So...The New York Times will eliminate 100 newsroom positions in 2008.  The respected publisher of the Orlando Sentinel, Kathy Waltz, resigns and walks out the door.  We won't dwell, though, on these latest episodes in the story of The Incredible Shrinking Newspaper Industry or its potent new sub-plot, Trouble in Zell Land.

 

Instead we close out Good News Week at The Biz Blog with three brief items.

 

Picking up where we left off in the previous discussion of the paperless New York Times,  many other papers are also offering electronic editions and having some circulation success with them.  Specifically, the two Denver Newspaper Agency papers -- the Post and the Rocky -- now have more than 20,000 paid electronic subscribers between them.  The Orange County Register has about 15,000. 

 

These are more modest variations on a reproduction of the printed newspaper -- a PDF file with zoom and search functions but lacking the streaming-and-sizing bells and whistles of Times Reader.  As with Times Reader, the price is right -- $30 a year for either of the Denver papers and $61.68 for the Register.   There seems to be a market out there for a traditionally configured electronic newspaper, even though it offers none of the multimedia content available at the papers' Web sites.

 

This morning also brought news that the New York Times Co., Gannett, Hearst and Tribune are launching a new business placing national online advertising.  Interestingly, neither the New York Times or USA Today will be included in the network of participating papers.  They have a lot of national online advertising already and their own sales and placement system in place.

 

But the business constitutes a vote of confidence that there is money to be made placing national advertising in metro and smaller papers, once the current difficulties of varying specifications and billing systems are eliminated.  That has been the pitch of the group of more than 600 papers that are hoping to launch a similar common platform in partnership with Yahoo later this year -- a move some say could boost member newspaper sites' online advertising 15 to 20%.  Uncertainty over Yahoo's future probably makes the venture all the more timely and attractive to the four heavy-hitting partners.

 

We close with a reasonable reubttal to the doomsayers -- in this instance a promotional piece from the World Assocation of Newspapers (WAN), the international equivalent of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA). Yes, it is propaganda but with some style, spirit and wit. Plus the message is a reminder that the troubles of U.S. papers take place in the context of a world-wide industry doing quite well, thank you, and with innovations worth adapting to our country's distinctive newspaper culture.