Their biweekly contribution to the NYT was something I looked forward to. They came up with material that nobody else had. I was also a fan of James Warren's column.

report 3 likes, 1 dislike   like  dislike

A big loss of crack reporting to the Chicago area. Joe Lake, Chicago

report 5 likes, 1 dislike   like  dislike

Terrible news and a lot of good reporters that have done great work will lost jobs.

report 4 likes, 1 dislike   like  dislike

So little journalism exists anymore and another one bites the dust. Very bad news.

report 2 likes, 1 dislike   like  dislike

Will miss their great reporting on Chicago Tonight. Great loss for Chicago.

report 1 like, 1 dislike   like  dislike

Me and all my aliaeses are oh so happy to hear this news...especially if it means that Dan Milhoppoolus is out of a job ! Since their inception, they have tried to tear down good, hardworking public servants. This is happy news indeed. Drinks are on the house !

Karma is a bitch ain't it ?

report 2 likes, 12 dislikes   like  dislike

That would be correct. If you read James O'Shea's book (I skimmed portions of it) and read other things he has written it is basically clear that he has believed that money magically flows into any news organization as long as it is edited the way he wants. It is one of the things he constantly complained about the Tribune. In his book and elsewhere, he essentially argued that the Tribune would be much more profitable if only his bosses had listened to him about how to run things. So his business plan at the CNC, from what I can tell, was basically nothing more than to assume everything would work out as long as he was deciding on and overseeing the content. This didn't have a chance in the world of being successful.

report 6 likes, 3 dislikes   like  dislike

This is really discouraging news. Since Chicago doesn't have any real daily newspapers, I would read the NYT for my Chicago news, supplied by the CNC.

This is not a good sign.

report 1 like, 2 dislikes   like  dislike

Though I was skeptical of CNC, I'm sorry this is happening.

I'd like to see a fuller examination of their business model. I get the idea it was a combination of grants, the NYT's contribution and hoped-for subscriptions from readers who would have a chance to participate in decision-making. But I'd like to learn exactly what didn't work. Criticism can be aimed at O'Shea, but he got a lot of smart people to sign on with him, including David Greising. So there must have been reasons to think it might all pan out. What were those reasons?

Note that the Bay Citizen out in San Francisco, which I believe had a similar model, is now in trouble after the death of its main benefactor and is seeking a merger with another reporting project. This isn't unprecedented.

So if grants and benefactors aren't the answer, readers aren't willing to pay and advertising is rapidly switching over to targeted content from news -- which is correctly regarded as a commodity as abundant as dirty air -- what is the way forward?

One assumption among newsfolk that was at the same time high-minded and self-flattering but mistaken has been that content is king. That's clearly wrong, unless maybe it's content geared specifically toward marketing, which is the opposite of news.

But news content should be king, and people should be eager to pay. So how do we make it so? Maybe we need to start from scratch and redefine news, beginning with ethics and practices but focusing most harshly on the purpose of news. Does it have any real value, beyond entertainment and diversion, in a world in which ordinary readers are utterly powerless to do anything about the events they're being informed of? If not, how do we change that?

Anyway, something has been learned. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

report 5 likes, 2 dislikes   like  dislike

I was talking about the CNC, but you're right, of course, about the Tribune. However, in addition to the Zell fiasco, the Tribune, like nearly every other big paper in this country and overseas, faces the horrible problem of what to do after about 15 years of spewing their expensively generated news content online for nothing. The lemming-like answer that many, including the Sun-Times, are trying at this point is paywalls. These don't work -- not even for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal -- and can't be made to work.

One thing the Tribune is doing right is community engagement, including special events and helping local businesses development websites and social media pages. They're not huge revenue generators, but they do build loyalty and tend to complement, rather than replace, the paper -- which should've been the goal all along.

report 0 likes, 1 dislike   like  dislike

@ Jessica - You're welcome to keep thinking about that Gawker piece -- it's out there (though your ability to recollect it is kind of interesting) -- but understand that its author is a former short-term Tribune reporter who . . . well, let's just say whose departure from the Tribune of Lipinski, O'Shea, Warren, etc., was, um . . . let's just say you're welcome to keep thinking about the Gawker piece and leave it at that.

But a suggestion: Balance thinking about that piece with thinking about this one: http://www.chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archi…

Read the comments at the end, too, supportive and not -- and you might get a truer sense of the overall dynamic.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Pelham,

The NYTimes now has more paid digital subscribers than all but a handful of newspapers have real subscribers. Circulation revenue was up nearly 5% in the most recent quarter. Digital subscription is working well for them

report 2 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Yes, I think they have about 400,000 digital subscribers. But they're not doing well. The key is advertisers, who are paying only a tiny fraction as much to reach digital readers at the Times as they pay to reach the Times' print subscribers. And I believe the Times is losing money overall, which is why they've had layoffs and one reason they wouldn't deliver on O'Shea's request for more money.

The general fact is that banner ads on digital sites -- no matter how exalted -- draw only a teensy amount of ad spending. Advertisers have many other and many better ways to target their money online than general-interest newspapers. And advertisers are THE key, not paywalls, which bring in only a dollop of revenue per subscriber. In fact, in the industry, paywalls are regarded not as a revenue generator but rather as a way to stop the hemorrhaging loss of paying print subscribers, who might otherwise figure they're foolish to pay for print when digital is free. With a paywall in place, though the price is small, it's still a cost and print subscribers are therefore a bit less likely to throw in the towel .

