Digital

Cablevision’s Newsday will hire 25 editors, reporters, and digital content specialists for a new website and apps serving New York’s Westchester county.

Diane Goldie, previously a local media editor at Newsday and editor-in-chief of AMNewYork for four years, has been tapped to manage the new products.

“Newsday is the indispensable source of information for Long Islanders. Now, through this initiative and by harnessing the strengths of News 12, MSG Varsity and amNewYork, Newsday will become the premier digital information choice for Westchester County residents,” Cablevision president Tad Smith said in a memo obtained by MediaWire.

MediaWire has the email to apply for the jobs, though it sounds like they’re being opened up to internal applicants only at first and anyone can apply.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Gawker editor-in-chief Remy Stern is stepping down, and Gawker is replacing him with Deadspin’s AJ Daulerio.

Daulerio had been looking for outside opportunities before the promotion, the New York Observer reports. “The site was basically at the place where I was going to want it to be,” he told the Observer, so he had been ready to move on.

Stern will be consulting for Gawker Media and helping with “new editorial initiatives,” according to a memo from Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton.

“It’s not as if Gawker in crisis,” the memo also said. “But we need to release the full potential of the site’s excellent roster of writers — and fill out the team with new hires. AJ has proven himself as both developer and recruiter of editorial talent. That’s what the site needs right now. Hence the switch.”

Daulerio’s spot at Deadspin will be filled by deputy editor Tommy Craggs.

Booth Newspapers and MLive.com (the website for all eight of Booth’s papers) have restructured into a digital-first company, MLive Media Group, serving eight cities in Michigan.

That’s great!

The restructuring is resulting in the loss of 550 jobs across the state.

That’s…not great.

“We’ve been clear since the moment we announced the launch of the MLive Media Group that we’d be a smaller company as a result of the transition,” MLive Media Group President Dan Gaydou said.

The 550 people who have received layoff notices make up just under half of MLive’s Michigan workforce, Gaydou said, but “this is not representative of the actual number of employees who will or will not continue with one of the new companies. All of these employees are eligible to apply for new jobs within the MLive Media Group and Advance Central Services Michigan, and we have and will continue to encourage them to do so.”

The biggest cuts were at the Grand Rapids Press, where 146 people received layoff notices; 91 at The Flint Journal; 77 at The Kalamazoo Gazette; and on and on.

The Daily Beast might be on track to be profitable this year, but the Newsweek part of the NewsBeast combo isn’t looking as good: Newsweek is estimated to have lost $20 million this year. So getting the combined Newsbeast into profitability by 2013, which owner Barry Diller says is possible, will be a “daunting” task, says Adweek’s Lucia Moses.

Newsweek is using some non-confidence-inspiring tactics in an effort to shore up readership: providing what are known as post-expiration copies, or grace copies, for example. That means that the magazine has been sending issues to people whose subscriptions have lapsed, a tactic magazines use when they’re having trouble reaching their promised circulation. But in a June report, nearly 5 percent of Newsweek’s subscriptions were grace copies, a number media buyers say is far too high. Meanwhile, print circulation is down despite the cost of those subscriptions being deeply discounted.

Traffic online is down, too. In short, it’s not looking good for NewsBeast. But if the company can’t increase revenue, it’s going to have to cut costs. Moses estimates that saving the money Tina Brown needs will require cutting half the staff. Yikes.

The National Writers Union and the Newspaper Guild-CWA are ending their boycott of the Huffington Post, which was launched in March and asked writers to stop writing for free on Arianna’s site.

As may be painfully clear by looking at the Huffington Post, not many writers withheld their work. (Although some of them did launch HuffingtonPostUnionofBloggers, which had the distinction of also not paying writers for their work, but without a CEO who could sell the property to AOL for millions. We’ve reached out to HPUB to find out what will happen to the site now.)Update: Despite a statement on HPUB saying that the site is affiliated with the same chapter of the National Writers Union that had been leading the boycott, HPUB was and is not related to the boycott. More TK…

At any rate, the NWU announced today it is ending the boycott—Romenesko has the press release—and the Newspaper Guild published a similar announcement Thursday.

We have asked, from the beginning, that Arianna Huffington and her staff meet with us to discuss the need for a model that compensates journalists for their efforts. Such meetings have now taken place, and the company has publicly pledged to work with us to resolve our differences.
We are pleased to see HuffPost leaders stating so clearly the importance of paid journalism, not only to our society as a whole, but to their own business model.
Now that we’ve opened a dialog with HuffPost, it makes sense to us to set aside the boycott as we attempt to work together and move forward. There is no single, clear cut answer to what constitutes an acceptable unpaid op/ed piece, when casual commentary crosses the line into researched analysis, or when a discussion about ideas becomes an “assignment.” These issues will need to be monitored and reassessed continually, and we think that can best happen by building a constructive relationship with HuffPost. However you feel about the Huffington Post, they are clearly a major player in emerging models of online journalism.

