On Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays, a broadsheet called The Times-Picayune will be available for home delivery and on the newsstands for 75 cents. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, a tabloid called TPStreet will be available only on newsstands for 75 cents.

In addition, a special electronic edition of TPStreet will be available to the three-day subscribers of the home-delivered newspaper. On Saturdays, there will be early print editions of the Sunday Times-Picayune with some breaking news and some Sunday content.

David also describes how the floundering efforts to make The Times-Picayune more digital has floundered and opened up New Orleans to other competing newspapers who are making inroads in the city.

It sounds like another recipe for failure to me.

From Poynter:

At a talk this afternoon in Miami, Jonah Lehrer acknowledged his plagiarism and fabrications and described how he hopes to redeem his reputation. Lehrer read prepared remarks then answered questions from Knight Foundation President and CEO Alberto Ibargüen and the gathering at the closing lunch for the 2013 “Media Learning Seminar.” A liveblog of highlights appears beneath the video.

Sounds like easier money than running a Kickstarter campaign, and there are a few cartoonists who qualify if Lehrer is setting the bar for qualifications to speak.

From the Washington Post:

Long reluctant to charge for online content, the newspaper is close to a decision to introduce digital subscriptions and charge online readers once they surpass a certain number of articles or multimedia features a month, the person said. Access to the home page and section fronts would not be limited.

The model — known as a metered paywall — would be similar to that used by the New York Times, which started charging for online content in March 2011 and now has nearly 600,000 digital subscribers. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have similar models.

I find it funny that The Washington Post has to use unnamed sources to report on plans within The Washington Post. But that aside, this is good news.

From the New York Times:

Mr. Buffett went on a newspaper spending spree this year by buying more than 60 newspapers from Media General and a small stake in the newspaper company Lee Enterprises, a chain of mostly small dailies based in Iowa. At the time, he stressed that he had great confidence that newspapers would continue to be solid investments for decades to come.

“I think newspapers in print form, in most of the cities and towns where they are present, will be here in 10 and 20 years,” Mr. Buffett said. “I think newspapers do a good job of serving a community where there is a lot of community interest.”

Buffett has purchased 63 papers and a 3% stake in Lee Enterprises.

“If you have half the reporters, they’re asking half the questions, they’re writing half the stories,” says Rachel Dissell, a Plain Dealer reporter involved in the effort.

This is personal. Reporters like Dissell are trying to save their own jobs, but they also think this is bad business.

“How do you not put out a shoddier product? And, if you put out a shoddier product, how do you get people to stick with it?” she says.

The Plain Dealer is owned by Advance Publications which owns the New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Birmingham News, Mobile Press-Register, and Huntsville Times. Advance Publications dropped those daily papers to a thrice weekly publication schedule earlier this fall. An announcement for the Plain Dealer is expected soon. The chain also owns The Oregonian which is also rumored as looking at a limited printing schedule.

From All Things D:

The publisher plans to tell its workers today that it will fire 50 of its 170 employees, according to people familiar with The Daily’s plans.
The move comes 18 months after the tablet newspaper’s high-profile launch, and a little more than a month after News Corp. announced plans to split itself into an entertainment company and a newspaper company. (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

The worst thing the news industry ever did was to give away their content for free. I had high hopes for this endeavor as someone with deep pockets could prove the tablet as a possible platform for paid content. It might be too early to write The Daily’s obituary, but not sure how this announcement can be spun as a positive sign.

Other details: the cuts will mostly be in the area of sports and editorial as they were the least read sections of The Daily.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has announced it has laid off 23 staffers from their newsroom citing weak economic conditions. Riverfront Times reports Post-Dispatch editorial cartoonist R.J. Matson was among those let go.

The Post-Dispatch announcement:

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has laid off 23 staffers from the newsroom, advertising and production, the company announced today.

The cuts continue the trend of downsizing at the newspaper, the largest in the Lee Enterprises chain, as the industry struggles to contend with declining print advertising revenue.

Lee earlier this month announced that it had narrowed its losses in the fiscal third quarter. The loss of $1.5 million, or three cents a share, compared with a loss of $155.5 million, or $3.46 a share, a year earlier.

Lee Enterprises, the paper’s parent company, also announced it gave CEO Mary Junck a stock bonus worth some $655,000.

J.D. writes on his blog:

Through this blog, Facebook and Twitter, we’re practically mutual online stalkers already. If I’m part of the new configuration, I guarantee you, we’ll be even more interactive. For those of you who only read the newspaper, the plan is for you to receive more in-depth coverage and analysis of the news that concerns you the most, three days a week.

Unfortunately, apparently, jobs will be lost. The reality of that is hard to fathom. Some of the finest people I’ve ever worked with are in this building. The Press-Register is family. I’m sure the folks in Birmingham and Huntsville feel the same way. This economy is a tough editor. But everyone will adapt, and you will too. Journalism is still a dog that will hunt. It’s a dog that needs to hunt. And it will continue to bring home the bacon to our readers, in whatever shape or form you choose to gobble it up.

Last week it was announced that the New Orleans Times-Picayune was dropping to a thrice weekly schedule.

This quote caught my eye:

“We are no longer a newspaper company,” Sun-Times Media Holdings LLC Editor-in-chief Jim Kirk said in a memo to staff. “We are a technology company that happens to publish a newspaper. We deliver content. And we will deliver content on many platforms and in ways that we haven’t yet fully considered.”

Or maybe to reword it for many readers of this blog: “I am a cartoonist that happens to appear in newspapers*. I deliver content. And I will deliver content on many platforms and in ways that I haven’t yet fully considered.”

* or graphic novels, comic books, magazines, ebooks, children’s books, or the web.

It’s an exciting time.