Moreover, keep in mind we're talking about the Times, which is one of just a handful of newspapers in the world with a global readership. A better example for major metropolitan papers would be the Times Co.-owned Boston Globe, which also put up a paywall but has only 19,000 subscribers. This is pathetic but will probably prove to be more like the norm.

One bit of silliness re the Times: They claimed that their paywall would be a success if it drew as many as 250,000 subscribers in the first year. As noted, they're over 400,000 in less than a year, so whoopee, right? But the 250,000 figure was just an expectation, not a measure of what it would take to achieve viability online. For that, the Times would probably need a number well into the millions. All this isn't to deny that they're not hauling in more circulation revenue recently. But you have to weigh that against the cost of acquiring that revenue and the loss of print circulation revenue and -- far, far more crucially -- ad revenue in the Internet era plus a number of other costs and factors I'm probably forgetting.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

Oshea falls on his sword. Well deserved (and nice bitch move on FB tattling):

February 20, 2012


To our readers:

As you might have heard or read by now, the Chicago News Cooperative is suspending its contributions to the Midwest pages of the New York Times and its website effective February 26 so we can reassess our operations and determine if there is a more sustainable path to the future.

Effective next Sunday, the Times pages produced by the CNC will no longer appear in the Friday and Sunday editions of the newspaper and its website. Obviously I’ve taken this step with much pride and regret – pride in the excellent journalism produced by the CNC staff over the past two and one-half years and regret that I could not raise the resources we needed to continue our current level of operations. As the CNC’s editor and CEO, I take full responsibility for this situation.

Unlike similar start-up efforts like the Texas Tribune in Austin, the Bay Citizen in San Francisco and ProPublica in New York, we never recruited the kind of seven figure donations from people of means concerned about the declining quality of news coverage around the country. As a result, CNC never raised the resources to make investments in the business side of our operation that would have generated the revenue we needed to achieve our original goal – a self-sustaining news operation within 5 years.

CNC always has been an experiment in trying to figure out a way to finance accountability journalism, the kind of reporting that many news organizations are abandoning as they struggle with a deteriorating business model and financial problems. This is a very difficult problem especially in major cities and carries ominous implications for a democracy. An organization dedicated to public service journalism is an indispensible civic asset, and we remain committed to finding some possible answers.

In the coming days and weeks, we will be examining our potential to see if we can identify an alternative path and preserve some of the journalistic assets we have developed. Continued support is welcome and would help us figure out the best path for CNC.

The decision to suspend operations was motivated by some complex factors and unresolved questions regarding our tax status and a change in circumstances that triggered questions about the economic wisdom of commitments between the CNC and the New York Times. Frankly, the situation is too complex to discuss in any detail in a note like this. Unfortunately, reports riddled with errors still get wide circulation on the Internet, and the reporting on our problems was no exception.

Early stories and Twitter posts on our problems were inaccurate. The reporting was sloppy and simply reinforced in my mind the need for solidly reported, well-edited journalism, the kind that professional CNC journalists have been doing on our website and in the New York Times since November, 2009. I can assure you that most of the people involved worked incredibly hard and in good faith to come up with some solutions to the cash shortage that threatens our future

I promise to keep you posted on our plans as we wrestle with these issues in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, I would like to deeply thank all of you who have supported us over the past two and one-half years, particularly the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, our largest donor; The New York Times, our second largest supporter; the CNC board, especially its chairman, John Canning; everyone who has donated individually both large and small and the staff of the CNC, whose work is simply heroic.


Thanks and regards,

James O’Shea
Editor and CEO
Chicago News Cooperative.

report 0 likes, 0 dislikes   like  dislike

I have no idea what he is talking about when he says "Early stories and Twitter posts on our problems were inaccurate. The reporting was sloppy and simply reinforced in my mind the need for solidly reported, well-edited journalism...". As far as I know, all the early news articles were simple and straightforward and didn't include anything that could possibly be considered an error. This was the first and most of the subsequent stories from other news organizations simply referred to this article. The first article to go significantly beyond simply reporting on the ending of operations was from Crain's Chicago Business ( http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/201… ) and I don't see anything there that strikes me as being likely inaccurate or sloppy or even that portrays CNC in a bad light. All the information apparently comes from O'Shea himself. So I don't think he is talking about that. Nothing comes up in a Google News search that could possibly seem to be what he is referring to. When he says "early stories and Twitter posts" I assume that indicates that he isn't just talking about Twitter posts.

It's odd that he compares CNC to ProPublica. ProPublica focuses on investigative journalism across the country while the CNC did more general reporting focusing on politics and policy. They didn't try to do anything in terms of the type of stories it reported that the Tribune and other news organizations didn't already do. They tried to do it better and sometimes succeeded. But that's not comparable to ProPublica, which focuses on a specific niche that the daily newspapers can't afford to do as much as before. The type of journalism from CNC was not something that is in decline in Chicago. The Tribune has increased its investment in and pages devoted in metro reporting in recent years and this type of news is edited as well as it has ever been there. So there wasn't really a huge need for the CNC to fill in gaps in terms of what it did. That's one reason why it was never going to get large amounts of contributions.

report 1 like, 0 dislikes   like  dislike