Portfolio magazine announced today that it's shutting down.

And man, talk about timing. Blogger Ryan Avent had just left the Economist's Free Exchange to take over (sometime Planet Money guest) Felix Salmon's Portfolio blog, Market Movers. Salmon moved over to blog at Reuters.

Avent announced he was posting online at Portfolio on April 15. The headline: "The End, For Now."

Salmon writes:

"I feel particularly bad for the amazing Ryan Avent, who's got off to a truly smashing start at Market Movers and who looks to have jumped ship from the Economist at exactly the wrong time."

Hats off to Avent, who's posted twice today despite the situation at Portfolio, including this cool take on the NYT's Tim Geithner feature.

As we reported earlier today, Chicago Tribune "Recession Diarist" Lou Carlozo was told Wednesday he was among those being laid off in the newspaper's latest round of cuts. Carlozo says when he learned the news editors forced him to remove an entry telling readers that he was out of work too.

The entire "Recession Diaries" blog was removed from the paper's web site. But Carlozo agreed to share his spiked posting for "Recession Diaries" with Planet Money so others could learn what it was like for him to confront the economy, first hand.

Continue reading "Update: Spiked 'Recession Diary'" >

Lou Carlozo thought he was being pretty nimble at a time the economy was wreaking havoc on his employer and the larger world. The veteran Chicago Tribune arts reporter was asked by editors to chronicle how the recession affected families in his region. In recent months, he blogged under "The Recession Diaries" about his own family's pocketbook concerns.

On Wednesday, the Tribune laid him off. And, according to a piece he wrote for a blog called True/Slant to which he contributes, the Trib told him to pull an account he had put online of the firing, part of wider job losses there. I heard about it from a friend who saw a Facebook posting yesterday -- so the news was already out.

Continue reading "'Recession Diarist' Laid Off" >

Steven Brill generates business plans like a furnace throws off heat -- with force and gusto. Now Brill has unveiled what he says may be the cure for ailing newspaper industry. It's called Journalism Online LLC, a venture undertaken along with former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery Jr., a former telecommunications executive and former CEO of the nation's largest regional sports cable channel. The trio think they can convince you to pay to read articles you can already get for free. It may sound like a tough sell, but hear Brill out.

"Newspaper publishers and magazine publishers have been engaged in group suicide," Brill says. "They all decided, for reasons I can't figure out, that they were going to give their stuff away for free online, at the same time that they sell it on newsstands.... They're now seeing the consequences of it."

So sure, publishers would love to make money online from paying readers -- it's expensive taking time to pin down elusive things like. But why would readers pay?

Continue reading "Converting "Should" to "Will"" >

Count Dean Miller -- a self-described "red-blooded American capitalist" -- among those who think newspapers will be around and making money for a long time. Miller was until recently the editor of the Idaho Falls Post-Register, a job he had held for about 14 years until he locked horns one too many times with the head of his company. (Disclosure: I met Miller at a professional conference at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg and have kept in friendly contact since.)

I spoke with Miller because of a fact that often gets overlooked: While most of the ink, blood and tears spilled over newspapers involves big-city dailies, smaller papers have tended to fare better. He says many of the most influential regional papers in the country have forgotten to focus carefully enough on their local readers and advertisers and are weighed down by major debt.

But he offers lessons for the bigger names in the newspaper industry, culled in no small part from his experiences in eastern Idaho.

Continue reading "Home Delivery On The Range" >

Amid the annual festival of self-celebration that is the Pulitzer Prize process is the hulking brute of a business story.

The New York Times won five -- five! -- Pulitzers, but the parent Times Co. reported a brutal plunge in its first quarter earnings. (Others are faring even worse: The McClatchy Newspaper company has been warned its stock price has fallen so sharply that it may be dropped from the New York Stock Exchange listing.)

As the Boston Globe appears to be the greatest financial drag on the Times Co., media critic Adam Reilly of the Boston Phoenix has called on it to use the Globe as a lab to test out innovations that executives hope will work for the New York Times itself.

Another Pulitzer-winning publication appears to have done just that: the Las Vegas Sun. In just four years, it appears to have reinvented itself from a trailing paper in a two-daily town into a multi-media power.

Continue reading "Eyes On The Prize" >

Even before the recession hit, there was a lot of angst -- and a lot of layoffs -- inside the news business as journalists fretted about how we will be able to afford to report the news. Now it's outright panic. Los Angeles Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein reportedly defended putting an advertisement on the front page of his paper by saying, "I'm just trying to keep the lights on here, folks."

And yet, out of tumult comes opportunity. And as the traditional newspaper model cracks apart, we're seeing a profusion of new proposals from actors old and new. We've heard from a few Planet Money regulars that you'd like to learn more about them.

Continue reading "Who'll Pay For News --- And How?" >