If the newspaper industry of late could be compared to a game of dominoes it looks like the next, very big one, may be about to go. The New York Times is reporting that the Sam Zell-owned Tribune Co. is deeply in debt (this we already knew) and is considering filing for bankruptcy.

Which makes us wonder if maybe all that shrinking and those “deep cuts” and the talk about reporters giving the customer what they want instead of gunning for Pulitzers didn’t actually pay off in the end. Of course, back in the spring of 2007 when Zell bought the company part of the plan was to sell off the Tribune-owned Chicago Cubs and reinvest that chunk of money, something, the Times points out, that the credit crunch (and travails of top-bidder Mark Cuban) have made exceedingly difficult. Also, this may all just be a bargaining tactic.

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A the year draws to a close get prepared for the usual onslaught of lists! We all know Time‘s Person of the Year is a non-compete, but I Want Media, which has just launched its yearly Media Person of the Year poll may provide a slightly more open playing field. Here are your choices: Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow, Sam Zell, Rupert Murdoch, Tina Fey, The Twitter Trio, Mel Karmazin, Jason Kilar, Eric Schmidt, and closest to our hearts, “The Laid-Off Journalist” (also, Page Six’s pick).

Think they left some out? They are also taking nominations. We would argue that due to his magazine and newspaper selling power (not to mention the YouTube fireside chats) Barack Obama is a obvious but viable choice. Also, how about the citizen journalist, or Tina Brown? Let us know your suggestions!

In his chat with Portfolio yesterday Sam Zell said this:

Our customers have an enormous interest in our newspaper on Sunday; have almost no interest on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday; Thursday and Friday, they’re more interested; and Saturday might as well be in the desert.

Which made us consider whether a newspaper did, in fact, need to be published every day. What do you think. Are newspapers necessary seven days-a-week?

Do You Need Your Print Newspaper Every Day?
( polls)

Yesterday we discovered that Sam Zell thinks newspapers have never recovered from defining success as they experienced it during Watergate — everyone wants to be Woodward & Bernstein (this ties into Zell’s belief that you can’t monetize Pulitzers). Today we hear from The Tribune Co.’s “Chief Innovation Officer” Lee Abrams who’s certainly being “innovative” (also not at all hesitant to put the CAP LOCKS function to use) in his latest memo.

In the memo Abrams is rethinking local television coverage (“What with the suits and ties. I’m not suggesting sloppy…but business casual…maybe even eccentric as the Crime expert could be in a Columbo styled rumpled sweater”), as well as pointing out that USA Today may be a model to emulate. Here’s a taste, and it’s definitely worth a read if only for the spasticness of it all but also to drive home the fact that actually noone has any idea what’s going on.

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The news is bad from coast-to-coast. FishbowlLA is reporting that the deep cuts taking place at Tribune Co. papers have struck once again. L.A. Times EIC Russ Stanton announced via email this morning that the paper is laying off 75 people from editorial, about 10% of their total staff.

The growing economic downturn is forcing us to undergo another round of job reductions and cost cuts. I deeply regret to report that today, 75 of our friends, colleagues and capable staff members in Editorial will be told that they are losing their jobs. This is about 10% of our total staff and these cuts are comparable in scale to those made on the business side of The Times last week. The severance terms being offered to our colleagues are similar to those offered in the other reductions we’ve faced this year.

In further Tribune news FishbowlDC is reporting that Sam Zell has decided to combine the Chicago Tribune and L.A. Times Washington bureaus into one operation. The plan includes reducing the staff of 42 by 12 and eliminating duplicate beats.

Is this the beginning of the end for the AP? There has been much chatter these last few months about rising prices at The Associated Press, and a number of newspapers have hinted that there were considering discontinuing their use of the service. Today one of those threats panned out when Sam Zell‘s beleaguered Tribune Co. announced that it was giving the required two-year notice re its plan to drop the news service from all its daily papers, including the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. Says AP spokesman Paul Colford:

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And we thought our credit card bills were bad. Sam Zell‘s Tribune company released its quarterly results yesterday. The results included $3.8 billion used “to write down the Company’s publishing goodwill and newspaper masthead intangible assets.” (That’s more than three times what NBC has sold in Olympic ads, just saying.)