The end to the boycott does not affect the lawsuit led by Jonathan Tasini, the Newspaper Guild said. That suit is still ongoing.

iPad newspaper The Daily is averaging 120,000 readers a week, or less than a quarter of what the company needs to be profitable, reports Bloomberg.

And since that 120,000 figure includes not just paying subscribers but also users trying out the two-week free trial, the number of people paying to read The Daily could be even fewer, Bloomberg says.

Daily owner Rupert Murdoch said earlier this year that half a million subscribers would be the “paper’s” break-even point. With the product soon to be available on Android, subscriber numbers might get a boost, but may still not reach 500,000.

The Daily’s advertising rates may not be helping, either: Bloomberg reports that the “paper” is asking for $1000 CPM, or several times the rate for many high-end publications.

Bloomberg points out that other newspapers with a circulation of 120,000 include The Blade in Toledo and the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, NY.

Time.com is focusing more on news niches and the strategy is paying off, PaidContent reports.

Newly-launched verticals like Techland, Swampland (for politics), Battleland (military), Moneyland, and more have only subtle Time branding but are part of what is driving a 12 percent increase in the site’s digital revenues. According to internal Time metrics, PaidContent says, vertical visits are 40 percent of Time.com total site visits.

Before the end of the year, Time will add up to four new blogs to its roster of nine existing ones, which contribute up to 200 posts per day. Look for new blogs (and possibly openings) on opinion, entertainment, society/family, and criminal justice. Openings are not posted right now but if they were they would probably be here.

The E. W. Scripps Co has merged its paper and TV digital teams “under one umbrella” in order to make it easier to launch new digital products and services, the company announced yesterday.

Scripps has 13 daily newspapers and 10 TV stations; the digital heads at each of those stations now reports to Adam Symson, the company’s new chief digital officer. Symson, pictured, according to the company press release, started life as a TV journalist, and has bounced around within Scripps corporate headquarters since 2003, first as investigative reports director, ultimately vice president of interactive for the company’s TV division.

Scripps president and CEO Rich Boehne added: “This new structure will result in better products, faster development, more efficiencies and improved financial performance while staying true to the Scripps mission of building value through enterprise journalism and public service.”

Fighting words from Detroit’s MetroTimes, the city’s alt-weekly, which got a copy of a memo from an editor who works for the Journal Register Company (they of open newsrooms and Project Thunderdome) talking about the newspaper’s digital strategy.

The editor asked reporters to, any time they cover a story:

• crowdsource the topic beforehand
• share relevant documentation with readers ahead of time
• check in on Foursquare and post relevant tweets or FB updates
• Shoot video of the event
• Write a breaking news version of the event and then post a more thoughtful story later, and promote both with social media
• Host a live chat about the story

This “is the single most stunning example I’ve ever seen of what is wrong with print journalism today,” MetroNews’s Jack Lessenberry, the paper’s contributing editor, wrote.

MetroNews isn’t made up of Luddites; they have a very nice website, a Twitter account, and appear to be cashing in on the daily deal craze. So what on earth is going on here?

Lessenberry added, by the way:

“Try to imagine Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reporting Watergate and being asked to do any of this. You can’t even imagine anyone doing these things, except as a bad Saturday Night Live parody of the life of a multimedia reporter.”

You “can’t even imagine” a reporter Tweeting about a story? Huh?

Here’s Journal Register editor-in-chief Jim Brady’s response, by the way:

Now it’s ON.

The Classical, a new sports site that will feature the work of Tom Scharpling, Eric Nusbaum, David Roth, Lang Whitaker, Pete Beatty, Bethlehem Shoals, and more, could exist for a year thanks to Kickstarter.

The group is asking for $50,000 to fund the site’s operation for a year. With just over a month to go, they’ve raised a little more than half.

If the site goes live, sports fans will get daily columns, long features, “and contributions from the world: prizewinning novelists, internet celebrities, guys and girls we went to school with who are unappreciated geniuses, members of the public. There will be theme weeks in the spirit of FreeDarko’s “Dream Week,” on-the-ground reporting when we can, and essays commissioned by you, the readers.”

$50,000 doesn’t leave much in the way of decent pay for writers—that money will need to be split between setting up the site and paying the editors, Neiman Lab says. But being able to raise $50,000 from potential readers, notes Neiman’s Justin Ellis, serves as a sort of proof to advertisers that the site has an audience, which would help in lining up ads and a bigger budget for Year Two.

“No one leaves this fundraising drive with empty hands,” The Classical’s Kickstarter page says. So if you want a sticker ($1 or more) or a branded chip clip (awww yeah, $10+), or if you just like supporting sportswriters who are trying to do something new, head over and donate.