Shore and Merrimack Valley news junkies. Starting Feb. 1, the Eagle-Tribune papers will open up their Web sites and provide all content for free. Currently, you have to be a paid subscriber to the print edition. The papers include four dailies, the Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence, the Daily News of Newburyport, the Salem News and the Gloucester Times.
Here’s the announcement.

What’s interesting about this isn’t that you’ll no longer have to pay. It’s that company executives have embraced the open Web, and now understand that there’s more value to be had — and more money to be made — by building online communities around their journalism.

They’ve been moving in that direction for some time with projects like RallyNorth.net, a separate site dedicated to high school sports and, more recently, the addition of Witches Brew, the Salem High School newspaper. Add in the blogs and multimedia features that are being integrated into the site, and you have a pretty good example of the “news as a conversation” model.

The Eagle-Tribune model is regional, as befits the four papers’ mission. GateHouse Media, which publishes weeklies in just about every community in Eastern Massachusetts (as well as a few dailies), takes a more hyperlocal approach with its Wicked Local sites. Here is the chain’s site for Danvers, which also happens to be one of the towns that the Salem News covers.

Slowly but surely, the news business is reinventing itself.

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