Portfolio points us to Alan Mutter who took the time to do the math and says that what these numbers boil down to is a loss of $20 million per day(!) since Zell took over the company. Maybe someone needs to make a Zell clock like the one that counts our national debt per person but in reverse and only for Zell.

“If current trends in advertising are permanent, we have a really serious problem.” No kidding. Words to live by from Sam Zell who may have met his Waterloo in the form the Tribune deal he orchestrated last year, which he is currently referring to as “the deal from hell.” No doubt slightly more hellish for the couple of hundred employees that have lost their jobs in the past few months. And it’s not going to get better anytime soon thanks in large part to the enormous debt Zell has piled on, which “is forcing Tribune to take more and more desperate actions.” It’s unclear whether the fact Zell threatened to “cut off their ties” of Tribune executives “if he caught them looking so formal at future meetings” is one of them. Also worrisome: Zell’s obvious disdain for the newspaper business, his questionable hiring practices, and the fact that his COO, Randy Michaels, a former “shock jock, has installed “jukeboxes, pinball machines, and a sculpture of a six-legged man running in circles.”

Meanwhile, in a scraping the barrel sort of way, there is some good news coming out of the Tribune-owned LA Times. Top editor Russ Stanton told staffers that the recent newsroom “deep cuts” had numbered 135, instead of the expected 150, and that fewer pages would be lost. So there, the road to newspaper hell is not without its tiny rays of sunshine.

We’re just going to assume that everyone who reads FBNY is acutely aware (more than a number of you probably first-hand) that the newspaper industry is in a free fall. It’s a rare day that at least one of our posts does not cover some lay-off here, or some shuttering there. And today is no different. Just worse. In fact it’s possible that the future of newspapers glass is still a bit too full. According to the Observer this may be the “worst year in modern newspaper history.”

But as bad as newspapers have been doing — it’s been conventional wisdom for a few years now — the industry is actually doing much worse than most ever anticipated, and that’s become painfully clear over the past two months.

Which brings us to the just reported New York Times Co. second-quarter earnings. Times Co. stocks have fallen 82% from last year. Here’s the numbers per the AP: “Net income dropped to $21.1 million, or 15 cents per share, from $118.4 million, or 82 cents per share, a year ago.” However! (despite everything we happen to be glass-half-full people) the company does report a gain in revenue from its internet properties, which “jumped 13 percent to $91.3 million and accounted for about 12 percent of total revenue.”

All this talk of dropping brings us to Sam Zell, current agent-of-doom for all things Tribune Co., and he’s not apologizing.

We’re looking at some of the worst advertising numbers in the history of the world. I have a responsibility … to keep this business alive when cash flow has eroded at a prodigious level. We’re not interested in trial by torture, not interested in dying by a thousand cuts…We’re doing everything we can to make this downsizing happen as quickly and as painlessly as possible.”

Quick? Frighteningly so. Painless? Not so much.

So considering the state of the newspaper industry it’s not hard to imagine that there might be more than a few disgruntled, dare we say bitter, journalists out there. After years of hard work and meticulous training they’re being turned out of their newsrooms in droves as ad dollars disappear and 61 year old women with digital recorders and internet access steal all the headlines. If we weren’t part of the problem and if the demise of journalism as we know it wasn’t such reliable subject matter for us, we’d be pissed off too. Even so, it was with some relief that (via PressThink) we were introduced to TreeHouse Media Project, which under the heading “Fuck Google” announces that its objective is to “provide journalists with the business knowledge and technical skills to survive — even thrive — in this harsh, yet exciting new media world.”

Fuck Craig’s List. Fuck Wall Street. Yes, we have ample reason to be bitter. Times have never been worse for newspaper journalists…But no amount of bitching will prevent Yahoo from poaching our readers nor investors from seeking bigger profits. So, let’s suck it up.

Suck it up! Also the sentiment we inferred from Sam Zell‘s “deep cuts” plan. The site, launched by a former journalist, aims to provide instruction in blogs & RSS feeds, video (reporting for the camera, shooting, editing, uploading to the web), podcasting, web design, database design and deployment supplemented with “in-person seminars with web-based instruction.” Hmm, sort of sounds familiar. At any rate, we imagine that in no time at all these well-trained journalists will be able to slap together an amateur looking online story just as quickly as the rest of us.